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53rd Annual JPMorgan Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference

May 14, 2025

Tien-Tsin Huang
Applied AI ML Lead and Vice President, J.P. Morgan Chase Bank

All right, sorry about the touch late. My name is Tin Jun Huang. I follow the payment sector at J.P. Morgan. Of course, happy to have Remitly back with us. Matt Oppenheimer, the co-founder and CEO of Remitly, is kind enough to join us again. Welcome back, Matt. Thank you for being here. I know you came a long way to be here.

Matt Oppenheimer
Co-Founder of Remitly, Remitly

Thanks for having me. Wouldn't miss it. Good to see y'all.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Applied AI ML Lead and Vice President, J.P. Morgan Chase Bank

No, of course. We'll try and be efficient with your time. I took a lot of questions from investors. Let's try and get through it. If you want to riff on something else, feel free to, Matt. Again, thanks for being here. I always like leading with the same question, Matt. I don't want to be redundant, but I always like hearing you talk about co-founding the company back in 2011, what the vision was then, but more importantly, how that's evolved and what it is today.

Matt Oppenheimer
Co-Founder of Remitly, Remitly

Yeah, yeah. For those that are newer to the Remitly story and do not know the founding, I have traveled close to 100 countries, lived and worked on three continents. Most poignantly, I was living in Nairobi, Kenya. I was running mobile and internet banking for Barclays Bank, Kenya. I saw how inconvenient and expensive it was to send money internationally. I see some smiles and understanding in folks' eyes as I am saying that. It was a lot more important and a lot more inconvenient for a lot of my Kenyan friends who were receiving money from their loved ones across borders. That is why I started the business 14 years ago now. Our vision now has really expanded, to answer your question. It is to transform lives with trusted financial services that transcend borders.

If you break that into three parts, transform lives, very impactful, very, very impactful. $2 trillion in remittances are sent every single year. We'll probably weave some customer stories in to make it real. It's huge. Trusted. Trust is very hard to build and very important in this segment. Financial services that transcend borders. That's the biggest part that's expanded beyond payments and remittances. Just huge opportunity to add a wide range of value to our customers' lives.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Applied AI ML Lead and Vice President, J.P. Morgan Chase Bank

Yeah. You have been laser-focused on the mission, Matt. Thanks for going through that. I guess let's get into the growth figures, and then we'll get into some of the thematic stuff, if that's okay. Just thinking about send volume revenue, you have been one of the top decile growers in our coverage. I know there's always this macro uncertainty that comes up. That's, of course, a conversation in every meeting here. Just detail for us why, Matt, the business is resilient in up or down markets, including some of the geopolitical stuff that's out there. Why is that? Why do you see it that way?

Matt Oppenheimer
Co-Founder of Remitly, Remitly

Yeah. First, just to put some numbers around the growth, you've probably already seen it, but 41% year-on-year volume growth, 34% revenue growth on over $1 billion in revenue, and balancing profitability. We had 16% adjusted EBITDA margins, surpassing the rule of 50. Really proud of that. Why is there that growth? I think one is the fact that there's a secular, just broad shift to digital remittance players from physical cash players. Sounds obvious, but I was talking with an investor earlier today trying to quantify how much is still sent in cash. It's still pretty large. That's number one. Number two is the fact that scale really, really matters. I will tell you, as a founder over 14 years, I've learned that the hard way. Being subscale in this business is painful.

Having scale, there's a whole bunch of we shared a flywheel a couple of quarters ago that I encourage you to look at. With scale, we can drive lower costs. We can drive better prices. We can drive better customer experience via the data and analytics that we have, the amount of product investments we can make. As a result, what we have is a really sticky product with our existing customer base. 93% of our transactions are delivered in less than an hour. If you look at the continued just retention of our base, it continues to remain strong. If you look at stats, like we have over two or close to 2 million iOS and Android app reviews with a 4.9 and 4.8 stars, respectively. Think about that for a second.

That's almost 2 million app reviews on a quarterly active user base of 8 million quarterly active users. Customers love our product. It's hard to deliver a fast, seamless experience. That's driven that growth. The very last thing I'll say that ties to the macro part of your question is there's a resilience in remittances. People are sending money to their parents, to their loved ones. You look back, whether it's the 2008 recession, you look back at COVID, you look back at various economic cycles, the consistency of sending money back to one's loved ones is always there because it's non-discretionary and because our customers, who kind of resilience defines them in a lot of ways, they've moved to new countries, new places, gone through a lot of hardship. They have the resilience to find new work if they need to.

