Morning, everyone. Thank you for joining me. I'm Andrew Schmidt on Citi's Fintech Research Team. My pleasure to host Remitly this morning. With us, we have Matt Oppenheimer, co-founder and CEO, and Hemanth Munipalli, CFO. Thanks so much for joining. Really appreciatiate
And, you know, we were just talking before, this actually ties into my first question. Good call-out from Matt Harris at Bain, which is fantastic. But you know, it's a great lineup for this conversation because I want to start off with you, Matt. Three years since IPO, maybe talk about, you know, your most significant learnings and what's different versus your expectations, because much different environment, obviously, than when you guys IPO'd.
Yeah.
Maybe talk through a little bit of that. That'd be helpful.
Yeah. Yeah, it's amazing. It's been three years. I think. And first off, really, thanks for having us, and really great to be here, and good to see some familiar faces, like Chris, I see out there and others. So, you know, over the last three years, I think one of the things that we knew to be true, but it's been amazing to see it time and time again, is just the resilience and predictability of our customer base. That's been a definite component that I think has been a structural benefit for our business. And then the second is, you know, we're on a real mission and vision to really transform financial services for immigrants around the globe.
I think that our ability to continue to execute against that vision while getting additional scale and leverage, we're in this very sweet spot as a company in that respect, in that we're investing in growth areas, marketing at great unit economics, new geographies, really reinventing our international payments platform and driving down contact rates and increasing reliability, and then what we call complementary products and services. It's so much easier to do all of those things at scale and get leverage out of the business. Remittances, at the end of the day, are like payments businesses, and payments businesses, there's just so much leverage, both on the P&L and from a customer experience standpoint, as the company continues to get more scale.
Got it. Thank you very much. Appreciate that. And then maybe just maybe one level down, just the platform, because obviously, the platform, your your corridor focus is obviously, you know, still big in the, the Big Three, but you've expanded throughout that. So maybe talking a little about the platform and corridor presence has evolved over the past couple of years.
Yeah, yeah. We've added something like 3,000 new corridors. We're in 5,000 corridors overall. And we're 2% of $1.8 trillion that's sent every year from a remittance standpoint. And so certainly, the platform, when you think about geography, has continued to expand really nicely, with lots of headroom for continued growth. But the other platform investments that we've been making is, we hired a CTO about two years ago. Actually our first CTO, 'cause we used to have tech under product, and our CTO has done an amazing job re-platforming our core technology, such that instead of being as kind of interweaved and intertangled, it's become and is continuing to become much more modularized. And what that means is, take our authentication systems as one example.
We can not only use our authentication systems in the remittance business, but we can do it, you know, more securely, more reliably, more efficiently. Our developers can work on our platform 'cause they can interact with the subcomponents of it. But we can also then leverage that platform to launch new geographies, to launch new products much faster, and that has been a huge unlock for us. As we often say internally at Remitly, it feels like we're really just getting started in that, in that effort.
Got it. I want to jump into that later, but, maybe before we, you know, go into unit economics, we could talk a little bit about, you know, why users choose Remitly and why they stay with Remitly. Because I think that's an important part of the unit economics discussion, because obviously, the remittance market traditionally known as being very, very competitive.
Yeah.
So maybe talk a little bit about that.
Yeah, yeah. And I'm, I-
Sure
... I think it's a really good foundation for then talking about unit economics in depth, which I'll let Hemanth do. But I, when I started the business, you know, now 13 years ago, I used to think it was about functional benefits like price and other elements like that. What I've learned about quickly, I've learned time and time again, is that customers care first and foremost about trust, and that delivering a trusted experience in international payments is incredibly hard, especially if you're subscale or if you're a legacy player. And to make the trust component a little bit more tangible, and then I'll talk about a couple, you know, examples of trusted experiences we deliver.
Think if you're a new immigrant to the U.S., maybe you've come from Latin America, but we serve, you know, hundreds of countries across the globe now. We're asking customers for their name, address, date of birth, tax ID or SSN, and then, unlike lending, 'cause I think trust is important in any financial services, but unlike lending, we're asking customers to give us their hard-earned money and trust that we'll deliver it hundreds of thousands of miles away to be picked up in cash.
