Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by for the Mogo Q1 2022 earnings call. I will now introduce Mr. Craig Armitage, of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.
Thank you, [Sylvie]. Good afternoon. Thanks for joining us today. Just a quick couple of notes before we get started. First, today's call will contain forward-looking statements that are based on current assumptions and subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. We undertake no obligation to update these statements, except as required by law. Information about these risks and uncertainties are included in the company's annual information form, as well as periodic filings with regulators in Canada, U.S., which you can find on SEDAR, EDGAR, and the company website. Second, today's discussion will include adjusted financial measures, which are non-IFRS measures. These should be considered as a supplement to and not as a substitute for IFRS measures. You can find reconciliations in our filings for those measures. Lastly, the amounts today are discussed in [Tangerine dollars] unless we indicate otherwise.
As with most quarters, we do have slides to accompany today's call. You can find these on the deck page and on the website under presentations. With that, I'll turn it over to Dave Feller to get us started. Dave?
Great. Thanks. Good afternoon, welcome to Mogo's first quarter 2022 results call. I'm Dave Feller, joined by Greg Feller, our President and CFO. We're clearly in one of the most challenging environments we've seen in a while, and one of the things this quarter is showcasing is how different certain fintechs are in terms of revenue stability and composition. With some of our peers seeing revenue fall off over 40% over two quarters, having a diversified business model is more important than ever. We saw this strength in Q1 with member growth up 62%, revenue growth up 50% year-over-year, and record gross profit of over CAD 12 million. It's important to note that this was also driven by the revenue base of our existing products, which is 95% recurring revenue.
While our existing business model is strong in this current environment, like all companies, we're taking a hard look at where we are investing and ensuring that these are areas that will give us a solid ROI with near-term impact. This quarter also continued to make focus on our 2022 roadmap as we get ready for the full launch of our biggest product to date, MogoTrade. Our mission continues to be all about making it easy for anyone to achieve financial freedom. The fact is that building wealth and financial health has been vastly overcomplicated, which is why most adults continue to struggle. In fact, 60% of 30 to 44-year-olds are very concerned they won't have enough money to retire. Yet the formula to achieve it is simple: spend less than you make and begin investing early and consistently.
As you can see, if someone gets on track early, they can easily retire a millionaire. For many, without the right program, they may never be in a position to retire. To deliver on this, we continue to focus on building out a next-gen digital wealth-building platform that has three primary components: spend management, investing, and impact. We believe all three of these are key elements of a best-in-class next-gen wealth-building platform. It may not seem obvious, the reality is most people don't realize the most important part of wealth building really comes down to controlling your spending. As we know, it's not really how much money you make, but how much you have left to invest that's the key to building wealth. As we just highlighted, 42% of Canadians are actually spending more than they make, which is also why 68% have debt other than mortgages.
Our goal is simple: to make it easy for anyone to control their spending so they have money to put towards their wealth-building goal. Although we have lots of opportunity to improve this product, today it is delivering, with 93% of our active users saying it helps them better control their spending, with an average monthly savings of CAD 200. Now, CAD 200 might not sound like a lot, but that's actually the amount that is invested monthly, with the sum on track to being a millionaire. Again, it doesn't take a lot to achieve financial freedom if you get started early enough. Like the rest of our products, we've also built an impact component into the card. Each time you use it, a tree gets planted. Besides the CAD 200 a month savings, our average card user actually offsets double the carbon footprint of an average Canadian.
This card is the only free and simple way for any Canadian to eliminate their carbon footprint, which is how we stop climate change. All this helped increase card spend in the quarter by over 70%. Controlling your spending is key to helping you save, but another way is to set up an automated savings goal. Almost half of Canadians, 49% in fact, don't have any emergency savings. Again, this is a major problem and one that Mogo has been designed to help solve. Today, we have over 145,000 subscribers using Mogo to help them save for a variety of goals, including emergency savings. With over 10,000 five-star reviews, this has proven to be a simple and powerful way to help our members achieve their savings goal.
