Great. Thank you, everybody. Welcome to the Marqeta Fireside Chat at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia and Technology Conference. I have the privilege of introducing Jason Gardner, Executive Chairman, CEO, and founder of Marqeta. My name is Mike Ng, and I cover Marqeta and fintech here at Goldman. We have about 40 minutes for today's presentation, inclusive of audience Q&A. If you have a question at the end, feel free to just raise your hand, and we'll get a mic runner over to you.
Not executive chairman yet.
Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah.
Still chairman.
Still chairman. We will get to that specific point.
Yeah, I bet.
During the conversation. Jason, first, thank you very much for the time and participating in our conference.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
It's a privilege. You know, to start things off, would you just describe the opportunity for modern card issuing processors like Marqeta, how Marqeta differentiates itself from peers and the path for continued market share gains over the next several years?
Yeah. The, I mean, most people know the story. The company got started back in 2010. This is after I co-founded another payments company and wanted to figure out how to put a bunch of Groupon coupons on a card, if we all remember what Groupon was like. I had to go build an issuing processing system from scratch and felt, after actually talking to banks and talking to other issuer processors, they just said, you know, "You can build whatever you want. It just needs to look like this," which is the same card that everyone had. I decided to go build an entire issuing processing system from scratch, deliver that via open API so that companies can build really purpose-built cards to solve either commercial or consumer use cases.
We invented a category called modern card issuing, which allowed a company to come in, whether it was, you know, Instacart or Cash App or Expensify, to build these cards to operate in a very, very specific way. No one had ever done that before. If you look at what Visa and Mastercard have done, they've interconnected the world for merchants that want to accept payment cards, whether online or offline. That's a massive business. I mean, even electronic payments globally is about $80 trillion. You have anywhere from $7 trillion to $8 trillion in the US around card volume. Today, Marqeta processes less than 0.5%.
If you think modern card issuing and the ability for companies to build card products, whether commercial or consumer use cases, is gonna continue to grow in the coming years, which is as I think we've seen over the last 10 years, a bank had a card, and now a card brings a bank. You know, we see that with companies like Cash App and Chime, where the card is really the tip of the spear and then all the services behind that. That's gonna be continuing to happen around the world. We're gonna capture that market opportunity amongst many other market opportunities, even continuing like on-demand delivery and expense management. If we think about the future within both debit and credit and the services that are being built around it, we're pretty excited about the opportunity that's ahead of us.
There's so much more that we have planned, and to do and plan to announce in the coming months and years. There's still a general sense within the company that we're only scratching the surface.
That's a fantastic overview. Why don't we talk about some of the news that was announced this morning? Marqeta's board of directors authorized a $100 million buyback, with no termination date. Maybe you can talk a little bit about why now and the plans there.
I think for, like, when I announced that I was gonna move from CEO to eventually executive chairman, like, I wanted to be very transparent. It's one of the core values when I started the company. I told every Marqetan, "You should know as much as I do about the business, not the HR-related stuff." I used to. I was talking this morning. That, you know, every Wednesday we had the all hands meeting, and I would tell everybody how much time we had left based on how much money we had in the bank. People actually loved it because it was so transparent that they understood how fast they have to work and how fast they have to build to get to generating cash.
Obviously my job was as a private company CEO to go out and raise money. When I announced, the stock went down 25%. Like, I was kinda shocked. Like, I thought it was gonna go down maybe 10%-15%. We as a management team and a board felt like we'd just been simply dislocated from our peers. We believe we're just massively undervalued as a stock. I mean, just based on how the market has operated, we're excited about the prospects from the company, and we decided it's time to go and begin buying back just to begin to put us in, you know, where we should be amongst our peers.
Obviously, the execution that we continue to have is strong, and we wanna show that we not only believe in the company, but we believe that we're dislocated, and the stock should be at a, actually, obviously, a different price point.
Great. You know, as Marqeta's Founder and CEO, you've obviously been incredibly integral to the story.
Mm-hmm.
As you step into that, you know, soon to be executive chairman role, it feels like there might be some sort of inflection or change in Marqeta's business. So what does that next stage look like? Is it any different from the current stage and phase that we're in?
Well, there's not a change in Marqeta's business. There's a change in me. I started the company by myself. I took the company public on June ninth of 2021. I was getting lots of questions from Martha Cummings, who runs NomGov, and about my succession plan. I was, you know, I didn't want to engage. Like, I was really like, I'm overwhelmed. We just went public. This is a whole new world. I mean, being a private company CEO and being a public company CEO is vastly different. A lot of the questions I was getting around succession planning, I kind of blew it off until January of this year.
