SoFi Technologies, Inc. (SOFI)
NASDAQ: SOFI · Real-Time Price · USD
18.36
-0.40 (-2.13%)
At close: Apr 28, 2026, 4:00 PM EDT
18.47
+0.11 (0.60%)
After-hours: Apr 28, 2026, 7:59 PM EDT
← View all transcripts

Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference

Sep 9, 2024

Mike Ng
Managing Director and Equity Research Analyst, Goldman Sachs

Great! Well, thank you everybody for joining. Welcome to the SoFi presentation at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia and Technology Conference. I have the great privilege of introducing Anthony Noto, who's the CEO of SoFi, which he's been since 2018. Anthony joined SoFi after serving as CFO and COO of Twitter. He was also the co-head of Global TMT Banking here at Goldman Sachs, and he was the CFO of the NFL prior to that. My name is Mike Ng. I cover SoFi and select Fintech here at Goldman. We have about 35 minutes for today's presentation, inclusive of a few minutes at the end for investor Q&A. So first, I want to give you a warm welcome, and thank you so much for being here. We always appreciate you making time to come to the conference.

Anthony Noto
CEO, SoFi

My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Mike Ng
Managing Director and Equity Research Analyst, Goldman Sachs

Yeah. SoFi often talks about being the one-stop shop for digital financial services. The company certainly made a lot of progress toward this vision, especially now that financial services and the tech platform segment, you know, represents or represented nearly 50% of revenue last quarter. Could you just talk about your vision for SoFi and how the company has made progress towards becoming that digital financial services one-stop shop?

Anthony Noto
CEO, SoFi

Sure. I always like to start with our mission first, because it grounds everything that follows from there. When I joined the company and I pitched the board on being the CEO in December of 2017, I wanted to build a company that would have a profound impact on people, and so our mission is to help our members achieve financial independence, so they can realize their ambitions. There are many people that have done well academically, they've done well professionally, they've struggled to live the American dream, have the size family they want, the career they want, live where they want, retire when they want, et cetera, and that there's this cohort of overachievers that fundamentally got left behind by the financial system.

They didn't have enough assets to get high net wealth types of services, and they had more sophistication than an average American consumer, given their income was higher at $100,000+ , and they ultimately are trying to get to this outcome. So it was our view that we could help them if we really took a long-term relationship with them. We built a relationship where we were there for every one of the major decisions they make, so when they pay for college, make sure they don't take out too much debt, or they buy their first home, they don't extend themselves, 'cause at the end of the day, they have to spend less than they make so they can invest the rest.

If you miss investing in your 20s because you don't have discretionary income to do that with or you don't think about it, it's impossible to make up down the road. 10 years of compounding over the next 30 years is really challenging. We need to be there for all the major decisions, so don't dig a hole they can't get out of, but also all the days in between. We understand how do you spend less than you make, and we have more data on them to make better decisions. In order to do that, we can't just be in credit card or be in mortgage or be in student loans or checking and savings. We have to help people borrow better, save better, spend, protect, and invest better.

And we purposely choose those verbs because we don't want to be constrained by industry constructs or industry products. Today, we have products in all of those categories. And at the end of the day, our payoff is we help people get their money right because we help them do all those things the correct way. In 2018, we did under $250 million of revenue. This year, we'll be close to $2.5 billion of revenue, which is a dramatic change over seven years. That was driven by re-architecting the company around that mission and building out all those products and services to get there. I think we're technically in about eight or nine products today, more so if you include all the different versions of those products. So, that's where we are today.

Where I see us in the future, each one of our products, we try to make that product best of breed on its own, based on five different differentiating factors, in addition to making the products work better when they're used together. We also want each individual product to have the best unit economics, so that we have a competitive advantage even before we combine those products and have leverage and lifetime value, et cetera. We're at the point now where we've had great success in our lending product. It's very profitable. It continues to grow very nicely. It has a big opportunity to benefit from lower rate environments. We're where we want to be in launching the core products and financial services. There's a lot more we could add to each and every product.

