All right, great. Morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us in the 2026 Wolfe Research Fintech Forum. My name is Paul Obrecht. I'm on the Fintech team here at Wolfe. Today it's great to be joined by Dave's Founder and CEO, Jason Wilk. Jason, great to have you on stage with us today.
Thanks a lot, Paul.
For anyone unfamiliar with the company, can you just give us a brief overview of Dave and highlight any key KPIs?
Yeah. Dave is one of the leading neobanks in the world. We have over 14 million registered customers on our platform. Our differentiation is that we focus on short duration credit using AI to give customers up to $500 between paychecks to get access to gas and grocery money in lieu of expensive overdraft fees. The company focuses on growing our monthly transacting member base, which currently sits at 2.9 million monthly transacting members that take out an ExtraCash origination, swipe our debit card or pay us a subscription fee. We also focus on our total originations growth, which is over $2 billion per quarter now. Lastly, we focus on our 28 days past due loss rate performance, which is around 1.89% at this point.
Great. I'd love to hit on your recent results, including that 28-day past due rate. You know, you recently re-reported Q4 key 2025 results, solidly outperformed. Can you unpack the key drivers of outperformance during the quarter? What really stood out, the sustainability of these drivers? Following that, I'd love to hit on that 28-day past due rate.
Yeah. Look, it was a tremendous year for the company. Did over $550 million of top line, over $230 million of EBITDA. Revenue was up 60% year-over-year. You know, we significantly outpaced all of our guidance for-
Mm-hmm
for the year, mostly driven by just improvements in underwriting to drive more originations per user. We also exceeded our monthly transacting member growth at 19%, again, getting to that 2.9 million number. Just a lot of resiliency in our customer acquisition costs as well. We acquired nearly 900,000 new customers in the quarter, and that was up 19% on the MTM count.
Great. Great.
Yeah.
You mentioned your 28-day past due rate of 1.89%. That compared to guidance of just below 2.1%.
Mm-hmm.
It was a 12% sequential improvement. Can you just really unpack the drivers and the improvements here and the durability, how you view that metric moving forward?
Yeah. Well, for those not familiar, our specialty is in cash flow underwriting. Customers who come to Dave, they connect their primary checking account to us via Plaid. We're using that information, which generally is 6-12 months of their checking account history. We, in 2019, introduced artificial intelligence into those models and have seen steady improvements ever since introduction. At this point, we are, you know, very happy with where we sit on that 28-day loss rate of 1.89%. Our goal really from here is just to continue to grow originations per user while holding the loss rates really steady there.
Right.
I think it's important to note that this investor right here in the front loves to talk about credit being an input, not an output, to our strategy, which is really true. We're very in control of the loss rate given the very short duration nature of our credit. The average duration is only about eight days, and we are connected to the customer's primary checking account. It's almost you can think about our credit as a semi-secured product given we have access to the repayment mechanism to pull.
Right.
Yeah, overall, just feel very good about where we sit.
Great. You mentioned AI in the underwriting process. You launched CashAI v5.5 in September.
Yep.
Just curious, what the impacts from that have been relative to your expectations, and then if you could share any thoughts on a v6.0 at some point.
v6.0 we'll start testing later this year.
Mm-hmm.
Excited about that. We tend to ship one major new model per year, but we're always making constant improvements. If you look at CashAI v5.5, it's not exactly what we thought it was gonna do. It's been growing origination steadily per user, but it's also been steadily reducing our loss rate down to that 1.89%. It's worth noting that last year we went through a pretty major fee migration. Up through 2024, from the founding through 2024, we largely monetized our ExtraCash originations with tips, so customers could pay us what they think was fair for using the service.
That served us very well for many years until we focused on delivering on more credit originations per user and saw that average tip would just tend to go down as we got people up the limit curve. 2025, we introduced a mandatory fee model where we charge people a $5 minimum or 5% transaction fee for each origination, and that was just a tremendous outcome for the business. We saw no degradation in conversion or retention on the book, which led us to a lot more confidence to grow originations per user. Having those spreads staying steady, we're able to maximize gross profit dollars.