Then the question started coming up again, and I was asking, like, my friends, like going to other public company CEOs, going to other founders who took companies public and then moved to an exec chair role. People like Scott Cook, and then talked to Brad Smith as well and got really excited about that dynamic duo. I mean, look what Reid Hoffman and Jeff Weiner did. Look what Brad Smith and Scott Cook did. I mean, that became really exciting to me because I'm a product person. You know, I like to go build things. Building things and focusing on people and culture within the company and then focusing on our customers is where I'm the best in the world at. I felt over time I was drifting away from that and becoming far more of a day-to-day operator.
If I can partner with somebody, I actually refer to it as I need to find the co-founder for the next stage of growth, and me and that person can partner together to drive a lot more growth within the business over the coming years. As we operate in 39 countries today and growing, there's so much we can do for me as an entrepreneur, but then also someone who's been born, bred, and trained for this job. This is probably one of the most enviable CEO jobs available in fintech. When I announced there's a lot of people who want this role. I've interviewed a number of people already, and I know that the market wants me to find somebody as soon as possible.
We don't have a time frame on it, but my goal is to find the best person that myself, the management team, the board, and the company can work with, to drive even greater value for not only our customers, but our shareholders.
Great. Maybe you can expand on that just a little bit more, as you know, go seek that next co-founder for Marqeta's next leg of growth. You know, are there any certain characteristics that you're looking for as you know, work on this CEO search? I know you mentioned there's no timeline. Similarly, I know that Marqeta's trying to fill other executive roles like the chief revenue officer seat. Maybe you can provide some updates on either what you're looking for or a timeline there.
Yeah. Simon Khalaf, who joined us from Twilio, is an amazing GM. He's also been a CEO before. He understands revenue, so he's stepping in on the interim basis to really drive revenue for the company. It's like even a short period of time, he's done an amazing job. You know, we have a strong presence in the market, so he's taking over a strong team as it is. I believe that you can't find a really good CRO until you find a really good CEO. So that's the serious CRO. We haven't even begun the search because we wanna focus on the CEO first. The CEO for Marqeta, like you need to have a good understanding of financial services, of specifically payments. You know, it's a very, very nice to have.
I'm not declarative that you have to do that because I've you know, I didn't know anything about issuing and processing when I started the company, and I brought people into the company who knew nothing about issuing and processing and have done an incredible job. You know, Randy Kern being one, our CTO. As I look, it's sort of the payments and financial services because I think operating in a space that's very regulated, you know, this is not a software business. This is payments. You know, when you move people's money based on instruction, whether it's commercial or consumer use cases, there are, you know, there's OCC, FinCEN, FDIC, the CFPB, and then there's all the counterparts of all those types of organizations in every country that we operate. That's just a different way to think about a business.
That's one. Number two is they have either been a CEO of a public company or are currently a CEO of a public company, or have been on an executive team of a public company reporting directly into the CEO. It's very, very different. After you go public, it's kinda like getting hit in the head with a bat. It's very different than as a private company CEO, you can really do whatever you want. You can't necessarily do that as a CEO of a public company. You need to find someone who has operated within that environment because it's very, very different.
I, like, I'm actually really excited about it to find somebody that I can partner with and I can do my best work so they can do their best work. I can see how the market thinks. You know, they, the market's gonna think all sorts of different things in regards to my announcement. For me, I'm sort of giddy about the whole thing. Like, to find that person that I can really work with and partner with to drive even greater value and greater heights within the business. For me, after 12 years, I'm very ready to do that.
That's great. Let's pivot a little bit and talk more about the business. Marqeta has a deep, long-standing relationship with several startups in fast-growing categories like on-demand delivery, buy now, pay later, expense management. Could you talk a little bit about what made Marqeta stand out in these verticals and have as much success as it has to date?
Well, like the early days. I think about, you know, sitting with Tony Xu from DoorDash and his team, and they were giving prepaid cards to their drivers with $2,000-$3,000 on them. You know, the drivers basically, you know, going to Nordstrom and shopping for groceries themselves and buying a pack of smokes at the bar across the street. You know, they had no control over these transactions. We sat down with them, and at the time, we were inventing something called JIT or just-in-time. This is the ability. When you swipe a card, it generates what's called an ISO 8583 message at the point of sale.
