Hello everyone, and good morning! I hope you're all doing very well and are as excited as we are about the coming hours. My name is Roberta Noronha, and I'm the head of IR at Stone. I have joined the company recently. It's been about five months, but IR is not new to me, and I'm really happy, and it's a pleasure to see some familiar face in the audience. The energy of this company was definitely a key factor in my decision to join, and I'm sure you're gonna feel part of it today. But before we get started, I would like to, or actually I must go through some important disclaimers. Throughout Stone Investor Day, we will be presenting non- IFRS financial information, including adjusted net income and adjusted net cash.
These are important financial measures for the company, but are not financial measures as defined by IFRS. Reconciliations of the company's non-IFRS financial information to the IFRS financial information appear in our IR disclosure materials. Additionally, I would like to remind everyone that today's discussion may include forward-looking statements. Such statements are not guarantees of future performance, and therefore you should not put undue reliance on them. These statements are subject to several risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from the company's expectations. Finally, many of the risks regarding the business are disclosed in our Form 20-F, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. As a last remark, presentations and a video of Stone Investor Day will be available on our website a few hours after the event ends.
With these disclaimers out of the way, let me show you the Stone team who's here today. Because it's our first Investor Day, we wanted you to have the chance to meet our management team, as well as the executive leaders. Not all of them will be presenting, but they will be around during the breaks in case you want to engage in conversations. In terms of the structure of the day, we will have a total of five modules. In the first one, we have a company overview showing you how we got here and what are our future opportunities ahead. In the second module, we will deep dive into our MSMB segments, showing how we structure ourselves to serve our clients in their daily activities. In the third one, we will go through our technology, service, and product platforms.
Following, we will have a very practical view of our operations platform, which is a major advantage when attracting and enchanting clients. Finally, in the last module, we will translate all previous presentations in our financial outlook. We will have two breaks during the sessions, one after the segment deep dive and another one after the operations platform. Food will be available throughout the event, so you can help yourself at your convenience. We will not have a specific lunch break. Before we get started, some information on how we will address Q&A.
As you can see, we will have just one session at the end of the day, and we will have mics for the in-person audience, who can also send written questions through the QR code that's printed and on your desk. Investors following the webcast, they can also send questions through the Q&A button in the platform. You don't need to wait for the Q&A session to send the questions. They can be submitted in advance, and we will be collecting them during the event. Now, without any further ado, I would like to invite you all to watch our opening video. Thank you. Please.
Welcome to Brazil the land of entrepreneurship for businesses of all types and sizes. Many of them are small merchants, but here at Stone, we consider them giants. They drive 30% of Brazil's GDP and are responsible for 72% of jobs created. Every day, they wake up early to open up their shops and rely on Stone to help them run their operations, sell to their customers, manage their money, grow for the future, and unlock the power of Brazil's economy. We built a team of disruptors with a special culture, doing things differently and dedicated to think not only outside the box but also outside the bank. We chose to operate where our clients need us the most.
Not from our offices or inside bank branches, but in the streets and inside their stores, on their counters and at their fingertips. Anytime, anywhere. They can reach us within five seconds through multiple channels, or we can arrive in person within hours or even minutes in over 5,000 cities to help them with the highest quality service that understands them and provides flexible options and solutions to meet their needs, instead of restrictions and red tape. Don't get us wrong, numbers are important, but we never treat our clients as one. Instead, we see their challenges as our opportunity.
We have changed the market over the past 10 years, and others have tried copying us, follo wing our footsteps, but we are already moving beyond and breaking new barriers, combining the power of payments and banking with specially designed software solutions that are simple and easy to use for smaller businesses, and vertically specialized for clients who need more functionality. We are empowering businesses of all sizes to gain more control, more freedom, more time, and we are just getting started. Welcome to Brazil, the land of entrepreneurship. Welcome to StoneCo Investor Day 2023. Welcome to the power of combining.
Good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here today in the so-awaited Investor Day. I think over the last quarterly results meeting, we kept saying that we're gonna address the questions in our Investor Day meeting, so here we are today. It's a pleasure to be here. So first of all, welcome and thank you for joining us today. On behalf of the entire team, I want to tell you that we appreciate you taking the time to spend a few hours with us to talk about Stone. Whether you're a shareholder, an analyst, or a potential investor, we'll provide you with a deeper understanding of the company and explain why we are so excited for the future.
As we begin to prepare for today, I asked myself what I wanted to accomplish, so I set some goals for myself and for the team. First, I wanna share my perspectives on Stone after eight months as CEO. Next, I wanna give some insights into our strategic priorities and our long-term outlook. And finally, I wanna talk about my goals to increase shareholder value. As some of you know, I joined the board of Stone about a year ago, so I had the opportunity to get to know the company at a high level. After eight months, my understanding of the company has increased significantly. A few things have surprised me more than I expected. Three things are better. As I got to know the organization from the bottom up, the first thing that really impressed me was the brainpower in Stone.
Unlike many companies in Brazil, the quality of people and thinking in this company is first class at every level. Really, the best of the best want to work at Stone, and I think this give us a real competitive advantage. The next thing that really surprised me was the execution capabilities of the team. They really get things done quickly and always with the client's best interest in their mind. So this type of organizational alignment is really rare. For example, in 2021, the company went through the perfect storm. The registry system failed, macro conditions got worse, and Stone's credit portfolio was stressed. All this happened at the same time Stone was digesting Linx, its largest acquisition ever. What most people fail to recognize is how quickly the team adapted to the new reality.
Profitability quickly recovered, and we were able to keep growing. That's quite impressive in my view. Finally, I was surprised by how much progress the company has made beyond payment... beyond diversifying beyond payments. This can be hard to see from the outside, because only the tip of the iceberg has been shown up in our results so far. Over the next few years, I think the power of combining payments, banking, credit, and software will become more clear as the iceberg rises out of the water. I also realized that we have plenty of things that, we need to work on. There is a lot of room for improvement, and I'm laser focused on addressing these issues. So let me give you a few examples. We need to sharpen our strategic focus.
As I got to know the business better, I felt that we are trying to do too many things at the same time. You may even have seen that these signs from the outside. I don't wanna limit our opportunities, but I have prioritized and refocused our efforts on fewer projects with better returns on investment, and I've emphasized a less is more mentality across the whole organization. Next, we need to become more efficient. We are better in some areas than others, and I think that's normal, but I believe that we can unlock significant operating leverage that will enable Stone to run faster and become even more profitable. And finally, in order to achieve our goals, we need to optimize our organizational structure, including our management, reporting, and business processes. I have already begun to make some key changes.
So, for example, we have redesigned our go-to-market approach and our organizational structure to more effectively deliver our full suite of solutions to the MSMB client segment. We have also prioritized the integration of our software business. I have prioritized four key verticals in software where we have a real competitive advantage: retail, gas station, food, and pharma. I'm focused on embedding financial services into our software for these specific verticals and developing the best go-to-market strategy. We are also rolling out better cost management and spending controls across the whole organization. Step one was implementing our shared service center and our zero-based budgeting approach. We are working on a number of other initiatives that we'll implement over the next few years. We have also decided to simplify and consolidate our technology platforms so that we grow more efficiently as a multi-product company.
Now, I wanna talk about where Stone is today. More specifically, what's our mission, and how does our strategy support it? How are we serving our clients? What are our, our true competitive advantages, and what are the best growth opportunities to allocate capital to? So let's begin with our mission. Our mission is to serve the Brazilian entrepreneur, transforming their dreams into results. So for us, entrepreneur means micro, small, medium-sized business. We, we also have larger clients, but our core focus and strengths are in the MSMB segment. We serve our entrepreneurs by helping them save time and money with end-to-end solutions that really combine financial services with software. And our solutions range from simple devices to more sophisticated, vertical-specific applications. These solutions help our clients better manage and grow their business, turning their dreams into results.
So after deconstructing the mission, I'm really pleased to see that the strategy does support and advance the mission, as I'm quite positive that you're gonna see throughout the day as of today. Next, let me walk you through how we are positioned to serve our clients. We have organized ourselves around each client segment to increase our ability to serve and address their needs in a differentiated way. At the foundation of the pyramid, we serve micro merchants with our own solution that is simple, easy to use, and cost-effective for our clients and for Stone. This has been a real successful business, and we're going to keep investing here over the long term. In the middle of the pyramid, we are targeting small and medium-sized merchants with two different approaches.
For smaller clients with simpler operations, we have the all-in-Stone solution that combines our payments and banking services. For medium-sized clients with more mature operations, we have more comprehensive solutions that integrate our financial services with vertical-specific software to better meet their needs. And finally, at the top of the pyramid, we have large clients that require more tailor-made solutions. We will be opportunistic in here, but as we streamline the business, our core focus and investment going forward will be on the micro, small, and medium client segments. The third element I evaluated was our competitive advantages, which I believe come from the combination of three areas: distribution, service, and software. The first is tech-enabled distribution. Our channels portfolio allow us to provide service differentiation at scale, as we have the ability to dynamically choose the right channel to serve each client.
Through our hubs and other channels, we cover 99.7% of Brazil's service GDP in over 5,000 cities. And more importantly, we have developed our own software, mobile apps, and technology tools to empower our people to cover their territories in a smarter and more efficient way. Later today, Natan will show you how powerful the application we developed, Marco Polo, is. Over time, we have also developed the ability to reach millions of clients beyond the hub through our digital channels. This has enabled us to open new market venues and operate more efficiently at a lower client acquisition cost. And finally, we have built a network of more than 300 software distribution franchises across the country. These franchises leverage the vertical specific expertise of our partners to sell our software and financial services more effectively.
Our second key competitive advantage is superior service. Industry data show that we have the highest client service scores in the market. This is crucial in a market where merchants have been treated poorly by banks and legacy players. So, for example, we can deliver our solutions to clients very fast, typically in one day to SMBs and three days to micro merchants. Once they are clients, we pick up their calls in under five seconds with the highest first call resolution rate. And as a result, we have consistently ranked number one in client satisfaction in Brazil. And our third competitive advantage is a comprehensive merchant platform that enable us to see data, understand our clients, and serve them from a broader perspective in Brazil than anyone else.
We can do this because we have a growing range of financial products and relationships that we are combining the leading software business in the market. So the combination of these three advantages, in my view, it's very hard to replicate. Finally, I would like to give you a high-level overview of our attractive opportunity ahead. We still have a big addressable market ahead of us, and we have only begun to scratch the surface. Our distribution model is far from saturation. Even some of our most mature hubs are still growing at a very strong pace. As we mature in a given region, our distribution channels yield higher productivity and strong word-of-mouth, unlocking additional TPV growth. Finally, we see a significant opportunity to grow clients through cross-selling between our financial services and software client base.
Therefore, we see a very positive outlook for the future. We expect a 13% TPV CAGR from 2024 to 2027. Mateus will dive deeper into that in the finance section. We will monetize this TPV growth at an even higher rate. As I mentioned before, we are much more than just a payments company. As we scale our banking, credit, and software solutions, we will continue to gain share in a BRL 100 billion revenue pool in the market. We are already seeing very good traction in our banking product, and we're just getting started in creating software and financial services bundles. So for example, our heavy users, those that use more than three products, generate on average 2.3 times more revenue.
Today, 21% of our MSMB client base are heavy users, up from 14% we had a year ago. This client category is growing rapidly because many of our, of our new clients are beginning this journey with us as a multi-product users. The combination of this trend, plus our pricing discipline, provide us a very positive outlook for the future. Again, as Mateus will dive deeper into this, but, we expect our MSMB take rate to increase more than 20 basis points between 2024 and 2027. We expect to generate even faster profit growth. Since we have already completed a significant investment phase across the business, I believe we can scale with limited incremental investment over the next, three to four years.
In addition, as we execute our new organization and cost management plan, I believe we'll be able to improve our operating efficiency. As a result, we expect a 31% CAGR on Adjusted Net Income over the next three years. As part of my efforts to streamline our strategic focus, unlock operating efficiencies, and implement a new organizational structure, I felt that we needed a simple way to organize and communicate our strategy. This is a simple visual, but I think it clearly captures what we want to do. So first, we want to focus on and win in the MSMB client segment. Secondly, after we win a client, we want to drive increased engagement. And thirdly, we want to scale our business and operations with minimal incremental costs. This strategy is really designed to generate better profit growth and increase cash flows.
So from a shareholder perspective, I believe we are on the right path to create value to you. In fact, I think we are so convinced of this, that I'm putting our money where our mouth is, and yesterday, we just announced an additional share buyback of BRL 1 billion. With that, I'm going to hand this over to Lia, who is going to walk you through our strategic priorities in more detail. I'll be here throughout the day to join in and participate in our sessions, and answer any questions you might have during our Q&A session. Well, thank you very much, and hope you all enjoy the day. Thank you.
Hello. Hello, hello, hello. Can you hear me well?
Yes. Good morning, everyone. I'm Lia. I lead Strategy and Marketing at Stone. I believe most of you know me, many familiar faces. I was in the team of the IPO, did all earnings calls since then, participated in many conferences. But for those of you who don't know me, I joined the company in 2015, and since then, my main focus has been to develop the strategy as we grew from a startup to the full-fledged company that we are today. Now that Pedro has provided you with some high-level thoughts on our strategic evolution and priorities, I wanna guide you all through a more in-depth perspective, but I wanna frame our strategic priorities in the context of our evolution until now.
As we evolved over the past years, we became increasingly focused in prioritizing our strategic steps in two main dimensions: the client segments that we served, and the products that we offer. Our strategic choices were made for very specific reasons. For example, as I'm sure most familiar with, with Stone will know, we started by serving SMBs with a simple payment solution at attractive prices, and with a very differentiated service model. We created our operational model to serve SMBs, because we had the right technological assets, a very favorable regulatory environment, and a large untapped opportunity. At each step of our evolution, we cemented the capabilities that enabled us to expand into adjacent markets, both by offering more solutions to the same clients, and also by adapting our model to serve new client segments.
Our set of strategic choices led us to the multi-product, multi-segment markets that we address today. Now, I wanna guide you through the steps of our strategic evolution, looking back at it with the benefit of hindsight. I wanna do it in a slightly more structured way, separating our strategy into five acts of evolution. While these... the acts don't include everything that actually happened throughout our evolution, they do provide an overview of all of the building blocks of what our company is today, and they give the necessary context for our priorities ahead. The beginning of our journey was to create a model to serve SMBs in a better way. In our act one, we built a strong foundational asset around distribution, operations, and technology. This enabled us to establish our footprint in the Brazilian payments market.
In the next session, you're gonna hear from Mateus Scherer, how our value proposition in the market was centered around offering a payment solution with a much superior service at attractive prices. We delivered that to a unique distribution model, that for the payments industry at the time, was something completely new. Through our hubs, we could take a very granular approach to most aspects of our execution, from hyperlocal pricing to tapping regional pockets of growth with great precision and focus. Achieving this would not have been possible without a strong focus on technology, both on the product side, through our end-to-end payments platform, but perhaps most importantly, on the operation side, with all client touch points being controlled by our systems and technology since day one.
Technology applied to operations was perhaps the most critical element that enabled us to scale this initial model as quickly as we did. Natan, as Pedro mentioned, will show you in a later session how our operations technology has evolved to this day, as it is the cornerstone of what makes our model special and possible. So I believe that nothing speaks better to the success of our business model than our ability to win new clients. We deployed our first hub in 2016, and at the time of our IPO, we were already serving 268,000 clients. Slightly over two years later, this number was almost three times larger, and revenue soon followed, almost doubling in the same period.
In this first act, we set our foothold in Brazil with a proven business model and strong technological and strong foundational assets around technology and operations, and we began to look at extending our reach to expand our business even further. Which led us to our second act, our expansion into the micro merchant segment. In the next session, Lia will also tell you how we adapted the core elements of our SMB model to create a unique approach to serve the large segment of micro entrepreneurs in Brazil. This strategy had two core elements that made it successful. First, the Ton value proposition targeted the specific needs of the micro merchant segments, with simple offers at attractive prices and a focus on leveraging technology to provide superior service. Second, a service model that was adapted to the economic reality of the segment.
Low cost to acquire and low cost to serve, as critical elements to achieve attractive unit economics. Creating a unique strategy to serve micro merchants through Ton, enabled us to achieve a new level of scale. What this graph shows is an indexed evolution of the Ton client base in the bars, and a proxy to our acquisition costs in the line. Scaling Ton with a tight control on acquisition costs, coupled with an intelligent set of self-service offerings, was critical to achieve attractive unit economics here. So operating at scale in both the micro merchant and SMB segments, meant that we were processing payments of payment volumes also at a large scale. But a lot of these funds were being deposited and spent elsewhere, most often in the accounts that our clients had with the large incumbent banks.
Since our IPO, we had begun to look at expanding our capabilities into banking, because we understood that the foundational asset that we created, meant that we could expand the ways in which we helped our clients. Our banking strategy was based on a few important decisions. First, we built a banking infrastructure from scratch, that allowed us to fully control the client experience end to end. Second, we integrated payments and banking into one single solution, and started to price bundles to new clients that onboarded onto Stone. As we did that, we started to see a powerful monetization cycle be created, once payments volumes converted into deposits in the client's banking account. Because the main driver of growth here was pricing bundles to new clients, we were also able to scale our banking with minimal incremental acquisition costs.