For a low monthly fee of only CAD 3.99, our members can easily set up multiple goals. Depending on the goals and risk profile, Mogo automatically assigns them a specific portfolio. Given today's current environment, we think helping people save money is more important than ever. Short-term savings goals are important. Ultimately, financial freedom depends on long-term wealth building. When we acquired Moka, we also knew there was a big opportunity to turn this into a best-in-class long-term wealth-building solution. Again, most don't know what to do. It's been vastly overcomplicated. Moka really makes it easy. This chart shows how simple it can be. Simply set up an automated CAD 200 a month debit from your bank account. Moka does the rest. Depending on how early someone starts, that can put them on track to being a multimillionaire.
To put CAD 3.5 million in perspective, only less than 5% of Canadians have a net worth of CAD 2.3 million or more. Recent market volatility also highlights the value and importance of a passive investing strategy as a core part of your wealth building. This recent correction will be the first time that many younger investors have experienced the reality of investing, and although active investing will always be a key part, passive is more relevant than ever. Part of the opportunity isn't just about helping people invest and automate, it's also about helping them retire with more money. Today, most people with their banks just hold them on high fee mutual funds. In fact, all mutual funds in Canada are now at over CAD 2 trillion. Last year alone, over CAD 100 billion went into these.
With fees that are usually around 2%, even if the fund mimics the market, the 2% has a big impact on your total return. In fact, as you can see, this would actually mean over time, with the exact same amount invested, this 2% fee would actually result in someone retiring with less than 50% of what they would have if they invested through Moka. The magnitude of this can't be overstated. As you can see here, it's no wonder why the vast majority struggles to achieve a level of wealth through the current solutions in the marketplace today. In fact, moving to a low-cost automated platform like Moka isn't an incremental improvement. It's life-changing. This is what disruption looks like.
Until recently, Moka was designed primarily as a short-term savings app. Now with some recent updates, we've built what we believe is arguably the most powerful long-term investing solution in the market. With a portfolio designed to mimic the benchmark S&P 500 index, along with industry-leading low fixed fees of only CAD 3.99 a month, we challenge anyone to find a simpler, more effective way to build wealth in Canada. Today, Moka Wealth manages just over CAD 300 million. You can see how big the growth opportunity is. Although passive investing is perhaps the easiest way to build wealth, active investing continues to be an important part of the mix. MogoTrade has been our number one growth initiative for the last year. We couldn't be more excited for this product.
Unlike the U.S. market, commission-free stock trading is still new in Canada, MogoTrade is actually only the second commission-free trading app in Canada. The first to also include 10% back with every trade, along with FX fees are half of what many competitors charge and real-time streaming prices. Now, although the level of retail trading has clearly had a big drop recently, this is still a massive market opportunity even at the lower levels, and we believe our value proposition will resonate more than ever in this type of market. One of the lessons we have learned over the last year, though, is how challenging it is to build a fully regulated product like this. Because of some of these challenges, we are behind on our goal of having this product fully rolled out this quarter.
Today, we are still in insight mode and continue to gather great feedback and insights that are helping to improve the product and get ready for a full launch. We expect that by the end of this quarter, we will have the product fully available, which positions us for a scaling marketing push sometime in Q3. An important point on the regulatory challenges is that although it can also be seen as a positive in that there's a real barrier to entry. Unlike what we saw in the crypto space where anyone could easily launch a crypto app, that's certainly not the case with equities. In general, we believe that the crypto-only apps will find it increasingly difficult to compete versus platforms like us with both equities and crypto.
