MoneyLion Inc. (NYSE:ML) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Diwakar Choubey: Hi Josh, I’ll start, and I’ll let Rick kind of go into the technicals here. But from the state of the consumer, we actually feel that the liquidity products that we provide on a first-party basis continue to benefit from a consumer that is really strong, right? So again, if you think about who we service with the Instacash product, it’s the policemen, it’s the firemen’s, the teachers, the union workers, it’s the gig economy worker. Our ability to predict when the cash flow comes into the bank account and how quickly it decays is industry leading, right? This is the piece of technology that we’ve been honing and making it very precise over the last 10 years. We have an incredible data advantage here, right?

And this is where we ingest data from third parties. We have a lot of data that’s being created on our own. Consumer-facing products as well as from the network, all of that creates incredible insights for us to know exactly how the paycheck is coming into this ecosystem. That allows us to make operational improvements, right? We talked about improving our payment rails. There’s a lot of innovation happening in the payments world, right? So again, this is where our team excels. This is the DNA of the firm. And we feel really confident that despite the macro backdrop, this segment of the American population is always either having a moment of excess or a moment of deficit. And our ability to predict that is really strong. We see this trend continuing in Q4 and into the early part of next year.

We don’t know – we don’t have a crystal ball in terms of just how deep the macro impacts 2024. But at least for the next two quarters, we feel very comfortable with our ability to manage this risk on a go-forward basis. And as Rick said, one of the opportunities for us now is to take some of these data insights that are being generated at such a large scale and make them into data products, right, to make them into consumer insights, fraud insights that anyone on our network, any financial institution on our network, whether they be FinTechs, whether they be banks, whether they be lenders, whether they be mortgage companies, auto lenders can use, and we see that as an opportunity to expand our enterprise business going forward because we’re finally at the precipice of being able to commercialize a lot of these proprietary datasets that we’ve been honing for a long period of time.

Josh Siegler: Great. Thank you. I appreciate that color. And then towards the end of Rick’s remarks, you mentioned that you were reaching that ideal level of growth and profitability and balancing that in the future. I was wondering if you could kind of give us an insight into how you envision balancing growth and profitability if the macro starts accelerating again, as you mentioned, some products could start accelerating beyond what we saw this year. So I was wondering what that balance would look like in a more growth-oriented environment? Thanks.

Richard Correia: Yes. We love that question, of course, because this is what we’ve been planning for. I think what you’ve seen is we’ve been able to extract our business away from the macro. And I’m acutely aware of what I’m saying that, that is something that is unique, given that there are kind of headwinds happening within the space and the amount of uncertainty. But the benefit of our platform is that we’re able to be nimble and durable during these kind of headwinds that we’re seeing in the macro. And there’s nothing that tells us that anything is going to change on that particularly on your question from our liquidity product. In terms of going forward, as we kind of see that shift, basically, what we expect to see is the investments that we have made in the platform, the operating leverage that you guys have been a witness to over the past four quarters is going to continue.