Right.
CashAI 5.5 was the first model leveraging that new fee model to maximize gross profit. Again, it's done exactly what it's been intended to do.
Sure.
Importantly, 5.5 versus 5.0, there's about 200 unique new features that are in that model.
Mm-hmm.
We'd expect version 6.0 to have, you know, many hundred more features as well.
Right
of which we can optimize from. I'd say, you know, we've gotten a lot of the juice out of 5.5 that we thought.
Great. Great.
Yep.
That's great to hear. On the topic of AI, obviously a hot topic for all payment stocks these days. You know, there's been increased debates around AI disruption. I would ask you how you assess the potential risks of AI for the industry more broadly. I'd be curious, but for your specific company as well. Then what aspects of your business model do you view as the most defensible?
Well, one, we operate in a very highly regulated space, right?
Right.
Bank partnerships, payments, compliance. This is not something that a vibe coder engineer could come up with overnight. It'd be nearly impossible. Second, the amount of data of which we have on our customers also significantly difficult to try and amass. Then lastly, the amount of capital you would need to absorb the losses to generate the portfolio of returns we have would also be a huge mountain to climb. You know, ultimately, I think that we should be one of the winners in AI. You know, if you look at a draconian scenario where everyone loses their job, you're gonna still have some sort of universal basic income on the customer base. We can underwrite any income into the account, and people are still gonna have needs for short duration credit.
I think if there's one asset class that's gonna prevail in a deeply, you know, subprime world, it is Dave, because we have the most visibility into the accounts, we have the most, you know, sort of settlement capabilities on those accounts with the fastest duration. Again, using artificial intelligence to look at all the risk signals, we think we're, you know, very well positioned to be a winner in that space. I think ultimately it is our underwriting that sets us apart. You know, there's a lot of copycats of our product in market, like Chime and Cash App, but I think what we're doing to underwrite external accounts of a subprime/younger consumer or thin credit file with this level of loss rate performance is pretty standout.
Aside from the underwriting model, how else are you leveraging AI these days in your business?
I think similar to most, I mean, we're using it in customer support. About 80% of our tickets, the first response is generated by AI at this point.
Mm-hmm.
That's just a helpful data point for us to keep scaling our business with more customers. We've not needed to add a lot more support staff as a result of anything, can actually shrink that part of the workforce. We're using it with our marketing department, so we used to spend quite a bit of money doing all these, you know, production creatives for TV, which is a major channel for us to leverage for advertising. Now our AI creatives we're shipping within a matter of hours.
Okay
Actually outperform all of our human creatives, and so that's just heavy cost savings, but also just a great way to optimize and drive more performance of our best channels. Lastly, just on the fraud vector side too, we're able to look at AI to sort of cluster and find groups of bad actors that you know could disrupt the system, and it's been very, very accretive to the company.
Right. Makes a lot of sense. I'd love to hit on guidance briefly. For 2026, you're calling for year-over-year revenue growth of 25%-28%.
Yep.
Healthy adjusted EBITDA margin expansion. Curious, what are the factors that give you confidence in your guide? What are the key drivers you see for the year, both from the top line and on the margin front? Where do you think you've embedded some level of conservatism, if any?
Well, I think we always take a pretty conservative approach for the year. You know, we want to build a lot of trust with the street that we can deliver on what we say we're gonna do. We put out a guide that we're very confident we can actually hit. You know, we guided to $700 million of revenue at the midpoint. I'd say one thing to point out is that we have a lot of confidence in our cohorts. We have just a lot of data and a lot of repeat customers of which we can use to have confidence in the quarter-over-quarter performance. As long as the marketing engine stays the way we think it's going to, then I think the business is highly forecastable. We're feeling good about it.
Great. That's good to hear. I loved it on ExtraCash, your flagship product. It is somewhat similar to some other offerings from competing neobanks in the market. I'm curious from your point of view, what really makes it differentiated? How has it been so successful? Why might a user who's evaluating products in the market favor ExtraCash over the competitor's products?
