All right, thanks everyone for joining us today, both online and in person. My name is Chris Kennedy, I'm the research analyst at William Blair that covers the fintech and payment space. For a complete list of research disclosures and/or potential conflicts of interest, please visit our website at williamblair.com. Next up is Remitly. From the company, we have the co-founder and CEO, Matt Oppenheimer. The business was founded in 2011. It came public in 2021. They are focused on providing financial services that transcend borders, and they are disrupting the money remittance market. We were comparing 2023 actual results relative to our initial estimates following the IPO, when we picked up coverage. Revenue in 2023 outperformed our estimate by $180 million. EBITDA was $75 million above our initial estimate, so the financial results here have been solid.
With that, let me pass it over to Matt.
All right. Thanks so much, Chris. Great to see everybody. Great to see some familiar faces as well as some new folks. I'm Matt Oppenheimer. I'm co-founder and CEO of Remitly, and it's great to be back at the William Blair Conference. I think this is maybe my third or fourth year here, and excited to share with you an overview of the business, and update strategically on where we're headed. So let's see here. This is the... All right. All right, so there's one issue with my login here. Okay, I may do this without my notes. All right. Let me just pull up my notes here so I can make sure we get the disclosures correct. Okay, cool. Sorry about this. Okay. All right, great.
So turning to our disclosures, presentation contains forward-looking statements, which involves risks and uncertainties. We will discuss our non-GAAP financial measures today, and a detailed reconciliation of these metrics and GAAP figures is available in the appendix of this presentation. All right. So with that, the other slides will be less scripted anyway, so we're good. So Remitly was founded in 2011, and with a mission to provide a faster, more affordable, and more transparent way to send money internationally. I was living in Nairobi, Kenya. I was head of mobile and internet banking initiatives for Barclays Bank Kenya, and I saw personally how hard it was to send money internationally.
But I saw how much more important it was, and much more impactful and much more difficult it was for a lot of my Kenyan friends who received money from their loved ones, abroad. Our vision is to transform lives with trusted financial services that transcend borders, and that's the unique space that we play. That's something that is the North Star for the team, that we talk about, daily. We address the unmet needs of customers who rely on cross-border, financial services, and we uniquely deliver trust and peace of mind to those customers.
We focus that by, as I'll talk through, by providing strong security, reliability, and ease of use, and we aim to serve not only our current customers, but also other customers around the globe, who have unmet financial needs. And to give you a sense of the market, we'll talk about here in a minute, but there are over 250 million folks who live and work outside the country they're born. And in Q1, our quarterly active user base was 6.2 million. So an enormous market when you include our customers' families, which we believe we can also serve over time. We're talking about close to 1 billion folks of the 8 billion folks around the globe.
So, at over 13 years, we've scaled the business since its founding in 2011, to a pretty exciting spot, and have become one of the largest digital cross-border money transfer players on the planet, with our digital-first positioning, as well as scale, that gives us significant competitive advantages. As I mentioned, we had 6.2 million quarterly active users in Q1, and when you look at it on an annual active basis, because different customers are active in different quarters, that number is much higher. The annual send volume reached $42.5 billion over the last 12 months, demonstrating our extensive reach, customer trust, and the volumes necessary to deliver a seamless experience for our customers, while also allowing us to drive down costs.
We operate now in over 170 countries and approximately 5,000 corridors. And when I say corridor, I mean country to country, be like U.S. to Mexico would be a corridor. So 5,000 corridors, which is up significantly from when we shared at our IPO in September 2021. And over the past year, we've achieved $1 billion in revenue and $58 million in Adjusted EBITDA, showcasing our, our scale as well as improved operational efficiency. So unique in the sense that to be over $1 billion in revenue, positive from an Adjusted EBITDA standpoint, and as we'll talk about here in a minute, growing 30%+ year-on-year. Those combination of metrics from a P&L standpoint, we're very pleased with and we think you're unique.