Invest is a good example, where there's an endless amount of different products we could offer and greater access. Credit card, we're just getting started. And then our tech platform business really enables us to be a faster innovator, allows us to be a low-cost operator, and it's a great business on top of that. So if I think about where we go from here, it's building out trust and awareness of our products, and we find the more we connect with people, the more they use our products, and they're highly differentiated. I think the thing that's probably the least appreciated about where we're going from here, beyond just building trust and awareness, and continuing to drive penetration and market share growth, and making the products work better together, is creating products on top of the products.

For example, we're testing something internally with our employees called Cash Coach. It's kind of a whimsical name, but it's pretty cool. In my app right now, I can click on Cash Coach each morning. It looks at all the cash I have across all of my SoFi products, and if I have other products connected via Relay, it looks at the cash there as well, and actually gives me suggestions on how I could better optimize my cash. As an example, this morning, I clicked on it, and it said, "You have excess cash, and you have $1,659 outstanding balance on your credit card. You should pay it off now because it's a better return than actually not." I clicked on that button, and I paid off my credit card debt this morning.

If you had $10,000 sitting in a checking account, getting 0.5% interest, it would explain to you that our savings account's at 4.5% interest. You could also invest in diversified way through ETFs or through robo accounts. And so that's a product on top of products. We couldn't create that product without having everything else, Relay and checking and savings, credit card, et cetera. Another product that we'll be testing at the end of this year and roll out in 2025 is SoFi Plus, a subscription product that allows you to get high interest, high rewards, discounts on other products, dedicated certified financial planner, access to things like IPOs, alternative investments, and other things.

That product will be priced at a level, that is paid for by the benefits you get in well excess of that price. But it also allows us to market to members and say, "If you sign up for SoFi Plus, you get exactly what there is. There's no asterisks, there's no requirements. It's all part of the subscription product," in much of the same way that Amazon did with Prime. When Amazon launched Prime and getting free shipping, you never had to factor into the price you saw on the screen another price. The price you saw on the screen was the price you paid. And so we wanna have a product that you use, and you get more value from using it, but it also telegraphically says you get whatever it says. There's not a bunch of asterisks, 'cause you're automatically a SoFi Plus member.

Then the last thing I'd say is, we're spending a lot of money and time in developing the data capabilities and the technologies to answer three questions for our members every day: What must they do in that day in their financial life? What should they do, and what can they do? And it gets very much overlooked 'cause the financial industry is so driven by interest rates and credit and default rates, et cetera. This is a technology-driven product that you could only do if you're a digital company, and you had all the products and services that we have. Unique value that's extracted from the data and giving back to the members based on everyone's activity.

Mike Ng
Managing Director and Equity Research Analyst, Goldman Sachs

Great. And, you know, to your point, I feel like the market's been very focused on one of your eight to nine products, which has been lending, but you're making a tremendous amount of investments to drive, I'll call them ancillary products, right, to improve the ARPU of your member base. Cash Coach and SoFi Plus sounds like really fascinating ones. Maybe you can just talk a little bit about that member strategy, member acquisition strategy. SoFi added 643,000 members last quarter. How has your member acquisition strategy evolved over time? What do people usually sign up for SoFi to get? Is it lending, or is it one of these other products, whether it be, you know, credit card or Relay? And, you know, how is SoFi helping to drive that unaided brand awareness?

Anthony Noto
CEO, SoFi

Yeah. One of our critical success factors is we need to become a household brand name. People need to trust us, and we spend a lot on marketing to do that, and it's multifaceted. Each business has to deliver a customer acquisition cost that's supported by their unit economics. Some of the businesses drive a return on that investment within 12 months. Some, the payback period is not for 24 months. But each business has its own identified customer acquisition cost. In addition to that spending, we also spend about 25% of our marketing on branded advertising. And typically, that branding advertising actually had been dedicated to specific products, but more and more, you'll see that branded advertising being spent across the entire umbrella. As an example, we released this weekend a new campaign with Justin Herbert.

Phenomenal campaign, but it's holistically about getting your money right, not just an individual product. I believe we just scratched the surface in how many members and products we acquire in a quarter. We find the more we spend, the more we grow, and it's at an acceptable return. So right now, we're just balancing growing versus profitability and ensuring we have that right balance. I do think over time you'll continue to see us benefit from word of mouth. Our unaided brand awareness has increased 4x since I got to the company. It was up 40% versus a year ago. As your unaided brand awareness grows, your marketing efficiency also improves, so it's a double bottom line.