Well, one, we invented the category.
Yeah.
We've been doing this since 2017. Our most recent competitors have only been in market for three, and both Cash App and Chime, I'd say are the largest scaled competitors. We've taken a very different approach in that we don't think that customers wake up in the morning excited to open up a new checking account and switch their direct deposit. We decided from the very first day of the company not to take that strategy. Our approach is, we let you connect your primary account to us. We don't require deposits, but we'll underwrite you for credit based on the health of your external account.
Yeah.
That strategy has served us well. You know, our CAC has been very resilient since the founding of the business. It leads to heavy word of mouth 'cause we can deliver on saving you from paying heavy overdraft fees to go get gas and groceries. When we deliver on that message of getting up to $500 within 5 minutes or less, people tend to tell their friends and family. Since day one, a third of our acquisition has been driven by word of mouth. I think that's a really powerful way we can continue to scale and gives us a lot of leverage on the ability to drive efficient CAC moving forward.
Right. Great. Obviously, new monthly transaction members growth has been phenomenal.
Yep.
You know, as you mentioned, accelerated to 19% in the fourth quarter with 2.9 million MTMs now. What do you see as the key initiatives in place to drive this accelerated growth? How do you see that progressing into 2026?
Honestly, more the same.
Yeah.
I mean, we're seeing a lot of success again in the AI creatives, and we're gonna do more of that this year. To continue to scale the channels that are working well for us, television, streaming TV, I think those are hard channels to unlock that are differentiated from our competitors, just given we've got a really strong brand. The fact that you can actually get money within minutes is a much stronger call to action versus, "Hey, open up a new checking account and then get credit." If you look at our CAC versus our competition, you know, it tends to be about a tenth. It puts us in a really good spot there from the ability to scale and differentiate. We're also launching a new product this year called, it's gonna be called the Flex Card.
It'll be a pay-in-four solution that customers can basically pay in four installments any purchase. That importantly is gonna be a cross-sell to drive more LTV for our customers, but also it's gonna be a new go-to-market lever for the business to drive more top of funnel. I think for us, it's just a great opportunity to drive more customers.
How do you see that pay-in-four product resonating in the market and certainly relative to a fairly saturated pay-in-four market at this point, I think it is probably fair to say. What do you think is really differentiating it?
So we-
The user base it comes with.
Well, we do see a lot of BNPL activity in the customer accounts.
Mm-hmm.
The fact that we have all that visibility gives us the confidence to go build the products that we wanna actually go build. I mean, most companies don't have that level of market-
Yeah
Intelligence. We know the demand is there. I think importantly, this is not meant to disrupt traditional BNPL. This is meant to disrupt subprime credit cards, which are not great for customers, not great for investors. Subprime credit cards are making money when customers are delinquent, right? They want you to revolve your balance, they want you to pay heavy late fees. Ultimately, most of those models end up getting blown up.
Yeah.
We like the idea of a pay in four duration, of which we think cash flow-based underwriting can be a meaningful differentiator. Because we know when the customer's paycheck is, and have the account connection, we think pay in four is gonna be a much better way to issue credit to consumers. It's also gonna be a much better way for us to drive revenue as a business because it's highly predictable. We're not sitting out there with open line duration risk, and the monetization's gonna be very, sort of consistent and transparent for us and the customer.
Mm
Given it's gonna be a higher monthly fee, a simple transaction fee, no compound interest, and no late fees.
Great. What's the timeline look like for pay in four coming to market?
We're testing with internal employees right now.
Okay.
I've got the card in my wallet. It's working well. New customers we'll start to test with some existing users next quarter. Depending on the results there, we'll start to scale up based on the efficacy of the underwriting models with the new product. We're really excited. In subprime credit card, you know, there's $110 billion of revolving credit card interest out there, $20 billion of late fees. Just like Dave was launched to disrupt overdraft fees and have had a huge amount of success, we think going after the pain points of subprime credit card, disrupting that with no credit check, no interest, no late fees is gonna be good.
