Sorry, the last session went a little long, so happy to host the Remitly session. Matt Oppenheimer is here with us, CEO, co-founder, to give us an update on Remitly. My name is Tien-Tsin Huang. I follow the payments and IT services sector. Thanks for being here, Matt.
Thanks for having me.
Always enjoy catching up with you. I always like to steal your thunder, 'cause I know you end with a customer story-
Yep
Typically on the earnings call. I always like kicking off with that, just to, just to kick it off and give everybody a feeling for the vibe of what inspires you.
Yeah, sounds great. Our vision is really to transform our customers' lives with trusted cross-border financial services. And the amazing thing about our service is you think about a lot of the folks who are working in the hospitality industry, in this hotel, our Uber driver that I took from the airport, wide range. You've also got a lot of more white-collar workers and, if you think, more affluent customers that send money back to India and various countries. But the fundamental thread of all of our customers is they're sending money home for basic living expenses, for emergency medical expenses. They've made huge sacrifices to be away from their families. And as part of that move, what's central is their...
Our customers use the word obligation, or duty to send money back to their families, and to be able to support them to do that more affordably, more reliably, with the dignity and respect that they deserve, is what we're all about. We've started with remittances. We'll talk, I'm sure, about our broader financial services vision, but what gets the 2,700 Remitlyans up every day is how do we improve, you know, the lives of those 250 million individuals that live and work outside the country they're born?
Good.
That's why we do what we do.
No, thanks for going through that, Matt. Look, I think the mission statement matters, and you've always, you know, lived up to that from a business perspective. So let's talk about the numbers and the business a bit. I know I get this question a lot. You're growing comfortably in the 30s. I call it 10x faster than the market in some ways, if you wanna use World Bank. I know it's hard to-
Yeah
... make it a perfect match. But who are you taking share from, and, and what's your comfort level in sustaining premium growth?
Yeah, well, I mean, just to put it in context, yeah, as you mentioned, 30%+ growth. We're now at over $1 billion in annualized revenue.
Mm-hmm.
We'll also probably talk about how we're getting, you know, leverage in the business with sizable increases in Adjusted EBITDA. So that's a really special business, first and foremost. And if you look at where that growth is coming from, for those less familiar with the remittance space, it's really fragmented. So folks like, you know, even the largest, most established players, without naming names, have 15%-20% market share.
Yeah.
15%-20%. Second largest has, like, just around 5%, and so the way the remittance industry is built is it comes down to trust. We'll probably talk about that and, because of that, it's very fragmented. So half the market, roughly, are what are called corridor or country-specific players, and that's where we're getting a lot of our share from, is subscale legacy players that had a business 10, 20 years ago and is shifting to digital.
But as is true with most financial services, it just takes a bit more time. So I think that the analogy of, like, Blockbuster shifting to Netflix and analog to digital transition will happen with remittances and is happening with remittances, but it just takes a longer period of time because that trust is hard to build. Once you've built it, you have a really nice, recurring long-term relationship with our customers.
Yeah. No, look, they're trusting their hard-earned money to send money back home, and it's not easy. I think, what, you had 6.2 million active customers in the first quarter, up-
Mm-hmm
... 36%. We look at it nominally. You're adding about 100,000 users per month. So can you just tell us, is there any change in the quality of those users or where they're coming from?
Mm-hmm.
What can you share around the commonalities around the users now?
Yeah, so for folks that are newer to the story, the way that we think about the business is very much in a unit economic lens. And, a lot of companies say that. I'll actually credit one of our directors, Nigel Morris, who is the founder of Capital One Bank and has been an investor for probably about a decade-
Mm-hmm
... teaching me what it really means to think in a unit economics lens. And when you break that out and you look at the LTV side of the equation, there's been a lot of stability, and LTV's cumulative gross profit, it's gross profit per transaction times number of transactions. And when we say lifetime value, we usually look at a five-year window.
Okay.
And when we look at that five-year window, we've shared in the past, it's been 6x, so 6x , the investment for that customer acquisition cost. So to answer that first, not a lot of changes on the LTV side. We continue to see strong retention. We continue to invest in our product to make it more reliable, faster. I can talk more about that later.