Saw that during COVID. Once they have employment, they send money back home on a regular basis and we'v e have seen that through a lot of economic cycles. That is why we raised our guide and have a lot of confidence in the business right now.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Applied AI ML Lead and Vice President, J.P. Morgan Chase Bank

All right. Good. I'm going to go in a little bit different direction, Matt, in terms of the types of questions I'm going to ask you. I wanted to actually start with FX, if that's okay. On the call, you said you manage foreign exchange, right? That's become a competitive advantage. You mentioned scale.

Matt Oppenheimer
Co-Founder of Remitly, Remitly

Yep.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Applied AI ML Lead and Vice President, J.P. Morgan Chase Bank

Right, in your growth discussion earlier. This concept of decoupling funding from FX risk, can you elaborate on that? There is so much FX volatility going on. We heard about it from Visa, Mastercard, etc . I felt like that was interesting that you called that out. Why?

Matt Oppenheimer
Co-Founder of Remitly, Remitly

Yeah. We wanted to highlight the advantages we have when we think about our FX, treasury, cash management. Last year, we sent over $40 billion in volume our customers sent. We enabled them to send via our platform.

I think that when you're sending that much volume through the system, we have the ability to continue to invest in what we call our finance product to be able to have analytics that give both our treasury and our business management teams the ability to look at things like real-time cash balances, which might sound basic, but when you're dealing with a lot of emerging markets, banks, and we have countless integrations across the globe with banks, telcos, other remittance providers, doing all of those integrations, having it in a centralized place to have real-time data that shows the exposures and balances we have, and then layering on the fact that we have a business management team, which really leads the various regions that we're in across 5,200 corridors. Corridor means country A to country B.

5,200 corridors enables that partnership between that business management and treasury team to very much price and adjust pricing in a way that matches changing foreign exchange rates. We have always kept the risk low on the foreign exchange side, but I think we are starting to see just ability to optimize and improve our pricing and foreign exchange with our scale. I think we still have a lot of room to go there.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Applied AI ML Lead and Vice President, J.P. Morgan Chase Bank

Okay. Good. Good. Good. That's good to go through. I think just because I ask about FX, right, I know that volatility is always a discussion, and we've seen a lot of that recently. Illiquidity is, of course, a discussion. I know stablecoin has come up a lot. We've heard it in some of the sessions, Matt, just for your own benefit here. It is a hot topic in tech. It's this whole friend or foe discussion as it relates to remittance. Same thing, how do you see that? What's your thesis on stablecoin?

Matt Oppenheimer
Co-Founder of Remitly, Remitly

Yeah. First, I think it's a really exciting space. I haven't felt that across a lot of areas in crypto. I think stablecoin is an area where I see there being an actual potential use case. I think that that use case could mean us as a business and helping us from a treasury and liquidity standpoint, especially with longer tail or more exotic currencies. It also could be our customers in the sense that if customers have the desire to store different currencies or have multi-currency accounts across the globe, maybe a more stable currency like USD as opposed to a local currency that might have inflation or less predictability, I think there is the demand for that across the globe. Now, we haven't seen that demand reach material levels.

If we do, to answer your question on friend or foe, I view stablecoins as a technology and a tool to solve a customer problem. I think it's neither. It's a technology that we can leverage to solve those customer problems. That could mean instead of dispersing into a traditional bank account, we disperse into a stablecoin wallet if we see that gaining traction. It could be us leveraging it from a treasury standpoint, or it could be us leveraging stablecoin to offer a wider suite of services to our customers as we think about our broader vision of financial services that transcend borders.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Applied AI ML Lead and Vice President, J.P. Morgan Chase Bank

How quickly are you running towards that, Matt? Especially on the leveraging treasury, we've heard more, not to mention peers, but I think it's always interesting, right? Stripe buying Bridge, and Visa talked about something exactly like what you're doing today. How far along are you in that?

Matt Oppenheimer
Co-Founder of Remitly, Remitly

Yeah. I think we're actively exploring, working on it. We haven't mentioned it in a ton of detail just because it's not material, but we're doing more than looking at it. We're talking with the right partners, integrating and launching in a lean way, ways that we can actually leverage it from a treasury and FX standpoint. I think when it comes to consumer standpoint, we haven't done anything there yet because we haven't seen the customer demand.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Applied AI ML Lead and Vice President, J.P. Morgan Chase Bank

Understood.