One of the things we'll be talking more about publicly is our obsession with our members, and actually approaching our experience as a product experience from the entire end-to-end. Most Silicon Valley banks or sorry, most Silicon Valley companies, technology companies, always talk about the product, the product, the product. But they end the product at the app or the website, as opposed to going all the way into the call center and thinking about, "How do I obsess about the member's value that we can deliver when they call in?

And how can we deliver not just value in that moment, but an ongoing relationship afterwards?" And I believe the more we obsess about that experience end-to-end, as opposed to just in the product or the service, the more we'll have people telling their friends about the product and more word of mouth, which we've really just started to see the benefit of that, which makes me realize we're at the scale where those experiences are critically important, and you want 99 and four nines of someone's experience to always be great. 'Cause if it is, they're gonna tell other people about the product, and you'll drive virality and even more, productivity loop in your marketing.

Mike Ng
Managing Director and Equity Research Analyst, Goldman Sachs

Okay. Why don't we stay on this topic of financial services for a little bit? Really good success story there. You had four consecutive quarters of contribution profits in financial services. I think the company has an 80% growth target for this year. What are gonna be the key growth drivers within financial services going forward? And, you know, how should we think about that in the context of the broader business here?

Anthony Noto
CEO, SoFi

Sure. One of the key inflection points we hit was getting to variable profitability in that entire segment-

Mike Ng
Managing Director and Equity Research Analyst, Goldman Sachs

Yeah

Anthony Noto
CEO, SoFi

... despite the fact that we're gonna lose annually about $100 million in credit card and Invest from acquisition costs and, and the payback period taking place, but the fact that the whole segment is variable profit means we could actually spend more there and cover those costs with the profits that we have. I'm super excited about that segment 'cause we're finally to the point where it's at the scale in profits, and at the level of revenue, that we can really try to accelerate things. When you think about the revenue streams there, there's a NIM revenue from our SoFi Money product. There's also a non-interest income revenue stream that's now annualizing $150 million a year, and we've just scratched the surface. The best way to think about modeling or growing that segment is product growth and revenue per product.

So within Invest, we're under-monetized by about 50% compared to where we would be if we had a complete suite of products that generate revenue there. So there's a lot of upside in continued product growth, but also a lot of upside in revenue per product, and you have the dual drivers of growth. And now that we're profitable, we can increase that investment there pretty meaningfully. Within Invest, we've really differentiated the product. We launched with fractional shares. We pioneered that. We have a handful of our own SoFi robo accounts, some of which have won awards for the performances over the years. We have our own ETFs that are now starting to become sizable. We'll do some iteration on both of those products to generate better monetization. They've been largely free.

We recently launched alternative assets, which has been a great contributor to our asset growth there. We talked about our net flows growing pretty meaningfully in Invest in Q2. We've seen that continue into Q3. Alternative assets and mutual funds have helped increase the awareness of that, so we really like the trend there. And of course, we have IPOs, which we started offering two years ago, and we'll continue to offer. And as the IPO market opens back up, we hope to have some very unique offerings for our members. It builds awareness of the product, but it also gives our members access to IPOs at IPO prices, which is very differentiated. Within credit card, we launched an initial product. We've learned a ton about it. We just recently had launched two new products there.

We're really focused on our 8.8 million members and bringing the credit cards to them, when that could be a really sizable business in and of itself. And so not only is there great opportunities for growth in financial services, it's a lot more economical. 75% of the members we acquire in Invest now come from an existing area of SoFi already, and that used to be at 35%. So-

Mike Ng
Managing Director and Equity Research Analyst, Goldman Sachs

Right.

Anthony Noto
CEO, SoFi

We really have a lot of productivity-driven cross-buy.

Mike Ng
Managing Director and Equity Research Analyst, Goldman Sachs

Right. The cross-buy is certainly working. And on your comment around $100 million of losses between card and Invest, you know, when should you scale out of those losses? You know, do you have visibility into that? And is it just customer acquisition costs, or is there something else?

Anthony Noto
CEO, SoFi

Sure.

Mike Ng
Managing Director and Equity Research Analyst, Goldman Sachs

Yeah.