So then, really, when we talk about the quality of customers, unit economics, it's about how much we're willing, and it's within our control, to spend on the customer acquisition cost side. And on that front, we continue to bring in record number of new customers, we mentioned in Q1. And you mentioned 100,000, and it's interesting because that's looking at the kind of like net adds number, the quarter, quarterly active users, quarter-on-quarter. Because different customers are active in different quarters, it's good to look at it at least on an annual basis. So we've added 1.7 million new customers over, compared to a year ago.
Mm-hmm.
Even that, when you compare it to the internal numbers that we have when we look at new customers, understates the number of new customers we're bringing in. That's great because that building top-of-funnel trust is the leading indicator of revenue growth, and, you know, we're excited about what's to come there and the unit economics that we continue to have in our business.
So just a stupid question then: so why, why do users choose Remitly? There's so many choices there. I Google whenever you pick a U.S. to Philippines, a bunch of things will pop up.
Yeah.
Why, why do people choose it, Matt?
Yeah. I mean, I think it starts and ends with trust, and I'll explain why that matters. But then it's a combination of selection, meaning we can send to 4 billion bank accounts, over 1 billion mobile wallets, over 400,000 cash pickup locations, even door-to-door delivery in some markets like the Dominican Republic, where it's possible, or I mean, where that's how folks like to receive funds. And so it's selection, it's speed. 90% of our transactions are dispersed in less than an hour.
Right.
95% do not need any sort of customer contact. It's price in the sense that it's a fair price, but not always the best price. Customers want to trust that we're giving them a fair price. But the reason trust matters and that it's not just a price or functional benefit is think about who our customers are. We're asking customers who just moved to a new country, or even if they've been here for years, to provide us with their name, address, address, date of birth, tax ID, if, if they don't have a Social Security number in the U.S. context, or Social Security number. Then we're asking them to give us their funds.
Mm-hmm
... a big percentage of their hard-earned money. Think of somebody who makes, like, $20,000 or $30,000 a year, and we're asking them to give us several hundred dollars of their funds, and then trusting us to deliver it hundreds or thousands of miles away back home. And because of the complexity in remittances, I talked about some of the convenience, selection, reliability, speed. That's not the case with a lot of remittance companies. And so when you look at like reviews of remittance products, pick your remittance company and then put in the word "review" and see the reviews.
Ours will not be perfect, but what you will see is that a digital-first player at scale, we have the ability to have this flywheel that's spinning to increase transaction speed, improve the product with a whole bunch of examples that I can give you, and ultimately build a more trusted and reliable product, which then creates this word-of-mouth effect that helps on that customer acquisition cost side that I mentioned. And that's the great thing about where the business is at now, is customers choose us because they trust us, because it's a fast service, because we have the way that they want to receive money back home, and because it's fairly priced, but not always the best, best price.
You mentioned that the LTV, the CAC, but so to your desire to just crank up and go acquire a bunch of customers, it sounds like it's there and available to you. So what... How do you govern that CAC question notionally as well as individually?
Yeah. I'd say that there's two ways that I'll answer your question. One is, it's we're constantly looking at that elasticity curve-
Yeah
...of, and so it's not like it's a, you know, decision we make for the year, and then we just, you know. We're constantly testing, especially a lot of our direct response marketing channels, which is most of our marketing dollars, a lot of digital channels. And we're saying not only what is the average customer acquisition cost, but what's the marginal customer acquisition cost? And then we're constantly iterating. But the second part of the answer that I think is actually also important is that in our business right now, there is no shortage of growth opportunities, and I can talk about that on the marketing front. I can talk about that in other areas. And the reality is that part of being a public company-
Yeah
... is recognizing that the shape of our P&L does matter in the sense that we're over $1 billion in annualized revenue. We're growing 30+% . I don't think there are many companies out there that have that and are showing leverage on the bottom line. And so when you do look at even with increased interest rates, the NPV of our marketing investments, you still see there's a lot of room to spend more.