Matt Oppenheimer
Co-Founder of Remitly, Remitly

We are well positioned to act on that should we see customer demand happening there. The biggest question on that front is how much of the problem if somebody who is in country X, let's take the Philippines, if they have the desire to store USD, how much of that is a regulatory problem versus a technology, i.e., stablecoin problem? It would be really interesting to see how it evolves from a regulatory standpoint. When I say that, I am talking more about the globe than I am the U.S. because I think it will vary depending on the country in terms of how much regulators allow stablecoins to be used more broadly.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Applied AI ML Lead and Vice President, J.P. Morgan Chase Bank

Yeah. It feels like you're on the front line of that. You're going to go where your customers go. I don't worry about that side of it. I think the treasury side is, it is nteresting. I know the developers have said it's easy to work with you guys. When the crypto craze first happened, you were right there as a partner, which is why I wanted to make sure I asked you. Thank you for that. Building off of stablecoin, maybe quickly on alternative payment methods, especially wallet, new rails. You rolled out Interact, right, pay by bank with Plaid. I think Visa at the lunch session talked about Remitly leveraging Visa Direct. What does all of that mean for you from a transaction cost standpoint, from a servicing standpoint, or engagement? What does it mean? Are you seeing some of the benefit?

Is there more benefit to come?

Matt Oppenheimer
Co-Founder of Remitly, Remitly

Yeah. I think it's another part of our flywheel. When we were tiny, we'd have to work with global aggregators. We'd pay a bunch of different costs associated with collecting or dispersing funds. That's one of our largest variable costs, collecting funds or dispersing funds. As we've gotten more scale, we've been able to do everything from launch Interact, as you mentioned, to PayTo, to Sofort, Ideal. You could go through so many different countries. What that enables us to do is offer a faster, lower-cost way to fund a remittance transaction than using a card. We're excited about those launches. We're especially excited that I talked about in our last earnings call is the way that card transactions work oftentimes is the higher it's a percentage-based in terms of the variable costs, things like interchange.

The higher amount sent, the more variable costs, and i.e., the more costs a customer is paying. Where with some of these alternative payment methods, when you're launching them, it tends to be not always, but oftentimes tends to be a fixed fee, which means that we can serve higher dollar transactions or higher dollar senders more seamlessly, more affordably, more quickly. It has been a key strategic priority for us to launch alternative payment methods like the ones I mentioned and oftentimes go directly to the rails within a country when that exists. This is more on the payout side. Like in Brazil, we have a direct integration with PIX, which is the local payment rails there. It's exciting to see the way that payments are evolving.

Given that we're operating in 170 countries, we can strategically look at how they're evolving in each market and then do direct integrations in the right way in each of those countries.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Applied AI ML Lead and Vice President, J.P. Morgan Chase Bank

Gotcha. So it's lower cost, so it should benefit transaction expense. It's helping consumers because they can then choose to pay the way they want to pay, like Ideal, right? The last point is that it opens up the chance to do more high-cost or higher ticket transactions or higher average value tickets. Let's talk about that. I think that's been a trend, shifting more towards higher transaction sizes. I wrote down, and my eyes could be failing me, greater than $1,000 principal value, up 45%. So you've got a lot of high growth there. This traction you have with high transaction amount senders, that would include SMB users, right, Matt? What is the opportunity here? Is this something you want to lean into more? I know there's more risk associated with it. Just what's your vision on how this evolves?

Matt Oppenheimer
Co-Founder of Remitly, Remitly

Yeah. Yeah. First off, I'm impressed with your ability to quote those stats and to keep all of the fireside chats that you have done today.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Applied AI ML Lead and Vice President, J.P. Morgan Chase Bank

This is remittance, right?

Matt Oppenheimer
Co-Founder of Remitly, Remitly

This has to be like your third. Yeah, exactly. I was going to say this has to be like your 35th. But kudos to you and your team for prepping so well. One other sidebar, and then I'm going to get back to it. I was talking to a team member of yours right before this, and he was saying how he left and came back to J.P. Morgan because of how much he's enjoyed working with you. So kudos to you and the shop that you run.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Applied AI ML Lead and Vice President, J.P. Morgan Chase Bank

Thank you for that, sir.