When any of you travel around the world, and you swipe the card, it works because that terminal is generating the exact same message, that every other terminal in the world is generating. We took that message, and we said, like, what if we send you the message so you can use the lat-long data of the app on the phone with the amount and the merchant, you know. 'Cause if you know they're gonna buy $100 worth of groceries, it's gonna come through as $100 worth of groceries, you would be able to authorize that. That allowed them to take off and scale. We believe that space wouldn't be able to be as successful as it was in the beginning without us.
That was Instacart, and then DoorDash, and Favor, and, like, all the host of companies in that space. That was the beginning of our strategy to go after verticals. We focused on these verticals and use cases where what can we do to allow these companies to scale, and not only know their unit economics on a minute-by-minute basis because we're sending them these transactions. You know, they can, you know, we have a, obviously, a rev share with them so they can figure it out. But we've reduced risk down to near zero, so they can hire hundreds of thousands of people across the world that would have Marqeta cards and be able to go buy groceries and food and begin to scale. We did that for expense management, obviously on-demand delivery, e-commerce, and then buy now, pay later.
You know, sitting with Klarna at the Money20/20 conference back in 2015, they needed to understand how they could scale. We said, "Well, we can do this thing called a virtual card. We insert into the checkout flow behind the Pay with Klarna page, and then allow them to go and scale." The speed to market is now they can onboard merchants incredibly fast without the integration. Now we've seen with Klarna, like we are powering them through 14 different countries. We've launched the Klarna card now. That's how we've always worked with our customers, is we think about what other use cases can Marqeta be bringing to your constituency, and then allow them to scale. Then we went into, obviously, digital banks, large tech giants, and now large financial institutions.
That's great. Among those key verticals that we just talked about, as you think about the next leg of growth, is that gonna be driven by expanding the share with these existing customers or perhaps signing new customers in these existing verticals or going into new verticals altogether?
All the above. Yeah. There's new verticals. There's a number of different verticals and use cases we're looking at today. In fact, the last two days, we had a board meeting yesterday, but the day before that was a full day of strategy. We had a lot of. There is no lack of opportunity or verticals or where we wanna invest our time or our money. You know, it's about saying no to the things that we believe we'll be good at and saying yes to the things that we believe we'll be great at. It's verticals, it's use cases, it's new technologies, new geographies, how do we spread our wings.
You know, like, we are operating in 39 countries today, but there's a ton of opportunity, say, in South America and Central America. We still believe that there's a ton more opportunity even in the U.S., and we'll continue to invest. The question is one where it's all the above because there is so much opportunity for us and where we wanna go. It's down to execution, and then, you know, making sure that our customers are adopting more and more of our platform and new technologies that we're introducing.
Great. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how Marqeta fits in relative to traditional financial institutions or, you know, traditional card issuers. Is there a certain use case that you think may resonate more with traditional FIs?
Yeah. Traditional FIs. If a large financial institution wins a portfolio from another large financial institution, it's $50 million just to get started, and it's probably another $200 million just to bring that portfolio online. If you think about the size of a portfolio based on a $250 million investment needs to be incredibly large. If I'm gonna start a new card product, I have this on-prem solution, whether it's FIS, Fiserv, or TSYS, that costs an extraordinary amount of money.
With Marqeta, because everything is natively in the cloud, it's APIs, you can literally launch 10 different card products in a matter of, you know, a couple months, and then A/B test that and see what creates the stickiness, and then end up using our technology to further differentiate that product to market. We believe there's just a lower total cost of ownership of using us for large financial institutions, as they begin to go and build. Now, large financial institutions are very, very long sales cycles, and we've done pretty well already. We've announced Citi with Tokenization as a Service. We've announced JP Morgan. We've announced Marcus. There's more coming. That's our foot in the door.
We can prove that this company and our Tokenization as a Service is gonna provide value because TSYS doesn't do it. That was. We were looking how do we get our foot in the door. Our foot in the door was, if I'm a bank that uses TSYS like Citi and JPMorgan Chase, I can't even use the card until I get it in the mail.
Right.
What if I could instantly issue it into Apple Pay or Samsung Pay or Google Pay and use it immediately? That automatically increases the likelihood that the consumer is gonna begin to engage, and that was our foot in the door. Even getting that is a long sales cycle. We're proving ourselves, proving our technology, and then obviously the sales strategy is to look for other opportunities, eventually, new card products.
Great. Let's talk a little bit more about new card products. You know, Marqeta is primarily debit today, and, you know, it's increasingly looking into new products, such as credit. Could you just talk a little bit about where you are on credit today and, you know, what points of differentiation does Marqeta offer that, you know, gives them the right to win in that, product and vertical?
