Great. We're going to get going. We've got the management team from PSQ, Michael Seifert, the CEO, Brian Billingsley, President of FinTech. We did this last year. The company was a little different in terms of strategic, excuse me, strategic focus. You guys got into the payments credit FinTech business. Maybe for those people that aren't familiar with the business, maybe talk a little bit about the metamorphosis in the last 12 months.
Happy to. Good to see you all.
Thanks for being here. PublicSquare started as a marketplace. We courted a network of consumers and a network of merchants that were joined together with a common value for patriotism. We target middle America consumers that love their God, they love their family, they love their country, and they love supporting small businesses that you're not going to find on Amazon or these other major retailers. As we grew that marketplace, we learned very quickly that we had other market opportunities that were complementary to the marketplace if we would listen to the feedback of the customers and the merchants and create the solutions that they felt were underrepresented in the market. A good example: we started as a marketplace, learned from our customers that they were looking for certain consumer brands that they were finding underrepresented in the market.
These consumer brands, they wanted to have a value for premium quality and values alignment with their own personal convictions. We launched a brands division in order to serve our customers. The same is true in FinTech. We actually started FinTech because as we polled our tens of thousands of merchants, the thing they consistently shared with us is, "We do not trust our payment providers. We want trustworthy, secure, cancel-proof, and best-in-class technology to facilitate our transactions." We took that as a loud and clear message to actually build the payments infrastructure to do two things: help our merchants sleep well at night, knowing that they can grow their businesses with the safety and security they deserve as a business owner in the United States, and allow for us to actually monetize the entire life cycle of a transaction.
We can handle not just the consumer purchase, but we can even handle money flows in and out of the business via ACH processing, alternative forms of payment like buy now, pay later. March of 2024, a year ago this month, we actually closed on the transaction of Credova. We acquired, in all equity, Credova, the leading buy now, pay later company for the firearms industry. We had a heavy representation of firearms on our marketplace platform. We have gained a lot of trust in the firearms industry. Credova is the leading buy now, pay later for the gun industry that had originated over $300 million in financing to date. We bought them in an all-stock transaction a year ago to serve as the foundation of our FinTech vertical. Since then, we launched payment processing in November of 2024, so about five months ago now.
At that point, we had offered debit, credit card, and buy now, pay later transactions. Finally, to complete the financial services offerings, we actually launched a month ago ACH processing as well. The last story I'll mention to you in this summary here, a month ago, we released a press release about a new partnership that we had announced with Guns.com. Guns.com is an incredible gun merchant online. They're a multi-vendor marketplace that does over $200 million a year in sales. Now, with that merchant, as of a month ago, we handle all their buy now, pay later transactions. We handle all debit and credit card transactions. We handle all B2B and C2B ACH transactions as well, which is incredibly exciting. That's the partnership we established with them. That partnership will be rolling out over the coming months in fullness.
The picture of our company as it sits today versus a year ago, we're not just a marketplace. We're an economic ecosystem that has a powerful customer acquisition vertical in the marketplace, a way to monetize the full life cycle of the customers and the merchant experience in FinTech, and a consumer brands division so that we have the ability to fill the needs described by our customers on the marketplace.
Great. I want to get to the flywheel in a minute, but I just wanted to ask you, since you're President of FinTech, how Klarna filing S-1 impacts your business, raises the awareness of investors, just any kind of impact you guys kind of see there.
Yeah, great question. I'm really excited to join PublicSquare. One of the key reasons why I was so excited to join PublicSquare is I saw a lot of similarities between a company like Klarna and PublicSquare. I was the CEO of North America, actually launched their U.K. business for them, and then came over back across the pond and launched the U.S. What was so powerful with Klarna was it was a FinTech, but most consumers, they don't care. They don't know that the company is in the background processing a card transaction. With Klarna, you had, being a FinTech, they processed the payments. It was also a strong consumer brand. When I got to meet Michael and the team, we obviously shared the same core values.