While you need to provide a fair and transparent price, and while we've brought down because we're taking a bunch of costs out of the system from, like, the legacy $20+ per transaction expense, once you're within that new equilibrium, you need to have a transparent and fair price, but we don't always price the business to be, you know, the best priced in the market. What we do is we invest in an incredibly trusted experience, and that means it's so hard to see in the product unless you use it. But it means everything from having state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms that delineate between good customers and don't put them through a manual review queue, while weeding out and rejecting transactions that are bad from a compliance or fraud standpoint.
It means doing many direct integrations with disbursement partners, which not only brings down costs, but when you look at the core product, think if you're going through a product and you're entering in your mom's, like, State Bank of India account and routing number. When we were subscale, there was, like, five hops to get to State Bank of India, which means we couldn't provide a lot of visibility. Where when we do a lot of direct integrations, we can do everything from account number and name validation, so customers enter in the account number and routing number and say, okay, if it's wrong, we will proactively say in many geographies where we've done this direct integration, this account number's incorrect, can you correct it? As opposed to submitting the transaction and going into this horrible experience. So that's a couple of like-
Mm-hmm
... 50 or 100 examples I could give, but there is a lot of complexity in remittances to deliver a trusted experience, and trust is paramount. And that's why, when we get to unit economics, we see really strong retention and really strong loyalty, and also now, I think, a very valuable brand that we've built within the communities we serve.
Yeah, thank you. I, I think that's right. I think, you know, it's hard for people to envision from the outside what goes on behind the scenes, complexity involved in making that a seamless transaction. It's not often very, you know-
Mm-hmm
... appreciated.
Mm-hmm.
That's helpful. For either of you, maybe, maybe Hemanth-
Yeah
... jumping to the unit economics, maybe talk a little bit about just maybe just reflect on the fourth quarter, you know, LTV to CAC. How are unit economics trending? What are the assumptions for 2024? And not to ask a three-part question, but, you know, what are the key drivers of sort of sustaining that-
Yeah, great
... over the longer term?
Yeah, thanks, Andrew. Great question. Great to be here. I think, you know, when we think about unit economics, it's fundamentally a lifetime value and customer acquisition costs. And, you know, if you think about lifetime value for our customers... Is this mic sort of-
Is your mic on?
Okay.
Sorry.
So if you look at lifetime value of customers, you know, it's really driven by sort of customer behavior and activity and retention. So Matt touched on some of those pieces in there, and we're seeing continued strength in that. So we're seeing, you know, customer cohorts, whether those are that we acquired before many years ago, or the ones we've currently sort of acquired even last year, very similar behavior and patterns in terms of how they've been behaving, engaging with us on the platform. So we, fundamentally, we talk about transaction intensity, which is basically, you know, how much are they engaging with us? You know, what level of sort of transactions are doing per active customers, and very healthy metrics around that. So that's one of the aspects of lifetime value. The other thing is transaction expenses.
So we kind of saw that not just Q4, but going back even all through last year and maybe a couple of years beyond, is our transaction expenses have been coming down, right? So we've been much more global company. We've got a lot of scale. We had $40 billion of send volume that kind of flew through our platform last year. And so when you've got that going for you, you've got, you know, better economics with our pay and payout partners. And our fraud losses have been, you know, coming down again, one that we continue to question, but it's driven by data that we ingest into our models. And fraud loss rates have been, you know, very manageable and, in fact, improving.
So you look at LTV then on a five-year basis, so we look at, you know, revenues less transaction expenses for our customers over five years. And, you know, we had a, we had a chart in our investor deck last, last week, which kind of showed how that's been building over time. And on a year, on a year-over-year basis, I think we grew that by 56%, when you-
Okay
... look at the aggregate dollars that we're showing there. So very strong fundamentals of the business, and kind of goes to the predictability and, I'd say, durability of the, you know, quote, unquote, "sort of cash flow stream" from some of the investments we're making. And then it gets to the other, I guess, part of the unit economics, which is, you know, what's the cost of acquiring these customers?
Sure.
You know, so it gets to marketing and so on. And so, you know, we saw, again, Q4 was super strong. We acquired a record number of new customers in Q4. It's a seasonally high quarter for us and as it is for the industry, but we've been outpacing, you know, sort of acquisition quite, quite well. And, you know, so marketing continues to be a high return payback for us. And so, so that's kind of the story of unit economics.