Matt Oppenheimer
Co-Founder of Remitly, Remitly

All right. High dollar senders. High dollar senders, I think it is what I would call a high ROI way of expanding the types of customers that we can serve. We have done a few things to help with that segment. One is we have adjusted how we think about our tier limits for high dollar senders in terms of we used to, and I think it was an industry standard to have in P2P remittances, pretty blunt force tiers. If you send $10,000 within 30 days or $30,000 within 90 days, there were specific things that were collected at those certain limits. What we have done with the track record we have from a compliance standpoint, with the data and analytics, and with our regulators, we updated our compliance policies and worked with them to say there is actually a better way of doing this that is risk-based, right?

There may be a customer that's sending only $500, where we actually need a lot more information from that customer. On the inverse side, there may be a customer who's sending above $10,000 that we can make it more seamless. That's number one. I think that customers are able to send more. A risk-based approach as opposed to that blunt instrument is also lower risk. Our regulators have liked that. Two has been expanding into new segments like micro SMB. When I say micro SMB, these are customers like there's a customer that I've talked about a few quarters ago named Mary, who moved from the Philippines 25 years ago. Mary is an outsourced bookkeeper. She provides bookkeeping services to other companies in the US. In order to do that, she's from the Philippines.

She has 10 contract employees in the Philippines. She needs to pay them. She already had come to our platform. Because our platform was designed to do KYC, know your customer, as opposed to KYB, know your business, she had to contact our customer support, and it just was not easy. We are not going after small and micro businesses in a huge way. We just updated our flow so that there is a KYB process for customers like Mary that want to use it. That means customers like Mary are send more. That is why you are seeing volume grow faster than revenue. The last I will mention is high dollar senders exist in every market. They exist in U.S., Mexico. They exist in US, India. They exist, you name it.

We have also turned on other corridors that were really high ROI to turn on, like Canada, U.S., or U.S., Europe, or intra-Europe. That has been great for us because it was relatively low effort, or my team would say, s uper easy. Nothing's easy. It was really relatively easier, I think they would say. We are already advertising in areas like take Heathrow Airport as an example, where customers from a broad range of countries are seeing those advertisements. You get a higher return on the marketing investments in dollars that we're actually spending. That is why you're seeing high dollar sender segment grow. We are excited about the opportunity. It's just leveraging a platform for broader use cases that we can, I think, uniquely do.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Applied AI ML Lead and Vice President, J.P. Morgan Chase Bank

Yeah. I mean, that begs the question, why not pursue things like SMBs, not just micro, but SMB, or pursue business bill payments? If you can do higher ticket transactions, you can do all the alternative payment methods. It feels like a natural extension. Cross-border is hard. We have seen Mastercard's investing in Corpay's cross-border business, which is also high ticket. There is a lot of evidence of that. Is that a consideration? Is that a priority for you, Matt, to lean harder into that?

Matt Oppenheimer
Co-Founder of Remitly, Remitly

Yeah. I think, quite frankly, I think there are other companies that do that well. For us, when I think about, I said this a couple, I said this two or three quarters ago, but it stuck with me. It's really important to stick with all investors. We are a growth company with no shortage of growth opportunities. While we might be able to go up market on things like SMB, when you look at the fact that we're less than 3% of $2 trillion in P2P remittances, there's a huge amount of room to grow there. There's a huge amount of room to grow in adding that last part of our vision, financial services, that transcend borders. There's a huge market, I believe, in that micro SMB segment that we can serve for the foreseeable future.

Listen, we have a bold vision, but we, I think, have been successful by combining that with intense short-term focus. That is how you get to the metrics like the rule of 50 that we have shared.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Applied AI ML Lead and Vice President, J.P. Morgan Chase Bank

Yeah. Look, I respect the focus, Matt. I'm not trying to push you to do something, right? You're way smarter about this than I am. It just feels like you've built a lot of those elements from the scale and the platform and the network. Again, I respect the focus. Let's go back to the focus of quarterly actives. I think, what, 8 million-ish users, and you're close to 30% growth there. Any change in the type of user that's coming into the system as you've observed it?

Matt Oppenheimer
Co-Founder of Remitly, Remitly

No material short-term changes. There are shifts in the sense that you can see in our financials. We have U.S., Canada, and rest of the world has continued to grow faster o n the receive side. W e continue to diversify away from our top three receive corridors, which are India, Philippines, and Mexico. That is all continuation that has been happening the past several quarters and years. I would say continued geographic diversification is one. I would say the second is just the continued trend of shifting digital that I already mentioned, so I will not repeat.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Applied AI ML Lead and Vice President, J.P. Morgan Chase Bank

How about the cost to acquire them?