Great.
Yeah.
Great. Another interesting product is the subscription offering. Can you just tell us a bit more about the monthly offering, what comes with it, and how it's impacted your ARPU and your member engagement?
We do have a $1 a month membership fee for the company, so that gives you access to our checking account, ExtraCash. We also have a job board called Side Hustle to find-
Mm
work at Instacart, Uber, DoorDash. We've since raised the price on new customers to $3 just to test that. We were in testing for six months to measure conversion or retention impact. We saw no impact, and so decided to scale that to all new customers starting in June of last year. That's now a pretty significant line item for the business given how many new customers we're acquiring per quarter, and expect that to be a meaningfully growing business. When you factor in the new pay in four card's gonna have also a higher subscription fee. You know, that recurring revenue stream is gonna be a much larger and larger part of our business moving forward.
It sounds like you made the switch in the subscription offering for new customers, didn't necessarily see a change in engagement. You changed to the flat fee-
Mm-hmm
for ExtraCash, didn't necessarily see any change there. Can you touch on the stickiness of your product and why it resonates so much with these consumers who just keep coming back?
Well, I think we can, you know, point to the fact that our customer is pretty resilient, and they also are not that price sensitive.
Right.
I mean, they're hungry for access to transparent, responsible, fair credit products, and they are willing to pay for them.
Right.
That gives us a lot of confidence moving into the new pay in four solution as well that even though there are existing solutions out there's either really high fees with subprime credit cards or there's high fragmentation with BNPL where you don't know who's gonna be at the end of the online checkout or store. Just very confident we can continue to compete there.
Great. I'd love to finally hit on ARPU just as we go through monthly-
Mm-hmm
transaction members then ARPUs. That obviously grew 36% in the quarter, helping to drive that 60%+ revenue growth. How have you been able to sustain these levels? What are the key drivers of ARPU growth as we look into 2026? I'd also just ask you for maybe a new cohort, an average cohort, your most mature cohorts, what does the ARPU look like across that spectrum?
Well, it's gonna be higher ARPU the longer you stay with us, right?
Right.
Loss rates get lower the longer you stay with us. You're gonna be higher on the limit curve the longer you retain on the platform as well.
Mm-hmm.
I think our average approval for new customers with ExtraCash is around $100, with the average for the total book being $214. You just see the steady step up there, and so naturally you're gonna see higher levels of ARPU. We also believe that the new pay in four product will be largely cross-sold to our, you know, repeat proven customers, at least to start with.
Mm-hmm.
We expect to see ARPU growth there. We have a lot, just a lot of initiatives to keep optimizing underwriting. We have some new features coming out with ExtraCash to expand ARPU for the year. Ultimately think our growth algorithm commitment we talked about the last call, the mid-teens MTM growth and the low double-digit ARPU growth is a really strong growth algo for-
Mm-hmm
The, you know, medium term to keep growing the company and hit these earnings guidance.
Right. We obviously mentioned your guide calls for some healthy margin expansion. During the year in 2025, it was incredibly healthy. Your adjusted EBITDA margins expanded 1,100 basis points in the fourth quarter.
Mm-hmm
which is very, very sizable.
Yeah, pretty high.
year-over-year growth. What seems to really be driving this efficiency? Is it on the gross margin side? Is it OpEx? And what are the key levers for expansion as we look into 2026 and beyond?
Well, the company is just incredibly efficient. The operating leverage we're getting out of the business with 300 headcount is tremendous. We built a highly scalable platform we think that can continue to generate operating leverage from here. We are making modest investments into the company this year. I think growing headcount from 300 to 320 to continue to build some new opportunities. You're talking about $10 million of incremental.
Right.
You look at our year last year. We grew ARPU 36%, and the amount of gross profit we added to the company versus the OpEx expense. I mean, it's incredible flow through.
Mm-hmm.
Expect to continue to do more of that as we build new products. The new pay in four solution is being built with the exact same team we have today.