Got it. Super helpful. Maybe we drill into just the LTV for a second because there's stuff... There's things you're doing operationally, like lowering transaction expenses, and then there's customer behavior-
Yeah
... retention, intensity. There's also mix, obviously. When we think about just the customer behavior aspect, you think about the cohorts you've added over the last 1-2 years, how have those been different from what you've historically added from a behavioral or just a productivity perspective, if that makes sense?
Yeah. I mean, I can, I can touch on this, and Matt can jump in as well.
Mm-hmm.
I think when we look at it, it's very similar on a broad base. So when you look at some of the segments that we've been, you know, really addressing, and the patterns of behavior are very consistent. We see... Again, what do we mean by that? One is, again, engagement on the platform, so transaction activity, and frankly, that's been improving, particularly when it comes to sort of digital transactions, which means customers are sending it to their friends or families, to their bank accounts, bank deposits, or to mobile wallets, which is a really, really amazing trend, and we think we kind of benefit from that being a digital player at scale now. So that's been a pretty healthy trend, and we continue to see that.
So across all sorts of customer cohorts, whether again acquired many years ago or have been recently acquired.
Got it.
Yeah.
On that last point, since you brought it up, I know, you know, one of the recent call-outs has been the growth of the digital receive side-
Yeah
... sort of, and that's been driving some growth there. How do the economics of a digital receive transaction compare to other types of transactions? Is it similar from a unit economics perspective? Are there advantages? Anything to talk about there?
I think there's... I mean, there's, I think from a strategic lens, there's certainly an advantage-
Mm-hmm
... to us being just digital in everything that we do, whether it's through the customer experience and certainly through the network that we've built out, whether it's direct connects and continuing to increase the connectivity there. But we don't break out specifically the economics of any specific micro segment.
Mm-hmm.
But we do think the digital transactions and these behaviors we're seeing-
... have attractive unit economics to us, and it's something that we can continue to leverage as we continue to become bigger in this market.
Got it. That's super helpful. Maybe we could touch on just customer acquisition, and Matt, maybe you talk about this in terms of the marketing strategy. You've, you know, put a little bit more traditional marketing into the mix, top-of-funnel marketing investments. Maybe you can talk about that, and then sort of as a corollary, you know, how does word-of-mouth or referrals trend in versus, like, paid search and things like that?
Yeah. Yeah, I think, you know, we have a good mix of, actually, you know what? Before I get into the marketing component, one thing to add on-
Mm-hmm
... on unit economics, because then we're gonna dive deeper into the customer acquisition component. But I do think that, there's varying degrees of sophistication, you all look at a lot of companies, when it comes to deeply understanding unit economics, not only on an average basis but a marginal and incremental basis, looking at it on a de-average basis because there are different variable costs for pay-in, pay-out, et cetera. And really understanding the levers there is something that, since Matt Harris gave us a shout-out this morning, I've learned something from Matt. I've also learned from other really great fintech investors like Nigel Morris, to kind of pay it forward with a shout-out to an investor.
Mm.
Nigel is the founder of Capital One Bank. He's on our board. The way that they leveraged unit economic depth and understanding to scale Capital One, back then it was using direct mail, now it's a lot more digital channels, but that is something that is deeply embedded into our success. So I think that that's really, really important to understand, and I credit Nigel for teaching me a lot about what I now know about unit economics. Now, if you apply that to a CAC lens, the first is we have, I think, a good full-funnel marketing approach. When we went out of the gate, because we are so quantitative, we would only say, like, "Okay, if we spent X and we get Y, like, 10 minutes later and measure it," that is all we would spend on.
But this isn't new to Q4, this is something we've been doing for the last couple of years, where we have a full-funnel marketing approach, where we market, you know, obviously a lot of digital channels and other components. We also use promotions for new customers, and we use them very, in a very targeted way, and we include that, obviously, in the customer acquisition cost. And we, we also have done things like upper funnel, where it's really important to define upper funnel, because for our customer base, it's very targeted. So we're not out doing random sponsorships or, you know, like, buying Super Bowl ads. We are looking at, like, specifically the Miami Airport and thinking: How do we, like, really have an integrated marketing campaign there?