So our banking has also performed very well so far. Our client deposits have grown almost tenfold since we started scaling at the beginning of 2021, until today. Today, over 88% of new clients have been onboarded with a payments plus banking bundle since 2022, showing the power and attractiveness of this combination to our clients. We still see a vast opportunity ahead. Perhaps the simplest way to measure the level of engagement that our clients have with our banking solution is to see how much of our clients' payment volumes gets converted into deposits in the banking accounts. This figure, shown on the line on the graph, has been steadily growing, reaching 5% in the third quarter of 2023.
But this still means that the money that gets settled from payments only stays in the account for about four days. So I wanna give you a bit more color on the power of the payments and banking combination, and why we still see a lot of opportunity ahead. On this page, we show that clients using more than three products generate 2.3 times more revenue than clients who use up to three products. While we're already able to engage 20% of our base at this level, there is still a significant majority of clients with an opportunity to improve engagement ahead. And we're taking the right steps in that direction, as you will hear from Rodrigo Cury in the sessions that follow. I wanna just highlight on this page how we have been able to improve the percentage of engaged clients over time.
As you can see on the bar chart on the left, the percentage of clients with more than three products is accelerating on each new cohort, due to both the evolution of our solutions and our better ability to price bundles to clients. Again, speaking to the power of our distribution capabilities, you can see on the chart on the right of the slide, that we achieved this acceleration while maintaining stable acquisition costs over time. So having achieved a significant level of scale in the SMB space enabled us to gain a much greater understanding of the diverse realities within the segments. First, we always believed that for some profiles of clients, combining their financial services offerings with software could provide a stronger value proposition for them and a powerful economic benefit for our business.
Second, we also knew that medium clients, the most sophisticated clients in these segments, were the most profitable, but also the most demanding in terms of their products and services. So our Act 4 was about evolving our model in order to create a winning strategy to serve medium clients within SMBs. And we did this first by building a specialized sales approach, layering a specialist sales organization in our hub footprint. In 2020, we acquired Linx, the leading retail software in Brazil. We wanted to penetrate its large installed base of clients with integrated software and financial services offerings. And we knew there was significant complementarity between the profile of clients of Linx and Stone. While Stone was very strong at serving smaller SMBs with its pure financial services offerings, Linx had a clear strength in the larger clients within its software offerings.
So as Pedro mentioned, this acquisition took a long time to close, and it happened in a challenging time, for our company. So this drove our decision, to initially integrate all of our software, all of our software operations under one segment, and to pursue back office integrations within the segment, while keeping management and execution separate from our financial services operations. More recently, with the significant turnaround that, the company underwent in 2022, and as part of our annual strategic revision, we have defined a clear strategic focus on integrating our financial services and software offerings in high potential verticals within the software business. On this page, I wanna break down our software business in a way that materializes how we are approaching the software opportunity within our strategy.
The verticals where we are prioritizing our execution towards capturing the financial services opportunity represent 48% of our overall revenues and grew 14% year-on-year in the third quarter of 2023. Here, we're gonna put a high emphasis on integrating all dimensions associated with combining software and financial services, from the evolution of our go-to-market, to alignment of incentives and product integrations. On the other hand, our enterprise business represents 20% of our overall software revenues, and our approach here will be to continue to manage the business for efficiency and cash generation, while our approach to financial service will be opportunistic. Lastly, 20% of our software revenues come from verticals that either do not have a relevant financial services opportunity or are not within our initial priorities. Our approach here will also be to manage for efficiency, cash generation, and growth.
So let me give you some color on why we have prioritized these four verticals to capture the financial services opportunity. They represent 64% of the total TPV pool of our installed software base, and 76% of the financial services revenue pool, due to better economics in the client base, which is significantly geared towards SMBs. To put these figures into context, currently, we have a TPV in MSMBs of BRL 358 billion, based on annualized third quarter figures. The priority verticals represent a potential TPV pool of BRL 236 billion, and we have only captured a small fraction of that opportunity....
So it becomes clear that as we advance on the strategy on this integration of these verticals, we open up a significant growth opportunity for our business by offering financial services bundled with software to this installed base of software clients. We're still in the very early days of executing on this strategy, and our initial data shows encouraging results in terms of driving better unit economics. Clients that were early adopters of our integrated software and financial services solutions have shown a 2.5 times better revenue profile, 2.1 times more money in volumes from banking, and 1.7 times more money out transactions from banking. As we gear up to put increasing emphasis on expanding on this opportunity, we're very excited with these early signs. This leads me to the last and most, most recent act of our strategic evolution, our deployment of credit.
We see credit as a massive opportunity to add shareholder value in the future, and over the last 18 months, we have gained confidence in our ability to capture it. We began to test credit in 2019, but due to a number of challenges and the difficult operating environment that we had during COVID, we did not perform well, and we made the decision to shut the product down. This ultimately hurt our earnings at the time, but we recovered more than 100% of the total disbursements, and more importantly, we had many learnings behind our mistakes. Since then, we've been working to completely revamp our credit operation based on a new team, new technology, and a completely revamped product.
As you will hear from Gregor in a few sessions ahead, this revamped product has greatly enhanced our value proposition to clients, and we have overstated that this is an area where we will be very careful while scaling, to ensure that our growth can be in line with our risk appetites and according to market conditions. In the next session, you're gonna hear a lot about how we're approaching the credit opportunity, both from our team, but also from clients' testimonials themselves. Here, I just wanna focus on the opportunity itself. If we consider all working capital loan products in the market, we estimate that the credit addressable opportunity amounts to BRL 54 billion, already net of funding costs and credit losses. But perhaps the most exciting figure to us is the opportunity that already exists within our installed base, which is over BRL 12 billion.
These numbers are representative of all client segments, but the majority is within MSMBs. Even if we take a conservative approach, these numbers make very clear how relevant credit can become to our business if we execute it well. I just wanna wrap up this deep dive into our evolution by bringing a few takeaways. First, if we take a step back and look at the revenue impact of all of our five acts together, you can see the power and benefit of our approach. We've been able to evolve, expand, and diversify our business, bringing new levels of growth as we cemented each new capability. Since our IPO, this led us to grow revenues at a compounding growth rate of 51%.
Speaking to the power of our business model, as Mateus will detail later today, this growth was coupled with significant contribution margin improvements while maintaining acquisition costs under control. So up until now, our addressable markets, I showed it to you in pieces of equal sizes. However, that is not exactly the case, both because client segments have different opportunities, but also because of the different revenue potential of each product. When we plot these market pieces to scale, we see a big change happen. We can now envision that our MSMB market presents an opportunity of approximately BRL 100 billion in revenue when we add up payments, banking, credit, and software, showing that we have not only diversified our opportunity, but also expanded our addressable market by eight times since our beginning.
I think we've come a long way since our early days, but we're still small in compared to our addressable opportunity. If we can execute our strategy diligently and consistently, there's still a lot of value to be created for our clients and for our shareholders. So Pedro just talked to you about our competitive advantages and strategic priorities. Towards the end of today's session, Mateus Scherer will guide you through how our strategic priorities will translate into financial results in more detail. Before I hand the stage over to Mateus Scherer, who's going to go through a deep dive of our SMB segment strategy, I wanna recap our priorities with an emphasis on why we believe we can capture this large opportunity that we see ahead of us
So in the next sessions, I hope that we can provide more clarity on the essential elements that will enable us to achieve our first strategic priorities, priority, which is to win in the MSMB market. We've built over time a true distribution powerhouse that allows for multiple client segment reach. We have an attractive financial services opportunity in our installed base of software clients, and the right assets and organizational alignments to capture that opportunity. And over time, as we have evolved our business, we have done so in a way that we have proven our ability to sustain the best service in the market. The combination of these elements will be key drivers of our ability to continue to win new clients and grow above the overall market, gaining market share.
Beyond winning new clients and growing above the market, we believe we will be able to drive engagement in the future, because as we evolve our product platforms and our ability to better price bundles to our clients, we expand the breadth of monetization levers. We have a huge opportunity to drive further engagement in monetization if we can scale working capital solutions in the appropriate way, for our clients and for our business. And we can use software as a differentiator to achieve higher level of monetization and better lifetime values. Lastly, we will be able to increase returns in the future as we generate profitable growth, by leveraging the intrinsic elements of our business model, that will enable us to grow, as Pedro mentioned, with minimal incremental investments.
So our foundational assets around distribution, logistics, client service, are really platforms for future growth. Most of the investments have been already deployed, and these investments will generate growth in the future. Our product and technology platforms will enable us to deliver multiple value propositions to different client segments through a single technological infrastructure. Through the remainder of the day, my colleagues will bring these points to life in their presentations, and demonstrate the power of our unique model.
I just wanna close by making a quick reflection around culture. In the IPO, we talked a lot about culture, and we made the decision today to focus on the evolution of our business and the priorities ahead. But make no mistake, this is a company of owners, and it's a company of team players, and everybody who's gonna come on the stage today is representing a much larger team that is really passionate about every day, every day working very hard to drive our mission forward. So thank you very much, and I wanna call to the stage Mateus Scherer.
Working? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Good morning, everyone. My name is Mateus Scherer. I'm the leader of the SMB business at Stone. I've been with the company since 2013, spending the last 10 years building our services for small and medium businesses. As Lia just mentioned, we've grown our payment business, expanded our banking capabilities, and improved and invested in software solutions over the years. Now, our big goal is to combine all these efforts together, to do even better in the SMB world. So today, we're gonna talk about our product vision, how we serve our clients, and how we go to market. So the MSMB segment includes different types of clients with different needs. SMBs are typically store owners.
They can have one or multiple locations, so they're not able to be at the store all the time. That's why they have to handle employees, they handle teams, and they also handle store managers. This segment is the largest in terms of revenue pool opportunity, with BRL 63 billion and 2.5 million potential clients. Over the years, we had the opportunity to deeply understand the clients' needs. So let me highlight them to you in three topics. The first one is that small business owners grapple with risks and costs associated with running physical stores. They aim to boost sales through different channels and multiple payment solutions. Second, they also deal with a lot of complexity and use time-consuming and inefficient tools.
They really want to simplify their back office tasks to focus more on sales. And third, they need timely and fairly priced capital to operate. They also need help managing excess capital when available. In response to these challenges, over the past 18 months, we've been reshaping our product vision. We want Stone to allow our clients to sell, manage, and run their business more efficiently. Now, let's explore each aspect of our value proposition. Our first priority is to make sure our clients never miss a sale. To help, we offer various payment methods and reconciliation for in-store and online sales. To offer more time and business control, we provide a merchant-driven banking account that centralizes all funds. We're developing tools like business credit cards, payroll, and reports, and we help more mature SMBs integrate Stone with their POS and ERP system.
More recently, we started to roll out solutions to provide clients with money when they need it. We also offer ways to improve business turnover, and we will help them with automatic savings. What sets us apart is that we offer a complete business tool and ecosystem, and we support the client's financial needs and workflows. We're presenting Stone to the market in two different ways. The first, our primary method, addresses common issues through our Stone Suite, so our app, our portal, our POS. This approach is tailored for small businesses who are typically less mature, and simplifies operations coming with bundled pricing. Now, let's watch a video to delve deeper into this initial approach.
Stone was born with a purpose to serve small and medium businesses in a better way, a universe of different profiles and types of clients. It's your local restaurant, the clothing store, the pharmacy, a gas station, and a world of other examples. Stone stands out when serving such diverse categories of businesses, because we know how to identify their needs, what they have in common, and where their interests diverge. Through a breadth of SMB solutions, we can offer them a better value proposition. Some pain points are recurring. They usually struggle with time, control, and ways of increasing their cash flows. However, in many aspects, they're also very different, and Stone is building the right solution for every small and medium business in Brazil.
I'm André Martins, owner and CEO of the Mega Lanche company. It's a diner that was born inside the Rocinha about 12 years ago. When we started our story with Stone, we started with just one machine. Today we have. How many Stone machines do we have today? Forty machines. 40 Stone machines. So, to talk a little about our relationship, I think the number speaks for itself, right? In Brazil, we have a unique position to address the multitude of SMB needs through financial services and software. At the core, our value proposition is to combine, in a single solution, an offering that meets our clients' financial services needs in a more practical and accessible way. When our clients have more demanding workflow needs, we can offer financial services embedded in their management software.
My name is Ricardo. I am one of the owners of Maya Café, and we've been with Stone for about 10 years, since the beginning. The Stone product that makes our daily life easier is the Stone machine. It's very practical. It's not just a payment machine; it offers me other services. When it's time to place an order, the girls are no longer with a piece of paper in hand. They use the Stone machine to place the order that goes to my kitchen, so that makes it a lot easier. Less mature SMBs struggle to operate their businesses, usually on their own or with a few employees. Their biggest need is to be able to sell more by offering more payment methods or by reaching their own customers beyond the store.
Stone's clients can choose from a complete set of payment solutions that range from different types of POS systems and acceptance of multiple payment methods. If merchants want to expand their sales beyond the physical store, we offer them payment links to sell through social networks or WhatsApp. We went from 50 deliveries to 450. Turn your dreams into goals, because when you do that, you can bring your dreams closer to your reach. Due to the owners' central role in operating their own business, time is a scarce asset, and being able to access different forms of working capital for their most demanding financial needs is also important.
A gente começou com a máquina da Stone e, num segundo momento, a gente passou a ter a integração com o nosso sistema. Aí ficou tudo mais fácil. Aí depois veio a conta da Stone, né? E com isso, a gente não só tava recebendo, como passou a ler melhor aquelas informações. É a combinação disso tudo, que faz a Stone, pra gente, uma opção, uma grande parceira. Businesses of various sizes can rely on the Stone Digital Account to receive their sales, transfers, and manage their finances. This helps them save precious time, better spent focusing on their core business rather than on administrative tasks. The Stone Account is tailored exclusively to the needs of a small operati
on, with multi-user functionality and a security layer that limits access, ensuring that only the owner can withdraw money or manage their finances. This transforms our app into an integral business tool, rather than just an account exclusively for the owner, as is the standard in Brazil. O empreendedor, o dono de um pequeno comércio, ele não é um especialista em finanças, então ele precisa ter uma página que seja fácil de consultar, onde os dados estejam ali, claros, transparentes. A gente tem isso com a PJ da Stone. Once our clients use our integrated payments and banking solution, payments start a monetization cycle whereby the sales volumes, which we process, get settled, and become deposits in the Stone Account.
The more our clients engage with our banking solution, the more they leave deposits in the account, which are monetized to float. This virtuous cycle is greatly enhanced because of our ability to combine everything in one single solution. More recently, we have launched another product designed to seamlessly integrate with our clients' operations: a working capital loan solution, which can address the day-to-day maintenance needs, such as purchase inventory, equipment, and renovations, or help our clients take the next step in the growth of their business when opening a new store, for example. A primeira ideia quem teve foi o Ryan, de montar uma câmara frigorífica, né? Porque agora a gente pode comprar em quantidade, briga r por preço pra poder vender e depois, agora, no segundo empréstimo, a gente conseguiu comprar o nosso caminhão.
Exatamente. Então, assim, pra gente, foi fundamental essa parceria. Unlike other loan products found in the market, the Stone loan solution was designed for entrepreneurs and works in sync with the business' cash flow, with a repayment schedule based on a percentage of sales rather than a fixed amount. The better their business performs, the less interest they pay on the loan. This makes the process of paying back the loan 100% aligned with client sales flows. A Stone tem uma forma de pagar pra gente muito fácil. Tudo que a gente vende num dia, nas maquininhas da Stone, ela é repassada pra nossa conta digital da Stone. Esse repasse diário é descontado a porcentagem do empréstimo, entendeu?
É, em outras palavras, vendeu muito, desconta normal, vendeu pouco, desconta pouquinho e a gente não sente muito. Meu nome é Daniel Silva, eu sou CEO na tutisofia.com.br. Nós vendíamos lingerie através de revendedoras e, a partir de 2014, tínhamos a ideia de vender lingerie diretamente pro consumidor final. Trabalhávamos com outra adquirente, que tinha uma taxa de aprovação de pagamentos por cartão de crédito muito baixo, e foi aí que conhecemos a Pagar.me. A primeira mudança que nós vimos foi o aumento na taxa de aprovação de pagamentos por cartão de crédito. Isso automaticamente aumentou nosso faturamento.
Digital native businesses are different from brick and mortar due to their growth profile and their ability to scale. That way, we're dealing with multiple needs from different clients, ranging from simple integrations like payment links to a development of robust checkout solutions with split payments. Each client will have a distinct integration need, but common operational goals. Digital clients will focus on conversion optimization, high-level security, and fraud control. Our solutions offer transparency, security, and robustness, along with a range of customizable features to meet their needs.
This approach of creating solutions specifically tailored to businesses provides us with a comparative advantage by being closely integrated into the client's operations rather than being a peripheral product. This not only benefits the client, who receives a product customized to their needs, but also benefits our strategy. The more our clients use and combine our products, the more accurate the offers and products we can develop for them based on the data generated. É muito dura a vida do empreendedor. Você tem que ter bons parceiros. É isso que a gente tem com a Stone. Ela tava com a gente nos momentos mais difíceis. A gente sente que é tratado como pessoa. A gente liga pra lá, tem uma pessoa do outro lado. Isso vale ouro.