Matt Oppenheimer
Co-Founder of Remitly, Remitly

Cost to acquire has been trending favorably. I think that you saw that in some of the leverage that we had in the first quarter. I think that is largely because of the fact that, one, we have an amazing marketing team that's continuing to optimize it. Two, I think that the word of mouth, which is not due to marketing. Word of mouth is due to the app ratings that I mentioned. It's due to ultimately, my definition of brand is a promise when delivered creates preference. I think we have a product that really very much delivers on promises and gets better every day. Because of that, and because our business is based on trust, so many new customers now find out about us because a friend in their community said, "why are you still going to that branch?

Why don't you try out Remitly? It's immediate. It's affordable. It gets there as promised. They protect your identity." I think that word of mouth has helped our overall marketing costs come down. With that being said, we've made sure that we're investing enough in marketing in the quarters to come. That is included in our guidance such that we can drive the kind of growth for quarters and years to come in the future.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Applied AI ML Lead and Vice President, J.P. Morgan Chase Bank

Okay. Good. How about all this immigration stuff? I know there's a lot of geopolitical around immigration and policy shifts. Your sensitivity there, is there anything you see that's concerning?

Matt Oppenheimer
Co-Founder of Remitly, Remitly

Yeah. Yeah. It's definitely top of mind for a lot of investors, including myself. I think that when you think about our business, there's a few things that give me comfort and why we had a lot of confidence in our guide this year. One is diversification. I mentioned we're in 30 origination countries, 170 countries overall, the r est of the world is growing faster. The second is that if you look at our customer base, our customers are linking a bank account or a debit card in order for us to collect funds. What that means is they've already gone through a KYC process at a financial institution. If you look at that, that signals a more established presence in the country. When we think about deportation and elements like that, I think it's not squarely our customer base.

It might be for other segments of remittance companies, but we feel well positioned there. The third, it's a huge market. Even if immigration slows or changes, there are 250 million immigrants that live and work outside the country they're born. As you mentioned, 8 million quarterly active users last quarter. If you look at it from a volume standpoint, we're less than 3% of the $2 trillion that's sent every year. Certainly watching all of that closely, but feel well positioned and very grateful that we don't have things like tariffs or other things like that directly impact our business.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Applied AI ML Lead and Vice President, J.P. Morgan Chase Bank

Sure.

Matt Oppenheimer
Co-Founder of Remitly, Remitly

Actually, one last thing, too, is when we think about it from a risk of recession standpoint, that non-discretionary point, huge, huge. It's one of the, I think, benefits of being in a business that matters a lot to people. Having gone through COVID and having seen the 2008 cycle and the World Bank and others did studies during that, remittances are this predictable, resilient flow through economic cycles, which gives me a lot of, honestly, gratitude for our customers, but also comfort as CEO of the business.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Applied AI ML Lead and Vice President, J.P. Morgan Chase Bank

Yeah. The World Bank data supports that, right? I mean, migration trends have generally been pretty stable and even through the cycle. I think there's a lot of history and data behind that. You mentioned 5,200 corridors, Matt. I think Western Union has 20,000. The opportunity to expand corridors is still in front of you. Is this an area where we'll can see step function change, or you'll ease into growing, or is there a choice here that you're making to stay selective with corridors?

Matt Oppenheimer
Co-Founder of Remitly, Remitly

Yeah. I think the first premise that's important to understand is so much room to grow in the existing markets we're in, s o much room to grow. That's point number one. Point number two is so much room to grow in those corridors for quarters and years to come. We are also in this for the incredibly long term. We will continue to add corridors, but it's from an offensive standpoint and thinking years ahead, not quarters ahead. The third point is focus has been the name and game of our company. For context in the audience, we're in 5,200 corridors now. We've been around 14 years. The first two years, one corridor, U.S., Philippines. First three years, we just added one, which was India, then Mexico. We were four years into the journey, we' re in three corridors.

We did not have any, we didn't be like, "oh my god, we got to add more corridors then because we're running out of growth opportunities." We methodologically continued to add corridors. I think over time, we'll get to the 20,000. We are also in no hurry to get there because I think focus from here to there will help us execute in the right way.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Applied AI ML Lead and Vice President, J.P. Morgan Chase Bank

Good. Competitive, I have to ask you about competition and if you're seeing any change there. Always the pricing question, w e do our best to track that. Curious to see if you've observed any changes in pricing and how you benchmark it.