When I saw, man, this is a company that could be a consumer brand, could actually steer consumers to our customers and also be able to process payments and have the consumer credit product, I was hooked. There are actually a lot of similarities between, obviously, we're on our growth trajectory. We're going to get there, but love seeing what Klarna has been doing and the numbers they're posting. We want to definitely follow that hardcore.
I don't know if your mic is on. I can hear you talking, but there you go.
It's on now. All right.
Yeah, absolutely.
Just add, let me there. Talk about the flywheel of your marketplace business, your credit products, your payments. The second part question, you guys have talked about kind of backlog on some of your financial products. That number has gone up quite a bit. You've, I think, done it with very little investment and marketing. Kind of talk about some of those topics.
Yeah. The beauty of this ecosystem we've created is that we're not a mini Berkshire Hathaway that just wants to buy a bunch of great companies but are sort of disjointed from each other and don't necessarily have synergies between them. We don't see ourselves as a holdings company. We don't see ourselves as a sum of parts even. We see ourselves as one company across multiple divisions. Our marketplace is an incredible customer generator. We have over 3 million registered accounts on the platform. It's been a very organic growth story of over 1,000 ambassadors on the marketplace that are spreading the word. Those customers are great purchasers on the marketplace, but they could also be phenomenal buyers or borrowers through our buy now, pay later technology. The same thing is true on the merchant side. We have over 80,000 merchants on the PublicSquare Marketplace today.
Those merchants are incredible, mostly small businesses that are representative of Main Street America. Those small businesses are not just great sellers on the marketplace. They are also phenomenal payments merchants at wonderful margin. For us, everything at our business, we want to play off of each other. You can go over to FinTech and say, as Brian just described, we're not just a payment processor for your card transactions at checkout. We're one of the only FinTechs that can actually drive consumer adoption to your storefront because we have this network of consumers, both shoppers on the marketplace and borrowers through buy now, pay later that could become shoppers for our payments merchants. We are actually able to offer them marketing packages when we're signing new payments relationships, which is unheard of in the payments space. That's something a Stripe's not able to do.
If you look even further, you can say, Darren's been awesome to ask, what are some of your KPIs you're really running toward this year aside from payments, GMV, and top-line revenue and margin and things like this? I said that one of the North Star metrics we really pursue is accretion from synergies exercised between divisions. Good example. How many buy now, pay later borrowers can we turn into PublicSquare Marketplace shoppers over X amount of time? How many PublicSquare merchants on payments can we turn into payments merchants over Y amount of time? This is wonderful because not only is it a great way to play off the trust we've established within one division to the betterment of all, rising tide lifts all ships, it's also incredible because it leads to zero-dollar customer acquisition costs.
Getting to the second part of Darren's question, currently, we announced via earnings last week that in less than six months since launching our payment processing vertical, we have over $2.5 billion in annualized gross merchandise volume under contract and onboarding over the course of Q1, Q2, and into early Q3. When you look at the $2.5 billion juxtaposed to the billion that we had signed the last time we announced at the end of the year in 2024, the onboarding continues to grow. The contracts are getting signed. All $2.5 billion we signed was $0 in customer acquisition costs. To make matters better, we actually have a pipeline north of $10 billion right now that already comes from existing trust relationships built through buy now, pay later.
Our mission over the next year, after a heavy investment in 2024, is to monetize the ecosystem we've worked so hard to build. Before we look outside of our ecosystem, we're really relying on the folks that we've already established trust with so that we can keep that customer acquisition cost low.
Just really quickly adding to the flywheel discussion, one, as we started to build the payments processing group inside of PublicSquare, we were able to leverage some great internal resources through the Credova acquisition. We had a great finance team. We had a great compliance team that we did not have to rebuild. We were able to leverage that and leverage those synergies. Two, the low-hanging fruit and the trust that Credova has built in the firearms and outdoor space. I mean, I have done a lot of market launches. I have started my own company. You guys know the first 20 customers you are begging and borrowing to join your platform. I have never seen anything like it. My launch, my design client was a $150 million merchant. We built great technology. It is a great product.
Also, the trust that Credova has built in the broader firearms ecosystem allowed us to go in and have those discussions not just with small FFLs, but some of the largest FFLs in the country.