It's not just about the solutions we offer. It is also about the superior service we provide. This is an integral part of Stone's DNA since our foundation. We are passionate about not just serving our clients, but delighting them with something that exceeds their expectations. We strive to be available anytime, anywhere, and they recognize us as the best service in the industry. We have been able to achieve this through a technology-based approach that integrates everything we do, from distribution to service to client support.
So, you're listening to me, right? Okay. So as you saw from the video, Stone's core value proposition is delivered as a horizontal strategy, allowing, allowing our clients to choose a single provider with high-quality service level and a bundled pricing. In the technology platform section, Joel, Marcus, and my colleagues will further explain to you how the product works. Now, let's talk about the second way that we will approach the market. The acquisition of Linx gave us another way to help businesses. Stone Embedded is a vertical approach that creates a unified value proposition, integrating financial services and software.
As you already know, we prioritize our four verticals, being retail, gas stations, food, and pharma, and we also integrate third-party software. Stone is known in the market for our high quality, high service level, and we aim to achieve this by establishing operational synchronicity between both Linx and Stone's service and distribution channels. We believe this approach is better suited for medium clients who are usually more mature and have, and have multiple locations. Again, let's watch another video that will explain this strategy.
For more mature businesses with multiple stores and multiple staff, where owners and managers are no longer in the store all the time, having a unified control and a comprehensive view of their business is crucial. Due to their higher maturity, they can have quite specific demands, depending on which segment clients operate in. For them, the need to manage this increased complexity becomes paramount. With the acquisition of Linx, the largest retail software provider in Brazil, we are now able to serve clients with vertical software across multiple industries. We have prioritized some of those verticals to greatly enhance our value proposition by embedding our financial services platform into POS and ERP software. Currently, we're focusing on retail, gas stations, food, and pharma. For those verticals, we are working to facilitate the most critical workflows that those clients have and offer an end-to-end solution.
People have this false idea that a gas station is self-managed, when in fact it is not. Reconciling, paying, buying It was a very busy day-to-day. Our partnership with Stone was just that, taking away the time and attention I had to give before, and now I don't have anymore. I can dedicate myself to other responsibilities, so to speak. We had a very big fraud problem because the person who filled everything out, for example, put in BRL 10, marked that they put in BRL 300, received the benefit on top of BRL 300. And the thing about being integrated with the pump and the machine is, it eliminates any error, right? Since the attendant is also already registered by CPF, it has to be the exact amount. There's no way to change the amount.
In the gas station vertical, we're dealing with business with tight profit margins, a high tax burden, and a need for constant management oversight, along with a high rate of fraud when compared to other sectors, because POSs often get cloned by fraudsters at the pumps. Therefore, having a solution that at the same time improves productivity and reduces fraud is essential. Today, we offer an integrated smart POS with instant reconciliation that allows clients to pay by card, Pix, or vouchers without leaving the vehicle. This improves the payment experience and provides more efficiency to the gas station.
Furthermore, with this suite of integrations, we have significantly reduced the number of fraud incidents by essentially eliminating the possibility of cloned POSs. In the retail vertical, store owners are looking to optimize their physical space as much as possible to display their products and improve their clients' shopping experience. To achieve this, we offer a mobile POS solution, minimizing the need for a physical cash register to complete a sale. Each salesperson can focus on the sale and client experience from start to finish. With this solution, each salesperson becomes a cashier, able to complete a sale directly with the client.
The advantages of working with Stone is that the machines have become a kind of mobile cash register. We can take it to the customer, pull the data if they already have a record. If they don't, we can do it through the machine, and they can make the payment without having to go to the cash register. The advantage is definitely bringing this complete experience to the customer. This agility that Stone brought certainly added a lot.
We have evolved a lot over the years in being able to deliver the right offering for the right client within the SMB segment, serving businesses of different sizes and profiles, recognizing that they have specific needs. Our proximity with clients and our technological capabilities allow us to understand our clients better than anyone else, and hence, tailor our solutions to their specific needs. We have a unique value proposition for financial services and software solutions, and a broad distribution and service capability that has allowed us to become the partner of choice for SMBs in Brazil.
So, as you could see in the video, adopting a specialized strategy allow us to address industry-specific pain points. The distinct solutions we're building will serve as a strong differentiator. So, so we get it: time is money. Our goal is to help our clients save both, all in one app. We see our solutions in two layers: the financial layer and the workflow layer. Here, you can see the client's financial layer, when they handle money coming in and going out, check on balances, and make their most their key financial decisions.
Well, we aim for a complete financial service solution. We want to help clients save money, save time, feel more secure, and make better financial choices. We uniquely connect this financial layer with key client workflows. Clients want to run their business, not use a bank. As we help them through technology, be it directly, with the Stone App or with integrated software, this is our power of combining. Now, let's talk about another important part of what makes Stone unique: our operational model. As you may recall from our IPO, we call this the Stone Model.
From the beginning, we aim to delight clients in every touchpoint. For this, we have three teams: sales, logistics, and client service. The sales team is everywhere in Brazil. They help us reach our clients in every part of the country, be it physically or digitally. Logistics team is quick to fix or set up things, getting our POS devices to the client in the next business day. Our customer and our client service team is available twenty-four/seven, answer calls in under five seconds, and resolves 93% of issues in that first call. Each of these interactions, totaling over one million each month, are opportunities for us to make our clients happier and also learn about how we can improve our products, services, and offerings. Later today, on the operations section, Natan will further explain how we apply technology to continue to make our clients happy and gain efficiency.
From the get-go, we recognize how we reach our clients as a powerful advantage. Picture this: over 14 million clients scattered across Brazil, which is a vast nation. Our mission: tailor our reach while being cost-effective. That's where our distribution network comes into play, composed of three pillars. First, digital channels. Think targeted ads, online tools and campaigns, allowing us to efficiently connect with our clients at scale. Next, our proximity channels. Here, it's all about personal service and creating strong client relationships. Third, our strategic partnerships. They help us reach even further, connecting with specific parts of the market and client groups. Over the years, we've evolved our hubs' operations and diversified our channels using different types to tailor our reach to our clients. So let's dive into how these channels work across Brazil.
Since Stone's first year, our sales and distribution model has become a significant competitive advantage. In a market dominated by well-established incumbents, in a banking distribution model mainly based on physical branches, it became clear to us that we needed to offer our clients something better. We needed to reach them faster and to be close to them in order to provide them with a much better service. We knew that we could create something that would surpass their expectations. It was with this intention in mind that we developed our hub distribution model, or polos, as we call them. Our polos quickly became a fundamental part of our approach and a unique aspect of our value proposition to SMB clients. As we launched and scaled our distribution through the hubs, clients no longer had to go to bank branches to get a POS.
We would serve them at their own counter. They no longer had to wait two weeks to start operating. We delivered their POS in 24 hours or less. This hyperlocal strategy enabled us to achieve national reach and capture a significant share of multiple municipalities over the years. Teams of trained Stone agents, equipped with proprietary technology, became present at every counter in Brazil. Today, they sell, upsell, manage the client throughout their life cycle, ensure satisfaction, and foster loyalty. Our proximity channels are characterized by their hyperlocal nature and our ability to address specific client needs and adapt to each region's specific competitive environment.
Channels with a proximity profile include different types of hubs distributed throughout Brazil, a country with 5,500 cities spread across 8.5 million sq km. But only 665 of these cities have populations of more than 50,000 people. We have created different hub operation models to address each type of city, targeting smaller cities through a franchise model that partners with local entrepreneurs, and gaining presence in larger cities through our company-owned operations. Our franchises operate in smaller towns and enable us to achieve a high level of presence within the interior of Brazil, providing us with significant scale and ensuring that we are able to deliver Stone's market-leading standards of service. Since the cost of service is shared with the franchise, we achieve higher cost efficiency, enabling high-quality operations in strategically important territories.
Our hubs are located in medium-sized cities and large metropolitan areas. These are staffed by Stone's employees and managed by the company. To ensure our high level of service and efficiency, we have a rigorous process for attracting and selecting people to work in these hubs. In addition to our investments in hiring and developing the best talent, we also empower our people with proprietary technology. For example, all our field agents have access to Marco Polo, an application we developed in-house that is embedded into their smartphones and tablets. Marco Polo provides our agents with specific data and intelligence to help them optimize their routes and sell more effectively. This includes identifying new sales leads, planning their sales calls for the day, creating a routine to track their clients' life cycle within their portfolio, and monitoring their clients' satisfaction levels.
This helps them to determine when to check on each client again or offer them additional solutions. Due to the hyperlocal nature of these distribution channels, our tactical approach is also locally oriented. Each city has localized pricing, allowing us to compete with precision and independence. Similarly, the focus and objectives of our agents are determined by the characteristics of the local retail landscape. In addition to franchises and hubs, which primarily focus on smaller clients, we have developed a team known as Specialists, dedicated to medium-sized clients throughout Brazil. They offer more personalized service, functioning like dedicated business managers. This team has been instrumental in our cross-selling strategy with software.
We also have software sales channels and personnel who focus on medium-sized and larger clients. These teams are primarily focused on selling vertical-specific software solutions, but they are increasingly advocating and promoting the power and potential benefits of combining our software and financial solutions. Software sales teams, similar to our agents, are responsible not only for sales, but also for upselling, cross-selling, and managing the client life cycle. This approach is facilitating the distribution of Stone's financial service to software clients. Finally, our partner program is focused on developing partner companies that resell or integrate Stone solutions into their client base.
As we evolve our offerings and the multiple ways in which we help our clients in different segments with their needs, we will evolve our distribution powerhouse to achieve synchronicity between the sales and setup process of each solution and our ability to sustain the highest levels of service and support. As an example, as we begin to scale our vertical software offerings with embedded financial services, we're working to adapt and specialize our distribution to the specific realities of each vertical. We're just getting started. There's still so much more that we can offer our clients and continue to extend our reach in more creative ways, combining technology and our vast distribution footprint.
So to quickly recap, we will continue to grow because our product vision and execution is unique, we are the leaders of service in our industry, and we have powerful distribution networks. Mateus will further detail to you how this goes to insightful financial metrics. Next, Lino will talk to you about our clients and about our strategy in the micro segment. Thank you, or as we say in Brazil, obrigado!
Thank you, Mateus. Good morning, everyone! My name is Victor Lino, and I'm the leader of the micro segment here at Stone. I have been with Stone since 2017, and had the privilege to be part of the team who developed Stone, our brand to in this segment. Today, I'm excited to give you more color on our strategy going forward, specifically talking about who the client is, the solutions we offer, and our go-to-market strategy. In this segment, the client is the business and is always in need to make a living. Operating informally and without physical stores or employees, they rely only on themselves to get the job done. They also mix their personal and business finances and are very keen on technology.
As you can see on this slide, this segment is very significant, both in terms of number of merchants, around 12 million in Brazil, and a revenue pool of more than BRL 33 billion. In order to address this big opportunity, we adapt the Stone's value proposition to the specific needs of these clients and the challenges involved in this segment. We have, in our Stone's DNA, the devotion to provide the best service, so our primary focus was on keeping this obsession, but on a much higher scale. To achieve it, we created a digital-first distribution and client experience. All of this was made to provide what the micro merchants value the most: low cost, simplicity, and digital proximity. For us, low cost means that our clients can have access to payments and banking solutions with the best prices in the market.
Simplicity is at the core of our solutions, so our clients can start selling in less than five minutes. Our user-friendly interface makes Stone intuitive and easy to use. Evidence of this, a good experience, is our top-of-the-industry score of 4.9 in the Apple App Store. Finally, digital proximity means that our clients can have fast and efficient access to us whenever they need. This commitment to solve our clients' problems in a fast and efficient way has played a significant role in our leadership in Reclame Aqui, a Brazilian customer review website. I'll now share with you a short video, so you can hear it directly from who matters, the client.
Every morning, a legion of micro entrepreneurs drives the nation forward. Hardworking people who are always hustling in their daily routines. Men and women who struggle to provide for their families and who are the engine of their own labor. Time is a scarce asset, and being able to access working capital for their most demanding financial needs is an imperative. Stone exists to serve these entrepreneurs who live in an urgent condition, giving them fast solutions. They need to close sales and have the money quickly. Low cost is also very important for this segment. Praticamente, meu dia todo é trabalho.
Como eu faço tudo sozinho, é difícil delegar funções. O Stone tá me ajudado de várias maneiras. Hoje em dia, dificilmente eu perco vendas. O meio que eu comecei vender e vendo até hoje é o carrinho na rua. É a máquina da Stone, Stone! No meu bairro, todos têm, Stone. Restaurante aqui tem, Stone. Eu faço entrega ou de motoboy, ou de táxi. Tudo bem? Até mais. Tchau. Eu vejo um vestido meu passando, assim, eu falo: "Eu sei que aquele vestido é meu. Eu sei cada traço que tem nele, e ele é único. Isso é muito legal. É.
We want Stone to be the solution for all our clients' life needs, from their income source through sales, financial management, and credit acquisition, but also for obtaining resources for life's unexpected events, family needs, and achieving their personal goals. Houve um momento, no começo da pandemia, que nós tivemos uma grande questão. A gente não tinha como ficar pagando aluguel sem trabalhar, aí falei: "Artesanal somos nós dois. Somos nós dois. E aí, pegamos o carro e saímos do Nordeste, viemos pro Rio de Janeiro. A gente teve que pegar tudo que a gente trabalhava dentro da loja, transformar em um produto digital, e a forma que a gente recebia nosso cliente dentro da loja, a gente tentou trazer isso pro online.
Antes eu vendia queijo, e quando eu não vendia queijo, eu estava atuando em algum grupo ou peça. E hoje eu virei o ator da minha empresa. Ton is their technological work tool and ensures that the micro entrepreneur never misses a sales opportunity. Tools such as the unlimited creation of payment links without sign-up or monthly fees, with the possibility of selling through WhatsApp, Instagram, and other social media platforms. Hoje em dia, quase ninguém tá pagando no dinheiro. É praticamente débito, crédito e Pix. E no Ton tem tudo isso.
Micro entrepreneurs in Brazil are fast adopters of simple technology. To enable those that are just starting their journey, we offer Tap Ton, our tap-on-phone solution. Tap Ton is a solution that allows customers to turn their smartphone into a point of sale to accept NFC card payments through Ton app. With Tap Ton, clients can get up and running within minutes and will pay fees only if they start selling, providing them more time to adopt a complete solution as they grow. This entry offering allows for a much larger scale than the traditional machine that relies on logistics and provides a more attractive pricing structure.
In addition to payment solutions, Ton offers a no-fees digital account so that our clients can access banking products without bearing high costs and bureaucracy, tracking sales and spending money all in one place, no matter if it is for business, personal use, or providing to their families. A Ton, ela fecha todos os ciclos do artesanal. O uso mais no aplicativo é a função Pix, que é como eu faço as minhas compras. Sim, na parte financeira, consegue acompanhar muito bem. É muito intuitivo, o aplicativo. Um sonho tá quase pronto, que é o e-commerce, que eu vou entregar pro Brasil inteiro. Então, tem vários sonhos que eu estou realizando. Eu estou vivenciando esses sonhos.
As you all heard, our clients need simple and practical solutions that address both their individual and business needs, and we are building just that. We offer tools to help them sell in person or through digital channels using POS, Pix, payment links, or even their own cell phone. So with this, they never lose a sale. Our simple and intuitive app empowers our clients to efficiently control and use their money for both personal and business needs. The clients can download the app, create an account, and sell in less than five minutes. They also have access to the money every day, including on weekends. In the end of the day, what truly matter to us is this feedback from our clients about how our platform empowers them to take control of their finances and brings them one step closer to achieving their dreams.
Finally, our micro go-to-market strategy is built around our most cost-efficient channels, allowing for rapid scaling with low CAC. As Lia showed, we reached a significant client base and lowered our acquisition costs in a very short period. We also have a broad portfolio of digital channels that enable clients to reach out when it's most convenient for them. With our quick setup process, again, they can start making sales in less than five minutes. As our client base grew, we've leveraged our strong relationship with our clients to establish a member-get-member program, enhancing their motivation to recommend us to their friends and to their neighbors. Our next video will give you more color on how we distribute our services to these clients. From the beginning, Ton was designed to be a highly scalable business with low acquisition and service costs.
To achieve this, we crafted a 100% digital experience for our clients, from the moment of purchase to day-to-day support.
Our digital channels are characterized by their high scalability and low client acquisition costs. Digital channels include inbound sales and self-service channels that have the capacity to handle and convert a high volume of leads. To achieve this, those channels are integrated with other areas of the company, like marketing, which strategically attract and direct new leads through actions and campaigns for our team to convert. Our self-service channel includes a dedicated website designed to capture leads and convert new clients.
When they decide to become a client, they have complete autonomy to choose the best offer and finalize the purchase through our channels without the need for assistance.
On average, their device arrives within three business days. This has enabled us to achieve significant scale with low costs.