Then we're geo-fencing it because we still, like, can't get past our, like, we have to measure what we spend. We will geo-fence and look at, well, how are the further-down-the-funnel marketing metrics looking from a customer acquisition cost standpoint within the Miami area versus other GMAs that we haven't done that integrated marketing approach? What we see is it brings down the customer acquisition costs for some of the paid and further, like, down-the-funnel marketing channels. And so with that context, we have a lot of confidence around the marketing spend that we have. And the other just huge structural benefit that we have, given that we have, you know, over 5 million quarterly active users now, is the brand that we've built starts to create, to the point about word-of-mouth, a lot of word-of-mouth because the brand is not the marketing we've done.
The brand is... My definition of brand is: A promise when delivered creates preference. And the promise we're delivering around trust-
Mm
...and reliability, we deliver, and in communities we serve, that product speaks for itself, and that's also bringing down customer acquisition costs and accelerating our growth.
Got it. Super helpful. Thank you. And if we just jump into competition because, you know, going back to the comment earlier, it is a focus of people. I think there's a perception it's competitive market. Maybe you could talk about just, you know, competitive intensity. You know, has it changed at all in the last year or two? Maybe just, you know, the, you know, that incremental customer, you know, are they sort of how do they make a decision in terms of who to go to?
Mm-hmm. Yeah. I would say that the headline is: Competitive intensity and dynamics in the last year or two has not changed in any sort of material way, nor has it changed in the last quarter or two. What has changed that has been a benefit for us is that there's obviously a rapid shift happening to digital, and there's also, with scale, the ability to provide a much more trusted and reliable service. And so those are really structural benefits for us. And what you see in the overall competitive landscape is it's still very fragmented. I mean, we have 2% of the overall market, right? As it shifts digital, and as scale becomes a prerequisite to deliver a trusted experience, there's a lot of sub-scale players that are having a hard time.
They're having a hard time because they can't deliver that trusted, reliable, fast experience, and their cost base is just higher because they don't have as much leverage to drive down everything from customer support costs. We mentioned in our last earnings call, 95% of our transactions go through without having to contact customer support.
Mm.
I'm not satisfied with 95%. We're gonna continue to make that better. But also, if you just look at the broader, sub-scale experience, the transaction contact rate is one metric that is indicative of the fact that if you're sub-scale or you're legacy, it's increasingly hard to compete versus where we're at, which is really reinventing how international P2P payments are done. And, 10 years ago, we were honestly not able to do that at sub-scale. Now, we're just getting better every day and pulling away from the competition in pretty material ways.
Right. On that, on that last point, I think, you know, it's showing up in the numbers, but, you know, it's hard for people to see externally the benefit of, you know, what's, quote-unquote, "a modern platform"-
Mm-hmm
... versus something that might be a little more monolithic.
Yeah.
So if you take it down a step deeper, you talked a little about this before, whether it's you know, take your pick, KYC, AML, pricing. Can we walk through an example of, you know, how the platform works?
Yeah.
in terms of in maybe relative to traditionally how it worked before?
Yeah.
For, you know, in history of remittances.
Yeah, yeah.
Mm-hmm.
I'll give you the kind of the framework, and then I will go into one... Like you said, there's pricing, there's KYC.
Mm-hmm.
I'll give you the framework of the platform, i.e., what enables us to deliver a reliable experience. Then I'll go into, like, one example, but I'm happy to take questions later on others.
Sure.
If you look at everything from localizing across 5,000 corridors to the front-end KYC payment acceptance to all of kind of what I call the middle of the stack, which includes everything from custom-built treasury platforms, accounting platforms, FX, cash management. We have our own CRM system, so if somebody calls into customer support, we have our own CRM system that has a lot of the risk tools that we've built out and visibility for, for agents to serve customers. And then you look at the disbursement network. And actually, one other component I forgot in the middle of the stack that's very important is all of the risk components, fraud and compliance. And then you look at the disbursement network.
Each one of those elements has a huge amount of complexity that creates a lot of friction for customers, if not done well, and only gets better with scale. So let's take one example of that. I'll let you pick. You want to talk about risk systems, or you want to talk about pay-in network or payout or any other of the other ones I just mentioned?
