UP Fintech Holding Limited (NASDAQ:TIGR) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

WuTianhua: [Foreign Language] Regarding the first question about TigerGPT, we think the AI technology can significantly improve productivity in many aspects of our lives and work such as programming, copywriting, design and more. So our mission is to make investment better through technology, and we have always paid close attention to the synergy between technology and finance. We have high expectations for TigerGPT’s language interaction capability in improving user experience. While our offers excellent market data and information, but many users may not know just exactly where to find them. So TigerGPT can help users improve their efficiency in this scenario. We are glad to have this opportunity to become the first technology-oriented broker to launch GPT functionality.

TigerGPT’s products dedicated to answering questions in the field of financial investment. It can act like the bridge between user inquiries and Tiger’s numerous investment content and paid market data. So this product can help our users greatly improve information collecting efficiency, including like market data, industry insights, third-party market data, individual stock option and financial knowledge. It can also greatly reduce the learning costs for new users taxing various functions of our app. We believe that TigerGPT will become a differentiated function to optimize the user experience and will contribute accordingly to user acquisition and retention. Currently, this product is in still in the internal testing phase, and we expect to open it to more market users at the end of the second quarter of this year.

As for the cost, since TigerGPT only serves the financial sector instead of being a general purpose model, the cost is very controllable and will not have significant impact on our P&L. We are glad to see the number of new fundings per account increased while average CAC dropped potentially quarter-over-quarter after CSRS’s update on December 30. A couple of reasons, firstly, with our brand being better received by the local user in Singapore market and attracting more organic traffic from overseas to save us some customer accusation costs. Secondly, we have reevaluated our cooperation with partner vendors in terms of advertising and branding and terminated the cooperations with those cannot generate a reasonable ROI. In the future, we will continue to adjust our customer acquisition cost dynamically risk by market condition and payback.

Generally, our current low customer acquisition cost provides us with flexibility to expand into new markets such as our recent launch Hong Kong market to help maintaining healthy unit economics. Thanks to our self-clearing capability in the U.S. stock market, the clearing cost as a percentage of total commission for U.S. cash equities were around 3% to 12%, keeping our overall self-clearing efficiency at an industry-leading level. Since mid-February of this year, we have gradually self-cleared more Hong Kong stocks with our launch in the local retail market. That clear cost as a percentage of commission income dropped to below 10% in the first quarter. Future clearing costs will be affected by factors such as market volatility and user trading behavior, but we expect that our overall clearing efficiency will further improve along with full self-clearing of Hong Kong stocks.

Thank you.

Operator: We are now going to proceed with our next question. And the questions come from the line of Judy Zhang from Citi. Please ask your question.

Judy Zhang: [Foreign Language] Let me translate. I have two questions. The first question is regarding on the take rate. We saw the U.S. stock market rebound, but the take rate decreased. Can you explain the key reason behind? And also, we saw the interest income increased continuously during the rehike cycle. What is the breakdown of the interest income? And the second question is regarding the regulation. We saw [Tiger APP] has been removed from the App Store. How can we understand the current situation, and how much it will impact on the existing customers? And also did regulator give us any further clarification on what kind of criteria the onshore investors need to meet to open the overseas brokerage accounts? Thank you.