Anthony Noto
CEO, SoFi

They all go through a phase. Every one of our products, when we launch them, you know, the general managers of the businesses had to lay out the long-term unit economics and then obviously, where they're starting from. And typically, where you start from is your subscale, so your fixed costs are hurting you as much as your variable cost. In some cases, you could actually have a variable loss just using the equivalent of COGS. But all of those products now are past that point, where they're at least, you know, there's a positive contribution before you get to the customer acquisition cost, and the primary driver of the losses is the customer acquisition cost is greater than their variable profit prior to that.

Invest is now to the point where, we're getting a return after about 18 to 24 months, and that's with monetization at half the level. In credit card, we've seen a good improvement. We talked about on the call, the improvement we saw in entry rates and losses there, and that's continued to improve as well. So, in addition to customer acquisition costs for credit card, we are still fine-tuning the credit model and making sure we get to a point where, that business can generate a variable profit prior to the fixed cost. And then you have enough scale times the variable profit to cover your fixed cost. Same pattern we had in SoFi Money.

Mike Ng
Managing Director and Equity Research Analyst, Goldman Sachs

Great.

Anthony Noto
CEO, SoFi

So they're on track, and we're very encouraged by where we are.

Mike Ng
Managing Director and Equity Research Analyst, Goldman Sachs

Great. I'd love to spend a little bit of time talking about lending. You know, SoFi has guided lending revenue, I think, down about 5% or better, this year in 2024. Could you talk a little bit about how SoFi is managing credit risk? You know, what's giving the company confidence to continue to originate loans in what feels like, a somewhat uncertain backdrop?

Anthony Noto
CEO, SoFi

Yeah. I think we've really developed a unique capability within credit. The team does a great job of sort of laying out a number of macroeconomic factors, micro factors, and internal factors that drive how much within our credit box. So for those that are not familiar, we only underwrite to prime credit, six to eight and above. Our average FICO score for unsecured personal loans and for our student loans are both in the mid-seven hundreds, and income's over $100,000 on average. We're pretty disciplined. We have about eight different tiers. Depending on where the economic indicators are in our dashboard, we contract those tiers. So at one point, we were down to just underwriting one through four tiers. And so as the economic indicators change, it allows us to move up or down within those eight tiers.

We're managing to a life of loan loss of 7%-8%, and when we stress those scenarios, we have to get back to that level. And that's some of that's internally driven, some of that's more driven by regulatory rules as well. So the team's done a great job of navigating within those tiers to make sure we've had disciplined credit. As we mentioned in Q1, we saw a peak in delinquencies, and we're both on a dollar basis and a percentage basis, and we're encouraged to see that. We shared some cohort analysis of life loan losses compared to 2017, and those curves are also a great leading indicator of how the actual loan portfolios are performing by vintage, as opposed to just the future performance.

It's a combination of those things that have driven our credit decisions. There are some credit products that we would underwrite with a significantly more volume if the demand was there. So student loan refinancing, great product. It's a small component of our balance sheet today. That's a great driver of the type of customer we want. So as rates come down, we expect that to pick up pretty meaningfully. Agency home loans, we'd underwrite as much demand as we could have because it's capital light. We're just pledging it to windows. We do have the capability now of doing home equity loans as a principal. It's a secured product. We'd underwrite as much of that as we could, given it's secure, and we have very little secured lending on our balance sheet.

In addition to refinanced home loans, you know, that would benefit meaningfully from a lower rate environment. On the personal loans, our balance sheet's pretty large. We've managed that business this year relative to the credit outlook and being conservative, but with rates coming down, that business would benefit as well. We'd likely want to sell more there to increase our originations if we chose to do so, but we're seeing the demand for loan buying increase quite meaningfully also right now.

Mike Ng
Managing Director and Equity Research Analyst, Goldman Sachs

Great. On the personal loan side, maybe you can talk about some of the key channels that you guys work with and pursue to offload some of those or sell those loans.

Anthony Noto
CEO, SoFi

Yeah, we have a variety of different buyers. We have insurance companies that are bringing in premiums and need to buy assets. We also just have credit funds. I would say the demand's really picked up over the last 18 months. We've been able to innovate more. We're doing whole loan sales, asset-backed security. We're doing secured lending. We have been doing lending as a service or loan platform business that originally started by taking our declines and selling them to a marketplace. It evolved into partnering with people using their credit box. Now we're the next evolution of the loan platform business, where we're actually underwriting loans for partners in our credit box for volume that we wouldn't otherwise want to write just given the size of our balance sheet, where it's at today.