Yeah. In the card world, you have two major components. You have the issuing and processing system itself. All of the technology to sort of manage the ISO 8583 messages, whether this is credit, debit or prepaid. Prepaid and debit are pretty much the same. Prepaid is kind of the bastard child of debit. Credit is very different 'cause you're dealing with what's called Reg Z compliance. This is when you log into a website, you know, to look at your credit card, if you have a Chase Sapphire card like I have, everything is formatted a very specific way. That's why when no matter which credit card you're using when you log in, all the interfaces look the same because they're actually legally supposed to go look like that, even down to the font size.
That's what's called Reg Z compliance. When you build a credit card issuing and processing system, everything needs to be able to support that interface. The next step of that is what's called program management. You have program management within debit. We refer to this as MxM and PxM, managed by, which is program management, and then powered by, where we're not providing program management, but more sort of a la carte, like Disputes Management or fraud management for the different products that we have. It's the same within credit. Within credit is, you know, when a consumer pays part of their bill, how does that money get allocated against the purchases that were made? When someone buys a product or they do a cash advance, those are different APRs associated with.
All the calculation around that, a lot of that is within the program management space. Today, within credit, we do only the issuing and processing. This has been a four-year journey for us. Four years ago, decided, you know, let's go build a brand new credit card. We thought the current credit cards out today all look the same. We want a different experience. It's two years or 18 months of like planning and then two years of building to get to where we are today. You know, we even just, we launched 40 new APIs within credit, a couple months ago. We're just scratching the surface within credit, but now we have like the Greenlight card, we have the M1 card, there's more cards coming out.
Today we partner with both Deserve and FNBO, First National Bank of Omaha, which is one of the largest credit issuers in the world. They're top 20. We leverage their program management. We've been very open that we're either going to buy or we're going to build our own program management system because in the program management world, there's just a lot of different features and functions you can build to drive revenue.
Great. That was very clear. I'd like to talk a little bit about Marqeta's customer base. Block is Marqeta's largest customer. It made up 69% of revenue.
Yep.
In the Q2. Can you talk a little bit about the scope of the relationship with Block's Cash Card, Square Card, Afterpay? You know, what are the most common use cases that Marqeta helps with?
Yeah. First off, we do a lot. Like Mike Milotich, our CFO, said, the best analogy is we're like a zipper. You know, we're so tied to each other based on the work that we do, which has been. We actually built the first card with them as part of a Hack Week project back in 2013. IO, who was running product at Cash App, reached out in 2016 to go build the next card based on people sending money in the P2P space, and there was just money sitting in accounts because people didn't have bank accounts. Today we look at it like, within the Cash App card itself, we have, you know, ATMs and accounts and ACH and the Cash Card and the Cash App card itself.
Within Square Card, we have the account infrastructure, the Square Card itself, money movement, ATM, and then now with Afterpay. You know, Afterpay is obviously one of the many buy now, pay later companies we work with. Even that acquisition, how did they implement Afterpay at the point of sale? They worked with us to go and do that. So we're very, very tied together in the work that we do. At the same time, like, they're an incredible business. Like what they've built, even in, you know, the Credit Karma and the massive amounts of deposits we saw in the first and Q2 for just people receiving their checks from the IRS, you know. Then cash loads, and then obviously adding buy now, pay later to the point of sale.
We have been working together for a long time. There are lots of people at Marqeta who have counterparts within Block, and Block counterparts working with Marqeta. I'm close to Brian Grassadonia, who's the CEO of Cash App. He and I have been working together for years. That is the perfect relationship. That's the relationship I think any company wants to have out of a customer, which is the customer is taking advantage and using the entire surface area of the platform. Part of that is because they know how to build products and are just crushing the rest of the market in regards to how it builds.
This is where we see the concentration problem, which was 63% in the Q1, and then went to 69% because they've added a number of things to their products, like the Credit Karma piece and Afterpay and the Cash App, where we saw the increase in volume. While, you know, we made a big bet on crypto, I still believe very strongly in crypto. That was really beginning to take off, and then the change in the market just depressed other parts of the market, like buy now, pay later and crypto. Why we saw the concentration grow. We expect that and our goal is to make sure that goes down over time as we not only build within the existing verticals, but new verticals.
That's great. I think it's very clear you guys have a very tight-knit and expanding relationship. Just given the importance of Block as a customer, naturally the upcoming contract negotiations and expiration is in focus. You know, Cash Card, I think, expires in March of 2024.
Yep.
Square is.
End of 2024.
