Yeah. Hey, good morning, everyone. I'm Devin Ryan, Head of Financial Technology Research here at Citizens. Thank you so much for joining us, always look forward to this conversation with Dave. We have Jason Wilk, who is Founder and CEO, then Kyle Beilman, who is the CFO of Dave. I feel like every year we do this conversation, you guys have done it for four or five years, come right after earnings, and I feel like we get good earnings, then we get to talk about it. Same thing from last night, you had great earnings, we're gonna get to that. Thank you both for joining me, first off. Great to see you.
Yeah, thank you. Great to see you as always.
Maybe just for the audience, people that are less familiar with the story, you know, Jason, could you just introduce the story of Dave and why you founded the company, and then just bring us to where we are today, and then we can get into some of the kind of current events.
Yeah. Yeah, happy to. First of all, taking a step back, the name stands for Dave versus Goliath. We were going up against all the major banks, specifically targeted at their heavy overdraft fees that the banks were charging. I had a personal gripe going through high school and college, paying $34 overdraft fees for paying for a cup of coffee or paying for gas or groceries, and my account dips negative for a little bit. Had this great innovation back in 2015, this idea that if you could use people's cash flow data to better underwrite them for short-term credit, you could offer a vastly superior product to pay for things like gas and groceries and not charge you these predatory fees.
That was really the way the company was born, was on the notion of giving Americans access to more affordable, transparent, short-term credit using cash flow underwriting. Since we launched, we also have our own checking and savings account that we launched back in 2021, the thesis of the company really is using cash flow data as a differentiator to offer short-term credit products for Americans that are better than payday loans, overdraft fees, and subprime credit cards. We are well on our journey to fulfilling that vision and did over half a billion of revenue in 2025, with 60% growth and company had its best year in history.
Excited to keep running this business, and we have a lot of momentum and trajectory here.
Yeah, that's great. Yeah, I remember, I think two years ago, was March. You guys had just reported fourth quarter. That was the kinda the inflection into profitability. The stock was up 80% and then ended up in 2024. It was the best performing financial services fintech stock out there.
Yep.
Over 800%, I believe, and then had a great 2025 as well. You're clearly a ton of momentum. Kyle, maybe just hit some of the high level financial points and then take us through. You just reported earnings last night. Some of the key points both from earnings, but then, you know, I think everybody was waiting for the guide. You know, we all, you know, figured that this would be kinda continued momentum into 2026. My view was it was even better than what people were hoping for. Maybe just hit us on a couple of the financial highlights from the quarter year, and then talk a little bit about what the guidance implies.
Yeah, I mean, like, I think from a top-line perspective, Q4 was another, you know, standout quarter, 60%+ top-line growth. We grew originations by 50%, about $2.2 billion in the quarter. Average originations per user continues to tick up while the loss rates are coming down as well. Our 28-day days past due credit metric was 1.89%, which is about a 12% improvement sequentially. We're growing our total originations, growing originations per user, and delinquency and loss rates continue to come down as we further innovate with CashAI, our proprietary underwriting system. From a unit economics perspective, you know, things continue to improve.
The health of our growth is really, really strong. All that sort of translated into a record EBITDA quarter for us. We had $73 million of EBITDA in Q4, you know, just executing very well. I think the important takeaway from the guidance and the outlook is we put out what we're referring to as our baseline growth algorithm, which is 15%, or call it mid-teens, MTM growth and low double-digit ARPU growth. We think that's a sustainable trajectory for the company to deliver on over the next several years as, you know, we're serving a massive TAM.
We're only 2.9 million Monthly Transacting Members amongst the TAM that we think is 180 million Americans. Ton of user growth potential. From a product expansion standpoint, still in the very early innings to deliver on that, you know, low double-digit ARPU growth underlying our growth algorithm. We're feeling very confident just in the durability of the growth trajectory of the company. You know, I think the powerful thing from an earnings standpoint is, and, you know, we talked about this, you know, all the way back in 2023. We hit this inflection point of 2.1 million Monthly Transacting Members and the incremental growth of users beyond that.