And so we kind of have this balance where we've got a very analytical, data-driven approach to marketing. And there's also just being, you know, in the public markets, it's important to continue to show leverage in the business. But we could grow faster if we spent more, and it would still be very profitable growth. We're just doing, I think, the right prudent thing in terms of balancing growth and profitability.
How about pricing as a lever for marketing?
Mm-hmm
... and your ability to win customers there? I know you don't like talking about take rate, but-
Yeah
... take rate was down in the first quarter.
Mm-hmm.
So just comment on the take rate dynamics here and what it means from a marketing perspective.
Yeah. So I'll break out pricing and take rate separately.
Thanks.
On the take rate side, it makes sense investors look at it because you're looking. You've got, you've got revenue and you've got total volume.
Mm-hmm.
But the kind of take rate fluctuations, which were within a few basis points, in Q1, is mainly due to mix shift, because take rate is so heavily influenced by average transaction size. So if India, if more customers are sending to India, U.S. to India as an example, in a specific quarter, because the average transaction size is higher, the take rate is lower, even though the profit per transaction might be more similar. And so take rate within the ranges that we see is really just mix shift.
Mm-hmm
... based on average transaction size. On the pricing front, as I mentioned earlier, I think there's... Customers care about price, but it's, it's only as it kind of builds up to, is this a trusted product? And what's great about the leverage that we're seeing in the business is if you look at the variable costs in our business-
Mm-hmm
... collecting funds, disbursing funds, an allocation for fraud loss rate, and customer—and then the fourth is customer support, those four, we're seeing a lot of leverage across the board on. And we can choose to let that flow through to the P&L, or we can choose to pass along some of those savings to customers.
Sure.
I expect there to be a mix of that, but the important takeaway there is, it's within our control because as a digital-first player at scale, we're increasingly just have a cost, a variable cost advantage. And it's, and then it's up to us to be fair to customers, especially in instances where there's structural shifts, like there's a shift from cash pickup to digital disbursement. In those structural shifts, I think it's incumbent upon us to pass along some of those savings to customers. But I also think that we have a structural advantage to be able to, even in those shifts, drive down the variable costs and then decide how much we're passing along to customers versus passing along to the P&L.
Yeah. I mean, you know, we saw that in the numbers, right?
Mm-hmm.
Even the take rate, understand it's driven by mix. The margin was, on the gross margin side, really strong.
Mm-hmm.
So your transaction expense has shown a lot of leverage, Matt, over the last several quarters.
Yep.
How much more room is there to go on that?
Yeah, I think there's, I think there's room on driving down our variable costs-
Yeah
... but I think that we also want to, again, balance how much we're flowing through to transaction margin versus passing along to customers. So I'd expect there to be optionality for us on that front-
Got it
... with a customer-centric lens on how we decide where to ostensibly invest those dollars.
Okay. So balance, like you said in the last two questions here.
Mm-hmm.
Well, you're just, you're going to balance that, but the opportunity is there.
Yep.
So you, you've mentioned a couple of times, digital player at scale. So PayPal-
Mm-hmm
...has talked about. Alex has talked about in the last earnings call that they're going to reset there and get back to maybe being more competitive, and that includes repricing the business to be more competitive.
Mm-hmm.
I think there's some overlap between Xoom and Remitly. What's your thinking there? What have you seen coming out of that asset, and does that change your thinking around pricing?
Yeah.
Or approach?
Yeah, we haven't seen any material changes in terms of the competitive dynamic, including with PayPal and the Xoom asset. I know that was mentioned, but if you look at some of the undercurrents of that specific mention, a lot of it was around the, like, PayPal USD and stablecoin in terms of how they're thinking about it from a strategic standpoint.
Yes.
So at the end of the day, when you look at the competitive landscape, and you look at the differentiated product, that we have, we feel well positioned. Not only as it pertains to being able to really reinvent P2P international remittances, of which, by the way, we're in like the... I don't know what's better than, like, a baseball analogy, but we're still in-- You're a basketball fan, aren't you?
I love basketball, but I'll do any sports.
All right.
Pick one.