You'll see more and more of that business go towards fees. We have about $90 million of fees a quarter now from introducing that product. As we start to leverage the loan platform business, we'll just be paid for the capability, the origination capability, marketing capability, distribution, and servicing, and get paid a fee for that as well.

Mike Ng
Managing Director and Equity Research Analyst, Goldman Sachs

Great. And, just on the other products, student loans to start, you know, there's been a lot of discussion and rhetoric around, student loan debt relief. And, you know, I always wonder whether or not it's impacting student loan refinance demand, even just the prospect of some sort of future relief in the future. Could you just provide your views on how some of these, like, loan forgiveness initiatives have impacted student loan refinance demand, if at all, and your outlook on the go forward?

Anthony Noto
CEO, SoFi

Yeah. I think it's important to remember, for our core customer that we've historically had in student loan refinancing, they're not going to be eligible for the vast majority of these programs, unless they were somehow misled or there's some nefarious activity. Most of them, their income will be too high, and even if there's a small piece of forgiveness, they'll still have their balances are still large enough that they'll have to refinance. It's very interest rate-sensitive. As rates come down, the demand for refinancing will happen, and there's a couple of reasons for it. Just simple math. If you have a loan that's at 8%, you can refinance at 6%, you're leaving 200 basis points against $70,000 on the table. Now, you may be motivated to do that in the intermediate term because you think you may get forgiveness.

But as rates come down and there's no forgiveness, people are going to look to refinance. There's no prepayment cost, so if you think rates are going to keep going down, there's no risk in refinancing now because you do it again later. The risk is if there's forgiveness. And so as, you know, the credit bureau reporting comes back, which happens here in the short term, as programs like SAVE from the president that, you know, he thought he would have a potential second round get shot down by the Supreme Court, you know, the demand's there. So last quarter was our largest quarter in three years in the second quarter because people are coming back to that market, and many of the student loans that were issued in the last three years are at pretty high rates.

So it's a combination of debt being at a higher rate, less opportunity for forgiveness, and rates are starting to come down to cause people to be interested. So, we think we'll have a lot of demand as rates come down.

Mike Ng
Managing Director and Equity Research Analyst, Goldman Sachs

Great. And on home loans, obviously, there's the factor of the U.S. housing market overall, which I think most people would agree, seems to be closer to the bottom, and likely to return to mid-cycle at some point over the next few years, which should be helpful to home loans, helpful for the housing market. But SoFi's also been doing a lot internally, right, to be able to gain share of the mortgage market. Could you just elaborate a little bit on some of the internal initiatives?

Anthony Noto
CEO, SoFi

Yeah. When we first launched home loans, we did it with partnerships. We were really just a demand aggregator, and then we moved to the point of processing, and now we fully own end-to-end, so we own the operating system for it, we own the operations center for it. We are able to do not just refinance loans now, but purchase loans. One of the key things we need to develop for purchase loans is being able to close in 30 days, and we feel really confident we can do that now, so we can deliver a great consumer experience for our members. In addition to that, we do home loans now, and we have the ability to balance sheet those loans or to sell them as well, so we're geared up and ready to go.

The day that the yen carry trade disruption happened and rates dropped, we saw the number of lock loans that day double. Now, they came right back down the next day, but it shows you the sensitivity that's there, just on a 25 basis point move. So, we've geared up. We've worked hard to be in this position. We started adding new, MLO, capacity, so when it comes, we're going to capture it.

Mike Ng
Managing Director and Equity Research Analyst, Goldman Sachs

Great. SoFi's made a tremendous amount of progress in securing and raising consumer deposits since becoming a bank in 2021. I think the current funding mix for loans is 80% deposits, 20% warehouse debt and broker deposits. Could you talk about what the optimal mix of funding is and why?