Matt Oppenheimer
Co-Founder of Remitly, Remitly

Yeah. The macro shifts continue that I've already mentioned, but shift to digital, r eally important, though, to understand. I mean, that is a big part of the thesis. And that shift to digital is both on the send and the receive side. Last quarter, there was an additional 300 basis points of growth in our disbursement to digital, bank account and mobile wallet. That's great. It brings down the variable costs, increases reliability. Those shifts are occurring. Not a lot within quarter in terms of competitive shifts. When it comes to pricing, because we don't deal with physical cash in and because it is shifting to more digital disbursement, you're seeing a new industry take rate. Once you're within that new kind of take rate range for the same average transaction size, we see a lot more stability because, again, the business comes down to trust.

You've got to have a fair, transparent price. Customers are providing us with a lot of their sensitive and personal information and a big percentage of their funds. Providing a fair price, which we can do uniquely with our scale is important. Beyond that, it is about building a trusted, reliable product. That is the brand positioning we have with our customers. It's not the best price, but it's fairly priced. We're going to give you peace of mind when you send that transaction back home to your family.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Applied AI ML Lead and Vice President, J.P. Morgan Chase Bank

Okay. Good. Now it's a little bit going backwards on the corridor front. Pricing is always important. Is that something you consider, Matt, when you're thinking about entering a new country or adding new country pairs? Just what's on the ground competitively? What are the pricing dynamics? Is that a consideration as you think about expansion?

Matt Oppenheimer
Co-Founder of Remitly, Remitly

It is as it ladders up to the size of the market. There' s a volume and then y ou have to obviously multiply that by the take rate or revenue per transaction in those markets or total revenue in those markets. In that respect, yes, and t hat might lead us to lower volume markets that have a higher take rate.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Applied AI ML Lead and Vice President, J.P. Morgan Chase Bank

Right. Exactly. That's what I was getting at.

Matt Oppenheimer
Co-Founder of Remitly, Remitly

Beyond that, we've proven that we can compete in some of the largest, most competitive markets. We've done that for 10 years. If anything, as we get down the list of countries that we can launch, it becomes a little less competitive.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Applied AI ML Lead and Vice President, J.P. Morgan Chase Bank

Is there a temptation then to solve for some of those gaps potentially through acquisition?

We've been a bit since you've done something, w hat, Rewire was the last one you did in size? I'm just curious if that's something on the radar.

Matt Oppenheimer
Co-Founder of Remitly, Remitly

Yeah. And Rewire was helping us expand to a new product suite as we think about financial services that transcend borders. We have a pretty high bar for acquisitions. I think our default has been organic. Really, the only sizable acquisition we've done is the Rewire acquisition. And even that was small, relatively speaking. Yeah, our default's organic. We're obviously constantly looking at the market. I think that unless there's a lot of conviction on the strategy as well as the culture, default of organic expansion often has the lowest risk and best ROI.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Applied AI ML Lead and Vice President, J.P. Morgan Chase Bank

Yeah. Because I know some of the traditional players are sometimes in the mode of buying their agents and getting more integrated or vertically integrated as a solution. For you, I mean, is it going to be more product-driven versus adding scale or geography? Can you solve more easily, organically on the geography side versus product? That is my question.

Matt Oppenheimer
Co-Founder of Remitly, Remitly

Yeah. Yeah. I think that inherently in the question is, is it easier to do that organically and that being both geographic as well as value-added services or product expansion? I think it's lower risk to do it organic. There's got to be a lot of conviction to do acquisitions. It doesn't mean they shouldn't happen, hence we acquired Rewire. Our default position is always going to be, can we do this organically.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Applied AI ML Lead and Vice President, J.P. Morgan Chase Bank

Right. Because you've done that in a disciplined way with margin expansion. You mentioned it up front and rule of 50 plus now. It doesn't feel like you're constrained in investing in some of these other Horizon 2, Horizon 3 opportunities and delivering on profits. Is that fair, Matt?