Over time, we realized that we achieved a high level of satisfaction and loyalty from our clients, even with the 100% self-service and self-support digital model.
Whether through the app, social media or chat, we effectively address client pain points through an AI system that identifies these main issues and guides our assistants in our channels to resolve them. Proof of this lies in our 8.9 out of 10 score on Reclame Aqui, a Brazilian customer review website. With a 92% resolution rate, Ton has an impressive outcome when compared to the rest of the industry. Due to this level of satisfaction, we noticed that our clients naturally recommended us to other micro-entrepreneurs, many of whom became clients themselves and continued to refer others to us. Recognizing the significant potential in strengthening and fostering this effect, we created a member-get-member program that has now become a cornerstone of Ton's distribution channel. With this program, a client who refers and successfully converts another client earns a commission.
This not only further enhances their satisfaction and loyalty to us, but it also serves as a substantial reduction in acquisition costs, as we can precisely calculate the cost through the commission value per new client. We've surpassed the complex, time-consuming, and many times expensive task of starting a business, delivering exactly what this audience values most: speed, simplicity, and low costs. All in all, our commitment is to provide micro-merchants in Brazil with simple, practical, and affordable solutions that empower them to succeed. Our path going forward is crystal clear, as we continue to approach this segment pragmatically and scale our offering with minimal incremental costs. Our clear strategy and our strong culture of execution will drive superior client satisfaction that will result in continued market share gains, with increasing profitability. Thank you, everyone, and I'll pass it over to Lia to recap our segment strategic priorities. Lia?
Your iPad. Lino? Just so I don't say the wrong thing. So we're gonna end the segment module soon. I just wanna do a quick bridge back of what you have just heard to our strategic priorities, and help compare a little bit how they translate to micro and SMB segments. So first, we're deeply committed to winning in the MSMB markets through a unique distribution capability, and using attractive bundles to combine financial services and software. Second, we do expect to drive engagement as we broaden our financial services solution portfolio, and roll out our software and financial services integrations. We will do so while scaling through our platforms, leveraging our foundational assets and our technology platform to scale with decreasing incremental investments. And I hope that you...
As you've had a chance to materialize these priorities are accomplished, taking into account the specificities and different realities of each client segment. So let me walk you through quickly how we win, engage, and scale in each of our client segments. Within SMBs, we're gonna win by serving clients mainly with our Stone Suite, with its horizontal and embedded value propositions, and with differentiated service. Here, a key to winning is our proximity channels, with their granular approach to pricing and local competitive dynamics. We will help our clients through a full suite of merchant-driven solutions. In contrast, in micro, we will win with our Ton solution, which offers simplicity, attractive prices, and a digital-first service model. Digital channels are paramount to ensure that this equation works, both for us and for our clients.
Here, our offer is mainly entrepreneur-driven, helping entrepreneurs both with their business and their personal lives. Our engagement equation for SMBs rests on driving bundles with payments and banking as an entry point for more product penetration in the future. We're scaling credit with a completely revamped credit product, and we will use software as a differentiator, especially in more mature clients within the segments. In micro, our engagement starts with a simple entry solution that is easy and intuitive to use. As clients grow, they naturally seek more mature solutions to increase, and increase engagement. We will scale banking through a value proposition that connects the entrepreneur's business and their personal life needs.
Finally, we're gonna explore the best options to address this segment's working capital needs in a way that is in line with our risk appetite, because we know that our clients value it a lot. Finally, let's talk about our two scaling machines. In SMB, we will leverage our massive client distribution footprint through our hyper-local distribution, our last mile logistics, and human touch client service. Our operations will continue to scale with intelligence and automation through the use of our best-in-class operations technology, and we will develop and implement new features, leveraging our single product platforms around payments, banking, and credit.
In Micro, we will continue to scale through our digital-first service model that combines variable cost with a unique service differentiation. We will leverage our digital channels to sustain high client satisfaction and achieve word-of-mouth effects. The same technological platforms used to scale in SMB will also be foundations upon which we scale in micro merchants. So with that said, we're gonna take a 20 minutes break, and get back to hear from our technology and product teams on our platform strategy. Thank you, everyone.
Hi. Hello. Thank you all for joining us today. In this module, we are excited to present the engine that powers our ability to provide unique and personalized solutions for each of our client segments, the Stone platform. Allow me to introduce myself. I'm João Bernartt, I'm responsible for Stone's products. With over 20 years in the tech industry, my expertise lies on creating products and solutions for merchants and retailers. Let me share a brief overview what you can expect for the next hour. We will begin with Marcus Fontoura, our CTO, sharing our technology mindset, introducing the Stone platform concept. After him, our product leaders will demonstrate our solutions and offer a sneak peek into what you can anticipate for the 2024 products roadmap. To conclude this module, we will offer our long-term product vision. So let's start. Marcus, please.
Hello. Now? Okay. So thanks, João. Hello, everyone. Thanks for being here. My name is Marcus Fontoura. I joined Stone last year after a more than 20-year career in big tech, working in Silicon Valley and Seattle, and I'm a big believer that technology can be used to solve the world's biggest problems, including helping entrepreneurs to achieve more and do more. That's the reason that brought me to Stone, and I'm very excited to be here. I'd like to begin by inviting you to watch a short video about our technology mindset. Since our inception, technology has served as a foundational pillar for all our endeavors here at Stone. Our journey commenced with the development of a scalable and highly reliable payment system.
However, it transcended the realm of point-of-sale solutions and back-end processing. Technology played an instrumental role in expanding our operations, supporting various teams from sales and logistics to client relations. As we continue to expand our product portfolio into banking, credit, and a range of software solutions, our unwavering commitment to technological excellence is increasingly important. With a variety of apps like Ton and Stone, and specialized software across different industries, we recognize the importance of a unified platform governing the entire client life cycle. Delivering a seamless client experience is our top priority.
Our strategy is centered on developing enduring, reusable, and scalable platforms. For instance, rather than creating a standalone banking application, we focus on building a comprehensive banking platform designed to serve a variety of applications and client segments. This platform is already seamlessly integrated into Ton, Stone, and several other products within our software ecosystem. In the context of our operations, our mission is to create platforms that ensure consistent client interactions across all our distribution channels. Furthermore, we maintain a detailed understanding of our client base and potential customers in every geographical region in which we operate. This enables us to adopt a data-driven approach, leveraging insights to support both sales and customer relations effectively.
None of our achievements at Stone would have been possible without our robust internal platforms. We rely on scalable solutions in data management, anti-fraud, security, and cloud computing. These platforms are the backbone of our operations, providing the essential tools and services that empower our developers to remain agile and drive innovation across all product domains. In our tech-centric approach, data guides every aspect of our decision-making. One critical metric of concern revolves around developer agility. We are deeply committed to building the services that enhance our developers' productivity, enabling us to promptly respond to the evolving needs of our product teams.
So as we outlined in the video, we strongly believe that having scalable platforms is very essential for a competitive advantage. However, this is a journey, and we still have some work ahead of us. I'm sorry for the eyesore here. Engineers like building slides with lots of circles. But, if you look in detail here, like, you can see that some names are replicated, and these names means, like, our services and teams that work to compose our experiences. If you look here, for instance, data platform appears twice. This means that, like, we had two different data platform teams build, without too much oversight and using different technologies. This was the state of the world about 18 months ago when I joined Stone.
I like to joke that we're, like, multi-cloud, but we were chaotically multi-cloud, because teams had independence to have contracts with different cloud providers. Of course, there is a reason we did that. We did that because we want to have fast time to market and development speed for it to be innovative. However, with our focus on multi-segment and multi-product, this solution doesn't scale very well. That's why you build the concept of a Stone platform, and that's what me and my colleagues are going to detail for you today. The main idea behind the Stone platform is this idea of use, build one, use many.
I mentioned in the video that banking, for instance, instead of building a standalone application for banking, we build a platform that is scalable and can be used in different segment domains like Stone and Ton. My colleague, Rodrigo Cury, will talk a lot more about banking in the near future in the next slides. So what is the Stone platform? Computer Science 101 tells us that platforms are built of layers, so this is a set of layers for you. So I'm not going to detail about these layers, but I'll just give you a high-level overview, and my colleagues on the product side will explain them in more depth. So the experience layer is the layer that allow us to build customizable solution for each product and segment domain.
The product layer is the layer that contains our main financial services and software products, including banking, credit, and payments. Operations, I like to call this layer as the technology of proximity that allows us, our teams to be pro- close to our customers and delight our customers. And finally, internal, which is a very important layer for us, is that the layer that has services that empower our developers and the rest of Stone to remain agile. So the main idea of building Stone platform and organizing it across these layers is that although we still very much believe that fast time to market is crucial for us, we want to be more intentional in our technology outlook. And this intentionality allow us to still, to gain more efficient but still, like, delight our customers and drive innovation very fast.
Again, this is just a few examples of, like, some of the services that belong to each one of these layers. I'm not going to go in detail in each one of them, but from my technology and engineering standpoint, the key idea here is to show it to you that these services are independently deployable units, that we have strong guidelines for security, scalability, performance, and efficiency. So we are being very intentional how we build these services and allow our technology platform that Stone to evolve. With that in mind, I'll invite João back to the stage to tell you which one of these layers mean.
Thank you, Marcus. Thank you, Marcus. Now that you have seen how Stone platform is structured, let's zoom in to the experience platform. As my colleagues have explained it, we serve segments of different sizes in business activities, which brings complexity to understand and address the client's requirements. To achieve scale to deliver applications for each of these segments, we need to be able to reuse our components and allow the developers to easily adapt the user experience to deploy multiple platform, web, mobile, Android, iOS applications, and easily set up features and craft the final experience in a unique way. From authentication systems to interface components like a simple button or even our POS hardware and software, we can reuse a lot of work. That's why the experience platform is where personalization meets scalability.
But part of this amazing speed to build different solutions that we have here comes from another layer, the product platform. Let's understand. Imagine building a payments, banking, or a credit solution for each segment. That would mean a lot of inefficiency waste, since many things could be done in a common way for all segments. Instead, if we create just one experience for payment or banking that serves all segments, would lead to standardization, in result, low fit for the specific needs of each client, leading to a loss of competitiveness.
The product platform aims at the best of both worlds, to provide specialized expertise through common APIs, application programming interfaces, and SDKs, software development kits, and microservices that will be used for all segment applications, but in an embedded way. This allows for the maximum possible reuse of a component and specialization here at this layer, while providing the capacity for specific configurations and customizations in the experience platform. From a perspective of technology, this is what it means to scale with minimal incremental costs. I invite you to watch a video that shows what our product platform can achieve.
When Stone was founded, we focused on addressing one of the most critical needs of merchants: accepting card payments in person and online. To achieve this, we created a 100% proprietary technology platform designed to help our client accept payments from more card brands, local and global, power a point-of-sale system that was better suited for Brazilian market, and also provide transaction processing with better uptime, response time, and conversion rates. We opened access to our payment infrastructure and created more powerful risk engines and anti-fraud tools that could be easily consumed through simple APIs and SDKs, delivering a complete Payment as a Service offering. This enabled e-commerce service providers, online marketplaces, and other digital businesses to integrate with us and offer their customers more sophisticated payment services, including split payments, billing, and recurring payments.
Stone's platform is now a unique, high scalable, and reliable one-stop shop that has replaced the need for multiple providers along the payment value chain, consolidated all operational and financial management into a single interface, and also created the ability to reach and serve broader range of clients and market segments in-store, online, and in-app, allowing our merchants to become omni-channel. But we have not stopped there. We have now extended the reach of Stone's platform into the front office workflow tools of some of our mid-size clients in key verticals such as retail and apparel, pharmacies, food, and gas stations, integrating and automating payments into their POSs, ERPs, order management systems, and promotion software systems to further simplify and improve their operations.
This allows us to combine more effectively the products we offer to our clients and compound our competitive advantage in the market. The evolution of Stone's platform has enabled us to disrupt payments in Brazil, and we are still finding new possibilities to make it easier for our merchants to get paid in a better way. But the technology and services we have created have also opened the door beyond payments into banking, credit, and value-added services.
The money that merchants receive needs to go into a bank account. As we've enabled our clients to receive more and more money via the Stone platform, we began to observe that their banking needs were meaningfully underserved. Once again, we felt compelled to expand our solutions to solve our clients' needs, and so we developed and launched the second module of the Stone platform, banking. In Brazil, all existing banks were primarily tailored for individuals, leaving a significant opportunity for Stone to fill this void. So we created an SMB banking solution capable of meeting the diverse needs of Brazilian entrepreneurs of all sizes.
Our banking module addresses all of the money movement needs for an SMB in a simple way, capable of automating various processes for our clients, such as paying suppliers, employees, and recurring bills. The integration of banking with our payment solution simplifies the reconciliation of sales across multiple channels and payment methods. This integration helps clients understand which channels are most profitable and best performing. Additionally, Stone Banking offers specialized batch management tools for Boleto and Pix, ensuring a safe, reliable, and scalable billing system. By embedding banking into the ERP, burdensome cash management activities can be streamlined and automated, facilitating the entire flow of accounts payable and receivables, as well as reconciliation.
To complete the current portfolio of financial offerings within Stone platform, we have also begun to extend small amounts of credit to our clients. Over the past 18 months, we have completely revamped our credit product and operations, implementing more thorough process automation, rebuilding our underwriting models, and enhancing our product usability and UX. We are now at the right stage to capture the significant opportunity we see ahead of us in helping our clients with their most pressing working capital needs. By virtue of our powerful integrated payments, banking, and software solutions, we have two distinctive competitive advantages when offering credit to our merchants. First, we can collect unique proprietary data that enables superior credit underwriting, and secondly, we can more easily and effectively extend credit to our clients when they need it the most.
By leveraging our clients' transactional data and additional information we gather from credit bureaus and our field operations in the hubs, we can utilize and enhance increasingly precise credit models. We are also developing the ability to incorporate data from their ERP and POS software systems, which will allow us to be even more assertive in our scoring process. Furthermore, our payments transaction volumes enable us to unlock credit to our clients and facilitate our collections on loans, which helps lower our risk of loss and allows us to provide more competitive lending rates. The models we build from our proprietary datasets also help us determine credit limits that align closely with our clients' borrowing capacity, thereby minimizing the risk of over-indebtedness.
The second major competitive advantage that the Stone platform provides to our credit solutions comes in the form of differentiated distribution. Our credit UX is embedded into our banking solution, so we can easily market our credit solutions to our clients via their banking dashboards. Beyond the working capital options currently available, our credit platform is also gearing up to expand its financing offerings. Soon, we will introduce an innovative revolving line of credit to provide our clients with greater control of their financial needs.
Finally, we believe our platform structure, designed to develop credit solutions, enables us to utilize much more agile product development and operational scalability within a strong control environment. We believe we have all the necessary information for managing the portfolio in real time, allowing for quick and effective adjustments without compromising credit quality. The Stone platform has developed significantly since its origins in payments, and we believe the integration of Stone Credit is the next evolution in our journey to helping Brazilian entrepreneurs fund their operations and growth. To demonstrate how the payment product can be combined with banking and ERP software for different value propositions, I'll call to the stage João Misko, the leader of the payment platform. Please, Misko.
Hi, everyone. Can you hear me? Okay. So hi, everyone. I would like to thank you for joining this session. My name is João Misko, and I have been part of Stone since 2016. I joined the company through Pagar.me, which is our company that serves digital merchants. After two years, I became the leader of this business, and in 2022, when we decided to pursue the platform strategy, I became the leader of our payment platform. We have evolved a lot during the last two years, and I would like to share what we have been doing and what we're gonna do for the next year. So in order to do that, I'm gonna share two use cases with you on how we are deploying our payment capabilities in different segments.
First of all, on micro, and the other use case on medium merchants, so going to all the streams of the spectrum that clients that we serve. Okay, so our first use case is Tap Ton, our tap-on-phone solution designed to simplify payment acceptance for micro merchants. As you have seen during Lino's presentation, micro merchants are cost sensitive and value simpler and digital solutions. With that in mind, we created Tap Ton, a cheap, ready-to-use that enables our clients to start selling within minutes. Okay, we were the first company in Brazil to invest on a tap-on-phone solution, and because of it, we get the leadership of this market, and we keep working hard to keep this position. So let me show you how it works. The process is very simple.
The merchant just need to download Ton's app, pass through the registration process, will take, like, five minutes, and choose Sell through Tap. Once it happens, merchant can define a value and ask the consumer to tap their phone or credit card, and debit card, too, sorry. The transaction is approved. What's important to say here is that this is the solution that's helping us to scale our offering within the micro segment, even in the smallest clients. As this solution is asset light, it provides us with very low cost of acquisition and service. Okay? Now that I have shown you the first use case, let me show you how we are combining payments, banking, and software to deliver solutions for the medium merchants.
As you may have seen during Gisele's speech, the life of a medium merchant in Brazil is tough, as they need to manage a lot of providers because we have a very fragmented ecosystem of solutions, and most of the time, they cannot afford to pay every solution they need. With that in mind, we created Stone Embedded solution, basically integrating Stone services with Linx POS services, okay? Where we can deliver everything that the merchant needs in the price they can pay. Starting the demonstration, I can say that before, the POS terminal was only used to process transactions. Now it's a whole sales solution. So imagine, you are in a store buying for somebody.