Anthony Noto
CEO, SoFi

Yeah, it's gonna depend on a number of factors, but right now, we feel like we've been able to manage our cost of funding quite reasonably. Deposits are going to be the primary source of funding for the foreseeable future, and it's gonna be, you know, a very high percentage of the total funding. That said, we wanna keep relationships with more warehouse providers and have that as a source, which means we have to utilize some of it each quarter. I would say broker deposits will continue to reduce, given our member level of deposits. We wanna keep our interest rate or APY in the top, you know, 20%-25%. We recently took interest rates down by 10 basis points.

One, because a bunch of our competitors moved rates down by even more than that, and two, we wanted to test what the reaction would be, and we're really encouraged by the fact that people are using SoFi Money for more than just interest rate. Two-day early paycheck matters, bill pay matters, the fact that you can get reward points matters, the fact you can pay your friends via P2P with a phone number or email, and now you can also do Zelle. And so we'll keep adding value-added services. But the APY is one important component of it, and we're gonna stay really competitive because we have the luxury of being able to afford it because we have the origination business. And a lot of our competitors, they're only offering a high APY right now because Fed funds is high.

They can't afford that interest rate when Fed funds comes down. They're gonna have to move lockstep with it because that's the way their relationships are with their sponsor banks.

Mike Ng
Managing Director and Equity Research Analyst, Goldman Sachs

Great. Let's shift gears and talk a little bit about the technology segment. It's a platform that certainly is strategic to SoFi internally for, to your point from earlier, the faster development of products and financial services, but you also serve a lot of external clients. SoFi has guidance for mid to high teens year-over-year growth in 2024 for the technology segment. Could you just talk a little bit more about some of the key products that are being sold here, what's happening in technology? During the last earnings call, I think there was a mention about LatAm causing a little bit of volatility.

Anthony Noto
CEO, SoFi

I would think about our technology platform business today as three sort of distinct products. One product is card issuing and processing, and that was the first original business. The second business is all of the capabilities that we build via APIs, so all of the microservices you need to, you know, be a depository institution, to be a checking product, to do B2B payments, and so we've built APIs for account opening, for balance checks, for P2P payments, for two-day early paycheck, for secure cards, so there's a whole farm of APIs that we've built, so you can just build your application on top and use all of our APIs, and then the third business is the core banking business. Think of that as an operating system for banking.

A lot of people don't understand that there's a different core product for every product that's out there, and so many banks and institutions have cobbled together a bunch of different cores for a bunch of different products. Well, what we have in our Technisys Core, we call it Cyberbank Core, is an extensible core to any product. And today, that's a product that we offer in checking and savings and loans. SoFi uses it for buy now, pay later. We'll soon use it by the end of the year for commercial payments and by the end of next year for our overall SoFi Money product. So those are the three different areas. As rates have gone higher, as the economy's become a little bit uncertain, people have delayed decisions. People have also delayed launches, and so we were impacted by two things.

Some deals we've won where companies, because of the economic environment uncertainty, decided to push off when they're launching, and that's had an impact. And then some companies that are very large, big partners, have pushed off making decisions until they have better clarity on interest rates and the economy. The most common phrase I hear from my team is: Where are we in X RFP? Where are an X business being awarded? They're waiting to find out about their 2025 budget. So rates going down will impact not just direct products, but also indirectly, corporations.

And I was on CNBC last week, and someone said, "Well, you know, what's your view on rate cuts?" And, you know, I made the point that if you're gonna cut 75 basis points between now and year-end, you're much better off cutting 50 basis points now, because you'll spur more economic activity next year, because corporations are making decisions about next year now, and if they know they have 50 basis points on a huge balance sheet of debt, they could do, you know, more hiring, they could do more investing, even having that information. So we'll see how it unfolds, but I love where we're positioned, and we haven't lost any of the large deals that are out there. We're in pretty good stead for those deals, and I only see the demand for what we do increasing.

It came out today that the FDIC is gonna crack down on sponsor banks and banking as a service and require sponsor banks to have ledgers for their partners. Well, guess what? Cyberbank Core is a perfect product for that type of capability, especially if the regulatory rules on reporting and information continue to change. You're gonna want a dynamic ledger that you could add other products to, and in real time and a moment's notice, and have real-time reporting. One of the biggest things I think that was missed in the demise of Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic, you know, people will say they failed because they were growing too fast. That's an outcome. The issue is they didn't have real-time asset and liability management. They didn't have real-time asset and liability management because they didn't have modern cores.