Matt Oppenheimer
Co-Founder of Remitly, Remitly

That's what I'm most proud of the team for, honestly, is to deliver in Q1, 34% growth with 16% adjusted EBITDA margin. It's no small feat. What that also means is from a balance sheet standpoint, our balance sheet continues to get stronger. We just have a lot of optionality as a business. Again, we're a growth company with no shortage of growth opportunities. It is for us just about prioritizing those as opposed to searching for growth because our existing areas are running out of growth. It's all about how do we fuel to your Horizon 1, 2, 3? How do we fuel investments in those areas in a high ROI way?

That means both growing, or not both, but all growing in existing markets, adding new geographies, adding new customer segments, and then adding new value-added services and complementary products to our existing customers. It' s a lot of opportunity. That is why I am excited not only about this year, but the team's thinking about 2026, 2027, and beyond.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Applied AI ML Lead and Vice President, J.P. Morgan Chase Bank

Sure. So I have to ask you now about GenAI and sort of your sitting in the CEO seat. Is that a priority to automate more of what you do or even externalize some of that with agents or are you can interface better with consumers? What are your thoughts on that?

Matt Oppenheimer
Co-Founder of Remitly, Remitly

Yeah. Yeah. I think oftentimes GenAI, especially investor conferences and all of that, can be talked about more from a cost-saving standpoint. I think it will save us. Oh my gosh, I'm so excited about it. I think that there's opportunities for engineering teams just to deliver more product faster. I was told recently that 50% of our code delivered or engineers are leveraging some tools that we've given them to be able to write code more efficiently and effectively. I think that there's ways of leveraging it from a customer support standpoint. We've had a virtual AI assistant and t hat's great. Our customer support costs have come down. What I'm really excited about is leveraging that to then say, how do we expand it to interact more directly with customers? We integrated into WhatsApp.

The reason we can uniquely do that is we have a virtual AI agent that has spectacular customer satisfaction scores. Now it is embedded into WhatsApp, which is an easier way, an easier front door, especially for maybe offline senders that want to kind of interact and get to know Remitly without having to download an app. I think there are big opportunities to embed our virtual agent into other experiences like WhatsApp and I could go on and on. The last one I will mention is I think our marketing team is thinking pretty innovatively because you have to have marketing that rolls out across 5,200, not 5,200 corridors. It is a little too specific. We are in 170 countries. Each country has a different language, different creatives, different merchandising that needs to be there.

The ability to create faster, more nimble, and culturally relevant marketing materials, I think, is another example so l ots of opportunity. I'm not one to, I'm actually sometimes skeptical of new technology because I think technology has got to solve a customer pain point. GenAI, incredibly excited about.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Applied AI ML Lead and Vice President, J.P. Morgan Chase Bank

Okay. Good. We'll keep asking you about it as things develop. We're almost out of time. I have to ask Horizon 3 stuff, Matt. I know the answer is you're focused on a lot of growth ahead and what you're doing. The theme of embedded finance and embedded banking and sort of banking your base is still out there. We've been hearing it throughout the conference. I know you have Circle and some, whatnot. There's so much trust that you have with your user base. What's the latest thinking on pushing into that?

Matt Oppenheimer
Co-Founder of Remitly, Remitly

Yeah. If you look at that last part of our vision, financial services that transcend borders. We're not going to go and try to disrupt a local financial services institution. I think we can all agree that for the 250 million folks that live and work outside the country they're born, when they move to that new country, everything, I experienced this when I moved to London. I worked for Barclays Bank. I was trying to get a consumer bank account set up. It was not easy, even though I worked for Barclays Bank, consumer bank. You think about our customer base, that's an even bigger pain point.

Where I think there's opportunities is to continue to expand the services that we offer beyond the transaction to think about other what I would describe as value-added services, being able to store value, being able to bridge credit access and credit worthiness, and help with liquidity needs, l ots of opportunity there. What I'm excited about the team's approach on that front is being able to invest in multiple different areas in parallel, given that we've re-architected our technical platform to what we call our North Star architecture, increases the velocity of being able to innovate in multiple areas. Not all of them will work, s ome of them, I'm more confident than ever will. I'm excited about talking more about some of those areas in the not too distant future.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Applied AI ML Lead and Vice President, J.P. Morgan Chase Bank

All right. We can end. You have a customer testimony you want to share, Matt? You usually have one, but put you on the spot.

Matt Oppenheimer
Co-Founder of Remitly, Remitly

Yeah.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Applied AI ML Lead and Vice President, J.P. Morgan Chase Bank

What was that on that?

Matt Oppenheimer
Co-Founder of Remitly, Remitly

Yeah. There was.

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