We just have tremendous flow-through from, you know, that revenue expansion down to earnings, and we'd expect that to continue to play out. I think just giving more clarity around the growth algorithm and our confidence in the durability of the growth should be the important takeaway for investors moving forward.
Yeah.
I mean, for context, we only have 300 employees at the company, just incredibly efficient. We think we can keep that efficiency. We're gonna make some modest headcount additions this year, but that's only in service of new products. We can scale our ExtraCash and checking business with the existing team we have and keep compounding ARPU and user growth with the same team effectively. Devin, you mentioned the guide, and so I think we guided to about $700 million at the midpoint for 2026 with roughly $300 million of EBITDA for the year. Really strong growth. It's like 25%-28% growth at the top line.
Not quite the 60% we grew last year, but last year with the benefit of a significant fee change, which increased prices for existing customers, it did not impact conversion or retention. It was a huge win for the business, but, you know, still expect the growth algorithm to continue into 2026. That's the guide we think is, you know, conservative, but solid.
Yeah. really, I think impressive relative to what, again, we figured would be another good year. I think even better. When you think about the monthly transacting, I mean, we have 2.9 million out of this addressable market of 180 million is kind of the total TAM. Talk about continuing to, you know, guiding for mid-teens growth, the ability to continue to drive that at these CACs that are, you know, around $20, which is really incredible. Like, how are you bringing customers in for such a low price point? Just the confidence in, is there a point where you hit saturate?
I mean, $185 million is huge. That would take a very long time to get to. Are there points where that CAC has to structurally go up, or do you just think you can grow for years ahead without much friction there?
As we had talked about, we're not solving for the lowest CAC, right? I mean, our goal is to continue to drive more LTV through ARPU expansion, which is gonna come from underwriting enhancements, but also new products that we're developing as well. You know, just expect our LTV to continue multiples of the CAC that we're generating. $20 is not what we're solving for. We could increase CAC significantly from here and still achieve the growth algorithm because the TAM is, you know, again, so big. I'd say how we're driving that efficiency at the top of the funnel, though, is we've got a really great brand.
Dave is an easy brand name to remember. It's a very friendly, approachable financial services name, dave.com, we've owned since the beginning of the company. We just do really well with our direct response messaging of, "You can use Dave today to get up to $500 in your pocket, no credit check, no late fees, no interest." That message really resonates at the top of the funnel to drive people in the front door. When we deliver on that message and actually give you the money, that magical experience drives heavy word of mouth. Since the beginning of the business, roughly a third of our acquisition comes from friends and family, not even paid referrals.
These are all free customers coming to us through word of mouth traffic, and we think that's another way we can have a lot of durability as we get into new features and just keep the CAC from, going out of control.
Yeah. The advanced size has continued to move higher, so you guys have been able to do that with your underwriting models. Just talk about how you're doing that, I think the average advance being over $200, like, that's a pretty big competitive advantage from my perspective, because your peers aren't able to do that, and somebody can't just enter the market and start giving away $200 with similar financial profiles. Talk about how you've been able to expand that, and then where can that go? I know there's a lot of inputs into what the average advance is going to be, but like, is $200 plus, can you continue to grow that number?
Yeah, we think we can. You know, a big part of the underwriting improvements is, one, obviously continue to chip away at the AI models, but also we just keep lending to repeat customers too. As you just have established repeat history with the business, the more our book becomes just existing customers, we can naturally bring them up the limit curve by virtue of just solid repayment performance. When you combine those things, it's, I mean, it's a lot. We have a lot of confidence we can keep growing that 214 number higher from here.
As we factor in new credit products like our new pay in 4 solution, that's gonna have a higher principal amount too. On a combined cumulative basis, we think we can certainly grow average originations per user from that perspective as well.
Yeah.
Yeah, touched on it a little bit, but CashAI is a very important, you know, piece of the equation when it comes to limits. We started investing in AI back in 2019 to power our underwriting models. I'd say one of the early innovators in the space as it relates to using AI for underwriting. We continue to, you know, see opportunities to improve our models. Back in September, we fully released our latest v5.5 CashAI underwriting model that supported both average origination size growth as well as lower loss rates, sort of the, you know, compounding effect of both of those on our unit economics has been very powerful.