All right, we'll go baseball, 'cause I don't know how to... We'll go basketball 'cause it's the NBA finals right now. We're in, like, still in, like, the early in the first half. And when I say that, 90% of our transactions are delivered in less than an hour, but that's still 90%. 95% of our transactions don't have to contact customer support, but 5% still do.
Right.
While our customer support cost as a percentage of revenue went from 10% down to 7%, which for a $1 billion in annualized revenue business is a big number.
Sure.
It's going from, call it $100 million down to $70 million.
Yeah. No, sure. Yep.
That's, those are big numbers, but we're still spending $70 million on areas like customer support that I think can be automated over time in terms of delivering a better customer experience. And so I mention all of that just to say that we're in the early innings of really reinventing international payments, and then I think that over time, we'll probably talk about broader financial services with Circle and other elements, but we're in the very early innings of really defining what it means to have cross-border financial services that meet our customers' needs.
Yeah. I do want to talk about Circle and the banking side of it, but just to round out some of the remittance things. So the corridor number stayed pretty stable sequentially, I think 5,000-
Mm-hmm
... was the number rounded.
Mm-hmm.
Is that less of a focus? Should we not be focusing on the additions of new corridors in this growth algorithm, or is there more to add there?
Yeah. I think what's important to focus on there is, if you look at 2024 growth, the vast majority of that is gonna be coming from our existing corridors. And so again, with the thesis that we have no shortage of growth opportunities, even in markets like the Philippines, that we've been in for 13 years, that's where we started. We're still growing in those markets with a lot of headroom for continued growth. Lots of opportunity there. The reason we're launching new corridors is to drive 2025, 2026, 2027, and long-term growth. And so I would expect us to continue to launch new markets, but I'd expect us to do it like we've always done over the last 13 years-
Yeah
... in a very methodical, you know, kind of intentional way. And I think that if I were to skew on anything right now, it's about doubling down a bit more in the existing corridors we're in, as opposed to launching new ones. Just 'cause we're such a fraction of the market, and there's lots of opportunity to continue to grow in those corridors.
Yeah, no, I believe that. No, I respect that. I think that, that makes a lot of sense. I figured I'd ask it just in case. But you did mention digital disbursement, and if you see a shift there, you'll, you'll adjust and path, maybe pass along some of that. But just in general, Matt, the opportunity to expand digital disbursement-
Mm-hmm
... all of, you know, we've had Mastercard speak this morning, and they're talking about A to A, driving more accounts.
Mm-hmm.
And there's a lot more new rails that'll help-
Mm-hmm
... you know, access wallets.
Mm-hmm.
I know you're a part of that.
Yep.
How do you see that evolving, and what does that mean for your P&L?
Yeah. I think that there is a shift to digital disbursement, and for us, that we're agnostic in terms of whether or not we want, you know, our customers to send via cash pickup versus digital disbursement.
Mm-hmm.
We're good at getting funds to customers the way that they want to receive them. And so, I think we're proud to be kind of leading, in some ways, that transition. When it comes to the scale that we have, we can drive down some of the variable costs. When it comes to our mobile wallet disbursement partners, some of our banking partners, I mentioned we can send to 4 billion bank accounts and 1 billion mobile wallets.
But in addition to driving down the costs, it's really important to understand that not all of those integrations are done in the way that we do them. And so some of these things tie together in terms of how we're improving reliability, speed, driving down support costs. So like one of, I could literally mention 100 examples in this space, but I'll just give you one to make that a little more tangible.
Sure.
Let's say a customer is sending money from, like, the U.S. to India, okay? Instead of going via an aggregator or a local payment system, even like UPI or there's another one called IMPS, there's another one called NEFT, where you're kind of going through several hops to get to that bank. What we will do is we will integrate, let's say, the customer sending to, like, a mid-size bank, like, let's pick, like, Yes Bank, mid-size, large bank. Instead of having several hops to get to that bank, we'll do a direct integration with Yes Bank in India.
