MoneyLion Inc. (NYSE:ML) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

And that’s really a testament to differentiated marketing strategy, right? If you take one takeaway away from this is that a lot of our peers end up becoming really beholden to increasing the nominal dollars of marketing spend, whether that’s on other people’s walled gardens, Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon of course they like that. We don’t have that reliance. We can go into our own marketplace and really present our first party offers as complimentary or substitution products to what’s available there to begin with and that really is driving a lot of our success.

Keeler Patton: Okay, understood. Thank you for taking our questions.

Dee Choubey: No problem.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question is coming from George Sutton from Craig Hallum. Your line is now live.

George Sutton: Thank you. My congratulations on the December EBITDA in particular well ahead of our expectations. So Dee, you mentioned your or you mentioned your position away from traditional sources. I think over the last week, I think everyone has questioned their traditional source for anything on the financial services side. Can you talk about how you might argue your model to really benefit from this?

Dee Choubey: Yeah. Look, I think that last week was certainly scary for all of financial services. One of the things that we saw was we’ve made massive investments in our technology platform to have routing capabilities across payments, across open banking aggregation. When we started to see some of the weakness of Silicon Valley Bank we were amazed that within minutes we were able to reroute millions of dollars of payment processing to back-up processors, right? So when we talk about the benefit of the technology that we’ve built that really came out over the course of over the last week. Now putting that aside, I think what you’re asking is how do we really kind of take advantage of this? We go really far to make sure that we have redundant solutions.

From a marketing perspective as I just said in the previous conversation, we have our own €“ we have our own walled garden in terms of where we go to acquire consumers. If you look at how we finance the receivables on our portfolio, a lot of that is through warehouse lines. And in this world that actually is a safer pool of capital than potentially something that sits at a bank, right? From just the changes that we’re going to go see in risk weighted assets over the next quarter or so, and sort of the scrutiny that the banks will have in providing the capital. So the fact that we have a whole network of partners on the warehouse side and now that we have significant, as I said a decade long experience in managing risk in real time and this is really where all of the artificial intelligence, all our capabilities or data advantages or the profiles that we have really come into play to give us confidence that we’ll continue to be a must have partner for consumers going through the course of the next couple quarters.

Rick Correia: Yes. And the only thing I would add is we look at our financing facilities and the question we often get is from those sources, what is your exposure on rates? And I think it’s important that we have fixed rate agreements on all of our financing sources for our warehouse facilities, which means that we can continue to realize our strong unit economics, delivering for our customers while at the same time not being exposed to a rising rate environment.

George Sutton: Great point. Now, Rick, on the incremental margin, I wondered if you could address that and talk about how you’re thinking about the potential EBITDA margin for the business?