We see the opportunity to add more features and more stronger signaling features for our v6 model that we're currently in development on that we expect to launch in the middle part of this year. We still think that there's a lot of upside to continue to improve on risk splitting within the portfolio and how that ultimately leads to this powerful flywheel for the business, because the more compelling offers that we get, you know, that we can provide to customers, the more customer growth we achieve.
That performance data then feeds back into the underwriting models and kinda creates this virtuous cycle that we believe creates a nice moat around the business because we have the strongest value prop in the market with the highest limits. We can see that in our own data that we have, you know, roughly 2x the limits of our largest scaled competitors within the data set. We can see based on the publicly disclosed data that our loss rates are just as good, if not better. Again, it kinda speaks to the flywheel effect that we've built around CashAI and how important that is for the durability of the competitive advantage that we have.
Yeah. obviously, you guys are early in thinking about artificial intelligence. This has been a big topic of the last two days here and people trying to figure out who's getting disrupted and then who's gonna actually leverage the technology and benefit. I think CashAI is one thing where you guys have already been integrating. How do you think about the technology more broadly? Is there more you can do with AI across the business model, over time? Is it gonna drive opportunities? Like, what gives you comfort that somehow agentic AI doesn't disrupt Dave. You know, I'm sure you guys are well aware of kinda all the trends here, so love to hear your thoughts on that.
Yeah. I mean, we touched on this on our earnings call yesterday. We think we're one of the big winners of AI. You look at just our performance since back in 2019, rolling out our first AI models, CashAI has proven to be a superior way to underwrite consumers for short-term credit. We've taken our loss rates from purely a rules-based system of over 5% delinquency rate down to nearly 1% on a 120-day basis from the investments in AI plus cash flow-based underwriting.
I think it's very difficult for a new entrant to come in and, you know, one, have the amount of customers it takes to run the models, but two, to have the balance sheet to absorb all the losses required to get your models to the point where we are today, and that's how Dave has become a clear winner in this single pay credit market. Even these scaled competitors, the Cash App and the Chimes of the world with their scaled user bases are only a fraction of the origination size per user, and those are, you know, major players.
I think the ability for us to be disrupted by some agentic, you know, vibe coding solution is, you know, slim to none. When you think about just sort of the draconian state of AI disrupting the workforce and lowering wages across the board or leading to a lot more government-assisted income, you wanna be in a product like Dave, which is small dollar, very short duration, high visibility. If you were to be invested in one credit asset class in the country during a downturn in the economy like that, or even in a good economy, I'd wanna be in Dave.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I mean, just the only thing I'd add to that is there's a lot of fin in fintech for our business too. You know, there's custom integrations, there's the bank partnerships, there's the compliance, there's the payments. There's a lot of stuff under the hood that is hard to just replicate, you know, without a lot of time and investment to get those things into a place that they work at scale in the way that they do for our business.
A lot of that stuff, again, comes back to we've reduced our cost to such a state that we can pass along a lot of those benefits to our customers in the form of better limits and therefore a stronger value proposition. On the credit side, as Jason mentioned, all this performance data that we have is the proprietary training data that we have for our AI models. That's hard, you know, it's hard to replicate that.
Yeah. I mean, one of the questions I get from investors is in that kind of draconian scenario, and maybe it's AI related or maybe it's some other macro shock, where your people are displaced or unemployment spikes, I think the question of how does Dave adapt to how they perform? I mean, you kind of hit on it, Jason, but like in that world, how do the models react? How quickly can they react? Then ultimately, my view is you guys are gonna be one of the first back in the market to be extending ExtraCash when people probably need it most, and you can have that visibility with CashAI.
Like, talk about how the models adapt to that scenario and maybe why you're not concerned about a, you know, an abrupt shift in the macroeconomic landscape.