So going a bit more to our growth in the first quarter, our quarterly active users grew 36% year-over-year. We now serve over 6.2 million QAUs, as I mentioned, but that's up 1.7 million from just last year. And we continue to benefit from record new customer acquisition due to our investments in creating a seamless and reliable and trusted and affordable product, combined, as I'll talk about, with a, I think, unique marketing, data-driven and analytical, marketing and customer acquisition strategy, which is critical in order to build trust with the customer base that we serve. A significant majority of our customers send money home on a regular basis and recurring basis to support daily living expenses.
Our customers are sending money back to their mothers, their siblings, their kids, their extended family, their loved ones broadly. And important to recognize, a lot of our customers have made huge sacrifices to be away from these close relatives to build a better life for themselves and their families back home. And so there's a reliability. Well, first, there's an incredibly just inspiring story that our customers have that inspires myself and the Remitly team every day, given their grit, tenacity, and the sacrifices they make. But there's also a reliability and predictability, as well as a non-discretionary need, because, again, our customers are sending money back for things like their mom's groceries and rent, and that's high on the use of funds for what our customers use their funds for.
There's some seasonality, given that different customers send different amounts and different frequencies. Examples of that during key holidays and festivals include Christmas, Mother's Day, Ramadan, just to name a few. So quarters like Q4 will be seasonally higher, quarters like Q1 will be seasonally lower. A trend, which I'll talk about, from a customer preference standpoint, is not only that customers are now originating transactions via digital devices, and so, I think most of the folks in this room know, but instead of on the origination side, like a customer in the U.S. or one of our 30 send countries, instead of going to a physical cash location, they link their bank account or their debit card.
They give us their name, address, date of birth, last four of Social to do the compliance and Know Your Customer checks. Then, as I'll talk about in a bit, they can send a variety of cash pickup options, but increasingly, customers are also digitizing on the recipient side. So we send to 4 billion bank accounts and 1 billion, over 1 billion mobile wallets, and that trend is both good for customers, because it can make it faster and there's more financial inclusion, but it's also good for us, in the sense that it can bring down some of our variable costs. And again, we send to 1.2 billion mobile wallets, 4.2 billion bank accounts, and 470,000 cash pickup locations across the globe.
We also, even in some markets like the Dominican Republic, offer home delivery, which is the way that customers like to receive funds in the DR. So we get customers the funds the way that they like to receive them. All right, so I've talked a bit about the number of customers that we can serve, the 250+ million. If you look at the amount of remittance flows that happen every year, it is $1.8 trillion, and that means that we represent about 2% of the overall market, if you look at the $42 billion that we sent over the last twelve months.
Currently, we have 2% of the market, but we're continuing to grow quickly, as digital providers become a much easier and more efficient and affordable way to send money. If you go back 11 years, our strategy has actually remained surprisingly constant since founding the company, 13 years ago, and there's lots of opportunity for continued growth, both in the short term and in the long term. First and foundationally, we aim to delight our customers with a fast, reliable, seamless cross-border experience that gives our customers peace of mind, which is our brand positioning. Some metrics that help substantiate that are 90+% of our transactions across the globe, 170 countries, are delivered in less than an hour.
That number continues to get better with our digital-first approach at scale, 90% in less than an hour, and 95% do not require any sort of customer support. Customer support contacts can happen in remittances because of the complexity that I'll talk about in a bit. Those numbers with scale, we're continued to committing to getting better, but excited about where we're at. The second is we have, I think, a unique and data-driven and analytical marketing approach across both performance marketing, mostly digital marketing, using very targeted and scientific promotions for new customers that match the customer acquisition cost—I mean, that match the lifetime value, which varies depending on the channel a customer comes in from and the corridor.
So, for example, a customer that comes from U.S., that is a U.S. customer sending money to the Philippines that might come via paid search, is gonna have a different lifetime value than a customer that comes to us via our referral program in the UK and is sending money to Kenya. Different customers have different lifetime values, and we have built a marketing platform that's proprietary to us to be able to match that customer acquisition cost that we're willing to pay, which also varies with the lifetime value that a customer has. And if you look at our overall unit economics, which I'll talk about in a bit, they continue to remain strong. But the second bucket is localized marketing at attractive unit economics.