And let's say the customer in the U.S. is sending money to that bank, and the way that we've done the integration with Yes Bank in India, as the sender is entering in the recipient, let's say their mom's, like, bank account and routing number. Let's say they accidentally, like, enter the wrong number for their mom. One of the things that we've added, we haven't shared the percentage of accounts, but it's an increasingly large percentage, is the ability to do, like, account number validation. So it matches, "Hey, is that the person's mom's name that matches with that account number?" And then it'll automatically warn the customer before they submit the transaction to say there's something that doesn't match in the transaction that you're submitting.
That is one of literally 100 examples of the kind of friction that we can remove if we do those integrations, one, to the last mile, which you can only do at scale, and then, two, do those integrations in the right way, given that that's been an expertise of ours since day one. And so, I think that it's easy to overlook how complex it is to do digital disbursement in the right way. It's much different than domestic, where you can kind of plug into one local payment rail. There's a lot more complexity to it, and I think that complexity and operational excellence has been a key part of our success. And again, we're in the early part of the first half in terms of our ability to really reinvent how international payments are done.
Okay. I think I've said it before to you on stage, I mean, when we did the diligence at the IPO, a pretty common feedback from your partners and banks was how easy it was to work with Remitly on the integration side. I think that really stood out as something I recalled. So is, is there room, based on what you just said there, to expedite the number of access points you have to whether it be wallets or, or banks? I mean, do you see another step function change, or is it really what you said, just doing it better?
I think that it's, if you think about... Then we should break out origination of funds versus disbursement.
Disbursement.
What we're talking about here is disbursement.
Disbursement, yeah.
I think in that instance, we send to 4 billion bank accounts and 1 billion mobile wallets-
Mm-hmm.
and then 400,000 cash pickup locations. Not all of those disbursement points are created equal, if that makes sense. So I think the depth is where we have opportunity.
Okay.
and to your point-
More existing.
To your point with the velocity, we talk about scale, but this is a very tangible benefit of scale. If we don't share the number of direct integrations we do per quarter, we share the output in terms of-
The-
Transaction speed, CS cost, things like that. But if you were to chart the number of integrations we're doing per quarter, it's really exciting. And I will tell you, having started this business 12 years ago, that was super hard to build a differentiated product. Like, I could only do one integration per, you know, quarter, call it, because, you know, we had 10 people that were working in a small room, and we had no leverage. Where now, the speed of those integrations is getting so much better, and that's where we have this flywheel that's now spinning, that really creates a more differentiated product, drives down costs across the system, both for our customers and for our investors, and creates a lot of long-term loyalty to our, to our, to our product and business.
Okay, good. Any questions from the audience before we talk about Circle and some other things? Yeah. So we have a mic, sorry, if you don't mind waiting for that.
Hi, can you just maybe talk again?
Hello.
Can you maybe talk about just the trends in customer acquisition costs, like, you know, maybe over a longer period of time, and... Thank you.
Yeah. I think that, as we were talking about, it's a constant iteration. If you look at it over a longer period of time, there have been periods, like a couple of years ago, where if you looked at it on a payback or NPV basis, we were just too efficient. And the paybacks were actually too short to where we were. We had the opportunity to spend a bit more, still within our payback and LTV to CAC guardrails. So, but I'd say for the last year, it's been stable. You know, iterations on the margin, but a lot of stability in terms of customer acquisition cost, while increasing the number of new customers, because we're adding new marketing channels, we're adding new geographies, and so, yeah, stability on the CAC side, increasing number of new customers.
How is it year-over-year so stable this year-
Mm-hmm
... year-over-year, is it?
Stable, I would say, over the last, yeah.
Anyone else? Yep, up front.
Thank you. Hi, Matt. How do you think about the potential long-term margin profile of your business versus the more traditional players? And is there any reason for it to be structurally different?
Yeah, yeah, I love that question. I think that there are... We don't, we haven't given a long-term operating margin percentage, but if you do look at some of the fundamental costs for us as a technology company, they are structurally, I think, less than a legacy player. And a few examples of that would include, we don't have cash in as a fee that we're paying our agents. And that's important not only because there is a physical cost to have, to, like, a physical variable cost. But the other important component of that is that a lot of that trust actually resides with that local agent in the community, and-
Walmart, for example.