Although our primary goal is to help people achieve financial freedom, we also believe that making a positive impact with your money will become an increasingly important element of what consumers are looking for, especially the next generation. Just as ESG investing has become extremely popular, consumers continue to gravitate towards brands with a purpose and making a positive impact. They want to see more than just words. They really want to see and understand the real impact they are making. We've designed this into the experience. Today, we are focused primarily on climate change given we see this as arguably the greatest social issue of our time, and one where most people struggle to see how they can make an meaningful impact. Our members today have already planted over a million trees, and because of them, over 800 million pounds of CO2 will be absorbed.
The ultimate wealth-building solution is one in which our members achieve their most important financial and life goals while also making the world a better place. We're still only scratching the surface on both of these, but excited for the journey ahead. With that, I'll pass it over to Greg Feller.
Thanks, Dave. Good afternoon. Our quarter results were posted this morning. I'll be brief with my comments so we can get to your questions. Our diversified and primarily recurring revenue base proved resilient in the first quarter as we continued to show strong growth across key metrics during a more challenging time for many fintechs. First quarter highlights included 15% member growth, record quarterly gross profit and revenue up 51%, strong positive contribution of CAD 7.4 million in the quarter, and lastly, we ended the quarter with a strong financial position of combined cash, digital assets on our investment portfolio of CAD 75 million, excluding our investment in Pink rho, which had a book value of CAD 98 million at the end of the quarter. Our growing member base increased by 62% over last year to approximately 1.9 million with a year-over-year increase split roughly 50/50 between organic and acquisitions.
Importantly, Q1 represented the third quarter in a row of increased organic net member additions. The scale of our member base remains a key asset and competitive differentiator in the Canadian landscape and gives us the ability to more easily introduce new products like MogoTrade. Our new member growth fueled continued revenue growth, which was up 51% over the same period last year. Revenue growth was driven by an increasingly diversified group of subscription and services revenue, which increased 38% over the comparable quarter. We believe that our high recurring revenue model has become increasingly valuable during this period of financial market volatility that has exposed a number of fintech models that are predominantly reliant on non-recurring transaction revenue, with some companies reporting dramatic declines in quarterly revenue.
We, however, continued to grow our revenue every quarter this year, driven by approximately 95% of our revenue coming from subscriptions, payment processing interest, and other recurring revenue streams. Obviously, MogoTrade, once fully rolled out, will include more volatile trading revenue. However, we believe this will be an incremental and complementary stream to the larger recurring base we've built. In addition to the recurring revenue nature of our business, we've shown that our business model can generate healthy margins as evidenced by the 17% gross margins this quarter.
Also, if you followed Moka for some time, you will recall that we generated very strong positive adjusted EBITDA through COVID when we decided to reduce our growth spend. Specifically, in the first quarter of 2020, we were able to dial back our cash outlay by almost 50%, which along with high recurring revenue components, resulted in us generating an average of CAD 5 million of adjusted EBITDA over the next two quarters before we decided to resume our growth trend. The combination of a strong balance sheet and the flexibility in our model give us the confidence to continue our investment spend to support desperately needed products like MogoTrade, while monitoring the business environment should we feel the need to dial back this growth spend to get to profitability sooner.
Another area of significance outside of Mogo is the increasing monetization rate of our members, which we've made good progress over the last year, increasing from under 10% to 14%. When you compare our average revenue across all our members to our monetized members, you can see that the payoff to continuing to increase the rate is significant, almost eight times. Outside of our core digital finance products, we also continue to see large opportunities for digital payments with Carta, despite some of the headwinds we were facing in 2022. We believe Carta is a valuable and underappreciated asset of ours and is a growing market poised to benefit from secular growth trends, and we remain committed to growing this business going forward.
During Q1, we also announced the formation of Mogo Ventures to manage our existing investment portfolio, which currently has a book value on our balance sheet of CAD 119 million. This includes CAD 98 million book value for our investment in Coinsquare, one of the leading cryptocurrency in Canada. Despite recent pressure in the sector, we continue to believe in the long-term opportunity of cryptocurrencies for the next generation, and we believe our investment provides our investors with option value and upside to that volatile sector without seeing the volatility directly in our own business. We also believe the portfolio investment is another underappreciated asset on our balance sheet, and we will continue to look for value maximization opportunities from this portfolio over the next 12 months.