Right.
I think we really are delivering what we said years ago, which was once we hit 2.1 million monthly paying members, that every incremental customer is really gonna be all gross profit effectively flows through into EBITDA, and that's really rung true.
Mm-hmm.
Despite very modest addition of OpEx this year, it's gonna be a lot of cash flow being generated.
Great. Before hitting on some recent trends and kind of broadly thematic question for 2026, I'm curious on a few funding questions. Obviously you have this forthcoming transition to Coastal Community Bank funding structure.
Mm-hmm.
Curious what the expected impact's here, what the timeline looks like.
I think we expect to start transitioning at the end of the second quarter.
Mm-hmm.
That's just gonna unlock a tremendous amount of cash. For those not familiar, right now we fund a lot of our ExtraCash receivables book with partially our own balance sheet, plus have an off-balance sheet warehouse facility with Victory Park Capital.
Mm-hmm
that we've drawn $75 million on. Moving forward, Coastal Community Bank's gonna actually originate and hold all our receivables for ExtraCash. The net of that's gonna basically unlock about $200 million of cash. That's gonna come to us sort of the end of the summer. In anticipation of that cash unlock, we just raised this convertible note.
Mm-hmm
Last week to accelerate our share repurchase, you know, anticipating that cash coming up here very, very quickly.
Great. That's helpful. I was just gonna ask about your convertible note, so-
Yeah
Thank you. I'd love to hit on spend trends, and given the nature of your products, you likely have very strong insight into consumer health, spend trends, credit health specifically. Are you seeing any changes year to date in any of these patterns among consumers? Anything to call out perhaps across income cohorts or maybe as we think about discretionary versus non?
Not particularly. I mean, we have access to a dashboard we built with all the cash flow data to look at trends in, you know, big box retailer to discount stores. We look at tax refunds, look at spend activity. Just not seeing really anything abnormal for the customer base. You know, refunds are 10% higher than they were last year, as expected from the no tax on tips.
Right
Overtime. It's not slowed our demand for the quarter, you know, outside of normal seasonal Q1 demands from just tax refund season. Yeah, nothing to call out. I'd say, you know, we do well in every environment except for a stimulus environment, and in one where there's heavy unemployment, we would do well there, given we can underwrite the cash flow information.
Right. That makes a lot of sense.
Yeah.
As we think to the remainder of the year, it sounds like pay in four is certainly one area of investment on the product roadmap. What else are the main areas that an investor should be aware of, whether it be product innovations, maybe it's more customer acquisition tools, AI integrations, whatever it may be? Just the key focuses, I suppose.
I think honestly, it's just business as usual.
Yeah.
You know, outside of the pay in four product, just feel very confident that we've got a working growth algorithm for our core business.
Mm-hmm.
There's a lot of demand for it. You know, we think there's further improvements in just doing what we do best, which is in our underwriting.
Right.
Ultimately, the fact we think there's just so much room to run on our TAM, if we just keep doing what we're doing, the business can grow and deliver on this growth algorithm.
Right. You mentioned some continued improvements in the ExtraCash product. What could those look like? What do you think could still be further optimized the product?
It's mostly this originations per user.
Yeah.
Customers are, you know, clamoring for a little bit more. We think there's still a lot of room to run on the limit curve, given we're at $214 per user.
Mm-hmm.
Our limits are $500, so as we continue to chip away at that. We have one slight iteration this year whereas we get people up the limit curve, especially towards the higher end around $500, the current model of Dave is an all or nothing approach, where we'll approve you for $500. If you don't take the full $500, you can't access the rest of the money until your next paycheck hits.
Right
We are testing right now the ability, if you take less than your desired amount, you can come back mid-pay period and take the rest. We're not taking on more credit risk, it's just you can access what we've approved you for, and we're already seeing some positive signs.
Right
within that test.
You're already effectively offering the $500 there, and if they don't utilize it all, then you're not necessarily taking more risk if they come back and say they want the rest.
That's right.
Okay.
That's right.