When you think about a traditional lender that's making a multi-year credit decision on an installment loan, Dave underwrites a customer for the next paycheck, right? We're looking at, call it eight-day duration for us to assess the efficacy of your paycheck, your cash flow data, and our AI is looking at how safe it is to lend to this customer. That's where I wanna be as a credit investor in a, you know, an economy that's ever-changing. You don't wanna be making these long-term decisions. I wanna be in the shortest duration cycle possible with the most visibility, and Dave has access to the customer's bank account and income and spending patterns, so we know what's going on.
Our underwriting models update every eight days. We see change or sort of cracks in the economy, we can pull back or increase originations based on what we're seeing. I just love where we sit from that perspective. Yeah, I mean, fully confident that we would be the winner in that type of a market. I'd say, and I touched on this in the call yesterday, but maybe in a worst case scenario, you were to see average origination per user going down. If you see this mass unemployment happen, incomes are not just gonna go away.
I mean, the government's gonna step in, it's gonna be unemployment income or some sort of universal basic income, and the needs for credit are not gonna go away. The type of credit these customers are gonna be able to take is gonna be the short duration, small dollar that Dave is best suited to step in and take care of. We're not just gonna see incomes evaporate or we're gonna have bigger problems on our hands than, you know, earnings multiples.
Yeah. I'm sure even today, you guys are doing advances to people that are on unemployment, but you still are able to capture that just as much.
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
100%. I mean, that's a great data point. I mean, we are already lending to SSI, unemployment, any kind of government-assisted benefits 'cause CashAI is analyzing any income. We don't care what your credit score is. We don't even look at your credit score. It's entirely based on our own proprietary algorithm to look at your cash flow, and then again, use AI that's looking at all the billions of transaction data points to come up with a user risk score.
Yeah. I think you guys have made a compelling case that the addressable market for ExtraCash, that product itself still is massive relative to where you are today, so there's still great runway there. You're now on the verge of rolling out a pay in 4 product, and that's kind of the next leg here of the credit spectrum for Dave. Talk a little bit about what this product is and then your right to win, because I'm not sure people fully understand, like I think it's pretty compelling that you guys are going to have a right to win immediately, and it could be almost as big as you want it to be.
I'd love to hear you guys talk about that dynamic and kind of the trajectory and how quickly you'll take the governors off of how much you'll let it grow, 'cause there's obviously that's a balance too. You wanna get comfortable.
Like we're not giving away a lot of details on the product other than that it is a pay in 4 credit solution that gives our customers a little bit more duration than they have with ExtraCash right now. ExtraCash, 'cause the duration's so short, tends to be used to bridge the gap between paychecks to go buy things like gas or groceries or sort of your non-discretionary expenses. We do understand and listen to and talk to our customers a lot on their desire for more duration.
We like the idea of moving into pay in 4, which is akin to sort of the buy now, pay later duration, and we feel that's a far better solution than what our customers are out there today using, which is sort of subprime credit cards, which makes our money when customers are delinquent on revolving high APRs and late fees. We think that pay in 4 is a much better product for both investors and consumers in the sense that our goal is not to make money on compound interest or late fees, it's to make money on a you know, simple monthly fee plus a transaction fee that puts us on the right side of the customers and does not put our customers in this debt cycle.
If you look at subprime credit cards, it's $110 billion of revolving interest and I think over $20 billion of credit card late fees. It's not a great product for consumers, and especially in this uncertain macro economy, you don't wanna be in the open line credit card business. You wanna be in a closed-end credit, a lot of visibility, a lot of certainty on when you're gonna get paid back. I think our right to win in that space is, you know, helps us certainly expand more into the $180 million member TAM that we're going after.
Yeah.
I think just, you know, building upon that, this is a core capability, unsecured credit is a core capability and competency of the company. We've proven that with ExtraCash, and that we'll be leveraging that same core technology around underwriting and servicing and payments that we've built to kinda extend into this new customer use case. It is a little bit more duration, we're gonna be, you know, mindful of, you know, transitioning and growing that product over time.
The nice thing is that we have a lot of confidence in the trajectory of the core business, we don't need to rush it, despite the fact that we think that this pay in 4 product is a really big financial opportunity for us. We're starting to test with, you know, real customers in the second quarter. We're super excited about the opportunity there. We've gotten a lot of positive feedback in the research that we've done and other sort of market points of validation as well, and think that this can be, you know, a really big growth lever for us in 2027 and beyond.