Finally, with today's results, we also updated our guidance, reflecting a shift in the rollout timeline and expected contribution from MogoTrade, as well as the reduced revenue contribution from Carta in the second half of the year due to the deferral of certain customer program roll-ups. Despite these short-term headwinds, total revenue is still expected to grow between 20% and 25% over 2021. We also stated that we now expect to improve adjusted EBITDA margins going forward. This compares to our previous guidance of improving adjusted EBITDA margins in the second half of this year.
In conclusion, despite the current market volatility, we remain highly focused on building out the leading next-gen digital finance platform in Canada and believe we are well-positioned as one of the leaders in the Canadian market to capitalize on this massive TAM that is still in the early days of a secular growth trend in the sector. With that, we will now open the call up to questions.
Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question, please slowly press star followed by one on your touch-tone phone. You will hear a pre-tone prompt acknowledging your request. If you would like to remove yourself from the question queue, please press star followed by two. If you're using a speakerphone, we do ask that you please raise a handset before pressing any keys. Please go ahead and press star one now if you have any questions. Your first question will be from [Adhir Kadve at Eight Capital]. Please go ahead.
Thank you guys for taking my questions. Just top of mind will be on trade, on MogoTrade. Can you just give us an update on progress on what are some of these regulatory hurdles you guys have to kind of cross and some of the regulatory hurdles that you need to cross that you're looking forward to?
Sure. I would say at this point, most of the regulatory items we actually have clarity on. Just to give you a sense of some of the detail, some of the stuff we are doing with MogoTrade including, for example, how customers are going to be funding the account actually hasn't been done before. Some of these items are new. When you get into certain details in terms of product and how it works, again, the devil's in the detail. They get very detailed on the flow of funds. I mean, there's a whole host of things. These things can take a lot of time, and you got to spend a lot of time designing solutions, et cetera. Based on that, we have to make tweaks to the experience to satisfy the regulatory requirements.
The good news is, though, essentially all the items that we were looking to get done, we have approved, and now it's just a question of refining those. Again, the funding was an example. One of the items that differentiates MogoTrade is when you open an account, you'll actually be able to instantly fund it up to CAD 50,000. That is not something that you can instantly do on other platforms through this process. I think it gives you a sense of some of the stuff that we're looking at. Again, as I just stated, where we are now, the product is out. We have people testing it. I personally have made over 100 trades on the platform.
We're confident that we should have the full waitlist in invitation mode off before the end of this quarter, i.e., the app will be available for anybody to download, sign up, and begin trading before the end of this quarter. Before the end of June.
Okay, great. Thank you. Sorry, I'm getting a little bit of feedback there. Maybe just moving on, you mentioned a little bit of a volatile trading environment, which trading volume going down a little bit. Just based on that, what are your expectations for the product and when it is fully live, maybe you can talk about that a little bit?
I'll comment on that. Look, I think it's too early at this stage for us to give any kind of specific guidance there. I think here's what I will say about this. We believe that we are still very much at the early days of the disruption that's happening around trading in Canada. The U.S. is way ahead of us. Almost every app has gone to free stock trading. In Canada today, there's really essentially one free stock trading app, and there's only one app that actually you can do both stock trading and crypto in. We expect Mogo to be the second there. We believe that we're very early days, and we believe that as we do a massive spend, even in a lower trading environment, obviously equity trading is not going away, investing is not going away.
We believe we've got a unique value proposition, a great user experience. Really the majority of trading today is still sitting within the big brokers, bank-owned brokers. We're at the early days in terms of disrupting that. We see this product as an opportunity to drive meaningful member growth, member engagement at a low cost CAC, given the fact that we are going to be very early. We also think that in some volatile environment, that there is going to be a shakeout in the industry, which actually in the long run is going to be better for larger, better capitalized, diversified players like Mogo. In a lot of ways, as painful as this is for all of us, that in the long run, we actually believe we'll have some better long-term dynamic impact from a competitive perspective.
