Good afternoon. My name is Aditya Buddhavarapu. I cover Remitly here at Bank of America. Very excited to be hosting Remitly at our six-week earnings conference for the first time, and pleased to have CFO Vikas Mehta. Vikas, thank you for joining and taking the time.
Thank you, Aditya.
Look, let's get straight into it. Do you want to maybe start off with giving us sort of intro to the Remitly story, talk about the origin and then how you got here, and I guess a few points about the evolution along that journey?
Yeah. As I said, thank you for the invitation, Aditya, it's great to be here. Remitly has an exciting story. We will be almost 15 year old, and in that journey, I'd say, there have been two chapters that are really prominent. We are about to essentially started our third chapter now. The first chapter was when we started, we started with U.S. as our focus from a send perspective. Our first few receive countries were Mexico, India, and the Philippines. Really honed our business through that initial foray and then expanded further. In 2021, when we had our IPO, we had 1,400 corridors and, again, very U.S.-centric at that point. We started with the second chapter, the second chapter was about a few things. One was about a global expansion.
From 2021 through 2025, we expanded to more than 5,600 corridors right now. We also really got scale economics working for us. This is where we started generating strong positive EBITDA margins, and have especially expanded our margins over the last couple of years in a very sharp way. The final thing in that chapter was about making sure that the unit economics and the business model were very accretive to us. With U.S. expansion, strong growth in the chapter one, with international expansion, proving the business model, expanding margins in chapter two. We started the chapter three right now, which is about diversification. This also marks a new CEO for us with Sebastian Gunningham, who is leading that chapter for us. As we started that chapter, in the most recent quarter, we did more than $100 million in EBITDA.
That was our first $100 million EBITDA quarter. We also had strong growth of 25% revenue, 37% volume growth. The growth story continues for us and we see that as an exciting trend. Now as we diversify into newer customer categories as well as use cases for customers, we feel that the Remitly story continues to come and have a very positive and exciting future ahead.
Great. Thanks for that. You've clearly come a long way. If you take a step back, volumes have increased tenfold since 2019. I think last year you were at about $75 billion of send volumes, but that still represents only about 4% of your sort of addressable consumer remittance market. How should we think about the sort of the next five, 10 years? What are the key core drivers? Maybe you can expand on some of the opportunities you talked about at the CMD last year in December as well. Also maybe how Sebastian coming on board as a CEO has maybe accelerated some of that or brought some new ideas there.
Aditya, I would put our growth drivers in two categories.
The first is the existing core business, which you pointed out. We have less than 5% market share in that. Then the revenue diversification, which I talked about, which essentially we have a 0% market share there. Let me start with the first one. If you dissect the core sender market, let's say, and think about the key drivers and catalysts for growth for us, I'd start first of all, with market share gains. To your point, less than 5% market share. Market is fragmented. We are now a scale player, one of the only few ones who have north of $1 billion in revenue, as you said, reaching $100 billion in volumes, still growing north of 30%-35%. That creates a nice virtuous flywheel for us, which will continue to accrue to help us win share.
Within that, if you think about the core trends of the shift from traditional brick and mortar to digital, that is ongoing. It accelerated during COVID. It further accelerated recently with the remittance tax in the U.S. We feel that there is still room ahead on that conversion of traditional to digital, and we'll continue to benefit from that. In addition to that, I'd say the other important aspect is global expansion. There's a lot of room for us to continue to expand. As I said, we have 5,600 corridors. If you look at others, they talk about 20,000 corridors. So we have a lot of room there. We shared at our investor day that out of the top 50 send corridors. We only have about 50% of those.
Again, from even the sizing of that geographic expansion, I'd say that there's substantial room for us to continue to expand. On the other hand, if you see the diversification story, a lot of these are adjacencies, whether it is high-value senders or Remitly Business or receivers. These are markets that came to us, these are customers who were using us for different purposes and came to us and said, Can you help us get these features, which would make it easier for us? We feel the product market fit is very strong, and what we need to do is drive a deeper focused effort on those aspects. We feel very excited. If you take Remitly Business, for example, that's 10x the TAM of the consumer side, which is $20 trillion. As I said, we have de minimis share there.
A lot of upside as we think about the next three, five, 10 years. Beyond that, moving into Send Now, Pay Later, moving into products which can help our customers save as well as spend will be additional areas, again, which are all adjacencies. We have a strong set of 10 million quarterly active users. As they adopt these other use cases, even with this captive user base, we'll be able to continue to grow in a very strong way.