Hmm. Let's talk about risk.
Risk? All right.
Yeah.
So when we talk about risk, there's fraud and compliance, okay? And it's incumbent upon us as a money transmitter to prevent bad actors, and by bad actors, it could be large-scale identities that have been compromised on another site. And then those fraudsters, and it's a whole industry, come to our site to try to cash out stolen identities. We have to prevent that, otherwise, we're liable for the fraud loss. And we have to prevent it in a way that doesn't have a lot of friction for good customers. Same phenomena exists with compliance, but I won't go into detail on that. The same tools we use for both are, as you can imagine... Like, how do you delineate between some of the most sophisticated fraudsters or compliance actors while not deteriorating customer experience?
The answer to that is very sophisticated machine learning algorithms. And to your point about what legacy players or what we even did when we were subscale, is we'd use a bunch of third-party tools, which are fine for your average e-commerce vendor, but not fine for the complexity of our specific platform. And, you would use things like rules-based engines, like, you know, X, Y, and Z rule. If that triggers-
Mm-hmm
... you do a manual review. Now, with our scale, the amount of data, both first party and third party, that we capture feed into our machine learning models to delineate between good and bad customers, has gotten and continues to get so much better. That results in lower fraud loss rate, a better compliance track record, fewer customers going into review, i.e., contacting customer support or us proactively reaching out to them, and ultimately, a very defensible and better, like, trusted experience that creates that same word-of-mouth that I talked about. Because, it's magical for customers how fast funds get there. That's one, again, of like, I could go through 10 examples there.
Yeah.
It's 1 of 10, and I think when folks really take the time to get to know this industry, they're surprised again and again-
Mm
... with the complexity and differentiation that we've built, that ultimately manifests itself in a more trusted and reliable customer experience.
Got it. Thank you, Matt. Maybe we'll turn it over to Hemanth-
Yeah
... to talk about marketing expense. This ties into what we were talking about before, customer acquisition costs, but maybe we could put a finer point on it. So there's, you know, a debate out there about leveraging marketing expense, right? So maybe you could talk about how you think about marketing expense in the context of returns, and then sort of your confidence that over time, this is a cost category that you can leverage.
Yeah, it's a great question. I think when you think about marketing, again, going back to sort of the LTV story on here, right?
Sure.
So we're looking at a predictable and durable sort of stream of revenue, less expenses. Basically, what I'd argue is sort of a variable cash flow stream that we would expect to have over a long period of time. So, so the marketing spend is contextualized in that context. So it gives us... You can look at it whether an LTV/CAC basis, and we've talked about a return of 6x on that, or you look at it on the basis of, you know, what we showed, or we talked about the last earnings on this transaction margin sort of view of the world, non-GAAP again-
Yeah
... and marketing costs associated with it. So we think the return profile on that is very attractive for us, and we continue to invest in marketing to drive returns for the long term. And that would include certainly leaning into marketing with the right return thresholds, even for this year. So we do expect to spend more in aggregate dollars of marketing this year versus last year. But again, we're looking to acquire even more-
Yeah
... new customers this year than we did last year. So we think, you know, with a payback of less than 12 months, it's a, it's a really great return profile for, for our investors and shareholders, really just creating long-term value.
Mm-hmm.
It's kinda how we think about, you know, marketing investments. Your second question was?
Well, I'll get into that. Yeah. So the second question, I think, is more about near term, and I apologize for near-term question 'cause you guys are very long-term focused. But marketing expense for this year, is there a way to contextualize this? 'Cause obviously there's some flexibility to flex that up or flex that down-
Yeah
... depending on the returns you're seeing. But, you know, how do you set the bar? Is it sort of a medium-term base case, or, you know, is there, you know, opportunity to flex that up based on what you see?
Yeah.
What's a right way to contextualize the level of spend that's in the plan currently for 2024?
Yeah. I mean, it's all spend that we broadly control to begin with, right?
Mm-hmm.
So when we think about marketing spend, again, if you think the broad buckets on it, is really performance marketing. It's growth marketing spend that, you know, can be dialed up or down, you know, as we look at different sort of return thresholds, which tend to be somewhat dynamic, depending on the segments that we operate in. So that's very much within our control. And even if you kind of move towards the upper funnel and maybe some of the brand spend, those are also well within sort of what we can dial in and dial out. Obviously, the time horizons on that will vary more than they would for direct marketing spend. So in terms of, you know, we look at this on a very granular level.