Great. Just going to squeeze one last one in. In terms of the go-to-market once it's fully live, can you remind us how you intend on advertising for the product, how the rollout will look like?
Sure. Again, we're trying to be pretty thoughtful and careful on how we do this. This again is definitely put in perspective. The scope of this from a product perspective is at least 100 times anything we've done in the past, right? The last product really we launched would've been Bitcoin account several years ago, and before that, card. In terms of just kind of scope and complexity, including regulatory, this is probably 100 times anything we've done, which is why we've obviously been focused on it for the last year. We've also learned a lot in terms of rolling out a product and getting product-market fit. That's also why we've been really careful on the current rollout, including the invitation process, really making sure that we're getting the right feedback.
That literally includes having people sign up, literally monitoring the actual sign-up experience, noticing everything they're doing, what they're understanding, what they're not understanding. Because of that, making adjustments to the user experience. Then we're going to be doing the same thing once we take invitations off. That's kind of the next phase where you start to get more and more people signing up. Really what you'll be looking, and what we're going to be looking for is really those signs of product-market fit. You're getting a good user experience, good feedback from existing users, and those are the things you need to see and want to see before you kind of hit the go button on paid marketing, right? Which is really when you start to get a good return there.
If you're premature there, and you don't really know you've got the right product experience, then it can be premature. Now as it relates to that, we actually are in the midst of completing probably, well, not probably, our biggest creative campaign ever. There's actually a 30-second spot that we've created. We've used an external agency that is essentially going to be ready to go once we believe the product is ready. Then there's a whole bunch of other kind of PR and other social elements that are all part of this strategy that'll play out over the next six months, right? It'll be definitely our biggest marketing and product launch ever as well in business.
Okay, great. Looking forward to it. I will pass the line thanks Dave..
Once again, as a reminder, ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question, please slowly press star followed by one on your touchtone phone. Your next question will come from Scott Buck, with H.C. Wainwright . Please go ahead .
Hi, good afternoon, guys. I'm curious, can you give us a little bit more color on the revised revenue outlook? You down kind of CAD 15 million or so at the midpoint. What of that is attributable to the slower rollout of MogoTrade versus the broader product?
Scott. It really is a combination of the two. Given some of the regulatory complexities of getting MogoTrade out that we talked about. The product itself and the timing of the launch isn't totally within our control. Just given kind of the lower volumes that we're seeing and the other macro challenges we're seeing, we felt it was prudent to be very conservative there given we haven't actually fully rolled that product out yet. That was a big chunk of that revenue, over 50%, and then the balance would be Carta. What's going on there is we were expecting some roll-ups with some of our existing customers which were pushed out to 2023. We still expect to get that, but that's going to happen in 2023. You can never perfectly time those things. There's a bunch of factors that go into it.
That's the other component of that, let's say, a more conservative approach. Again, our general view is in this environment, taking a conservative approach is a prudent way to go. We do think that both MogoTrade and Carta are positioned to drive growth in 2023 for us. Obviously the visibility on those items in the second half of this year are more challenging, so we've decided to reduce that playbook.
Great. That's very helpful. Second, on the EBITDA commentary, is this you proactively pulling back on some growth investments beginning in 2Q or just a more natural progression?
I think it's just us, obviously, in the current environment, putting a level of discipline on the spend here that we believe will continue to show our path to profitability. I think that is the lens that we're looking at it by. Importantly, as I mentioned on the call, we've talked about in the past, we obviously have growth dials that we can turn back very quickly and very aggressively if we felt we needed to. The reality is we have a lot of ways to manage and control that EBITDA number. Obviously, we are balancing the opportunities that we see on the investment side in areas like MogoTrade, in areas like Carta with the more volatile markets and investors' concern on path to profitability. I think what makes us unique is we're not just saying we have a path to profitability.