I guess what comes to mind is how much marketing do you need to spend in these businesses? Just before you get to that, you rattled off some big numbers, but just for edification purposes, when you talk about $2 billion, what's your kind of vague on that? Also, credit and payment, maybe talk a little bit about how you actually make money on a revenue basis on those.
Yeah. On the payment side, for a few breakdown specifics, when we say numbers like $2.5 billion in GMV, that's the gross sales conducted through our merchant partners on their own checkouts. When we have signed contracts of $2.5 billion, that's the merchant's gross sales on an annualized basis. Our revenue as a portion of that fluctuates between 1.9%-2.3%. When you're modeling out what the top-line revenue looks like for our.
Got it. Yeah, we need to get that done.
Yeah, tomorrow. Great. We're going to get going. We've got the management team from PSQ, Michael Seifert, the CEO, Brian Billingsley, President of FinTech. We did this last year. Company was a little different in terms of, excuse me, strategic focus. You guys got into the payments credit FinTech business. Maybe for those people that aren't familiar with the business, maybe talk a little bit about the metamorphosis in the last 12 months.
Happy to. Good to see you all. Thanks for being here. PublicSquare started as a marketplace. We courted a network of consumers and a network of merchants that were joined together with a common value for patriotism. We target Middle America consumers that love their God, they love their family, they love their country, and they love supporting small businesses that you're not going to find on Amazon or these other major retailers. As we grew that marketplace, we learned very quickly that we had other market opportunities that were complementary to the marketplace if we would listen to the feedback of the customers and the merchants and create the solutions that they felt were underrepresented in the market. A good example, we started as a marketplace, learned from our customers that they were looking for certain consumer brands that they were finding underrepresented in the market.
These consumer brands, they wanted to have a value for premium quality and values alignment with their own personal convictions. We launched a brands division in order to serve our customers. The same is true in FinTech. We actually started FinTech because as we polled our tens of thousands of merchants, the thing they consistently shared with us is we do not trust our payment providers. We want trustworthy, secure, cancel-proof, and best-in-class technology to facilitate our transactions. We took that as a loud and clear message to actually build the payments infrastructure to do two things: help our merchants sleep well at night knowing that they can grow their businesses with the safety and security they deserve as a business owner in the United States, and allow for us to actually monetize the entire life cycle of a transaction.
We can handle not just the consumer purchase, but we can even handle money flows in and out of the business via ACH processing, alternative forms of payment like buy now, pay later. March of 2024, a year ago this month, we actually closed on the transaction of Credova. We acquired, in all equity, Credova, the leading buy now, pay later company for the firearms industry. We had a heavy representation of firearms on our marketplace platform. We have gained a lot of trust in the firearms industry. Credova is the leading buy now, pay later for the gun industry that had originated over $300 million in financing to date. We bought them in an all-stock transaction a year ago to serve as the foundation of our FinTech vertical. Since then, we launched payment processing in November of 2024, so about five months ago now.
At that point, we had offered debit, credit card, and buy now, pay later transactions. Finally, to complete the financial services offerings, we actually launched a month ago ACH processing as well. The last story I'll mention to you in this summary here, a month ago, we released a press release about a new partnership that we had announced with Guns.com. Guns.com is an incredible gun merchant online. They're a multi-vendor marketplace that does over $200 million a year in sales. Now with that merchant, as of a month ago, we handle all their buy now, pay later transactions. We handle all debit and credit card transactions. We handle all B2B and C2B ACH transactions as well, which is incredibly exciting. That's the partnership we established with them. That partnership will be rolling out over the coming months in fullness.
The picture of our company as it sits today versus a year ago, we're not just a marketplace. We're an economic ecosystem that has a powerful customer acquisition vertical in the marketplace, a way to monetize the full life cycle of the customers and the merchant experience in FinTech, and a consumer brands division so that we have the ability to fill the needs described by our customers on the marketplace.
Great. I want to get to the flywheel in a minute, but I just wanted to ask you, since you're President of FinTech, how Klarna filing S-1 impacts your business, raises the awareness of investors, just any kind of impact you guys kind of see there.