Okay, great. Clearly lots of areas that you're focusing on, we will dig into those. Before that, do you also want to maybe talk about what enables all of this growth? The underlying infrastructure that you built in terms of partnerships, payment methods, application for the consumer. Just maybe talk of all of those elements of the offering, which will underpin that story.
Yeah. I think I'd say the strategic differentiation that we have is the infrastructure that we have built. This infrastructure has a lot of different, call it layers, if you may. It begins with a strong technological foundation. When we started in that 15 years back, the approach we took was a very technology-first approach. This is where we never had a brick-and-mortar presence. We always started with web and then quickly moved to a mobile-first approach, and embraced that as our foundation. Even as we look at AI right now, we are, again, leaders in embracing that, and making sure that it bolsters our platform. Similar for stablecoin. I'd say technology layer strength is, I'd say, a big differentiation for us. The second highlight I'd give is compliance and regulatory strength.
This is where as a company, we have always thought about compliance as a design component rather than an add-on. Anytime we are thinking about a new geography, new licensing, we start with the construct around what's the best compliance angle that we can take here. Don't discount that at all. As we do that, especially when you run a business at scale, it creates consistency. From a customer perspective also, we feel being compliant helps us to create that strong relationship with the customer, where they know they are working with a partner who is committed and who is going to do the right thing. That would be a very important part of that layer. The third layer I would talk about is the transaction layer. This is the whole partner ecosystem, if you may.
This is how we can get transaction done in less than 20 seconds. This is how we can reduce the transaction defect rate where high 90% of our customers have seamless transactions happening. This takes a long time to build. I'd say that both on the partner ecosystem directly working with government rails like UPI and Pix or building stablecoin rails. I think this layer is, I would say, the biggest differentiation for us. Optimizing that at scale creates massive economies of scale, as well as a structural advantage for us.
Great. You spoke about some of those products you're looking at, whether that's spend, save.
Also we hear it is high-value SME. These are all in very early stages. Can you maybe just give an update on the rollout? Which one is maybe slightly more advanced and which might scale earlier, and some maybe a bit later?
I'd say that, to your point, all these different initiatives are at different stages. I'd say that, again, we gave this four by four framework. I'll just repeat that a little bit, then share where we are in each of these. From a customer category perspective, we have core senders, we have high-value senders, we have Remitly business, and we have receivers. From a use case perspective, we have send, we have spend, save, and borrow. If you think about customer categories, core of course is our bread and butter. Beyond that, high-value senders is the one we have a lot of traction. This is not something new. Our core experience always provided ability for high-value senders, but we were not as focused on that opportunity.
Now, as Sebastian comes in as the new leader, he's putting these four buckets and creating leadership and accountability for each of these. That's where we feel high-value senders is already a decent percentage of the volume. From a revenue perspective, it's a low single-digit contributor. We believe there's a lot of headroom on that one, that's something exciting. Remitly business, I would say, is the distant second, something that we just started over the last, call it 18 months, and we've seen a lot of very good initial signals on that. The team is fantastic. They are working backwards from what the customer is looking for, building features at a very fast pace. We've talked about 20,000+ businesses on the platform at this point. The unit economics are fantastic. That's, I'd say, the second one. The receivers is very new.
It is very nascent, just, I would say, months in that versus, call it, years in the Remitly business side. It is very exciting. If you think about every sender, there are approximately three to four receivers. Call it our 10 million quarterly active users, you are talking about 30 million-40 million receivers. All of a sudden, that opens up a huge market for us. A lot of use cases are such, especially if you take freelancers, where the receiver is initiating the request for payments. We are already seeing very good early adoption in that space. If you think about the use cases, again, send is a predominant use case. Outside of that, I would say we have rolled out Remitly Flex, which enabled the Send Now, Pay Later. That journey is already underway for the last 18 months.
The save and spend are initiatives we are working on right now. I would say we have rolled out, but selectively, and you will continue to see us do more and more on that side.
Okay, great. Clearly, all of those new products and then require investments and product tech, et cetera. Can you talk about how you are looking at balancing your growth ambitions with that sort of profitability as you move forward, and where should we That sort of market projection for mid, long term?
Yeah. It is a great question. I think about that a lot, and this also goes back to just the discipline that we have as a company in thinking about growth, profitability, and capital allocation. This is where we do not want to get too swayed on either of the directions, and we want to have the balanced approach there. If you just look at our past as an indicator of how we have operated, we have been north of Rule of 40, Rule of 50, clearly over the past, call it, 24 months. In doing so, if you just take the last quarter, for example, our revenue growth was 25%, and EBITDA margin was 22%. Again, a great example that we can do both the things at the same time. While we are investing right now, we are able to generate good margins.