So when we see, you know, microsegments, specific corridors, you know, not just U.S., Canada, which we continue to grow in, by the way, like, we have significant growth even sort of in the core segments, core corridors that we've been in. But even when we look outside international, which again, rest of the world growth last year was, you know, more than 100% with $200 million of revenue, driven again, by the fact that, you know, we're acquiring new customers at very attractive unit economics. Those unit economics improve over time when you're in new markets. So, you know, to your question about, you know, what are these thresholds? The thresholds are set at a pretty granular microsegment and corridor level, and we monitor and manage that, you know, on a pretty periodic basis.
The other thing I would say to this is, we do consider cost of capital, right?
Sure.
We're certainly in an environment where that matters. It should matter always, almost regardless of the macro environment-
Right
... where we believe we're, like, strong stewards of capital, and we're focused on looking at, you know, NPVs on the spend and seeing what the right thresholds are there as we navigate through, you know, so the capital costs as well in this.
And then long-term leverage, net line is based on just basically your. As you get larger in terms of scale, obviously, there's virality in terms of word-of-mouth.
Yeah.
But you're in more markets where your, you know, your customer base is a little bit mature. Can you talk a little bit about just long-term scale and sales-
Yeah
and marketing expenses?
Yeah. I mean, there's a couple of key drivers. And one, I think you touched on there, Andrew, is like, when you think word-of-mouth, and it's been a really strong aspect of when we see customers coming in and, you know, downloading the app and having experience in the platform. We, through surveys and other means, we do see that that's a pretty strong, healthy trend of increased word-of-mouth, and that does improve marketing efficiency. Certainly, it has been, and we think it will continue to bring that down over time. I think product experiences will be another aspect, again, that drives word-of-mouth.
Sure.
So more fundamentally, at the core of what we're talking about here, which Matt touched upon as well, is, you know, bringing down that friction and building kind of that trust behind our customers. I think is fundamentally at the core of what we're trying to do. And we'll see that manifest itself in terms of, you know, marketing efficiencies over time. And the one last sort of finer point on marketing efficiency is, we're actually already marketing efficient in terms of marketing spend. We're talking about deploying the marketing spend, efficient marketing spend-
Yes
... to acquire new customers. So, you know, it's not inefficient spend.
Right.
It's actually very efficient spend.
Mm
... that's going to acquire new customers.
For longer-term returns.
Yeah.
That makes a lot of sense. And actually, if I could go back to the LTV to CAC conversation, 'cause it came up in my thought process. So when you're, say, in the Middle East, and you're ramping in the Middle East, or we can take another new market, the unit economics of the new markets, how does it compare to historical vintages of, you know, when you've launched in, say, you know, U.S. to India, U.S. to Mexico? 'Cause I'm sure you have the data, you probably looked at it, but how does that compare?
Yeah, I think it's similar, especially because there tends to be synergy. So what I mean by that is, if we launch the UAE, and folks are sending money to the Philippines, like, we've already gotten a lot of leverage with our Philippine disbursement partners to where we get those same variable costs. We may have also, on a more global basis, started to build out a brand for Filipino immigrants, even if they're in the UAE versus the U.S. or Canada or other places that we serve.
Sure.
In markets where it's completely new customer segment, you might have a slightly higher CAC that comes down.
Mm-hmm.
But, more and more, there's just a lot of synergy there. We don't... Yeah. Yeah.
Okay, fair enough. So I wanna switch gears, and, you know, we only have a little bit of time left.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Always more to talk about.
Yep, yep.
So just the adjacent products and services side, Matt, not many templates out there today for successfully attaching value-add services to remittances.
Mm-hmm.
Obviously, you know, you guys are in beta with Remitly Circle, which is super interesting, kind of a shared account.
Mm.