Yeah, great question. I'm really excited to join PublicSquare. One of the key reasons why I was so excited to join PublicSquare is I saw a lot of similarities between a company like Klarna and PublicSquare. I was the CEO of North America, actually launched their U.K. business for them, and then came over back across the pond and launched the U.S. What was so powerful with Klarna was it was a FinTech, but most consumers, they do not care. They do not know that the company is in the background processing a card transaction. With Klarna, you had being a FinTech, they processed the payments. It was also a strong consumer brand. When I got to meet Michael and the team, we obviously share the same core values.
When I saw, man, this is a company that could be a consumer brand, could actually steer consumers to our customers and also be able to process payments and have the consumer credit product, that was hooked. There are actually a lot of similarities between, obviously, we're on our growth trajectory. We're going to get there, but love seeing what Klarna has been doing and the numbers they're posting. We want to definitely follow that hardcore.
I don't know if your mic is on. I can hear you talking, but there you go.
It's on now. All right.
Yeah, absolutely.
Just add let me there. Talk about the flywheel of your marketplace business, your credit products, your payments. The second part question, you guys have talked about kind of backlog on some of your financial products. That number has gone up quite a bit. And you've, I think, done it with very little investment and marketing. Kind of talk about some of those topics.
Yeah. The beauty of this ecosystem we've created is that we're not a mini Berkshire Hathaway that just wants to buy a bunch of great companies but are sort of disjointed from each other and don't necessarily have synergies between them. We don't see ourselves as a holdings company. We don't see ourselves as a sum of parts even. We see ourselves as one company across multiple divisions. Our marketplace is an incredible customer generator. We have over 3 million registered accounts on the platform. It's been a very organic growth story of over 1,000 ambassadors on the marketplace that are spreading the word. Those customers are great purchasers on the marketplace, but they could also be phenomenal buyers or borrowers through our buy now, pay later technology. Same thing is true on the merchant side. We have over 80,000 merchants on the PublicSquare Marketplace today.
Those merchants are incredible, mostly small businesses that are representative of Main Street America. Those small businesses are not just great sellers on the marketplace. They are also phenomenal payments merchants at wonderful margin. For us, everything at our business, we want to play off of each other. You can go over to FinTech and say, as Brian just described, we're not just a payment processor for your card transactions at checkout. We're one of the only FinTechs that can actually drive consumer adoption to your storefront because we have this network of consumers, both shoppers on the marketplace and borrowers through buy now, pay later that could become shoppers for our payments merchants. We're actually able to offer them marketing packages when we're signing new payments relationships, which is unheard of in the payment space. That's something a Stripe's not able to do.
If you look even further, you can say, Darren's been awesome to ask, what are some of your KPIs you're really running toward this year aside from payments, GMV, and top-line revenue and margin and things like this? I said that one of the North Star metrics we really pursue is accretion from synergies exercised between divisions. Good example. How many buy now, pay later borrowers can we turn into PublicSquare Marketplace shoppers over X amount of time? How many PublicSquare merchants on payments can we turn into payments merchants over Y amount of time? This is wonderful because not only is it a great way to play off the trust we've established within one division to the betterment of all, rising tide lifts all ships, it's also incredible because it leads to $0 customer acquisition costs.
Getting to the second part of Darren's question, currently, we announced via earnings last week that in less than six months since launching our payment processing vertical, we have over $2.5 billion in annualized gross merchandise volume under contract and onboarding over the course of Q1, Q2, and into early Q3. When you look at the $2.5 billion juxtaposed to the billion that we had signed the last time we announced at the end of the year in 2024, the onboarding continues to grow. The contracts are getting signed. All $2.5 billion we signed was $0 in customer acquisition costs. To make matters better, we actually have a pipeline north of $10 billion right now that already comes from existing trust relationships built through buy now, pay later.
Our mission over the next year, after a heavy investment in 2024, is to monetize the ecosystem we've worked so hard to build. Before we look outside of our ecosystem, we're really relying on the folks that we've already established trust with so that we can keep that customer acquisition cost low.