Now, the sales attendant can choose from the store's product catalog, the product that you buy, but not, not only the stores they are in, but also other stores and e-commerce inventory, enhancing a lot the chance of converting that sale. Beyond that, the sales attendant can also collect consumer data in order to further promotions and also CRM actions. Of course, the solution allows the merchants to collect payments and also print the tax receipt. It might look simple, but in Brazil, this is a very complex process, as geographically it's very different. We are simplifying a lot the life of our merchant. Okay, the sales process is finished, but not the work of the merchant. Now, the back office process of managing the sales starts, and in order to solve that, we are integrating our banking with the ERP, okay?
So now, within a few clicks, the merchant can check their financial statements looking for balance, future and actual; they can reconcile their sales and receivables, and also manage their cash flow. Going further... I'm sorry. Now, we can say that the ERP became the online banking of the merchant. This is something that we truly believe to change the game. Going further, these integrations also powers new automations, like automating the bill payment flow. So before a process, what was made by humans manually, can be automatically done by the ERP. Based on its entries, the ERP schedules bill payments, and everything goes through an approval flow. So we make sure that there's no human errors during the process, and the finance team can approve all the transactions and payments. In the end of this process, everything is reconciled through the cash management solution.
In Stone, we say that time is money, and we are helping merchants to save both. In summary, for this first session, I would like to say that payments can be deployed in very different manners and different experience through multiple segments. Second, Stone's POS solution is the only POS solution that the merchant needs. And third, with Stone's, the ERP becomes the online banking for the merchant. Now, I'll bring you some highlights of what our clients can expect from our payment platform during next year. First, where we are aiming to become the single point of contact for payments, acceptance, and reconciliation. Why is that?
As we keep enabling new sales channels, such as social networks, marketplaces, and payment methods such as Pix, boletos, and merchants want to sell through all of these channels and payment methods, managing sales gets complex and reconciliation becomes crucial. In order to solve that problem, we will provide a simple and intuitive experience that allows merchants to have full control over their sales, independent of payment method or sales channels. This is the first one. Secondly, we believe that we need to pay our merchants whenever they need or want. In order to go and solve this problem, we are doing three things. First of all, we are paying our merchants in non-weekdays. Second, we are starting to pay card transactions in the same day that transaction happens, and we are pursuing to be instant settlers. We can set
We want to settle transactions, like, five seconds after it happens. Independently of it's a card transaction, Pix, Boleto, or any kind of payment method, we believe money, it's important to be fast delivered to the merchant. Then, the third point that will make us deliver our vision is going beyond payments, as you could see in the video. And what we are doing on that? We are creating a product catalog that is integrated to multiple channels, such as social medias and marketplaces, that will allow our merchants to sell more. Another thing that we are working on is to deliver an invoicing suite, evolving our payment link to a new solution that will help our merchants to send bills and invoice to their customers. And the third point that we are working here is to bring that solution that I've shown you of tax issuance
In the integration of software natively for our solution. And the fourth point is our app store. We are opening our app store in the POS terminal to third-party softwares. Okay? That's all that I had for today, and I would like to reinforce one last message: everything that I have shown you today are products that can be delivered in any segment and any brand that we have, as we have one single platform. This is a matter of a business and offering decision. Now, I would like to invite Rodrigo Cury to share with you what we're doing in banking. Thank you, guys.
When we started Stone, there were already established players in the market, and we needed to accelerate, to define how we were going to differentiate ourselves. We focus on what has always been
Did you like the video? Hello, everyone, I'm Rodrigo Cury. I'm the Head of Banking at Stone, and I joined the team about 1 year and a half ago. I come from the market. I have about 25 years in the banking industry, and I worked at Citi, Barclays, Santander, and BTG Pactual before coming to Stone. So, I'm going to tell you a little bit of our plans, and it's... working for Stone, implementing new features of banking is something very, very, very, how do I say? It's very good to know that you have the payments business going on, a very big, strong thing that we can combine forces to give more to the customer.
We are already part of the, cashing, the sales cashing process, so the banking is something that, combined to the payments, is very, very strong. Okay? I'm going to show you some things that we've done to grow the bank. If you are following the, the figures, you can see that we grew a lot in banking. Lia mentioned before. So there are a few things, more than launching products and features that we did, I'm gonna, give you some examples. First one is to enlarge the methods we give to the customers to sell, to cash in. So what have we done? Apart from the, the POS terminals and the, the online payment links, we are putting a lot of efforts in Boleto and Pix. It's growing a lot.
If you've been recently in Brazil, maybe you have seen this kind of thing, a printed QR code on the counter of the store. If you are a merchant, don't do that. It's not very smart. Why, why not? Because you are very exposed to fraudsters, and it's out of your reconciling systems, so it's out of control. Don't do that. What have we done? Seeing the opportunity, we have launched the Pix embedded in our POS machines, so the customer can really make a shop in the stores in a safe way, and this transaction is like any card transaction within the reconciliation system. It's easier, safer, more convenient. Okay? What else? One client, one interface, even if they are using multiple products. So we embedded our solutions into the apps and portals.
Statements, balances, and everything that you can find in banking are interconnected to the legacy systems. So, the other things that... Remember, you heard before, that everything we do is we do better because we know our clients, our clients' needs. What it means? Many of them, they have employees, and some of those employees, they help the owners to manage the businesses. What it means? That sometimes you have to be multi-users on that account. Okay? So it's a very important feature in our offer that we can give, for example, to a finance manager, the power to use the account to pay bills and make transfers. Then it goes to the owner that can control and approve the transaction. It's much safer as well. Okay?
I think we've done a lot of things here, and it's helping to grow the business, what do you call? We are expanding integrated cashing methods. The offering in a unified view of cash flow and tailoring workflows to meet complex needs. That's the summary I would made for the recent deliveries. From now on, I'm going to share you a few things that we want to do for the next months, we want to deliver next months. Among a lot of things, I chose four things to share with you guys. A cash flow monitor, a new savings product, a payroll system and our credit card evolutions. Okay? So briefly, I'm going to start with a cash flow monitor. We call that also the BFM, Business Finance Manager.
So we can help the customers to conciliate not only the cashing transactions, but the outflow transactions, the expenses. It makes control, you can categorize, and it helps clients to control their finance across the board, everything. Even transactions for other financial institutions using the Brazilian Central Bank open finance rails. Okay? More than that, we can add insights, ideas, and advices. It really can help the customers to make our clients to make a better financial management in a daily basis. Second is our new savings product. You can call that the virtual piggy bank, cofrinhos, we say in Portuguese. What is that? Clients want to save money. They don't know how.
So we give them an interface that they can set purposes, like expanding the business or buying new equipment or anything like that, and automatically, from out of the payment system, the receivables, they can save a part of that if they want. But it's flexible. I want to make an episodic deposit. Okay, you are allowed to do that. I want to take it off. You know, some there are very cash intensive. They want to take the money off. Okay, it's free. So it's something that it's a huge demand from our customers, from our clients, to help them to save money, to have a healthier financial life. Third, I just said before that many of our SMB customers, they have employees, and it's a headache to them to manage the payroll.
Big companies, they are well-served by traditional banks in general. They have solutions available in the market. Small companies don't have anything. So we are going to launch something that are going to be integrated with their ERP, and they can anticipate sellers, for example, not only pay that for- anticipate that. It's a headache, as I said before. And you can add benefits to the well-being of your workforce. So it's something unprecedented in Brazilian market. And fourth, not the least of the things, we are launching, as you may know, we are launching a credit card right now, as we speak. But it's a standard credit card, and we are going to launch a lot of new features, basic, tailored for our customers. Benefits, not just air miles and things like that, that are made for individuals.
We want to be, again, combined with the payment system, that's very strong. Let's remember that our clients, they don't have a salary one day per month. They have a cash flow day by day. We're going to do something very new, and if you, if you track us, you're gonna see that, are very innovative things. Okay? That said, after this glimpse of banking, I'm sure you are eager to know more about credit, and I will invite my dear friend, Gregor, to the stage. Thank you very much.
Hi, everyone. Thank you for coming and for the patience to understand our business and the challenges that we will face ahead. I'm Gregor Ilg. I'm responsible for the credit business here at StoneCo. A little bit of background: I've been working in the financial markets for over 30 years, orbiting around credit, commercial, treasury, and risk areas, being the majority of my experience held at Banco Santander, where over the last 8 years, I was responsible for the risk SMB area from 2014 to 2022, when I eventually decided to join StoneCo. The reason why I decided to trade 22 years at Santander to rebuild the credit business here at StoneCo was because I envisioned the possibility of making a huge improvement in the SMB markets, because we have here at StoneCo a unique situation.
We hold currently the most important asset in the entire industry: clients. We have lots of clients, and not just clients, but clients that connect to us, as Gisele and Lino mentioned before, in a very special way. Our payments platform connects deeply with our clients, driving their primary revenues. We align with our customers, develop solutions that addresses their main pain points, expanding the banking product portfolio enhances engagement, a key to drive, credit revenues. And last but not least, our hubs working as a potential first line of defense, strengthen our position for portfolio expansion. Over the last 18 months, we developed a comprehensive credit structure, using data from across the company and the, and the market. We now manage the entire credit system from concession to recovery, and this brings us to our new credit solution.
I think it's gonna be easier to demonstrate how user-friendly this solution is for our pre-approved clients. Let's move on. Well, as I mentioned before, we rebuilt our credit solution from scratch. When I say solution, I think this showcases the synergy between platforms, 'cause it links our clients' account data in our banking platform to the credit card receivables in our payments platform, thus generating a robust credit offer. In this case, you can see we are talking here about a BRL 25,000 offer. Once the client decides to apply for it and has the credit approved, we have now introduced monthly installments. Besides the installments, our client can also access all the information of the offer via app, and he can have the resources credited to his account in a couple of days.
We just don't do it online in real time because we have to register the credit card receivables in the trade repository to have a stronger and solid collateral, and I will get to that later on. In this case, the client has installments of BRL 5,000. We also have a innovative way to have the prepayment of our installments. As my colleague, Rodrigo, mentioned in the video, we can retain, or we retain, a portion, a percentage of our clients' daily sales in credit or debit cards. So you don't see any kind of bullet payments across the entire period related to that specific installment. Extremely smooth and easy. I'll show you here how that works. You will see that he can prepay a portion of the installment through his POS terminal, through his payment link.
These two features are already up and running, and he will be able also to do so with the Boleto and the Pix transfer. This is coming soon. And once the installment is fully settled, we inform the client how much he saved on his loan. This generates a win-win situation, 'cause the client reduces the cost of the loan, while Stone reduces the delinquency of the portfolio. However, if the retention mechanism is not enough to repay or prepay the entire installment, we also offer alternatives for our clients to keep the loan on track.
The client can use future receivables, can use account balance, we can issue a boleto, we can have Pix, but most important of all, if the client has card receivables at any other acquirer, the resources arising from these receivables will mandatory be used to serve our credit. This is the advantage of having the credit card receivables registered at the trade repository, so there will be no cash evasion. We acknowledge that our client may have challenges over the time of the loan, and therefore, we offer to our clients the possibility to reschedule the repayment flow of his loan in case the client should need it. This process is extremely easy, and it readapts the cash flow, the new cash generation of our client to the repayment flow of the loan.
One thing that is very clear to us is if our client is committed to repaying us, we are committed to helping him do so. Well, one question that always pops up is, what are we doing differently this way, this time? In the relaunch, we revamped both the product and user experience, learning from our initial credit venture. Key improvements include monthly installments, as I mentioned before, replacing the previous lump sum payment and retaining the retention mechanism. We integrated retention data into monitoring, enhancing our ability to identify credit issues and offer reschedule options via the app. Moreover, all loans now bear the personal guarantee of the main shareholder. Enhanced monitoring tools provide real-time data for immediate response to any unusual vintage behavior. Our models now incorporate extensive external data, and control points ensure decision quality by continuous monitoring scoring processes.
As I mentioned just a couple of minutes ago, acquiring collateral is registered at the trade repository before disbursement, minimizing the cash evasion risk. We have also assembled an experienced team of well-versed in credit business, developed advanced decision models, and redefined governance, setting boundaries with the approval of our risk appetite statement at our executive committee. We are now definitely prepared for the new credit cycle. Now, let's talk about the future. The strong interaction between segments and platform is a key strength in distributing credit products to our client base. A unified language, mindset, and ambition unite us to conquer the principality in the banking relationship of our clients. With these thoughts in mind, let's have a sneak peek of our goals for the next 12 months.
Well, first of all, we intend to scale up our working capital facility for our SMBs by expanding our offers according to the performance of our models, unlocking new cohorts, but always with a cautious approach from a credit and risk perspective. As also mentioned before on the video, we will launch a new overdraft facility, which is different from what you can see or is currently available in the market, addressing several of the pain points that our clients commented to us, and which will generate the capability of penetrating our portfolio. Last but not least, we will build up our product market fit in micro. This is something that we will do by understanding the credit dynamics of this specific segment, experimenting with different financing structure to find the best fit. That's not all.
We're not just focusing on the next year. We are also setting things up for the long-term success. For instance, we are looking to providing Linx customers, our software customers, with built-in credit options to help them manage money better. We are also exploring partnership with the local development bank for more competitive deals for our SMBs and micro clients. And we are figuring out new ways to unlock challenging customers without breaching our risk appetite. We understand that too much credit, like too much medicine, can be harmful, and we want to avoid that for our portfolio.
We understand that the combination of the three main measures planned for the next 12 months, coupled with our payments and banking strategy, will allow us to claim our spot as the primary bank of our clients, increasing engagement, satisfaction, and significantly reducing the churn of our base without compromising either risk appetite levels or the quality of our credit portfolio. If you have any questions or would like to further explore any of the information I mentioned before, I'll be more than glad to address them at our Q&A sessions afterwards. Thank you so much for your attention, and now I'll invite João back to stage to wrap up the platform theme. João, please come up.
Thank you, Gregor. Watching the demonstrations, we see that the three products reinforce each other, turning financial management into a simple and smooth process. This is what we call the power of combining. At the core of our experience, we have placed our bank account as a business management tool, not as a checking account for individuals. We are calling it a working account because it automates various day-to-day operational workflows, for the customers. We strongly believe that the convenience that we are creating through this account will enhance the primary and engagement, not only for the banking, but for all our products. So surrounding this account, we will evolve the value for our clients, reinforcing the options for money in through payments feature, as you saw with Misco. Pro...
We will improve cash flow management, provide new ways of money out, and we will help merchants for future planning through banking features combined with ERP software. And finally, the credit platform will complete the set of offerings. As you can see, what will make the difference is a set of solutions from all platforms working together, reinforcing each other. Looking ahead, we have established some strategic guidelines to create a clear product vision for the evolution of each of our platforms. Our product platform will evolve from payment to an omni-channel checkout, merging our payment platform with order management solutions and other retail software will simplify how clients set up sales through different channels, and will amplify the possibilities to our clients sell more. Additionally, we will evolve from banking to intelligent spend management.
Open finance, plus AI, plus embedded banking into ERP will bring a complete new way of spend management, from reactive to proactive, from a place to find information to a place to get insights, from a task-oriented banking to an automated business process solutions. That is the future of banking. Finally, we will move from credit to a smart cash flow advisor. Our banking evolving to an intelligent spend management will provide a huge amount of data to credit models, predict cash flow requirements, and suggest new way to optimize the use of external capital. This will reduce interest costs and maximize net results. Our product vision, we will empower our clients with intelligence and knowledge that will help them sell more, save time, manage a better and healthier financial life. Thank you for your attention. Now, we have Natan with the operations platform. Thank you.
Hello, everyone. You hear me well?
Yes.
Okay. So my name is Natan Gorin. I joined Stone in 2015, and over the past several years, I played different roles to help build our sales, client services, and technology teams. Since 2017, I am responsible for our operations platform. As João and Marcus have explained, operations platform is one of our tech platforms, and during this module, we are going to better understand how it works. Gisele and Lino mentioned that our MSMB operations rely on three distinct, yet interrelated teams. Our sales operation has established a distribution in over 5,000 cities across Brazil, with an effective way to relate and reach local merchants. Our logistics operations provide quick delivery and maintenance of our hardwares everywhere in Brazil. Our client service provides round-the-clock support, promptly solving clients' issues through our chatbots and our Enchanterss.
Since the beginning of Stone, we have always taken a tech-first approach to drive scalability and provide and deploy intelligence to the front lines of our businesses. We've done this by developing in-house proprietary technological solutions that our teams use every single day. Those solutions are what we call the Stone Operations Platform. Earlier today, during the SMB segment block, you were able to see a video in which you better understood how our sales and distribution work. Now, we are going to watch a video that will better explain how our service differentiation takes place through our logistics and client services operations. Let's watch it.
There were already established players in the market, and we needed to accelerate, to define how we were going to differentiate ourselves. We focused on what has always been one of our core pillars, providing our clients with the best service in the Brazilian market. Since then, we've grown significantly and diversified the products we offer. We achieved this without, for one second, losing sight of what makes Stone different.