They didn't have their own processing, and we provide that capability to financial institutions.

Mike Ng
Managing Director and Equity Research Analyst, Goldman Sachs

It's really fascinating. And if we could just expand on that, you know, who are the primary customers of SoFi's modern core products today? You know, are there opportunities to get into larger financial institutions at some point? And I would imagine the sales cycles are very long, so maybe you can talk a little bit about, like, the pipeline, right?

Anthony Noto
CEO, SoFi

Yeah, I think the biggest need right now for upgrades of core technology because of end-of-life technologies that exist already is from the largest banks in the country, in the United States. LatAm definitely has a need for core banking technology. Those are smaller opportunities than the large banks in the U.S., but that's actually, that's absolutely one large opportunity that I'm very optimistic about. The second opportunity is for brands that are not financial institutions, that have some financial services products, and they wanna launch more of those products. But again, they want it to be scalable. They want to be able to use AI in production, and they need modern technologies, which we provide, and we're in conversations with a ton of large brands that wanna add new capabilities to what they're already offering, but also product extensions.

And then there's a whole category of B2B money movement that happens, commercial payments, et cetera, that SoFi will participate in, both with the technology platform, but also the sponsor bank. It's unlikely we'll be a sponsor bank for consumer-driven businesses, but for businesses that are operating at the enterprise level for financial payments and commercial payment opportunities, SoFi can be both the technology provider and the bank of record.

Mike Ng
Managing Director and Equity Research Analyst, Goldman Sachs

Great. Why don't I take a pause and see if there are any questions from the investor community in the audience? Okay, if there is, just raise your hand and we'll get to you, so you mentioned, you know, seventy-five basis points cut through the end of the year. How do you think about how rate cuts will impact SoFi's businesses?

Anthony Noto
CEO, SoFi

Yeah, you know, we've never operated in an environment where we had rates declining in a stable economy. When I first got to SoFi, rates were increasing pretty rapidly, and they did until 2019. COVID hit, and rates dropped, obviously, to zero with a really uncertain economy, and we've gone through the last two years with rates going up, and now we're finally to the point where we could have a stable economy and lower rates, and that would be, I think, positive for all of our businesses. We'll underwrite as much as we can in home loans, given the nature of the business being capital light, and so we'd be really encouraged by lower rates spurring that business.

And student loans, it's a great member, as I mentioned earlier, and so we would be pretty aggressive there as well in lowering rates to give people good savings. I also think there's a lot more freedom on our balance sheet when we're at lower rates, because we have great demand for our loans now. It's up meaningfully over the last eighteen months. 100-200 basis points lower from here will only make those loans more attractive to buyers, in addition to some of the other programs that we have. And so we could benefit not just directly from the businesses but also indirectly. And as I mentioned earlier, rates going lower for companies will allow them to reduce their debt expense, and they could spend more on technology and hiring, which would help the tech platform business.

Mike Ng
Managing Director and Equity Research Analyst, Goldman Sachs

Great. Why don't we wrap up where we started, which is really touching on strategic goals and long-term vision. You know, what are you looking for SoFi to do over the next 12 to 24 months? What do you think is potentially underappreciated by the markets?

Anthony Noto
CEO, SoFi

I'm super excited for 2025. 2024 has been a great year so far. Couldn't be prouder of the team. We'll have the SoFi leadership group in here in San Francisco in the next two days. We do it twice a year, once in September, once in February. This meeting is gonna focus on setting our 2025 priorities, and I'm working on those for the last six weeks with the team, and we're gonna share them with the team tomorrow. I get chills just saying it. Like, we're just getting started. 2025 is gonna be a great year. The priorities we have as a company for next year really lean into the different areas that I mentioned, and I think it's a year in which we could really pull away from the rest of the pack.

So, we'll share those with the investment community when we report the fourth quarter in 2025 and give 2025 outlook. But I love where we are, and finally looking at light at the end of the tunnel, being able to operate in an environment that could be, you know, really positive for us overall.

Mike Ng
Managing Director and Equity Research Analyst, Goldman Sachs

Great place to wrap up. Anthony, it's been such a pleasure having you on stage and at our conference. Thank you so much.

Anthony Noto
CEO, SoFi

Thanks, Mike.

Powered by