Just really quickly adding to the flywheel discussion, one, as we started to build the payments processing group inside of PublicSquare, we were able to leverage some great internal resources through the Credova acquisition. We had a great finance team. We had a great compliance team that we did not have to rebuild. We were able to leverage that and leverage those synergies. Two, the low-hanging fruit and the trust that Credova has built in the firearms and outdoor space. I mean, I have done a lot of market launches. I have started my own company. You guys know the first 20 customers you are begging and borrowing to join your platform. I have never seen anything like it. My design client was a $150 million merchant. We built great technology. It is a great product.
Also, the trust that Credova has built in the broader firearms ecosystem allowed us to go in and have those discussions not just with small FFLs, but some of the largest FFLs in the country.
I guess what comes to mind is how much marketing do you need to spend in these businesses? Just before you get to that, you rattled off some big numbers, but just for edification purposes, when you talk about $2 billion, what's your kind of vague on that? Also, credit and payment, maybe talk a little bit about how you actually make money on a revenue basis on those.
Yeah. So.
This presentation has now finished. Please check back shortly for the archive.
Not too much.
Great. We're going to get going. We've got the management team from PSQ, Michael Seifert, the CEO, Brian Billingsley, President of FinTech. We did this last year. The company was a little different in terms of, excuse me, strategic focus. You guys got into the payments credit FinTech business. For those people that aren't familiar with the business, maybe talk a little bit about the metamorphosis in the last 12 months.
Happy to. Good to see you all. Thanks for being here. PublicSquare started as a marketplace. We courted a network of consumers and a network of merchants that were joined together with a common value for patriotism. We target middle America consumers that love their God, they love their family, they love their country, and they love supporting small businesses that you're not going to find on Amazon or these other major retailers. As we grew that marketplace, we learned very quickly that we had other market opportunities that were complementary to the marketplace if we would listen to the feedback of the customers and the merchants and create the solutions that they felt were underrepresented in the market. A good example, we started as a marketplace, learned from our customers that they were looking for certain consumer brands that they were finding underrepresented in the market.
These consumer brands, they wanted to have a value for premium quality and values alignment with their own personal convictions. We launched a brands division in order to serve our customers. The same is true in FinTech. We actually started FinTech because as we polled our tens of thousands of merchants, the thing they consistently shared with us is we do not trust our payment providers. We want trustworthy, secure, cancel-proof, and best-in-class technology to facilitate our transactions. We took that as a loud and clear message to actually build the payments infrastructure to do two things: help our merchants sleep well at night knowing that they can grow their businesses with the safety and security they deserve as a business owner in the United States, and allow for us to actually monetize the entire life cycle of a transaction.
We can handle not just the consumer purchase, but we can even handle money flows in and out of the business via ACH processing, alternative forms of payment like buy now, pay later. March of 2024, a year ago this month, we actually closed on the transaction of Credova. We acquired, in all equity, Credova, the leading buy now, pay later company for the firearms industry. We had a heavy representation of firearms on our marketplace platform. We have gained a lot of trust in the firearms industry. Credova is the leading buy now, pay later for the gun industry that had originated over $300 million in financing to date. We bought them in an all-stock transaction a year ago to serve as the foundation of our FinTech vertical. Since then, we launched payment processing in November of 2024, so about five months ago now.
At that point, we had offered debit, credit card, and buy now, pay later transactions. Finally, to complete the financial services offerings, we actually launched a month ago ACH processing as well. The last story I'll mention to you in this summary here, a month ago, we released a press release about a new partnership that we had announced with Guns.com. Guns.com is an incredible gun merchant online. They're a multi-vendor marketplace that does over $200 million a year in sales. Now with that merchant, as of a month ago, we handle all their buy now, pay later transactions. We handle all debit and credit card transactions. We handle all B2B and C2B ACH transactions as well, which is incredibly exciting. That's the partnership we established with them. That partnership will be rolling out over the coming months in fullness.
The picture of our company as it sits today versus a year ago, we're not just a marketplace. We're an economic ecosystem that has a powerful customer acquisition vertical in the marketplace, a way to monetize the full life cycle of the customers and the merchant experience in FinTech, and a consumer brands division so that we have the ability to fill the needs described by our customers on the marketplace.