Got it. That makes a lot of sense. Do we have any questions from the audience in the interest of time? Yeah. Okay.
I actually just have one about competition.
Yeah.
We cover Chime, we cover Block. Jason, there's been a lot of development in product velocity with other companies coming out. Some of them seem to be somewhat similar to what you guys offer. I'm curious if you're seeing any impacts on your growth or any customer acquisition impacts. Just as a follow-up to that, what are your acquisition, customer acquisition targets? What do you expect to see in terms of monthly active user growth over the next year or two?
Well, first, I think it just shows the size of the overall industry. The fact that Block with Cash App was able to roll out their Borrow product, which, you know, has some similarities to Dave, as well as Chime. These are pretty massive install bases with Cash App at like 60 million MAUs rolling out a competitor product three years ago. If you were to ask me if they were to launch something, you know, would that have some impact on our business? I mean, I could say, you know, probably it would. But the fact that we're acquiring nearly 900,000 customers per quarter, our CAC has not increased at all really, and we have some overlap in some of the existing Southeastern TAM, and have had no impact on our business.
I think that just again speaks to the total massive size of this industry that we're all playing in, that Dave really invented back in 2017. As far as our growth outlook for the year, we're committed to that mid-teens MTM growth, and so I would expect to, you know, grow out that 2.9 base, you know, at least to 15%.
Any others? Yeah, yeah. Ken.
Can you just describe the difference between the 900,000 adds and maybe you netted like 400,000. I guess what's the churn? Are there base customers that are not churning and it's just like a lot of new people coming in, and those are the people that are churning? I'm just trying to understand the churn and the retention, I guess.
Yeah. Not all 900,000 are turning into MTMs. Those are people that open up an account with the company. We're just looking at the total net sort of addition to the MTM count. Know that the MTM is based on a month. If you were to pull back and look at our total base of transactors over a six-month period, it'd be significantly larger. It's hard to really, I guess, look at churn from that perspective. We're just looking at the net total MTMs is the number we report out on. Does that help?
I'm sorry. The 2.9-
Is a subset of the 13-14 million total account holders that we have.
Yeah.
I think that one thing about ExtraCash is you see episodic uses of it. People may use it one month, they may not need it for a couple of months, and we'll see them again, and they'll come back into the MTM base. The CAC is based on more of the top-of-funnel metric of new account holders, MTMs who are engaged in a particular month. We see sort of transient kind of activity between account holder and MTM given the nature of ExtraCash. I think importantly, a significant portion of the business is to repeat usage. In a given month or a quarter, it's about 97% of originations are repeat customers, and the average tenure that they've been around is close to two years.
We are seeing these people a lot, and it is a highly retentive relationship that we have with them.
I'm not sure who he is, but that sounds right.
Following up on that point, obviously sounds like very, very high percent of repeat users. How often are they engaging with ExtraCash?
Like, on a.
On an average basis.
On a monthly basis?
Mm-hmm.
Well, you can only borrow once per pay period.
Right.
Right? That's the important part. Basically, there's some customers on monthly income, some customers on gig economy, and so it really depends on what your income profile is.
Mm-hmm
on how active you are. Our goal is to increase transactions per user.
Right.
I mean, mostly through the Dave Card as well as the Flex Card. It's a way to sort of stay, you know, top of wallet, top of mind for that customer more and more over time.
Great. I guess my final question for you would just be, if we're sitting here on stage next year at the 2027 Wolfe FinTech Forum, and we're reflecting on 2026, what are the three goals you would say that if you accomplish these, 2026 was a successful year for Dave?
Well, I think if we have more than mid-teens MTM growth and more than low double digits.
Mm-hmm.
The low double-digit ARPU growth-
Right
That would be a great year for the business and, you know, we expect we can deliver on that and we're just excited about the year overall, and I think we'll have some more stats to share around the Dave and Flex Card this time next year, which we'll be excited about.
Great. Jason, thanks so much.
Yeah.
Appreciate it.
Thanks, Paul. Thank you.