The third is we see significant opportunities to continue to expand across the globe. We have 5,000 corridors, as I mentioned, and we very intentionally, as we have done over the last 13 years, add new corridors, both origination countries like the UAE, which is the most recent one that we've talked about, as well as receive markets across the globe. We do that in a very intentional way to be able to drive long-term growth. The punchline in the third bucket is there is still an enormous amount of room for growth in the existing markets that we're in, for the coming quarters and years. We're launching new corridors and new countries to be able to drive growth in years to come, given that we're in this for the long term, but lots of room to grow in our existing markets.
And then the fourth is, we believe there are enormous opportunities to deepen relationships with our customers. You mentioned you saw the vision was cross-border financial services, not just payments. And we think we have a unique technology platform we've built to continue to build, to efficiently scale, new features and products to millions of customers that we serve today. And, we have, I think, unique data, trust, analytics, partnerships to be able to do that effectively. At the end of the day, as I mentioned at the beginning, trust is foundational for our customers, and, in order to achieve that trust, we are obsessively focused every single day on reducing what we call transaction defects.
And in broad buckets, these are related to pay- in, how we're collecting funds from banks, across the globe, and debit cards. These are related to risk, how we prevent bad actors, whether that's somebody trying to complete a fraudulent transaction or a compliance bad actor, while making sure that our good customers can complete a transaction instantly and seamlessly. So that risk area is the second, and then the third that causes transaction defects is disbursement network. We're dealing with banks and financial services institutions across the globe, and our network, as we've gotten more scale, has the ability for us to go deeper and deeper to that last mile, to be able to drive down defects from the start and improve the speed and reliability of our customer experience.
So one example of that, just to make it real, but I could give 50 examples, is things like account name and number validation. And when we were subscale, when we were small, we would not have the ability and sophistication to integrate with, call it a bank in India, to where when our customer's entering in their mom's name, branch number is what they call it there, and account number, maybe they got one of those numbers wrong, maybe they got the name wrong. And now we have the ability, like you would almost have domestically, to do things like account number validation, to say, "Something doesn't match here. Before you submit the transaction, please check those details again." Those are the kind of things that you get from improving the disbursement network, which we can uniquely do.
We have this flywheel that's now spinning with our digital-first approach at scale, and there are many, many examples like that account number validation example, that make it so more transactions go through faster and there's a lower risk of customer contact. And as a result, of our efforts, we're continuing to not only improve the metrics I mentioned, but we're also getting some real expense savings, with 260 basis point improvement in our customer support costs, as a percentage of revenue year-over-year. That's a big number when you look at the annualized number there and how we will continue to drive down customer support costs while growing revenue, which will result in higher leverage for their business and additional potential to drive more to the bottom line.
All right, going into the second bucket, our focus on marketing investments, I talked a bit about, and remains on ensuring that we again match that customer acquisition cost with the lifetime value. We delivered another record number of new customers that we brought in in the first quarter, as our marketing investments across channels and across new geographies across the globe continued to perform effectively. Our integrated campaigns is also something that has, I think, shown good returns.
So again, the founding of the business has been performance marketing, but over the last, call it three, four, five years, we've started to do still analytical, but slightly middle or more top-of-funnel marketing, and that could mean advertising in the London Tube in areas where our customers specifically live, and then measuring the effectiveness of that marketing in London versus other areas throughout the UK. We've done that in Sydney, we've done that in Madrid, we've done that in cities across the globe. And what you see is an improved conversion in our performance marketing further down the funnel. So still very measurable but effective, and a continuation of what we've been doing now for quarters and years.
And overall, we have high confidence in our recent marketing investments, which are expected to deliver strong returns, not only for the quarter and the year, but beyond, with predictable and durable unit economics that we're very proud of. So this gives you a sense of the kind of cohort view that we look at internally. And we have observed that our customers' behavior over the past many years has been really predictable and really sticky. And this is why we don't optimize for marketing expenses in a specific quarter. We're much more focused on what is the customer acquisition cost and then the lifetime value that comes to fruition over multiple quarters.