That is even before, call it, the AI advantages are kicking in. Another important facet in how we are running our growth portfolio is that all these are adjacencies. All the things that I said, whether it is all the customer categories or the use cases, none of them are springing out of beyond the remittance business, if you may. That's the reason why we are able to have a very synergistic growth plan. Take, for example, Send Now, Pay Later. Zero marketing needed for that. The reason is that we are only offering Send Now, Pay Later to our existing customers, and that too selectively for customers who have good credit history with us. That's one example. If you take Remitly business, the infrastructure is exactly the same. It's offered in all the same corridors, in the same rollout.
Of course, we get to select, let's start with U.S. first, prove that, then move beyond. Clearly there is an infrastructure advantage. If you take receivers, it's similar. The receiver relationship is already there, a little weak, but we can build stronger relations there. A lot of it is adjacencies, and that creates a nice profitability angle to it.
Okay, great. As that margin scales up, how do your priorities on capital allocation look like, whether that's that organic investment into the business, any opportunities for M&A, also returns to shareholders, which is something that you have been doing more recently. Yeah, if you could expand on that as well.
Yeah. I'd say a very prudent capital allocation approach, something that we have deliberately thought a lot about and put in place. Our first priority is organic growth. As you highlighted, we have a lot of important initiatives in play here, and we want to make sure that we continue to deliver against that. As we have said before, no shortage of growth opportunities, right? High ROI opportunities in front of us. We are going to manage them in a high unit economics outcome way. That is the most important bucket, if you may, from our capital allocation perspective. As you think beyond that, we have put a buyback program in place now for over three quarters.
We feel that there is a great opportunity for us to return the money to the shareholders and also take the benefit of, in our opinion, what we believe is a discounted stock compared to the fundamentals and making sure that we can reduce our dilution as well as put money behind buyback. To highlight one data point there, last quarter, we tripled our buyback compared to the previous quarter. We will definitely vote with our dollars there and make sure that we continue to back our buyback program. The last point is on M&A. I'd say, especially with AI, the technology bar is very high. We can do things very quickly with AI now, as you know. Beyond that, we have a fantastic technology team building Remitly for Business receivers, Send Now, Pay Later, so on and so forth.
Organically, we have been able to leverage our technology teams to continue to build strong products and features. I'd say that very balanced capital allocation plan, starting with organic growth and then buybacks.
Okay, great. Zooming in on this year specifically, you started off Q1 with, as you said, 37% volume growth, 25% revenue growth. All of those are tracking ahead of even your guidance for the full-year. How do you think about the cadence of growth during the year? Any way you think about the seasonality and maybe anything you're seeing right now.
Given macro geopolitical uncertainty as well?
I think if you step back a little bit, I'd say the beauty about cross-border payments business is the resilience. We love that business, right? We've seen that where there are macro ups and downs, the business continues to deliver. That's what you saw with the 37% volume growth. That's what you saw through the entire last year, with very strong volume growths in the same 35%-40% range. That's the good part, that the business is very predictable. As we have said, our business works based on cohorts. The customers that bet on us last year and the year before and so on and so forth, are the ones that are driving majority of our revenue, right? 80%-90%. The ability to predict our business is very good. We talked about record new customer acquisition last quarter.
Overall, the business momentum is really strong. That gives me a lot of confidence in the current quarter, in out quarters, for rest of the year. That's one strong fundamental aspect of our business. Outside of that, yes, there are nuances in Q1 and Q2 in seasonality, in H1 and H2. We talked about a few of those in our Q1 prepared remarks, a few being holiday timing. Put forward a few things and created comparison, call it differences the last year versus this year. Similarly, just the revenue comps that we had last year, very strong revenue growth, same like H1 last year. It's a little bit of a comp distortion there. If you tease out all of that, really a strong fundamental position that we have right now.
Strong growth as highlighted in volume, in revenue, and we feel that deep confidence in how we see our second quarter shaping as well as the full-year.
Okay. Good to hear. At the beginning, you did talk about how you differentiate yourself. Maybe we can go into that a bit more. Cross-border payments more broadly is quite a fragmented industry. Who do you compete against across the core sort of consumer market, but also as you move into high-value business with key players in the space? What does it look like in those segments?
Yeah
I guess the different criteria that customers would consider?
I'd say that if you go back to even a lot of thoughts we had shared at Investor Day in December, it's a similar thought process I'll share right now, which is, if you think about our competition, I'd put them in a two by two scale or two by two framework. On one hand, it's scale, players who are, I'd call it sub-$1 billion revenue and north of $1 billion revenue for ease. On the other hand, you'll take all players who are brick-and-mortar and players who are digital. If you think about all these sub-scale players in general, we have a massive structural advantage when it comes to cost. Being able to do $75 billion, being, call it top 5 player for our partners when we go and negotiate FX prices or other rates.