Exactly, yeah, or the local, like, bodega or store. And so there's higher per transaction fees, so to speak, where with us, you have to build that trust at the top of funnel with customer acquisition costs, but then the repeat variable costs, I think, has a structural advantage. Payout as it moves more digital, you bring down costs there. I think that as a digital-first player at scale, our fraud loss, it's hard to know definitively compared to the legacy players, but I think we have a pretty sophisticated way of both decreasing the amount of very sophisticated fraud attempts that go towards fraud loss, compared to a legacy player, and certainly compared to a sub-scale player that might not have the machine learning resources or the data to feed into those models.
And then when you get below the kind of variable cost line, I think that just inherent in being a technology company as opposed to having to employ very large groups of folks to do a lot of manual monitoring and just operations of physical branches, we invest in product and engineering, but that's then building durable resources that are things like our compliance tools or our fraud tools or our what we call our Remitly Transaction Engine. So I think that all of that flows down to a margin that I believe is higher than the legacy players. Sizably higher, potentially, but we haven't, we haven't, you know, gone out and said, "Here's what that operating margin is." But it's exciting, and it's also...
You do see that in our bottom line, given the scale and size that we're at now. You know, our adjusted EBITDA increased from $5 million last year to $19 million this year this quarter, in Q1 of this year. And so, you're seeing, you know, sizable leverage in the business. And ultimately, I think that the right thing that we will be optimizing for is, since I mentioned adjusted EBITDA, I think one of the most important metrics for us is free cash flow per share, so we also are taking into account the dilution aspect. But I think there's a lot of structural advantages for how we can deliver that, you know, at a different level than some of the legacy players.
That's the beauty of the network-based model.
Yeah.
Hey, Matt, great to hear from you. Quick one: how should investors think in the long term about the sort of competitive dynamics or moats versus, say, a Wise?
Yeah, yeah. I have a lot of respect for the, for the Wise folks, and when I think about digital first players at scale, I think Wise is, is important to note, and us. They're, they're competing with the banks. We're competing more with, like, the legacy broadly defined money transmitters. So different areas of a $1.8 trillion market, and we're excited to, you know, to see them be successful. It's, it's that's the advantage of also being in a huge market, and we're excited about, you know, the success that we're gonna have for years to come.
The valuation difference is real. Yeah. Anyone else? Yeah.
I'll ask again. Do you, do you have a sense for what share of customer send volume do you-
Share of customer send volume is the question.
Yeah.
Western Union or whatever?
Yeah. I think, yeah, when we've done share of wallet studies, the share of wallet tends to be high. We haven't broken out those numbers externally, because some of them are qualitative studies, if that makes sense. But, the retention numbers overall have been high in our business, which is why we focused more on that new customer acquisition.
I do think that as we continue to scale, small movements on the retention side, just 'cause we haven't focused on it as much, could have an outsized impact on the business, but we'd be doing that from an offensive, not defensive standpoint. And so overall, high share of wallet, good retention, that's why we focus more on new customer acquisition. With an increasingly large base, we also see there being opportunities on the margin to increase some engagement with our existing base.
All right, I'm eager to ask you about Circle. So I know you've narrowed the focus on remittance in general, and that's driven a lot of the EBITDA expansion that you've talked about, which is great, but you've also been investing in other areas. And thematically, Matt, I know you've heard me talk about this with you and others, you know, everyone's trying to bank their users-
Mm-hmm
... and everyone wants to earn that trust. You talk about leading with trust with consumers-
Mm-hmm
... with businesses, you pick it.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
It feels like Remitly has a great chance to bank their users, offering a traditional bank account.
Mm-hmm
... an ability to spend-
Mm-hmm
... against Remitly with maybe a card, pay other bills, you name it.
Mm-hmm.
What's the vision there? Can you spend to get after that under the construct of what you've, you know, committed to in terms of growth and profitability?
Mm-hmm. Yeah. So, maybe I'll start with the opportunity, and then I'll circle back to the point you made around: Can we do that while showing leverage in the business?
Yeah.
