Remitly Global, Inc. (NASDAQ:RELY) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Robert Napoli : Great. And then I guess, just a follow-up on during the quarter, you announced a partnership with Mastercard Send, and you’ve talked a lot about direct integrations, maybe two separate questions related in a way. What does the Mastercard Send relationship bring to you? And how is the progress been on direct integrations and what effect has that had on your business?

Matt Oppenheimer : Yeah, thanks, Bob. So on the Mastercard Send and Visa Direct partnership, it enables us to send funds to Visa and MasterCard linked debit card. So deposits into the bank account of the customer’s recipient that has a bank account linked to those debit cards. And it also gives us some other just scale and cost improvements both of those partnerships. So really grateful for the partnerships with both Mastercard and Visa. And when you think about direct integrations, which, as I mentioned, is up 100% compared to two years ago, what that does is it creates a more reliable product at a lower unit cost. And you see that in our expanding margins, you see that in the 230-basis point improvement in our customer support costs.

And so it’s a win-win-win from that standpoint. And that falls into the third bucket of investments that we talked about making in terms of a frictionless remittance experience, and we’re really proud of the progress there. But as I mentioned in the overview, we’re just getting started in our ability to continue to drive down friction and to reduce overall costs for our customers.

Robert Napoli : Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. One moment for questions. Our next question comes from Will Nance with Goldman Sachs. You may proceed.

Will Nance : Hey, guys. Good evening. Appreciate taking the question. I wanted to also pile on the marketing costs. Maybe a lot of the comments have been focused on the direct investments you guys are making in both Q3 and Q4. I mean I guess just assuming these are successful, you guys sound pretty confident that these will bear fruit, should we be thinking about these investments that you’re making, all-equals being kind of reoccurring costs in the future? And it looks like the marketing costs stepped up roughly $8 million non-GAAP sequentially. Is that roughly in line with the incremental investments you’ve made? It sounds like maybe that’s a partial quarter, a little bit higher in the fourth quarter. But is that sort of the right range as we think about kind of incrementally stepping up, things like brand marketing on a go-forward basis in addition to the kind of normal performance-based market that we have seen in the past? Thanks.

Hemanth Munipalli : Yeah. Let me try to give you an answer, Will, thanks for the question. In terms of sort of the run rate question, and then turn it back to Matt to maybe give a broader response to your question there. I mean, first off, I think I don’t think run rate necessarily is the way to think about this — about investments we’re making on the brand marketing side. First off, the way we look at brand marketing and upper funnel investments, they really tend to spread across the entire customer base versus just the new customer acquisitions, which is a lot of what our performance marketing is directed towards. So we do expect to get leverage on it as we get bigger and bigger in terms of our base of customers, which includes both.

Obviously, the active customers include both the new customers as well as cohorts of existing customers. So we do think that overall, we will have some deleverage in terms of CAC in Q4. But as we look forward to 2024, maybe talk about guidance next year, we’ll be able to share more in terms of how these efficiencies we’ve been doing over the last several years in terms of marketing, how that pans out. But we have high conviction that these investments would deliver returns in 2021 and beyond. Anything to go add, Matt?

Matt Oppenheimer : Yeah. The only thing I’d add Will, is I think that with marketing investments specifically, I think you know that we have a lot of discipline around our unit economics. And the way we look at it is within the LTV to CAC ratios and within the payback periods that we’ve defined, we’re willing to spend to get the right amount of customers to be able to drive both 2024 and long-term growth. And I think that’s a continuation even as we talk about upper funnel or brand investments, we’ve been doing that. We’re doing a bit more in Q4 for the reasons we’ve talked about. But you can see very clearly the return on that in a short time frame. And we’re excited about that because we’ve got a bold and audacious vision that we’re working to accomplish. And Q4 is a time for us to set up 2024 for success. And so we’re excited about the investments we’re making in order to do that.

Will Nance : That makes sense. I mean just to put a finer point on it. You said you wouldn’t characterize it as run rate. So does that mean we should expect these costs to come down, all else equal then? Or are you saying like we don’t make incremental investments on top of this and we kind of scale over these costs over time as the customer base gets bigger?

Hemanth Munipalli : Yeah. I think — well, I think the way I mean, a lot of this is a question of timelines. And what we’re talking about here as we look forward into sort of 2024 and the mid, long term, we do expect to continue to be able to drive leverage in our marketing spend. We think the word-of-mouth effect that Matt talked about as well and these brand investments will ultimately help us also drive down performance marketing costs and continue to get leverage on it. It’s a question of time horizons. But we look forward to 2024. In particular, we’ve got a high conviction that these investments we’re making in the fourth quarter of this year will deliver results for us next year.

Will Nance : Understood, okay. I appreciate taking the questions.

Operator: Thank you. One moment for questions. Our next question comes from Alex Markgraff with KeyBanc. You may proceed.

Alex Markgraff : Hi, thanks for taking my questions. Maybe just not to overplay it, but just one more on the kind of marketing piece of the side of things and unit economics. You all talked a lot about guardrails, but I think it’s kind of helpful context. I’m just curious, as you sit today and making some of these investments, kind of, if you think about the higher end of those guardrails, just any sort of context to help us think about where you sit today versus what maybe you’re comfortable with at the top end or the far side of that guardrail.