We have invested in building a broad footprint to serve our clients across the country, but to do all this, it was essential to have a strong culture and a talented and dedicated team that centers everything they do around the clients.
We work to stay ahead every day by combining logistics, client service, our distribution capabilities, and technology to serve our clients better than they thought could be possible. Our focus now is to continue to scale, drive even greater operational efficiencies, and make our clients happier every single day.
We started by investing in the last mile, the very end of the logistics chain. Today, over 85% of our last mile professionals are in-house. We call them Green Angels. Then, we decided to invest and bring the other pieces of the logistics chain in-house. We managed a fleet of almost 1,000 cars, motorcycle, and trucks, and over 30,000 square feet of Stone warehouses. Believing that the supply chain is core to our business, we developed our capabilities in fulfillment, transportation, quality control, and POS repair, and have our own asset recovery team that works alongside the Green Angel by reaching inactive clients and recovering the POS machines. Today, we manage millions of POS, and our reverse logistic efficiency allows us to minimize investment in CapEx for POS, while maintaining lower levels of DNA and POS write-off than our competitors.
To keep moving forward, we rely on the intensive use of technology. For example, planning our delivery routes.
We use AI to analyze complex variables between client needs and our logistics capabilities. All this was developed in-house as our proprietary software. It's not enough to define the route based on distances alone. For example, if a client has only one device and it is broken, or they are upset during the call for a critical issue, they become a priority in the same day with our express service. And the same goes for our client service.
We are available. When a client calls, we respond in less than five seconds. We solve their problems quickly over the phone and online, without transferring them to any other departments. Client service in Brazil used to be so bad that it became a joke, but not here. At Stone, clients talk to a single Enchanters, as we call our client service representatives, and the Enchanters solves the problem on the spot, with no wait times and a smile in their voice.
So how is technology helping our relationship with our clients? Well, self-service in Stone App for simple questions, text, chat, and WhatsApp communication channels, and bots for text communication and call screening.
But none of those annoying bots that get in the way. Ours are punctual and efficient, allowing us to cut costs, serve more clients simultaneously, increase speed and satisfaction.
Unlike the telephone, which has a ratio of one agent to one client service, text channels allow an Enchanters to serve multiple clients simultaneously, providing scalability and operational efficiency.
Over the past year and a half, we have used these same pillars to guide the evolution of client service on our software platform. After the acquisition of Linx, our first step was to introduce the culture of enchantments. We also invested in client retention loyalty, and a new team called the NPS Guardians.
They were tasked with contacting dissatisfied clients. Today, Linx has the highest NPS in its history. We are happy to see that the NPS of our core POS and ERP solution has increased 22 points since we have started our journey together. This evolution is a result of Stone's culture of customer focus and excellence in service. We have managed to establish a methodology and processes infused with our DNA to replicate what we have built over the years at Stone within Linx.
In software, we provide exclusive services focused on each vertical, with a relationship team dedicated to each business profile. We want to know how they are doing. If they need help, we will go beyond to assist them, and if we can attend to a need that they have through any of our solutions, our Enchanterss will be ready to help them.
At Stone, we invest in training our Enchanterss to understand not only our operations and services, but also our clients' businesses. At the end of the day, our goal is to help them be more successful, and we go to great lengths to achieve this purpose.
As we had the opportunity to understand in this video, Stone operations were founded on very clear and simple principles: to provide the best client experience possible while pursuing our operational excellence, and do it all with simplicity, for both our operation and mainly for our clients. Having the tech-first approach since the beginning was very important to make the creation of this moat possible. We created three main operational platforms, technological platforms for our operations: Marco Polo, Green App, and One. Marco Polo is our platform for sales and distribution. It helps us to manage our sales territories across Brazil, the sales pipelines, the clients' portfolio, and their whole life cycle. It plays a very important role to increase the productivity of our sales force. Green App is our platform for logistics operations.
It has it supports our whole logistics operations throughout Brazil, with capabilities that range from supply chain management through last-mile logistics management. It plays a very important role to keep our delivery times low. We have One, which is our platform for client services. It enables us to service our clients through multiple channels, including chatbots, and empower our Enchanterss to be very effective while solving client issues. Here, our main goal is to solve clients' issues as fast as possible, while sustaining high satisfaction rates from our clients. We have organized a demonstration to show how all of this works in practice. The first demo is on how we onboard a client to Stone. We are going to use only illustrative data during this demonstration, and we have developed a comprehensive system to manage the whole onboarding cycle of a client to Stone.
From deciding where to open a hub, to then deciding which clients to prospect, to then finally pricing and affiliating the new merchant to Stone. It all starts with the system we built to manage our sales territories and distribute the sales territories across Brazil. As you can see, we have already deployed several hubs and franchises throughout Brazil. For every one of them, we have designed sales routes, which are smaller territories that our sales agents are assigned to. Those sales routes are designed considering market share and active client base data. With these metrics, we know exactly where we need to allocate our sales agents and our sales routes to get the best results and the right size our sales force. After we deploy our sales force to the territories across Brazil, we start our lead prospecting process.
We have very detailed information of SMB merchants in Brazil that do not use Stone solutions yet, so we can go after them to increase our market share. We also have very detailed information of the active clients at Linx, so we can go after them to increase our cross-sell metrics. To effectively go after the correct SMB merchants, every sales agent at Stone has a very detailed information of the market share and cross-sell opportunities within their sales territories. So we provide them with simple and direct lists of clients they need to go after, so we reduce the time spent on non-target leads. The active client base landscape varies a lot across territories, and for us, it's very important to guarantee that our sales agents have clear priorities.
So for example, how to decide if we need to go after a new lead or we need to go after a retention alert for a current client, or to go after an upsell opportunity? All of our sales agents and hub leaders, sales leaders at all, they have access to a system in which they can plan their activities for the week. In this system, they have access to our central suggestions of basically what to do, so we can take into account all these factors: most profitable leads, most profitable retention alerts, most profitable upsell opportunities, and taking it all into account to optimize the planning of our sales force, so we can maximize our results. Moving on, we are going to now see one of the core features of our sales platform.
Every sales agent in our team has access in real time to their sales pipeline and full clients portfolio. This allows us to continually track our clients' engagement with Stone. Also, our team has access to very specific information, such as, for example, if our clients have a current open credit offering or they are great potential cross-sell opportunities within Linx. Now, we are going to see a very important part of our sales platform. Whenever we reach a client, we have the opportunity to present to them price offerings from Stone. Our pricing methodology considers very specific requisites to generate an offering for a client. For example, we take into account the location of the merchant, its TPV, its industry or segment, and even who is the sales agent that is currently pricing that merchant.
When we have this information, we are capable of generating multiple pricing offerings detailed for this merchant. As of now, bundled with payments, Pix, banking, and we are evolving this. As soon as the client chooses one of the offerings, our sales agent closes the deal and welcomes the new merchant to Stone. After the sale, the setup is very simple. Our sales agent can have a POS with himself and immediately set up the POS for the merchant. In this case, our merchant can use the POS immediately and start right away accepting credit card payments, using our banking account, and accepting Pix payments.
The other option, which is more common, is that the agent will request a Green Angel to complete the setup, and through the integration between Marco Polo and Green App, our logistics operation will immediately receive a request that will allocate the nearest Green Angel to complete the setup in the same day or in the next one. That's what you can see on the screen on the right here, which is a print of the integration between Green App and Marco Polo. We have seen here various steps on how we decide to open a hub, and then we go after the client. But all of this process is supported by a robust management system.
All of our sales leadership has access to multiple real-time dashboards in which they can keep track in detail of all of our sales goals, targets, so they can act on the levers we are not performing well. Additionally, our logistics operation also has precise controls over thousands of deliveries we do every single day. In the logistics systems, we invest a lot on how to optimize the delivery routes of our Green Angels, as you can see on this print screen here. This is very important to maintain high SLA levels, to keep delivery times low, and to prioritize emergency deliveries when needed. In this first demonstration, we could see how we strategically deploy technology and our operation to bring new clients to Stone.
Now, we are going through the second demonstration, in which we will show how we solve clients' issues when they reach out to us. The first way is when the client reaches out to our sales agents in the hubs or in the franchises. So our clients can reach out to our sales agents to solve any day-to-day concerns. And through Marco Polo, our sales agents have access to the full spectrum of information regarding the life cycle of the client. Since historical CRM interactions or the profitability, detailed profitability for each product, they can keep track of the interactions with the client services team, and they can even request services. So, for example, if the client reaches out to the sales agent because he has a problem with the POS device, the sales agents, through Marco Polo, can immediately request the service order for the Green Angel.
The other option is to service our clients through chatbots. So as we saw in the video, our chatbots are available 24/7, and they are effective, because they have information regarding the clients, they have access to the information, and they have authorization to perform actions with security. Brazil is a very conversational country, so a significant number of our clients prefer to reach out to us through WhatsApp or chat. That makes our chatbots a convenient solution for both our operation and for our clients. In the micro segment, as we saw earlier with Lino, our chatbots retain the majority of requests and issues, which drastically reduces our cost of services for this segment. Additionally to our chatbots and our sales agents in the hubs and franchises, our clients can rely on the expertise of our Enchanterss.
Our Enchanterss, they are also available 24/7 through all the channels: phone, chat, WhatsApp, email. In other words, our clients can choose to contact us in their preferred manner. Our unified platform, which is One, has one of the, its core features, that is to make it seamless to service them through any channel. Additionally to this, as soon as an Enchanters answers the phone or answers the chat or answers the WhatsApp for a client, all the information regarding the client pops out in the screen of our Enchanters. This makes us very effective to solve their issues quickly, because we reduce the time spent on investigations or data gathering to solve the issue. As we saw in Marco Polo, our Enchanterss also have access to the full spectrum of information here.
We still see a lot of room to grow productivity in our operations using artificial intelligence tools, more specifically, generative AI, and we gave a first important step in our client services team. So our agents, through One, can also turn long conversations into short summaries that are stored in the historical data of our clients. This increases our productivity and elevates the quality of the data we have stored regarding our clients, because those summaries are very precise. So in the second demonstration, we could see how we solve our clients' issues fast and maintain high satisfaction rates from our clients.
To wrap up this module, I would like to go through some key messages that I have already said here. It took a lot of time to reach this level of effectiveness and simplicity in our operation. Took a lot of time, investment, efforts. This is precisely why it is so hard to replicate. The second key message here is that we plan to continue scaling our products to new clients and roll out our new solutions to our existing ones through this platform very easily, because we can use the platform that we, we have already built.
And looking ahead, we plan to, as we, as I said before, we still see a lot of room to grow productivity with AI, so we plan to go in this direction, and we also plan to expand our operations platform ecosystem to new parties, such as Sales Linx, Linx-linked sales channels and our integrated partners. We plan to go in this direction, so we can get even more clients and delight them even more. Now we will have a 20-minute break, and after the break, we are going for our financial outlook module with Mateus. Thank you very much.
Well, hello and good afternoon to everyone. As we are approaching the end of the event, I would like to start by thanking everyone for being here. We're really glad that you all came. For those that don't know me yet, my name is Mateus. I joined the company back in 2015, when we were still a really young company. Since then, I served on various roles across the company before having the opportunity to lead our finance function as the Company CFO. Today, I'll be presenting about our financial outlook. But before doing so, I'd like to start by reviewing a few key takeaways from our financial journey to date. Today, you heard from my colleagues the fact that we developed a strong growth engine in our company throughout our journey.
We achieved this by offering the best services and solutions to our clients, while investing to improve our operational model, investing in new distribution channels, and unlocking new addressable markets. To put the number into perspective, when we compare the numbers for the third quarter of 2023 to the numbers we had in the third quarter of 2018, just before our company did its IPO, we can see that during that period, we grew our TPV by five times, and our revenues grew 8-fold. I think the fact that we developed this strong growth engine is often underappreciated when assessing our financial journey. But what's more important to me is that our growth has been achieved while historically maintaining a strong commitment towards strong monetization and good unit economics.
This can be seen by the level of take rates our company has been able to sustain throughout its journey, even while relying mostly on payments as a monetization lever, which, as you'll see, it's no longer a reality. By combining strong growth with good unit economics, we built a business that has been historically profitable, but even more importantly, cash-generating throughout our journey. And there is still room for significant financial improvement. Historically, our company has placed more emphasis on the speed of growth rather than cost efficiency and expense management. Only recently, we started to implement new initiatives in the company towards tighter cost controls, which we're already starting to see the benefits. But as we're going to show, we are still in the early beginnings of that journey towards enhanced profitability.
So as we move to our financial outlook, I would like you to keep these four key elements of our journey in mind as we move forward, because they will continue to be important drivers for our growth going ahead. First, the growth engine we have developed still remains in place, and this is what will drive us towards winning MSMBs. Second, our commitment towards monetization is also in place, and now we'll be equipped with a broader set of monetization tools at our disposal. Third, while speed remains essential, cost efficiency will now rise as a crucial pillar in our journey ahead. By combining these three factors, we can ensure that we have a business that continues to grow its profitability and cash generation over time. So with that, let's move to our financial outlook.
You've heard from Lia and Pedro today on our three strategic priorities. When framing how to provide our financial outlook, we thought about linking strategy to finance, showing the main financial drivers and financial impacts from each one of our strategic pillars. Our first strategic priority is to winning MSMBs, like you've heard many times today. In that journey, two very important success metrics will be our ability to continue to grow our MSMB TPV and gain market share, and now, also our ability to grow the level of client deposits. Our second priority is to drive more engagement with our clients. This connects with our continued commitment towards a strong monetization. If we are successful in that journey, the rates will rise over time.
And now, as we revamp our credit product, the growth in our credit portfolio also becomes another important source of monetization going ahead. Our third strategic priority is to scale through platforms in a way that we generate additional operational leverage in our business. In that, we expect our Adjusted Net Income growth to significantly outpace the growth in our MSMB TPV going ahead. While our operation and the foundational assets we have in place will drive most of the profitability expansion, at this time, we're also going to control administrative expenses in a tighter way, generating further operational leverage in this line. Now, by executing on these strategic and financial pillars, we can guarantee that our business remains profitable and cash generation in our journey, and in the end of the day, that will enable us to maintain a robust capital structure and generate increased shareholder value.
Now, we'll deep dive in each one of those strategic pillars, providing you with not only the financial goals from our strategic plan, but also what we think are the key reasons to believe in our, in our ability to execute on those targets. Let's dive deeper in the first priority, to grow the base and winning MSMBs. When we look at third quarter 2023 results, our company has just released that we were able to grow 20% year-on-year on MSMB TPVs. We showed throughout the day the fact that we believe we have a unique set of distribution channels and a unique operational model. We believe that these factors combined will enable us to grow at a very similar pace next year, reaching for BRL 112 billion in TPV MSMB. As we're also going to show, our distribution models are far from saturation.
That's why we believe we can compound our growth rate in TPV MSMB at 13% per year between 2024 and 2027, reaching upwards of 600 billion BRL in MSMB TPV by then. We also showed throughout the day that we completely integrated our banking and payments platform in a way that as we grow TPV MSMB, we unlock the growth in client deposits. To that end, as we evolve in the efforts to drive more engagement in these solutions and release new features, we expect the growth in our clients' deposits to significantly outpace the growth in MSMB TPV by a factor of more than two times as we move ahead. This will drive our clients' deposits to grow to 14 billion BRL by 2027, effectively tripling from the current figures.
Now, as we reflect on what are the reasons to believe we're going to be able to achieve those goals, we wanted to share four main messages that you might have heard from today's presentations. First one, in regards to our distribution channel, we believe we are still far from saturation. Second, we have a big TPV pool within our software business, and now that we have decided to prioritize our four key verticals, we believe we have the right setup to seize this opportunity. Third, in regards to banking, we are still in the early beginnings of the journey. And fourth, while not being a financial metric, we consistently have the best service in the industry, and we believe this is a key enabler for our future growth.
Now, when we say that our operational model is far from saturation, you've already heard from Gisele and Lino today, that we now have a national footprint in regards to distribution, that covers more than 90% of the cities in Brazil, and more than 99.7% of Brazil's country's service GDP. But what's more important is that when we look across our geographies, all of our territories continue to grow across the board, regardless of their maturity level. In this page, we show two critical pieces of data. The bar chart delineates our market penetration across our regions in Brazil. As you can see, in most regions, we have between 10%-20% in market penetration. Yet, in more than a quarter of our territories, our market penetration extends beyond 20%.
But what's more important is that our growth is the fastest where our presence is the strongest. This can be seen, for example, when looking at the TPV growth for the regions in which we have between 25%-30%, which was of 36% year-on-year. This is not a coincidence. By sustaining superior service, as our distribution channels mature, they continuously yield higher productivity, and also unlock powerful word-of-mouth effects that unlocks further growth. This, in our view, is the first reason to believe in our MSMB TPV growth targets. Now, you've also heard today that we decided to prioritize four key verticals within our software business. Within those verticals, Lia has already shown that there is a substantial TPV pool. Now that we have realigned our organizational structure, we believe we have the right setup to seize this TPV pool.