Yep, end of 2024, and Afterpay also comes up at some point in 2024. Maybe you can talk a little bit about, you know, what you see as the key points of focus during the negotiations and whether there's any opportunity for that timeline to change at all.
Yeah, there's opportunity for the timeline to change. It's the number one question I get asked all the time, which is very natural. You know, we have concentration, you know, and the, you know, our public company investors wanna reduce that risk, and the way to reduce that risk is to sign a long-term contract. I know that. We talk about it all the time, you know, internally and with Cash App in regards to what does the next stage of our relationship look like. You know, in many ways, the relationship with Cash App has been like zero to one. What does one to infinity look like, and how do we talk about all kinds of different things, like new products and credit, new geographies?
Obviously to get a longer-term agreement, you know, economics is a natural part of that. You know, if there's any vendors in the room, we all know that when we go and do contracts that, you know, the best way to sign long-term contracts is better economics. All of these will be discussed. You know, when we have news around the renewal, everybody will find out about it at the same time. It is a focus. I hear it all the time. I completely understand it. We work with Cash App on a literally minute-by-minute basis. Like, the amount of business that they do on a daily basis is extraordinary. I mean, even last quarter, you know, 20% of the days of the quarter we did greater than $500 million in volume.
If you think about the technology and the scalability and the infrastructure it takes to go manage that, and then all the people it takes to manage that is incredible. That's because of the collaboration we have with companies like Block and others to be able to support that at scale.
Great. We're approaching the 10-minute mark, so before I open it up to investor Q&A, maybe I'll just sneak one more in on competition.
Okay.
You know, card issuing and processing is obviously a competitive space. You know, we mentioned some of the legacy or traditional card issuer processors before, but there are also some more tech-enabled entrants like, you know, Stripe, Adyen, Galileo. Maybe you could talk a little bit about the competitive landscape. Who do you see as most directly competitive with Marqeta? And you know, what do you see as the moats and points of differentiation?
Well, probably, yeah, I mean, we don't. It's funny, we don't see Galileo that much, but they're a pure issuer processor like us. On the Adyen and Stripe side, like they're both amazing companies. Like Peter and John and Patrick over at Stripe have built an amazing businesses, but 99% of their focus and revenue is on the acquiring side. You know, there's thousands of acquirers across the world. I mean, even we've seen companies like dLocal go public in the last year and a half.
Mm-hmm.
There's tons and tons of competition, and that's where they're focused. Like, issuing and processing is not the battlefront for them, it's the battlefront for us. They're great competitors. They build great technology, but they're not a pure play issuing and processing system. Issuing and processing absolutely demands focus because the technology and the scalability of the platform is immense. They're operating in an incredibly complex business around the world in the acquiring space, which is most of their revenue. They can move their resources to a different battlefront, which means they give up on what's happening here, and they need to defend that with everything that they have. This allows us to go and scale and grow to where we are today, and obviously well beyond that.
Why don't I pause there and see if there are any questions from the audience. Got one right there.
In terms of Square and Cash App. You might want me to just say, you're just talking a lot about kind of commerce and how that's scaling up. How exactly do you get kind of the revenue model? How do you benefit from that, please?
Our revenue model is based on usage. We generate, especially here in the United States, we generate interchange on every single card transaction, and then we share that interchange with Cash App and Block. We actually do that with every single customer. It's an interesting model. When we were going out and even as a private company raising capital, you know, I would always say companies come to us to make money. It's actually true. Companies, because based on volume they deliver, we deliver revenue to them. The more volume that were delivered by a customer, the more share of the interchange that they get, and Cash App and Block is not any different than that.
Obviously, the amount of volume they deliver to us is just quite significant, so they get the majority of the interchange pie versus Marqeta. Does that answer your question?
Yeah.
Okay. You can ask me whatever you want, so don't hold back.
We got one over here.
Before you get started.
Yep, yep. I'll just get that mic over to you.
Thank you. Yeah, just kinda thinking about the kind of main pain points for your customers that you're trying to solve kind of longer term, how are you thinking about that and, you know, what does that kinda landscape look like?
Well, actually the pain points for our customers is they know they need a card. They don't know exactly how to go about doing it. Over time, we've been providing more and more professional services in regards to how they think. We've been doing this for years already. We found this out even in the early days when we went and launched. I assumed, okay, we're gonna come out with an API, and it's gonna be so well documented, we don't need to speak to anybody. It was like, it didn't happen that way. People needed to know about compliance, what a card load is, how do I order a card, you know, what are even the 16 digits mean? I mean, we got a myriad of questions.