In general, the cost structure benefits that you get when you are operating at scale just creates a huge advantage. I'd say scale versus sub-scale is a huge advantage for us. There are very few players who are at scale who are growing at the pace we are growing. You can count on one hand, fingers. On the other hand, if you look at traditional brick and mortar and digital, again, the business models are completely different and there is a huge advantage being a digital player. That's something that we have proven even with our expansion of EBITDA margins. If you now parse it out to, call it scale and digital players, I think that's what we think about as the real competition. Within that, we take a viewpoint of creating deep trust with the customer.
We are hyper-focused on making sure that the speed, the pricing, the call it ability for our customers to reach out to our customer support, just the overall customer experience that we give is differentiated versus anyone else. I'd say, given the market is fragmented, we are not as hyper-focused on our competitor. We feel that there could be multiple winners in this space. What we believe is that if we can provide our customers a differentiated and a delightful experience, then we'll be one of the winners. That's what matters to us.
Got it. On your point about scale and how that drives cost advantages.
How do you think about then, what you do with that cost advantage, the ability to maybe funnel that back into price or.
again, back into the business? Just more broadly, how do you think about your philosophy on pricing overall?
Yeah. I'd say that again, something that we think deeply is, we want to provide our customers a very holistic experience that is superior. That holistic experience includes a fair price. It includes an experience that is stellar, whether it is the speed of app and the latency or whether it is customer support or whether it is with regards to any issues that they may have and the resolution thereof. I think that's very important. That also is true with the pay in and payout experiences for any corridor that we support. We want to give the best experience across each corridor to each customer. In that framework, we feel that price plays an important role, but it's not the only factor that plays a role.
This is where we want to make sure that we have investments in our customer support, in our technology and development, in our infrastructure setup, creating multiple options for pay in and payout. That's part one. Part two is, as we have shared, with regards to just the margin profile, we want to keep our margins relatively flat. If you think about our, what we call revenue less transaction expense margin. We want to be thoughtful both for our customer as well as for our investors. The benefits that we get, we want to pass it to both our customers as well as to our investors. We know that below the gross margins, there is a lot of scale advantage that we can get. As we scale, we can continue to leverage there.
Overall, I'd say that's the plan that we have been running, that gives us a consistent RLTE margin, but massive scale on the bottom line through managing those fixed expenses. Ultimately, we want our customer to have a great experience.
Right. How do you think about then the role of stablecoins, both in terms of, all of those things you talk about, the user experience, price. What role does that play today and then maybe going forward?
I'd say that stablecoin is very interesting. We believe it is an enabler to our business and something that I'd say augments really well with the existing infrastructure that we have. If you think about the three legs of our infrastructure stool, we have our partner ecosystem for our rails, we have the direct government rails, we have stablecoin rails. Really being able to leverage the best option at that point of time for that corridor is how we optimize. That's one way. The second aspect is the customer side, which is, what does the customer really want? If they want stablecoin, we'll provide stablecoin. This is where I have stablecoin on my wallet. Customers can do the same and customers can transfer. We know that in some countries, especially where there is high FX volatility Argentina being an interesting example.
Sometimes the receivers want stablecoin instead of their currency. This is where we enable that. We believe that this is of a nuanced use case rather than a primary use case. We are enabling that. We'll continue to update you how we see the demand coming through, but right now it's much more of making sure we can give all customers all different kind of options. The last aspect is around the working capital side. We have seen benefits there, but limited liquidity pools, as we have shared before. Nothing has changed dramatically there. Overall, I'd say, it's an enabler for us. It helps us. It's not a disruptor or game changer thus far. We are very deep in that, and we understand the technology well and want to make sure that we harness it for our customers' benefits.
Mm-hmm. Okay. One aspect of stablecoins which comes up is, everything around compliance and so on. That's a broader topic for the industry as well today.
That's right.
Could you maybe, again, go into how compliance is designed, how it works, how you approach building that relationship with regulators and prospects, and then what that means from a customer perspective?
Yeah. I think the good news for us that it is within the umbrella of our compliance program, right? We don't want to take an exception there, and we want to again see what is the art of possible. We want to work with the regulators first, and we want to make sure that we are complying through all of that. If you look at, call it, the rules of stablecoin in China or India are very different than Brazil, are very different than other countries, right? Argentina, let's say. We want to look at each country and be hyper-compliant, and at the same time understand the regulations and where there is an ability to support that as well. I'd say nothing changes for us dramatically.