Great. I want to get to the flywheel in a minute, but I just wanted to ask you, since you're President of FinTech, how Klarna filing S-1 impacts your business, raises the awareness of investors, just any kind of impact you guys kind of see there.
Yeah, great question. Really excited to join PublicSquare. One of the key reasons why I was so excited to join PublicSquare is I saw a lot of similarities between a company like Klarna and PublicSquare. I was the CEO of North America, actually launched their U.K. business for them, and then came over back across the pond and launched the U.S. What was so powerful with Klarna was it was a FinTech, but most consumers, they do not care. They do not know that the company is in the background processing a card transaction. With Klarna, you had, being a FinTech, they processed the payments. It was also a strong consumer brand. When I got to meet Michael and the team, we obviously shared the same core values.
When I saw, man, this is a company that could be a consumer brand, could actually steer consumers to our customers and also be able to process payments and have the consumer credit product, that was hooked. There are actually a lot of similarities between, obviously, we are on our growth trajectory. We are going to get there, but love seeing what Klarna has been doing and the numbers they are posting. We want to definitely follow that hardcore.
I don't know if your mic is on. I can hear you talking, but there you go.
It's on now. All right.
Yeah, absolutely.
Just add let me there. Talk about the flywheel of your marketplace business, your credit products, your payments. Then second part question, you guys have talked about kind of backlog on some of your financial products. That number has gone up quite a bit. And you've, I think, done it with very little investment in marketing. So kind of talk about some of those topics.
Yeah. The beauty of this ecosystem we've created is that we're not a mini Berkshire Hathaway that just wants to buy a bunch of great companies, but are sort of disjointed from each other and don't necessarily have synergies between them. We don't see ourselves as a holdings company. We don't see ourselves as a sum of parts even. We see ourselves as one company across multiple divisions. Our marketplace is an incredible customer generator. We have over 3 million registered accounts on the platform. It's been a very organic growth story of over 1,000 ambassadors on the marketplace that are spreading the word. Those customers are great purchasers on the marketplace, but they could also be phenomenal buyers or borrowers through our buy now, pay later technology. The same thing is true on the merchant side. We have over 80,000 merchants on the PublicSquare Marketplace today.
Those merchants are incredible, mostly small businesses that are representative of Main Street America. Those small businesses are not just great sellers on the marketplace. They are also phenomenal payments merchants at wonderful margin. For us, everything at our business, we want to play off of each other. You can go over to FinTech and say, as Brian just described, we're not just a payment processor for your card transactions at checkout. We're one of the only FinTechs that can actually drive consumer adoption to your storefront because we have this network of consumers, both shoppers on the marketplace and borrowers through buy now, pay later that could become shoppers for our payments merchants. We're actually able to offer them marketing packages when we're signing new payments relationships, which is unheard of in the payment space. That's something a Stripe's not able to do.
If you look even further, you can say, Darren's been awesome to ask, what are some of your KPIs you're really running toward this year aside from payments, GMV, and top-line revenue and margin and things like this? I said that one of the North Star metrics we really pursue is accretion from synergies exercised between divisions. Good example. How many buy now, pay later borrowers can we turn into PublicSquare Marketplace shoppers over X amount of time? How many PublicSquare merchants on payments can we turn into payments merchants over Y amount of time? This is wonderful because not only is it a great way to play off the trust we've established within one division to the betterment of all, rising tide lifts all ships. It's also incredible because it leads to zero-dollar customer acquisition costs.
Getting to the second part of Darren's question, currently, we announced via earnings last week that in less than six months since launching our payment processing vertical, we have over $2.5 billion in annualized gross merchandise volume under contract and onboarding over the course of Q1, Q2, and into early Q3. When you look at the $2.5 billion juxtaposed to the billion that we had signed the last time we announced at the end of the year in 2024, the onboarding continues to grow. The contracts are getting signed. All $2.5 billion we signed was $0 in customer acquisition costs. To make matters better, we actually have a pipeline north of $10 billion right now that already comes from existing trust relationships built through buy now, pay later.