We've been really good at, and I am still this way today, like treat every customer like gold. Like, treat them like they were our first customer ever, and educate them because you build tremendous trust, especially with a product that either supports their core business or is their core business. We spend a lot of time educating them on things like RiskControl, which is one of our products around fraud. What's Disputes Management? As you have a card product, you're gonna find, you know, that people ordered the red dress but wanted the black dress, so they're gonna return it. That's a dispute. And then there's tons of education.
We're finding, like, as they go into, say, credit or, you know, they're here in the U.S. and they wanna go to Australia, or they're in Australia and they wanna come to the U.S., is how to really educate them on what they should be taking advantage of. As I said to the company, part of our job is to, like, point to the moon and say, you know, "Mr. Customer, Mrs. Customer, this is where you need to go, and we're gonna help you get there," and then provide basically all of the products and education to help them achieve that. That's worked really well for us and that will never change 'cause it's in our culture.
Got one over here.
Just jumping back to the interchange piece for a bit. Given your sort of revenue share structure as opposed to some of your other peers that are just sort of clipping a fee on it, with, you know, your concentration in Square and companies like Square, if that gap on the debit interchange ever closes for them where they're sort of getting around the larger bank cap, how does that then flow through on the revenue impact for you guys? Do you see a big sort of cliff if they sort of have to pinch that interchange really hard or is there anything to mitigate against that?
Yeah, a couple things. When you talk about the big bank cap, there's something called the Durbin Amendment, which happened after 2008, which if you're a bank of $10 billion assets and below, debit interchange is still unregulated. It's anywhere from 200-300 basis points, which is the share of the pie. Above $10 billion, it's capped. Capped within. That was what we refer to as sort of a large financial institution. That's capped. There is nothing we see right now in regards to that potentially changing. I mean, even Dick Durbin had his meeting of several months ago to talk about this, and nobody showed up.
Because you have 5,000 mid-market banks and no representative of a state or a senator is gonna come in and wanna hurt the banks in the small towns throughout the United States. We don't see that happening. Like it's pretty low that debit interchange is gonna change. We're still operating as if debit interchange is gonna remain the same. Credit interchange, whether it's a large financial institution or a mid-market bank or a small bank, is still just completely unregulated. Even around the world, I mean, you have a debit and credit interchange, and even Europe is 20 basis points for debit, 30 basis points for credit, but commercial interchange is still unregulated. There's tons of opportunity around interchange, and that will continue.
There are parts of the world like Australia and Europe where, you know, the interchange pie is not there. We've figured those models out where we get obviously paid by our customers to go operate. We've already figured that out, but in the United States, we just don't see the debit cap changing where our customers would have to adapt.
Maybe just refining that, more so just on the Square piece. Right now, from my understanding, they're getting around that debit interchange cap.
Well, they work with Sutton Bank, which is below the $10 billion cap, so.
Yeah. Yeah, you know, Square is seemingly looking to scale that quite rapidly. What's sort of the risk with that being such a concentrated player? Seemingly they're gonna get through that 10 billion cap at some point.
This is not different for companies like Chime and Dave and, like, all the other neobanks out there. I mean, there's, you know, obviously Block, but there's also Instacart and DoorDash. Like, the way it works is, banks work with other correspondent banks where they basically move money to stay underneath the cap. That system has been operating for a long time. You know, nobody's disputing that. That's just simply how it works, how they can stay below the cap.
Correct. We're just about a minute out. In closing, I guess a two-part question. Maybe you can talk a little bit about how you balance, you know, long-term profitability and growth, and also talk about, you know, what elements you're most excited about over the next three to five years.
Yeah. This is part of the reason, you know, to bring in someone who's been born, bred, and trained to the stage. Like, our focus is to build a sustainably profitable company, and one that's very efficient at scale. You know, that is a pure operator, and we have a plan to make that happen. You know, we were free cash flow positive even in the last quarter, so we're still operating towards the goal of becoming profitable, EBITDA profitable. We're able to do that because we still see massive space within the market for us to continue to grow and around the world. As we think about the products and that we wanna go build, we wanna have products that focus on interchange.
We wanna focus on those that are non-interchange products that are at a much higher gross margin to allow us to go build lots of tools and lots of features and functions that companies can take advantage of around the world as we build towards being a profitable company. That is ultimately the goal.
Great. That's an excellent way to cap off the session. It's been a privilege to share the stage with you. Would you please join me in thanking Jason for his time and thought? Thank you. That was great. Yeah.