To give more perspective on this fact, let me remind you that within our priority verticals, we have a TPV pool of BRL 236 billion. This is comparable in size to our overall MSMB TPV business. But when we look at the current penetration, we still only have 8% of this TPV pool, which showcases that now that we have a unique value proposition to address these verticals, we can unlock another significant TPV growth avenue, and I think this is the second reason to believe in our TPV growth targets. Now, let's move to banking. To date, Guga has explained that we have completely integrated our payments and banking offering in a way that as we grow MSMB TPV, we automatically unlock the growth in client deposits. And the growth in our client deposits extends beyond the growth in our MSMB TPV.
When we look over the past two years, we saw a significant uptick in client engagement, as measured between the ratio from deposits to TPV, which grew from 2.9% in the third quarter of 2021, up to 5% in the third quarter of 2023. As we release new feature and create more price bundles, we believe the engagement with our banking solution is going to continue to increase, driving our growth in client deposits. To that end, we expect to reach BRL 7 billion in deposits by the end of next year, and BRL 14 billion in deposits by the end of 2027, effectively tripling deposits from the current figures. Like I said, this is only possible because we continue to sustain the best service in the industry.
As you see, our company, since the inception, has continuously sustained the best customer service ratings in the market, as measured by Reclame Aqui, the biggest benchmark portal for client feedback in Brazil. The gap versus our peers continues to be very substantial. Like I said, even though this is not a financial metric, we believe this is a key factor in our growth journey going ahead. Now, let's move towards monetization. While growing the base by itself would already be a powerful driver for top-line growth, by enhancing the level of engagement our clients have with our solutions, we can accelerate this trend.
As we deepen the level of engagement with our solutions, we not only offer our clients a better value proposition, but we also unlock a broader set of monetization tools, upon which we can build price bundles, improve unit economics, and add to overall profitability. While take rates are dependent on many variables, including client mix and macroeconomic conditions, by executing on this strategy and enhancing the level of engagement with our solutions, we believe we'll be able to maintain take rates for the next year flat, despite falling rates, and to increase it by more than 20 basis points by 2027. Also, while our monetization strategy is no longer reliant on credit, we know that by managing our portfolio in a careful and disciplined way, we can significantly enhance our unit economics and add to our overall profitability.
To that end, we expect our credit portfolio to grow to BRL 800 million by the end of next year, and upwards of BRL 5.5 billion by the end of 2027. Now, as we reflect on what are the reasons to believe in this take rate increase, I want to remind you a piece of data that Lia has just shown in the beginning of the presentation. We can already see in our base that clients that we call heavy users, who use more than three solutions, have significantly better economics than clients that use less solutions. Also, the percentage of these merchants is improving in our base very rapidly.
To remind you of the data, when we compare the ARPAC from heavy users versus the remainder of the base, we can see that these heavy users generate more than two times as much ARPAC as the others. Also, the potential to improve engagement in our base is still huge. We still can address 79% of our base, which currently still uses less solutions. Finally, not only is the percentage of merchants engaged increasing the overall base, but more and more, we are being able to onboard merchants already using multiple solutions. This speak to the early success of our bundle offerings, and the number of products that we have at our disposal.
So as we move ahead, we expect the contribution from new solutions to our overall take rates to increase and to drive us towards our take rate goals. Now, let's move to credit. Throughout the day, you've seen our efforts to completely revamp our credit offering. I've also shown you that we expect to grow our credit portfolio to BRL 800 million by the end of next year, and by upwards of BRL 5.5 billion by the end of 2027. Needless to say, the potential to expand credit portfolio is very huge, with merchants requiring working capital solutions to run their businesses. We also believe that our operational model provide us with an edge to scale credit in a responsible and profitable manner, and this is due to the fact that we have proximity and solutions that combine payments, software, banking, and credit.
The issues we faced in our first credit attempt, in our view, were related to execution problems and not to our overall strategy. Because we understand the importance of transparency, especially in this area, we wanted to share with you the initial figures we have been seeing since resuming our credit offering. While it is still early to draw any definitive conclusions, our preliminary data suggests that when we look at the observations for the NPL, 30 days for each cohorts, 3 months since inception, we see a delay rate between 2% and 3%. Given the short-term nature of our loans, which have a 12-month maturity, this puts us in the right track to deliver expected losses below 10%. Given the rates we charge, this puts us in the right track to have a very profitable credit product as we move ahead.
Now, when assessing the portfolio as a whole, NPLs falling between 15 and 90 days, it still remains very low, at 0.5%. Also, NPLs over 90 days, it still remains virtually nonexistent. We know that these rates can be affected by the rate at which we grow our portfolio going ahead. But going forward, this will remain the norm in our disclosures, and given that this is a standard market metric, this will offer you a clear metric to gauge our performance as we evolve in this offering. Now, before moving over to operational leverage, I wanted to emphasize the importance of prudence in our approach to credit underwriting. Despite the early indicators, we are fully aware of the complexities involved in this process. Credit underwriting is a journey that requires patience, and cautious, and careful navigation.
This time, we're taking the conservative approach, choosing to err on the side of caution rather than the side of risk. With that, we covered the main drivers behind our top-line expansion. Now, let's move to our third priority, which is to gain operational leverage by scaling through platforms. In that, we expect our Adjusted Net Income growth to significantly outpace the growth in our MSMB TPV going ahead, reaching BRL 1.9 billion in Adjusted Net Income for 2024, and BRL 4- and 4.3 billion in Adjusted Net Income by 2027. Also, I mentioned earlier today that we are implementing tighter controls over expense management and cost optimization. This speaks to our guidance of administrative expenses, which we believe will grow closely aligned with inflation going ahead, not surpassing BRL 1.45 billion by 2027.
As we reflect on the reasons why we believe we're going to achieve operational leverage and improve profitability, we want to focus on key main message. First, we developed what we call foundational assets, upon which we are growing at very low marginal costs. Second, as we implement more cost discipline towards the company, we're going to gain additional operational leverage in that line, aiding to overall profitability. Now, to give you more color on what we call foundational assets, let me guide you to our first foundational assets, which is our logistics platform. Like we showed in the videos earlier today, over the past 10 years, we have consistently and steadily invested to establish our logistics footprint. Now that this infrastructure is in place, we have been able to scale with diminishing costs as we grow the base.
To give you more color on that fact, over the past three years, our logistics cost per client has decreased by 16% while we grew our base. I think this showcases our ability to enjoy economies of scale as we scale our base and be more efficient in our logistics footprint. The second foundational asset we have in place is what we call our client service platform. Our approach to client service was not designed towards just minimizing costs, but rather towards providing superior service. Our rationale was deeply rooted in the belief that preventing issues is better than fixing them. So historically, we invested in what could be perceived as an overqualified team, but we believe that by eliminating reasons for our clients to contact us, we could sustain superior service in a very efficient manner.
The results from that strategy are starting to show in our P&L. When you look over the past 3 years, our customer service cost per client has decreased by about 44% on a unitary basis. I think the main notice here is that this was driven by the fact that our clients have less and less reasons to contact us, and that's why, over this period, we have been able to sustain our historical customer satisfaction levels. When we put all of this together, over time, we have been able to decrease our tech by 9%, while we improved our contribution margin by 2.4 times. This was driven by the synergies between our growth, monetization, and efficiency initiatives.
Our contribution margin, for example, was driven both by, by our monetization and by the improvements we had in our client service and logistics platform. Now, I've already said many times that while this operational levers will continue to be the main drivers behind our expansion, given that historically we had placed more emphasis towards the speed of growth rather than efficiency, we realized that there was still a substantial opportunity to improve margins through cost efficiency. After the fourth quarter of 2022, we started to implement a series of initiatives in our company in the form of zero-based budgeting, implementation of shared service center, and more recently, the integration of our software business, that have started to yield results.
When we look at our administrative expenses from the fourth quarter of 2022 until the last quarter we just released, we see a reduction of over BRL 50 million per quarter, which has already benefited our margins by three percentage points. As we move ahead, we fully expect this trend to continue, and that's why we're guiding that the growth in administrative expenses should remain closely aligned with inflation as we move ahead, driving margin expansion. Now, to wrap up our long-term targets, I would like to share a few messages. First one, we have a strong growth machine in place that we believe is going to continue to drive us into winning market share and growing. Second, we now have a broader set of monetization tools that extends beyond payments, and this is at our disposal to enhance our profitability.
Third, by combining our operational model with a greater focus on efficiency, we believe we can drive our profitability up by more than 2 times in the next 4 years. And with that, we believe our company is uniquely positioned to drive strong returns to our shareholders. Now, to finish it up, as we advance towards our goals, like I said in the beginning, we've always had a company that has been profitable and cash-generating, and we expect this trend to continue, with the gains in profitability driving more cash flow gains. To that end, the discussion of what we're going to do with that capital remains increasingly important. We believe that maintaining a robust capital structure in Brazil is paramount. So maintaining a strong balance sheet will continue to be priority number 1.
But as our business evolves and generates cash in excess of debt, we will always choose capital allocation alternatives as to what we believe increases shareholder value. That connects, that connects to the buyback plan that we just announced and fully executed of BRL 300 million, and also with the buyback plan of up to BRL 1 billion that we announced for the market yesterday. So with that, I would like to call Pedro back to the stage for closing remarks before we jump into Q&A. Thank you.
Well, it's been a long morning in some ways, and as we conclude today's event, I think I want to express and say a special thank you to the Stone team. I think none of this would be possible without the work that you guys did. I think it was amazing. So from the bottom of my heart, I really appreciate it, and I'd like you to extend my thank you to all the team. Thank you very much. It was amazing. I'd also like to thank all of you for participating in our first Stone Day. I think the last one we had was when we did our IPO. I think it was an amazing opportunity to have all the investors together, analysts, potential investors.
The real idea behind Investor Day is to provide you more visibility in terms of our strategy, what are the key levers and competitive advantages that we have within our plan, and how we're gonna evolve over time. The idea is really to provide this and make this as a continued process over the next coming years. I think another big important piece of getting together today was really to show up the team. I think we have... I started the conversation as of today, talking about the quality of the people and the brainpower that we have within Stone.
I think this is a very sincere statement, and the idea is really to have you guys to engage more and have the chance of meeting the leaders that we have within the company, because these are really the people that will make the difference and will get us there. And last but not least, I'd like to wish you all happy holidays. We're gonna engage in our Q&A session right after this presentation, so happy holidays, and thank you for being here today. It was amazing. Thank you.
Yes. two minutes. They're gonna do the setup for the Q&A, okay? In the meantime, I'll just remind everyone, the ones here in person for sure, you just need to raise your hands. We'll have mics, like, the IR team, Julia and Carol, they'll be walking around with the mics. For the ones that are at home following us through the webcast, we have already received a certain number of questions. We'll try to mix a little bit, you know, get some from the in-person audience, some from the webcast. But if you still want to send us, we are receiving your questions, okay? Thank you. So
Roberto
I sit in the middle?
Sit on here.
Yeah. Okay, fantastic! Now that we found the chairs, let's get started. Do you have questions here in the audience?
Many.
Oh, fantastic, many. We start here with Mario, and then we go in this direction.
Hi, this is Mario Pierry from Bank of America. Thank you for your presentation, very insightful. I would like to focus more on the cost side, because I think this is where you can control, right? The TPV can depend on the market, et cetera. So when you talk about cost optimization, can you elaborate a little bit more between headcount? You know, when we look at your headcount relative to your peers, you're much higher. If you can discuss a little bit, headcount per hub. How do you see opportunities between reducing costs in the software business versus the financial services? Also, if you can discuss a little bit on your guidance about the CapEx necessary to achieve such goals, especially on volumes, you know, POS, you know, sales or POS, and if you can expand on that. Thank you.
Thank you, Mario. Maybe I can start by the last part about CapEx, and then we talk about cost optimization. So regarding CapEx, I think the message here is very similar to what we previously said in our last earnings call. When we look at the general trends in CapEx over the past two, two or three years, I think the company has been increasing its efficiency, as measured between the relationship between CapEx and revenues, which have decreased by over two percentage points. And we see the current level of CapEx that we have now as a stable levels that will enable us to keep growing. I think something that we have highlighted over the day is what we call scale through platforms.
It speaks to the fact that over the past many years, we put a lot of capital towards building logistics, client service, our technology platforms with banking, credit, and so on. And I think as we move ahead, we see the investments that we still need to make as being incremental. So we don't expect any big changes when we look at the trend for CapEx going forward. I think this is the first part of the question. Second part of the question regarding cost optimization, I think when we look at our plan, I would break down the enhancement in profitability that we can have line by line.
So when we look at the general trend in cost to serve, we highlighted that with logistics and client service, for example, which are two very big costs for us, we have been able to grow with diminishing incremental costs. I think this trend we expect to continue to fully taking place, so this will drive efficiency in our cost to serve as we move ahead. The only different factor here that we didn't have in the past is that as we scale our credit portfolio, we have provisions in the cost to serve, so this might offset some of those gains. Then most of the profitability expansion, looking from a margin perspective, will come in the form of administrative expenses, because in the end of the day, when we monetize our TPV better towards banking and credit, we dilute that line.
We see that given the initiatives we have in place, not only in the financial services segment, but also in software, then maybe Sandro can answer that. We're going to be able to control that line more going ahead, ensuring that the growth is not significantly above inflation. Of course, the business still needs a lot of investments going forward, but the idea here is to gain efficiency, so that we offset some of that needed growth with other levers in the company. I don't know if you want to answer.
No, I think you touched most of the points. I agree with Mateus. I think on the software side, I think there are many initiatives we put in place within Stone, like the shared service and the ZBB, which have not been implemented into the software business. So we're gonna deploy this, and we're gonna see efficiency increasing over time. But, I think you touched the key, the main pain points.
What about headcount or hubs?
Want to start?
Sure, I can start. You're right that when you compare headcount, we do have a much higher headcount than the other players. But I think the main reason for that is because we took the decision of having a verticalized operation when others have a lot of third-party services. So when we look at our logistics footprint, client service, and distribution, this amounts to the vast majority of personnel expenses within the company. And in those lines, we believe that despite having a higher headcount, we are very efficient. I think we showed that today. So there is still improvements to come when we look to personnel expenses, but they are more in the form of unifying processes that we have decentralized in the company. This is what the shared service-
Yeah
Center is about, and less so about, pure headcount reduction-
Yeah
Like you see in other places.
Can I add on? I think Mario also alluded to headcount and hubs, right? So maybe thoughts on that. Like I think it was obvious in the presentation, we already have a significant level of coverage through our hub operations. But most importantly, even the hubs that were more mature in terms of penetration, we continue to grow. So because we have the ability to take this very granular approach of our penetration in each part of the market
this allows us to be very precise in saying this specific region has room for more agents. And so we'll continue to make those decisions, because we're seeing healthy returns on the selling, the investments that we do in selling. Although most of the distribution footprint is already in place, that doesn't mean that we won't continue to hire agents where we see opportunities to do so. I think that's the message around hub headcount.
Sure. Sorry, I'll take one from each side.
Hi, thank you. Thanks for the presentation. That was great. I'm Jorge Kuri from Morgan Stanley. I wanted to ask you two questions about your net income guidance for 2027. How is management compensation tied up to this specific number, if any? And then the second question is, you evidently have seen the consensus number for 2027 is BRL 2.1 billion. So you're like well ahead of that. Help us understand what bridges that gap. You know, how much of the delta from the current run rate to the BRL 4.3 billion is the new credit solution? How much is the monetization of the banking part, which I'm guessing is the monetization of the deposits?
How much is the software, and how much continues to be the prepayment of credit card receivables? Especially given that, you know, it just feels that that's maybe not a business that's sustainable over the long term. I mean, evidently, it's probably not gonna change in this regulatory inquiry, but I think this just has become an issue where it seems like it's unsustainable over the long term. So how are you trying to, like, move away from that? Thanks.
Maybe I can jump in on the first part of the question. I think management compensation is linked to the plan that we just disclosed in 2024. So short-term compensation is aligned in terms of what we call global goals for 2024. So short-term compensation is linked to the KPIs we just provided to the market. Long-term incentives are linked to the 2027 guidance we just gave in terms of restricted stock units and performance stock units. So management compensation is really tied to the plan we just announced.
Maybe I can add on the second part of the question. So we did see the consensus at BRL 2.1 billion, but if you look at the third quarter 2023 numbers already, the company reported BRL 435 million in net income, which when we annualize, we are already at BRL 1.74 billion, give or take, in terms of run rate. So first message here is that only by increasing MSMB take rates, which were almost doubling until 2027, when you combine this with controlling administrative expenses, you have most of the way, mapped there. Then when you think about monetization, think even internally, we don't look, at the PNL for each product separate from one the other.
What we try to see is how much is our relationship with our client worth and how we can better manage those lines given that we have this relationship. So the message here, I think we don't see like prepayment rates versus MDR rates versus credit income as we move ahead. What we do have confidence is that given that we're currently able to monetize our MSMB take rates, our MSMB TPV by 2.39%, which is the take rate, as we advance on the engagement with banking and credit, we believe that with those solutions, we can increment it by at least 21 basis points.