We've actually proven in the past our ability to generate positive EBITDA, positive cash flow, and do that quickly. By the way, that was back when we were generating CAD 10 million a quarter revenue. Now we're over CAD 17 million. The other component, which I think is a really important differentiator, which we've talked about in the past that the market hasn't appreciated, is the high recurring revenue nature of our business. The reality is, if you are a high transaction fee-based revenue business it's very difficult to figure out how to cut your way to profitability because you don't know what your revenue is going to be next quarter. We've seen that those revenue streams can drop off very quickly. We obviously have spent a long time building up the recurring piece.
That obviously gives us the visibility and the ability to manage our spend towards whatever our profitability targets are.
That's great. Member growth remains pretty impressive. Is there a particular product or two that's driving that? As a follow-up there, you're close to 2 million members at this point, right? How much room is there left in the Tangerine market?
Well, I'll let Dave talk about what we see as the bigger opportunity there. It actually is fairly broad-based. I mean, look, Dave, I think one of our advantages is we have multiple products and we have multiple ways for members to onboard. Obviously, we're super excited about the MogoTrade out there. Quite frankly, we see that as one of the biggest opportunities to drive that member growth at that attractive CAC level. That's something we're focused on. I would say it's fairly broad-based as far as the size of the TAM, the LFA, etc.
Sure. Yeah, a couple of comments. Obviously, there's two ways to grow the business, even if the member base actually didn't grow that much, and that's clearly getting more adoption from our member base with our existing products. As I mentioned earlier, today we have just over 145,000 subscribers on Moka. As you mentioned, we're close to two million on the member side. That's still a new product for us. There's a lot of opportunity there in terms of marketing that to our existing customer base, including integration. We just rolled out, as I mentioned in my commentary, potentially updates to the Moka app. It also positions us as a great long-term wealth building solution, of which we believe all of our members need. We can put that up against anybody's products in the marketplace.
Also just giving another perspective, obviously, you look at companies like RBC, and RBC has over 13 million customer accounts in Canada. The largest financial players are well north of 10 million in terms of customers. It's a combination of obviously increasing the attach rate for existing members based on our product offerings as well as obviously increasing the member base. Tangerine is an example, which you see on [GGRS], has approximately 2 million customers. National Bank has approximately 2 million customer accounts. These are obviously companies that are in the tens of billions. You can still grow your business materially just from your existing member base as you bring another product along with obviously growing it.
Sure. No, that makes a ton of sense. Then last one from me quickly, did you guys repurchase any shares during the quarter?
Sorry, Scott, we did not. We are subject to certain blackout restrictions on that. No, we did not.
Sure. Understood. I appreciate the time, guys. Thanks a lot. Thank you.
Once again, ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your touchtone phone. Our next question will be from [Josh Howards at TOM]. Please go ahead.
Hi, everybody. Thanks. Hi, Greg. Good quarter.
Hey, Josh.
I'll look to the last caller's question. I know that it's probably tough for the board to buy back shares and you're subject to all kinds of restrictions, volume weighted average, price time of day, blackout, all this stuff. I guess more conceptually in a perfect world, given the large discount to intrinsic value, is this something that you guys would like to do or something you're pursuing should the restrictions lift?
The answer is yes. Obviously, we don't believe that the current share price here is reflective of the underlying value of our business, nor quite frankly, the assets on our balance sheet. That's why we put that share buyback in place. We will absolutely be looking at opportunities to leverage that buyback when we, A, have windows and we feel it's appropriate.
Great. Thank you.
Bye.
Thank you. At this time, gentlemen, we have no further questions. Please proceed.
Well, thank you for your questions today and for joining us on our Q1 call. We look forward to updating you post Q2 results. Thank you.
Thank you, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes the conference call for today. Once again, Greg Feller. At this time, we do ask that you please disconnect your lines.