We have a very highly compliant infrastructure and everything that you said, the KYC and the AIML foundations are very strong with stablecoin as well.
Okay, great. AI is something that's come up multiple times in this discussion. How are you using AI today? Also maybe for helping the customer experience. You again mentioned that there's more upside potentially from AI from a margin standpoint. How do we think about that as well?
I'd say early days on AI right now, but from just a thought leadership perspective, we have a new CEO, Sebastian Gunningham, and he's very AI forward in his thinking. He has already spent a lot of time. He used to run Amazon Marketplace and was there more than a decade. He brings a lot of that phenomenal machine learning AI experience. He's been pushing really hard to make sure that we can think about both an AI first approach of thinking from first principles, how to run an AI-led company, and also in terms of infusing AI in our existing workflows. If you look at all of our functions right now, we are deeply thinking about AI, have started leveraging AI workflows in a very substantial way. A couple examples would be customer support.
We've talked about it, where we see massive efficiencies, and just the ability to support customers across different channels through AI is very strong. The second example is tech and dev. Of course, that's like a use case every company talks about, and we have seen great benefits there. Beyond that, I'd say one of the things that we have done is come up with a new role type or job description, which is the Knowledge Development Engineer. We believe that this is a role that can manage end-to-end workflows leveraging AI. We are substantially investing in rethinking some of the roles and how we can redesign the organization of the future. We're all deeply committed to the AI story, but as I said, early days. Every day we learn more, and every day we continue to improve.
Okay. Got it. Maybe if we take a step back and go to some of those growth drivers you mentioned. You said geographic expansion or corridor expansion is one way you can look at. What is the approach to entering new markets? How do you look at gaining scale, becoming competitive when you go into Saudi or any of these markets coming up?
A few things. One is we have a very well-tested playbook. As I said, we were 1,400 corridors in 2021. Right now, we are 5,600 corridors, and the playbook has worked really well for us. We know exactly how to think about the stages of expansion. The second part of that, which is even more interesting, is that every new corridor is nuanced. If you think about the payments that work in India versus Dubai versus Africa, it's all different, right? Paying and payout types. This is where we have to not only take that playbook, but customize for that new geography. Behind the scenes, we have a roadmap on what that global expansion looks like. I'd say there are companies, there are corridors where we have seeded those corridors, right?
Think about Japan, Brazil, and we need to really pour gasoline to really drive them much, much faster. I think that's one category. The second is, if you think about newer geographies, Middle East is a big one for us. As I shared earlier, we have approximately 50% of the top 50 corridors or top 50 send countries. If you take Saudi or if you take Bahrain or others, there is a huge opportunity there. The regulatory construct there may be different. You may have to partner with a local player there. You may have to have a different licensing approach. That is the customized aspect of it. Finally, I'd say that our ability to have the same partner ecosystem quickly synergize is very helpful. Think about UAE, for example.
Most of the receive countries from UAE are India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Philippines, et cetera. Because of that, we already have receive partners in all these countries. When we unlock UAE, it becomes very easy because the payout side is already very well baked. The same would be true when we do that for Saudi or for other countries. That makes it exciting. At the same time, it's not as huge of a lift. Again, every geography is nuanced.
Okay, great. I think we're almost at the end of our time. Maybe to close, as you look out over the next year or so, what are you most excited about in terms of product markets, et cetera? Maybe also, is there anything that keeps you up at night in terms of maybe some of the risks you think about?
I think the most exciting thing for us right now is the leadership of Sebastian. We are able to think in a very different way. I think he's bringing an AI-first approach to running the company. He is driving focus with this four by four I talked about. There is an accountability leadership measurement and follow-through done in a very precise way. The last thing I'd say on that is speed of execution. I think just the ability to come out with features and products in a weekly sprint rather than monthly or quarterly. Gone are the days where we want to sort of wait for quarters. Now it's on a daily and a weekly basis.
I think that those are three that are very exciting, I'm really looking forward to the results next year and the year after on how we can continue to diversify, very important, continue to harness the AI efficiencies and become a company that can show others how it is done. Finally, all of that should accrue to the business model as well as the financials. Very excited about that. What keeps me up at night always is, are we doing the best we can do with our customer experience? We are in a business where there are millions of transactions that we do, how can we get to a place where all of them are defect-free? All of them have outstanding experience? How can we make sure that we do that in the most compliant way?
I'd say that's the most important thing for me. Fortunately, we have an awesome team. We have a great foundation and a phenomenal track record. Luckily, I sleep well at night.
Great. Sounds great. Thanks a lot, Vikas, for joining us and for sharing your insights.
Thank you, Aditya.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.