I mean, if you just look at your existing customers, you could see that many of them are using some type of product, maybe buy now, pay later. I'm assuming you can see probably even what they're buying with that. You can use a lot of the same both customer learnings, the data you have on customers that are already in the funnel. It would seem that there's a huge addressable market within your existing customers.
I think the important thing is that we see that ExtraCash and these, you know, buy now, pay later products are complementary solutions. To Jason's point earlier, people are using ExtraCash for gas and groceries and things like that, and buy now, pay later for, you know, more discretionary type purchases. We're not, you know, worried about this cannibalization effect, and that these two products can coexist with each other within the same ecosystem and be very synergistic with one another.
Yeah. In scaling it seems like a lot of the same infrastructure is gonna be utilized. There's not a lot of incremental expense, direct expense, probably personnel or technology that needs to be built to deliver this product.
That's right.
Yeah. Exactly. I mean, same issuer processor, same bank partner. I mean, really, it's a lot of the same parts that we can use. Importantly, CashAI is gonna be the underwriting engine behind it and just show another use case of how we can use the same underwriting technology to expand into, to different product sets.
Yeah. As we think about, I know you're saying kinda like more 2027, like is the expectation this could be material to 2027?
Yes.
I'm sure the demand's there, but yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
We have no impact embedded in the guide for 2026. I think there is a reasonable shot that we get some contribution from this product this year. We expect it to be a, you know, meaningful business for us in 2027.
Yeah. another element I think is interesting your business for one that is associated with credit is huge cash generation, capital light. It's only getting more capital light with this migration of the advances over to Coastal Community Bank. Talk about you generating a lot of free cash flow that's gonna keep growing here over the next year based on the guide. Like, what are your plans with this? Is it just you buy back stock, you increase the buyback? How should we think about capital return versus can you plow some of that back into internal growth? You're so efficient, like, what are you gonna do with that?
We're already doing that.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah, I think We made the point on the call yesterday that if you look at the company's current cash balance plus the impact of the transition to our Coastal funding facility, which for context is a transition from a more on balance sheet structure with the warehouse where we're funding receivables ourselves to now a structure where the bank is gonna fund our partner bank's going to fund originations. We'll pay them, you know, access fee for, you know, the balance sheet usage that we have at the bank.
That's gonna free up $200 million of cash, that transition, and then pair that with what we expect the free cash flow generation to be for the year. We're sitting here with a pretty meaningful portion of the market cap in our expected cash for 2026. As part of that, we increased our share repurchase authorization to $300 million yesterday. I would expect us to start executing against that authorization pretty aggressively here in the near term.
We love our business, and we wanna own more of it. Yeah, we view buybacks as a great way to return capital to shareholders, and if done at prices at these levels can be a great way for value creation.
Yeah. Just last question. We'll wrap up here. I don't wanna get too far ahead of the roadmap, but obviously pay in 4 is coming. Is there more as you think about kind of like where Dave is over the next three to five years? Like, how many more legs of the stool can you add? What is obvious, and how do you think about the diversification strategy for what your customers need and want and how you can grow with them?
Look, I think anywhere we feel like we can meaningfully differentiate from FICO, where a customer needs access to short-term credit and cash flow-based underwriting is a better outcome, I think we wanna play in that space in short-term credit. I think expect more from us in the short-term credit product spectrum. I think the more we can do for our customers for more parts of their life, the better chance we have to start to win more of their direct deposit and primary banking relationship over time, which we already again offer Dave Checking and savings to our members as well.
I think there's gonna be this flywheel that the more we do for you, the longer term the relationship can be. If you look at the relationship with consumers and their, you know, traditional banks, like, those lifetimes are like 13+ years. If we can aspire for that kind of retention, the growth opportunity for the business is massive.
Yeah. Well, I think we're at time. Jason, Kyle, thank you. Congratulations on great 2025, best wishes for a great 2026.
Thanks a lot.
Thank you, everyone.
Thanks a lot.
Thank you.