I think the opportunity for, like, really serving the 250 million individuals, now I think closer to 300 million, that live and work outside the country they were born, is enormous. Like, remittances tend to be at the center of their financial services need. But even for me, like, when I moved to London and I worked for Barclays Bank, in their retail and commercial bank, it was hard for me to get a bank account because I didn't have, like, the local utility bill in London, right? And it's not just about getting that bank account, but then it's like, how are you sharing that, you know? How do you have things like a shared account with your family back home, as opposed to having it be, like, completely disjointed?
And I think we don't use the word bank as much, simply because I think banks do a ton of different things, right? And for us, we think that we call it complementary services because we think that there's opportunities to, if you go back to our vision, provide trusted cross-border financial services, cross-border. And in that intersection of our customers' needs to live an international life when it comes to their, you know, financial services needs, that's where I think we can win and add other services. So we'll probably talk a bit about Circle here in a minute, but big opportunities there. And then when it comes to doing it profitably, one of the things we learned in Passbook, actually-
Yeah
which was our initial effort years ago. We learned a bunch of things, but one of them is we initially thought, "Hey, build it separately, because it'll give that team more autonomy, more velocity." And what we actually learned is, we have the opportunity to re-architect our existing platform, and we brought in an amazing CTO about two years ago, and that CTO has helped create what we call our North Star architecture, that aligns with what we call our integrated product strategy. And that North Star architecture is decoupling our system. So take our authentication systems as an example.
Instead of building a new authentication system for a new product, we decouple it so it's easier for not only new products, complementary products, to innovate on top of, but it's also way more efficient, more effective, more secure for our existing remittance business, engineers working on our existing remittance business, to build and deploy code with a more decoupled system. And so-
Mm-hmm
... that work has already been happening in the last couple of years.
Okay.
While we've been doing that, we've still been getting leverage in the business. What it means is, if you were to actually look at the amount that we're investing in complementary products, outside of that kind of re-architecturing, it's pretty modest, because we can do it a lot more efficiently and effectively on top of a more modern technology stack. So that's what excites me, is we can innovate much faster, we can do things like Circle, and there's more to come, both in that and other areas, that I think can really improve our customers' financial lives.
All right, so let's talk Circle and the vision there.
Yeah, I think that we're laser-focused on customers, and that's why we haven't talked about it in a ton of depth. We do have a separate app that you can download, although we've kept it behind a wait list, so we can target segments of our existing customers as we open up access. But I think that there's a fundamental, you know, way that we can improve the way that customers send money, even how they send remittances via Circle, and having that done in a better way. I think there's opportunities to improve how customers store money in multiple currencies across the globe, and how customers share money, as I mentioned, with their loved ones, if you think about things like shared accounts.
And so, and then the last one I'll say is, over time, how customers pay for goods across the globe. And we've got, I think, an amazing network of banks, of other folks that we have announced partnerships with over the years in our remittance business, that give us a unique ability to, to really build that, global financial services product for our customers. So more to come on that, but really excited about being able to deepen the relationship with our customers and how they, you know-
Mm-hmm
... send, store, spend, and save money.
Yeah. No, I think it's a very logical extension. How about, quickly, I know we're most of the time on the up, any update on the crypto front? I mean, you mentioned PayPal, I know, is trying to do something on the stablecoin. What's your latest thinking there?
Yeah, I think, yeah, I respect that you asked about crypto, because everybody asked about it, like, three years ago, and then nobody asks about it anymore. Like, and so I like the consistency, truly, of like still talking about it.
Not annoying.
No, it's not. You know, we always go back to the customer, right? We always go back to the customer. And I think, I think even when you think about things like multicurrency accounts and stable coins, I think some of those areas solve real customer pain points. I think the question that I'll always go back to is, do you need a stable coin or crypto solution to that, versus a non-crypto or stable coin solution? And so if there are things that help us in the crypto space, then we're open to it. If customers want to receive money into a crypto wallet as opposed to a-
Yeah
... fiat, you know, mobile wallet or, or bank account, we're open to that. We have not seen the demand yet from customers-
Okay
... but we're open to it, and most importantly, we're laser-focused on innovating on behalf of our customers.
Great. Right on the zero dot. Well done, Matt. Thank you for the update. Appreciate the time. Always means a lot to have you.