There's some impact in quarter, but then you see here in this chart, that we use deep knowledge of our customer lifetime value to be intentional about how much we pay to acquire new customers, and our payback period remains below, 12 months. And similar to prior years, in 2023, you can see here on the bar on the far right, a significant portion of revenue less transaction expense was contributed by customers acquired prior to 2023, further demonstrating the predictability and durability of the lifetime value of our customers. And when we say lifetime value, important detail, we measure that in a five year window, when in reality, now that we have a decade plus of data, smaller cohorts, we have customers that have stayed with us much longer than five years.
So exciting stickiness and predictability of the business, given the product, the unique product that we deliver. We're also seeing opportunities to continue to grow around the globe, and today, as I mentioned, we serve 5,000 corridors. We have plans to increase that reach to drive growth for the quarters and years to come, and we've demonstrated success outside of North America. Our revenue outside of North America grew more than 7x, seven times, to nearly $200 million in 2023. I will tell you again, having gone through the whole journey from the very start, this was something that investors asked five years ago, as they should have: "Can you roll out this playbook across the globe?" We've proven that we can do that very well.
And this continued diversification also provides other benefits as we scale, including reducing risk, having more of a portfolio from an FX standpoint, in terms of customer demands. And while the global market opportunity is significant for us, we're still very intentional about our investments and are focused on ensuring product market fit as we roll out new markets. And that has been in the DNA from the very start of the company. So for context, a lot of companies went really broad in the early days in terms of countries. We started just with U.S. to the Philippines for about two years. Two years, just U.S. to Philippines. Then we added India for about a year. We added U.S. to Mexico for about a year. So the company's been around 12, 13 years.
First four years, we were only focused on those three corridors, four countries. And the reason that's important is because twofold. One, we really got the playbook right out of the gate. And two, while 5,000 corridors is a lot, we are intentionally holding back on launching all markets at the same time. We do it in a very methodical way to be able to deliver efficient, from an investment standpoint, and sustainable long-term growth. So really excited about our geographic expansion. And then lastly, let's see here. Lastly, just to talk a bit about our technology investments. The platform that we've built is also incredibly unique in the sense that we have put more investment into what we call our North Star technical architecture.
That is taking what has been more of a, more, monolith of a platform to more of an API-based system. And what that has, it has done and, and continues to do with the CTO that we brought in a couple of years ago, is, one, increase the efficiency of the investments we're making in our core remittance platform, because it's easier for our developers to build on top of a more decoupled platform. It also has risk, security, and reliability benefits. But the third thing it does is it really helps us be able to add more complementary new products on top of a technology platform that we can leverage and, and our new, what we call complementary products teams, can innovate on top of a platform that's much more modular.
So there have been some questions in the past, and we talked a little bit about Circle, which is one of those complementary products that we think has the ability to really improve how money is not only sent, but also stored, shared, and spent across borders. And while it's early in those products, which is why we don't talk as much about them, that is just one example of complementary products that we can add over time to deepen the relationship with our customers. Just a few highlights on the overall shape of the P&L. Starting with the top left, I've covered revenue well, but 32% year-on-year growth, and you can see over a longer window, continued strong and sustainable growth. Improved transaction expense as a percentage of revenue.
You can see again the sustainability as well as the improvement with transaction expense as a percentage of revenue decreasing to 33%. And marketing investments, as I mentioned, we focus on a longer window, but even with that longer window, you're seeing some leverage in Q1, with 24% of revenue going towards marketing investments to drive not only that quarter, but future quarter and years growth. That is one that I do want to highlight. We look at less from a quarterly standpoint and more from a unit economic standpoint, but even with that, we're seeing leverage in the marketing side, given the opportunities we see in that space and the strong unit economics.