But maybe we could, you know, talk about your vision for just adjacent products and services and how this product launch might play into that.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, our vision is to really transform and improve lives with trusted financial services that transcend borders. And so our vision is very much a wide range of financial services, and I think that what we've done a good job of, it actually goes back to the first question over the last couple of years-
Mm
... is instead of building a completely separate tech stack and other things that were duplicative, expensive, and kind of narrow the number of bets we could make because of the complexity, by re-architecting our system, we're able to launch and iterate new products much faster. And so I'd put Circle in that, in that category, so we're really excited about. We have two broad areas in addition to sending that we think there are very clear pain points that we can solve for customers that, you know, just deal with financial services systems that are not designed for them as immigrants to a new country.
More to come on that, but the punchline is: excited about, you know, Circle being out there, and even more excited about our ability to launch, test, iterate in a customer-centric way, and new products more broadly.
Got it. Thank you, Matt. And then maybe wrap-up question for Hemanth, and then turn it over to Matt for closing remarks. You know, maybe just a visibility question for 2024... and then sort of longer term growth and margin algo. Just, you know, you, you expressed in the last earnings call the visibility you do have, especially when it comes to predictability of the customer base, how much comes from, you know, previous customers versus new customers, et cetera. But maybe you talk a little bit about the visibility, top and bottom line visibility that you have this year, and then anything you can provide about sort of intermediate to longer term growth and margin algo.
Yeah, I mean, it's extremely visible. I mean, we look at, again, going back to the predictable and durable, and what do we mean by predictable is, you know, we think the significant percentage of our revenue less expenses for this year is coming from acquisition of customers and existing customers from last year. So that one is giving us a lot of visibility in terms of the revenue forecast that we have for this year, which, by the way, is, you know, a growth rate of 30%-32%- 30%-32%, revenue guide for the year, which is, you know, which is, which is pretty, pretty nice and exciting.
When you go down the P&L and you look across, whether it's transaction expenses, whether it's customer service costs, as well as getting operational efficiencies in the business, which we've got a lot of line of sight in terms of, you know, what we can expect there, which is reflected in our EBITDA guide for the year as well. We're looking at a range of $75 million-$90 million on EBITDA for this year. And just to put it in context, we had $44 million of EBITDA last year, and we've continued to grow, you know, our EBITDA on a very sustainable basis, while making these investments for the long term, right? So we're talking about marketing investments and some of the technology investments as well.
So, in short, I'd say, you know, a lot of visibility in terms of, you know, 2024. And then thinking longer term, just kinda stepping back a little bit, I mean, we're again 2% of a $1.8 trillion dollar market, and we're just getting started, as we kind of like to say internally as well. So we're really anchored around growth and continued sort of strong growth rates that we wanna keep demonstrating for years to come. And then, you know, reinvesting back in the business, you know, through some of the efficient spend, and finding efficiencies in the business, and growing our profits on a sustainable manner for years to come. So we don't-
Mm-hmm
... we're not guiding to any specific margin, if you will, for the long term, just given where we're at in terms of the growth phase of the company. But we do think we're building something that's very differentiated from a financial profile perspective, and we're really focused on some of the longer term returns that we can deliver.
Got it. Thank you, Amant. And then, Matt, anything to close us out with?
Yeah, I mean, I think we've covered a lot.
Sure
... around, you know, how we're getting scale in the business, how we're one of our Remitly values is deliver on promises, how we've done that since becoming a public company, how we've got an audacious vision. All of that we covered well. The thing that I would want to emphasize in the last 30 seconds is all of that is possible, given who our customers are. And that customer base is incredibly diverse. Everyone from technology workers to a lot of the folks in the hotel that are helping us out today in terms of us having a great conference and having our food and, and rooms and everything else taken care of.
But the thread that ties them all together is grit, tenacity, resilience, that spans economic cycles because they're sending money back to their very close loved ones, often whom they've left, like parents, siblings. It's the heart in our customers and business, and then the grit, tenacity, perseverance, combined with the non-discretionary nature of the service, from an investor standpoint, provides a lot of predictability. But from a purpose standpoint, the 2,700 Remitlyons around the globe that wake up every day to serve our customers, that is what I think differentiates us and defines us as a company. And so I wanna end with that, 'cause that's why the company's doing well at the end of the day, and that's why we really feel like more than ever, we're just getting started and serving them.
Great note to end on. Thanks, Amant.
Great.
Thanks, Matt. Thanks, Amant.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Thanks, everyone, for joining. Appreciate it.
Thanks.