Our mission over the next year, after a heavy investment in 2024, is to monetize the ecosystem we've worked so hard to build. Before we look outside of our ecosystem, we're really relying on the folks that we've already established trust with so that we can keep that customer acquisition cost low.
Just really quickly adding to the flywheel discussion, one, as we started to build the payments processing group inside of PublicSquare, we were able to leverage some great internal resources through the Credova acquisition. We had a great finance team. We had a great compliance team that we did not have to rebuild. We were able to leverage that and leverage those synergies. Two, the low-hanging fruit and the trust that Credova has built in the firearms and outdoor space. I mean, I have done a lot of market launches. I have started my own company. You guys know the first 20 customers you are begging and borrowing to join your platform. I have never seen anything like it. My launch, my design client was a $150 million merchant. We built great technology.
It's a great product, but also the trust that Credova has built in the broader firearms ecosystem allowed us to go in and have those discussions not just with small FFLs, but some of the largest FFLs in the country.
I guess what comes to mind is how much marketing do you need to spend in these businesses? Just before you get to that, you rattled off some big numbers, but just for edification purposes, when you talk about $2 billion, what's your kind of vague on that? Also, credit and payment, maybe talk a little bit about how you actually make money on a revenue basis on those.
Yeah. On the payment side, for a few breakdown specifics, when we say numbers like $2.5 billion in GMV, that's the gross sales conducted through our merchant partners on their own checkouts. When we have signed contracts of $2.5 billion, that's the merchant's gross sales on an annualized basis. Our revenue as a portion of that fluctuates between 1.9%-2.3%. When you're modeling out what the top-line revenue looks like for our company with $2.5 billion in GMV, you take 1.9%-2.3%. The reason there's a variance there is because depending on the size of merchant, if it's a larger merchant, it's closer to that 1.9%. If it's a smaller merchant, it's generally closer to that 2.3%. On the credit side of the business, we really look at originations.
That's the thing that matters a lot to us because last year we onboarded over $3 billion in new GMV in the credit business, but different than payments. In payments, all of the gross sales we get to process for the vast majority of our merchants. In credit, our originations, the amount we actually finance is a percentage of the overall gross sales. For some merchants, that's 1% of gross sales that we actually originate in financing. For some merchants, that's actually north of 10%. It just depends on how much they're actually marketing our product, how deep of a partnership we have with them. On the margin side, payments is at a lower margin in the early days.
Something I'd love for you to actually talk about, Brian, is just how that'll fluctuate over time and how different it is than traditional payment stories, given that we're actually starting with a lower margin and building into a better margin, which is sort of alternative to many other payment companies. There's a key reason as to why. On the credit side of the business, our margin is actually nearly 100%. The beauty of these products bundled together is that we can come to a merchant and offer a dual-wielded checkout solution between payment processing and buy now, pay later. Why that's so great for a merchant is they view it all as one service. In fact, we've had merchants join us outside of the gun industry, outside of even the PublicSquare Marketplace.
They joined us purely because they said, "I'm tired of dealing with a payments company and a buy now, pay later company. Two separate accounting teams, two separate finance teams, two separate engineering teams. I'm negotiating two separate sets of rates. I'm tired of it. I would love to see my checkout as a checkout." They have come to us and said, "You're the only one that bundles. We want that." It's great for us because we can be very variable with our rates. We can actually pull levers and say, "You know what? They want a little bit of a lower processing fee on each transaction. Let's juice our fees a little bit on buy now, pay later, or vice versa. They really want a rock bottom fee on buy now, pay later.
They're not as worried about the residual effects on the payment processing transactions given their card mix or whatever it might be. Let's actually adjust the rates accordingly. It gives us a really cool double-edged sword that helps us serve the merchant's desires and do so in a really effective way.