And then lastly, continuing to deliver scale benefits in other OpEx, both on the customer support side and on the overall headcount investments we're making to deliver not only growth but efficiency to the bottom line. And then, before I wrap with a customer quote, which is something that we do every earnings call and every meeting, because it brings us back to what really matters, I'll just give you a sense of the 2024 outlook, and then, if we have time for a few questions, happy to take those. We're really excited about 2024. We have guided to 30% to 32% year-on-year revenue growth.
And if you look at that, what that is based upon, it's continued, predictable, and reliable customer behavior, that we have a long track record of being able to predict and see consistent seasonal patterns, high return marketing investments, while on the bottom line, continuing to significantly improve our Adjusted EBITDA, which we've guided to $85 million to $95 million for the year. So a unique, unique business, as I mentioned earlier, and the scale and size of the top-line growth, combined with continued leverage on the bottom line. While we talk about Adjusted EBITDA, we also are very much focused on dilution, specifically in SBC, and also managing that expense as we continue to scale.
So with that, the reason I'm here, the reason I started the business 13 years ago, the reason I have the privilege to do what I do, is because of our customers. And it's easy to lose sight when we talk about 6.2 million quarterly active users, that each one of our customers has a story. This customer story is from James, who has been a Remitly user, since 2023, sends money from the U.S. to the Philippines. Again, we've been in the Philippines 13 years. We're still adding healthy, large cohorts of new customers like James. And James shared, "I have tried different platforms in the past for sending money, and since finding Remitly, it is the only one I now use. I love that the money arrives in a bank account in the Philippines fast. The process online couldn't be simpler.
Remitly is the only way to go for international money transfers." Thank you all for your interest in the business. Thank you to customers like James for using our service every day. I'll turn it back to Chris, if we want to take any questions, or if we should just go ahead and wrap. Thank you all.
Quick, quick question. I guess one, geographic expansion, you mentioned that, big opportunity. Talk about how new countries ramp over time?
Yeah. Yeah, it's a playbook we've done over a lot of years, and what I would say is, when we launch new send geographies, like the UAE that we mentioned, there's some compliance, meaning not only getting the license, but then optimizing the KYC, the know your customer experience, as well as sometimes adjusting the payment acceptance. Once we've done that, there's a marketing playbook that we ramp up. We start bringing in healthy cohorts of new customers, and we're seeing that in the UAE. On the receive side, it's actually much faster and easier. We do commercial agreements with our disbursement partners, direct integrations, and the focus there, I'd say, even given that we're in 170 countries, is going deeper as much as going broader.
Because as we go deeper, and by that I mean in India, we maybe started with one bank, and then we'd access everything else via local payment rails via that bank. We now have more banks than I know off the top of my head or can count, because it gives us the ability to do faster transactions, things like that, account name and number validation, but many other examples like that, and it brings down the cost. And so I'd say that the disbursement side, it's very easy for us to add new markets. It's a new commercial agreement with a new partner in a new country, but the focus there is depth, because I think there's a lot of leverage on the cost side, the customer experience side, and the customer support side.
Yeah, the question, just so folks that are listening on, is: How is the payment system different than all the other fintech companies that are out there? Fintech is such a broad area, so, I think I'll narrow it into cross-border payments. I think that if I even compare to how our payment system is different than it was 10 years ago when I started the company, we have countless pay- in and pay- out partners. That gives us the ability to have that more reliable, fast, and lower risk of customer support contacts.
If you look at the risk system that we've built, the machine learning technology that we've been using long before a lot of folks started talking about AI and other elements, gives us the ability to do unique risk scoring from both a compliance and fraud standpoint for every account in our system, to both keep fraud loss rates down and maintain a fast customer experience for good customers by leveraging a lot of analytics that can scientifically delineate between those two parties. All of that, at the end of the day, ladders up to peace of mind for our customers and a lower cost experience that has more selection across, you know, billions of bank accounts, hundreds of millions of 1 billion mobile wallets and hundreds of thousands of cash pickup locations, and greater convenience and selection.
That's why you see that we're kind of continuing to grow at very fast rates. Customers love using our product and come back again and again.
Back up there.
All right. Thanks, Chris. Thanks, everybody.