Yeah, and a little more detail on the margin topic that he discussed. Most payments companies, when you see them launch, you typically start with small businesses where the margin you can demand more of a merchant discount fee and then move up market. You typically see companies like Stripe or Square have to fight to keep margin over time. We decided with the trust and the relationships we had with Credova, we actually started with very large merchants that we've named, GrabAGun, we've named Guns.com, other similar ilk in that mix. Typically the margin is a little thinner there, but we're able to get billions in volume on the platform quickly. As we move into mid-market, we'll actually be able to expand our margin instead of fighting the shrinkage there.
On the marketing question, how much investment do you need to put in this? Or I guess said another way, what's the runway you have existing with pipeline before you kind of have to invest into the business?
Yeah, I'd say from a pipeline perspective, we have the next two years, we've got our hands full. We won't be looking at any outside marketing over the next two years. We felt that way in the fall when we launched. We only feel that way more so today for a key reason. We have had great success with our internal audience, both from the buy now, pay later business as well as from the marketplace. Therefore, we don't have to look outside to garner more interest. The second reason is with the power of our board of directors, for example. I'll get a call from one of our board members that'll say, "Hey, I've got a great friend or old existing business partner who reached out and said, 'I'm really interested in your payments technology.'
I'd love to get locked and loaded.' We've never had a relationship with that merchant before. Yet, because of the trust within our company at the executive or board level, those are real quick pickups that are great merchants that provide a lot of accretive value to the company. I'd say with all of that currently at home, we've got our work cut out for us for the next two years to put some numbers around it. Sales and marketing will actually pretty drastically decrease in 2025 compared to 2024. We announced last week that we do expect to double our revenue in 2025, so north of $46 million top line. We actually expect for operating expenses across the entirety of the business to decrease. That's G&A, S&M, and R&D, with the largest reduction actually coming from sales and marketing.
We invested a lot into our channels, invested a lot into our acquisition in 2024. Now it's really time to make sure that we are monetizing that ecosystem in the flywheel in 2025. That's our focus, I'd really say even through the remainder of 2026 even. We're not looking out external from that too much. One other point I will mention on marketing is that one of the things we invested in really heavily in 2024 was in our ambassador program. Across the business now, we have over 2,000 ambassadors that are around the country for either marketplace brands or FinTech that are just spreading the word about what we're doing. This is really helpful because they're all incentivized to do so.
They have an existing relationship with our company, whether a business owner or a consumer, and they're able to really garner interest from their communities in such a way that we're actually dealing with the opposite problem right now, which is what do we actually choose to do first? There's a lot of demand, and we want to make sure that we're not getting out over our skis, so.
Yeah, and one thing I'd add, not just in marketing, but where we're really maturing the company across the board, something Michael slipped into the earnings call last week, if you listen to it, was we actually announced a line of credit with a pretty sizable bank. What that does for my business unit is actually significantly reduce the cost of capital, which will allow us to lend to our prime and super-prime customer base much more aggressively. Really seeing the company mature across really all spectrums of the business.
Yeah, it's over a 50% reduction in cost of capital, which will be very material for the business. It's fun because some of those products that Brian's referencing on the buy now, pay later side of the business are the great customer acquisition channels that we've wanted to juice more, but it hasn't worked out historically from a unit economics perspective. With a 50% reduction in cost of capital, we really get to exercise our 0% interest Pay in 4 product, for example, with much more oomph. That'll be really fun because once those customers come in the door, those super-prime folks, you can actually upsell them into other opportunities on the marketplace and our brands division as well.
On this FinTech portfolio, do you guys take any balance sheet risk?
We have certain exposure on our balance sheet. In fact, we're going to be balance sheeting more of our loan and lease products in 2025 post the fundraise that we conducted in early December of 2024. With that fundraise, we have a healthier, stronger balance sheet than we've ever had before. Given that most of the investment has really been completed in 2024 for the technology as it stands today, we are able to actually get creative with our balance sheet in order to juice our credit business more to the positive both top and bottom line. What that looks like practically is historically, we've balance sheeted anywhere from 10%-15% of our loan and lease products, obviously within our risk profile that we're comfortable with. We'll juice that over the next year.
We're going to be taking on more of our own products utilizing our balance sheet, which does great things for the unit economics of this business. The great thing is we don't have to actually stretch outside of our risk tolerance in order to do that. The only limitation for us.