If you do some backwards engineering that number, I think you'll see that only by monetizing banking through flows and with very reasonable assumptions in credit, we're still being very conservative on what we call our current take rates, the current levers that we have. And I think that is a place where execution might differ from the plan. When we look ahead, we're really conservative in terms of building that up in the plan, but in execution, our approach to pricing, I think we explained a few times, which is based on internal return hurdles and also what we're seeing in the market. So we're going to remain disciplined, and even though our plan assumes some room to manage the relationship, I think the execution, we're going to have to continue to price discipline as we move ahead.
Tito?
Hi, thank you. Tito Labarta from Goldman Sachs. A couple questions, if I can. One, I guess a little bit of a follow-up to Jorge's on, you know, thinking about the take rate and the evolution. How do you factor in sort of the competitive environment? You mentioned, Mateus, I think, you know, stable take rates for next year despite lower rates.
Mm-hmm.
Do you see potentially take rates coming down as rates come down? And then also on, I guess, on the competitive environment, you mentioned MSMB TPV growth of 13%, industry is growing maybe a little bit below that, so it does assume some type of market share gains. Maybe what do you assume for the industry, in that, and, and how do you see the competitive markets or dynamics evolving between incumbent players, other disruptive players like you? And just the last thing, do you factor in financial expenses coming down as well with lower rates, just to see how it factors into the guidance? Thank you.
Yep. Maybe I start from the last question as well, and then Lia maybe can comment on the competitive landscape. In regards to macroeconomic assumptions in the plan, we just updated with the latest market data from October. So our assumptions for yield curve and inflation rates are what's implied in the curves as the end of October, which I believe it's 11.7% in terms of interest rates going forward. So there's not a big assumption in terms of falling rates and increasing spreads, quite to the opposite. And then in regards to what we assume, our plan is conservative by nature when we look at take rates, so we do have some room for decreases, stable decreases to decline over time, but the contribution from new products more than offsets the trend in our plan.
Yeah, I think what I would add in terms of competitive dynamics, Tito, is what I believe we say almost every earnings call. Competitive dynamics hasn't really changed for us. If anything, the market is much more rational, and as Mateus said, right, we will maintain our pricing discipline as we move ahead. And what is implied in the plan is that regardless of which levers we use to price the relationship with our clients, we're gonna maintain the same healthy return hurdles that we have done so as we grow. I think that our ability to continue to grow and gain share is something that we have proven we can do.
The implied TPV growth, the TPV growth implied in the guidance, this is a growth that we believe is above the growth of the market. We're not disclosing estimates on market growth because we don't want to get into that realm. But we do expect the market to grow below the guidance of TPV that we are giving, which implies that within the MSMB segment, we will continue to gain share. So I think that's the message around competitive dynamics and how we see that moving ahead.
Now we will take a question from Yuri, and then I will get one from the webcast.
Good to go back.
Can you hear me? I was going to ask the industry growth, but Lia already replied my
I already said I'm not gonna answer.
We're not gonna share. What is the 13%, comparison to the industry? So on expenses, maybe for Mateus, when I look here for the third quarter, the run rate during the annualization here on your run rate versus 2020-2024 expenses guidance, going back to Mario's, question as well, I see an implied 15% growt for, for the next year. What is that? Like, should we see a bump on expense in the fourth Q? Like, should we not annualize the third Q, expenses guidance? That's the first one. And on deposits, when we look to the BRL 14 billion guidance you have for total deposits, what is the mix of interest-earning, interest-paying deposits? How much is demand deposits? Just to try to understand the floating, that I think it's a powerful driver on there. Thank you.
Yeah. Well, again, start from the last one. So when you look at deposits, different from other peers, in our history, most of our deposit is non-interest bearing, and that continues to be the assumption for the, the plan. I think earlier in the presentation, Cury has highlighted the fact that we are experimenting with, time deposits as well, creating what we call the Cofrinhos or the automated savings offering. I think the right way to think about that in our plan it is that, as we launch this solution, this is going to be additive to the, the guidance that we are providing in terms of volume.
And then to the second part of the question regarding expenses, you're right, the run rate for administrative expenses, it's, it's slightly lower than BRL 1 billion in the third quarter. We do have some seasonality for administrative expenses in the fourth Q. That was the case for the previous year as well. We're not expecting to be a huge bump, but that explains why when you compare the 15 or 10-15% implied growth versus the run rate, it seems to increase more than inflation. In reality, I think the growth will be closely aligned with inflation, a little bit beyond.
Very good. So I, I think like we have already addressed some of the questions from the audience that's following us on the webcast. But there are like three different questions regarding the same topic, which has to do with the fact that we have already grown in the domestic markets. And they are questioning if we think about internationalization, going abroad, especially Latin, if we're considering any expansion plans on this sense.
Well, I'll be very blunt in some ways. I think in the plan that we just released, there is no consideration in terms of expansion into international markets, right? I think I think there are many opportunities on the domestic market yet. I think we have an amazing plan and we have to focus on the execution, right? I think what I believe we should not be doing is trying to engage in too many venues or too many opportunities at the same time. It's really focused on delivering what we're promising. But having said that, I think we always have to be open for optionalities that might come abroad. So if there is a good opportunity, I think we're gonna have to evaluate. If it is accretive, we're gonna move ahead. As of today, the plan that you've seen, that's what we have within the domestic market.
Thank you. I think, I have lost count here. I am not sure I-
Neha has a question.
Yes. And then, we go, Sheriq
Sure
And, here. Is that okay? Please, Neha, then we.
Hi, thank you so much. So two questions. First, on the prepayment business, I think following the Jorge Kuri's question, I don't think that was very clear. How do you tackle the long-term headwind of regulatory changes in the prepayment business? Maybe not in this cycle, there's no change in that, but what do you include in your guidance of the 2.7% take rate in 2023 and 2027? Do you expect some pressure from the regulatory side on the prepayment business? Is that already included? So just a little bit more, if you could zoom in on the 2.7% take rate that you mentioned for 2027.
If you could break it down, just, very generically, maybe 50% of that is coming from payments, 20% coming from software, 30% coming from credit, or any kind of rough breakdown. What is included, what is not included? Where is the upside, where is the downside to your numbers? Like you mentioned, financial expenses coming down is an upside to your numbers, which you have not baked in with the, with the current assumptions. So any, any more color on that would be very helpful. Thank you.
I think there's two parts to the question. First is assumption on regulatory, and then the second is, take rates, right? I don't know, you want to take, or maybe call
Vinicius.
Vinicius.
You want to join us and maybe talk a bit about the regulatory environment back in Brazil?
Carol.
Well, for those that don't know, I think it's better if you introduce yourself. Yeah, absolutely. My name is Vinícius Carrasco. I lead the regulatory affairs and economic research teams in Stone, and there's... I'm at Stone since 2018. And on the regulatory issue you brought, we don't believe there will be changes, because any attempt would face strong opposition from clients, from customers, from merchants, from congressmen, from pretty much all the society. This is one point. The second point, there's no technical reason to believe there will be changes. So first of all, banks themselves, they can restrict or increase the number of installments of a transaction. There's no need to have some sort of coordination, kind of, implied by a change in regulation.
So we believe that such a change would be really a form of restricting competition. Secondly, there's no evidence whatsoever on the relationship between delinquency and installments. Quite the opposite. If any, transactors that are paying installments more often, often they, you know, they default less. And third, and related to the first point, the impact on consumption would be huge. I guess that's why we would see stronger position. So, we really don't believe there will be changes.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Then if I may add on the
Thank you, Vinicius.
Take rate question. Again, we really don't look at take rates from a revenue line perspective, we look at the whole relationship. But I think some important factors to highlight are, first of all, we don't include software revenues in our take rates, so that's definitely an upside as we create the manual offerings. And also, last quarter, we started to disclose, Pix TPV, but this is not included in the guidance for MSMB TPV that we just provided. So we're only talking about current TPV in this guidance. Of course, we are monetizing and improving our, Pix TPV as well, but this can be seen as an upside to that number as we move ahead.
Yeah.
I can just follow up on that. How do you see Pix from a medium-term perspective? More in the sense you have some players like Nubank doing Pix financing. So essentially, they're moving the revenues, which would stay with the acquirers, is now going to players like Nubank. So if there's more and more adoption of things like this, like people purchasing from Pix, getting a discount, and doing financing through the bank, do you see that adoption increasing further, and do you see that as a risk for the acquiring business? Thank you so much.
Yeah. So I'll elaborate a little bit on Pix, and I think maybe Vinicius would want to come back and be much more technical than I will be. But this is our stance on Pix Parcelado as a solution. The economic logic behind Pix Parcelado has been around for decades. It's called Parcelado Emissor. From the perspective of risk, that means giving credit to consumers, right? We've seen, for example, some players with some solutions where they bridge both sides of the market, and then you can create these cross-subsidy effects that Vinicius can talk a lot about. But for that to happen, you really need to bridge, and you need to reach merchants, and you need to reach consumers.
And the models that we have seen, they do this basically within the online space, where it's easier to do that 'cause you can partner with platforms that will make that connection. In the brick-and-mortar space, we see that as a much bigger challenge because of the challenge of distribution that we talked a lot about today. So I think that in our perspective, Pix overall, we do think that it will increase adoption, but we continue to see this as an opportunity because we enable our clients to accept Pix as a payment method.
We monetize that, we help them reconcile. Pix becomes deposits in the account, and the more that we evolve our banking solution, the more we will use Pix as rails to create different types of solutions and offer to our clients. Like Cury, for example, gave the example of payroll, which is completely being developed on top of Pix rails. So I think the perspective on Pix and our stance is positive. I don't know. Vinicius, you want to add?
Ditto. Ditto. Fully agreed. So again, Pix is not a network. Pix is a rail. Mastercard is a network, Visa is a network. They connect merchants and, and customers. And, and, as Lia pointed out, we've seen something similar to Pix Garantido and Pix Parcelado for decades. Parcelado Emissor on the rails of Visa and Mastercard, and then you do not extract the benefits of connecting merchants and, and customers. So there's a subsidy going on.
So merchants kind of paying more to stimulate sales and subsidizing, customers. That's what the, the interest-free installment transaction is. If you have a relationship between banks and cardholders, the subsidy don't doesn't take place, and is much a more expensive type of transaction. We really believe that, installment free transactions are the most efficient and the cheapest way to, you know, have a transaction. Parcelado Emissor is, is really an example of the difficulty of displacing Parcelado Sem Juros.
Perfect. Thank you, Vinicius.
You're welcome.
Hi. Hi, team. Josh Siegler, Cantor. Fantastic presentation, by the way. So for my question, multiple times, you brought up a chart where basically you demonstrated the fact that penetration of financial services in the software market still has a lot of room to run. I was wondering if you could comment on what the biggest challenge of cross-sell in the software market has been thus far. What gives you confidence that that will improve moving forward as well? And whenever you're bringing new software customers in, if it's easier to offer them a bundled service initially? Thank you.
Great question, Josh. I think I'm gonna take that one. Sandro, feel free to complement. So I think the short answer is, the biggest challenge is really the go-to-market, right? So at the end of the day, it doesn't suffice to have great integrated solutions that help clients' pain points, if you don't have the right go-to-market to actually drive the distribution. And I think it's also about how we align incentives across the organization to make that happen.
So although we had put a lot of effort on the integration side, and we had, I think, voiced this a few times in past earnings calls, that we had developed integrations across many POS and ERP solutions within Linx, we did very little on the go-to-market side until very recently. So, a good example is the recent effort that we've done in gas stations. Maybe, Sandro, you wanna talk a little bit about that and what we're doing in gas stations, how we're leveraging the channels, and
I think
what we've seen so far.
Yeah. Good, good afternoon, everyone.
Maybe, maybe, Sandro, you can introduce yourself.
I can introduce myself, exactly. I joined, I joined Stone in October 2021, so I used to be the head of people, organization, and now I took over software to work and lead the integration with financial service. I really believe that the way that we organize ourselves and the structure is a big enabler for what we need to do. Today, we are just organizing in a way that we're gonna segregate these four verticals, and we just assigned leaders for each of them. Then we created already some functions. So we have that gonna serve the four verticals. So we have a go-to-market function. This go-to-market function will lead the go-to-market strategy for each of the four verticals, but also will lead the integration, work together with the financial service go-to-market team to integrate them.
And then we can have a much better alignment and synchronicity between our the team that we have in the software, mainly the distribution franchises that we have with our specialists, as our agents and our hubs. So we're gonna synchronize this, and we just did this in software. We were able to grow very fast in the last month, with more than 200, around 200, gas station having our solution that you guys just saw here. And the other one gonna be pricing. It's our point. So we're gonna have a prices that are gonna serve all four verticals, and will be totally aligned with the people... With, sorry, with the pricing team for StoneCo. The main objective of this price team, we're gonna be to optimize the bundle, looking at the P&L of the client, not the P&L of software or the P&L of-
Of financial service.
Financial service. So this is gonna help us a lot. The other, the other function will be the client service. So the client service, we are already discussing how we're gonna integrate. So I think, I believe that in the end of the first quarter, we're gonna have one point of contact for these four verticals already, and then our, these clients can be served in a, in a level of Stone. That's gonna be a big change.
Yeah.
Okay? And the other one, the other one is inbound sales, that we can generate a lot of demand from our our sales team in financial service, from other kinds of channels that we have, and we're gonna integrate them as well. So this is gonna be a tower, and this tower gonna be all leaders of verticals, and all leaders of the functions will be reporting to me directly. Then we can make very quick-
Quick decisions
Decisions to integrate.
he whole system.
I think to Sandro's point, there's one aspect that we didn't talk too much about, but I believe a lot, which is our focus is on capturing the 236 TPV opportunity, and I think on the gas station initiative that we're undertaking now, we're already seeing a lot of traction. But the essence is to enable all of our channels, be them franchises within the software business, be them the specialist sales organization that we have within financial services, to sell those bundles. So what we did see in this initial efforts in gas station is that, for example, when a specialist, a Stone specialist, goes to sell the bundle solution, they actually, within the route, go to gas stations that don't use Linx. And so that also becomes a new sale of the software on the software side.
And that connects a little bit to Mateus' point, that it is so early for us to assess the opportunity on the software subscription side, that we don't make very strong assumptions in our plan, but that is an upside opportunity. If we really are able to enable all of those channels to sell the bundles, then that should also drive additional revenue growth in software. And naturally, I think one more point that is important, as an element and a key driver, is that we can deploy all of the technology that we use in our operations within Stone, in all of our software channels and customer relationship, like Sandro mentioned. There's a lot of work to do, but essentially, I think most of the work is, like Sandro said, on the go-to-market and on the pricing and our ability to execute and create good bundles for clients.
Great.
Thanks, Sandro.
Hey, thank you so much. Sheriq Sumar from Evercore ISI. I have a three-part question, if you don't mind, and one is-
Yeah
Following up on the prior question. Within the priority verticals that you have talked about, how much is the penetration within each of these verticals? And going forward, what are the low-hanging fruits that you think that could immediately, you know, help you drive the volume growth?
Yeah.
That's one. On the second part, on the winning the MSMB space, you laid out just the volume growth and the take rates going higher. I mean, but why not include the, any software metrics within that? As to why, why is that not a priority, within that segment? And the third part is, excluding the macro noise within the software business that you're seeing on inflation and everything and all, it's like, are there any metrics that could help us point as to what exactly is the organic growth that we could consider, or a- or anything that would help us understand as to, okay, you know, the, the number of subscribers are increasing or the penetration is increasing on that? Yeah.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Maybe I'll take the first part on the penetration. So, I think we gave the number, right? The, the BRL 236 billion versus the BRL 358 billion and the overlap. It's, it's still very small, it's very in line, actually, if, if you look at that TPV pool, the big majority of those clients are medium clients. So remember I was explaining the Act 4. In hindsight, it's easy to explain how, how, the strategy played out, but the actual reality is, what we learned, the more and more we looked within Linx, is that there's a significant pool of clients that are actually SMB clients, but they're the very top range of SMBs, right? And, so our market share, with the pure Stone solution in those larger SMBs, was actually low.
That overlap that you're seeing is pretty much close to our market share there. Because we didn't have such a strong value proposition with the pure Stone horizontal offering, to those more sophisticated SMB clients. So that is why we believe that by putting everything in place, that Sandro just said, on the incentives and the go-to-market and pricing those bundles, we'll be able to gain more participation of that pool, and that will be a driver of growth of the TPV guidance that Mateus provided. So I think that's the thought on penetration. I think that's.
The second part was on the software, winning the MSMB, MSMB segment. So why not provide any metrics when you're trying to win the MSMB segment? Why not provide any metrics on the software side? And, outside of the noise of the, on the macro front, like, what are the organic trends that we can keep track of?
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah, that's a good question. I think the general question here is about disclosure in software in general. So to that regard, in the Investor Day, we really wanted to emphasize the opportunity in terms of the TPV pool, because this is the largest opportunity. I think as we move ahead, we are thinking about how to improve our disclosures in software and how to provide you with more drivers for our performance. So that is probably something that we're going to address in the later, the next earnings calls. But to give a little bit of color in that regard, when you look at our software segment on a standalone basis, there are two main areas of focus. In regards to top line, I think you got the point, which is there's a lot of macro noise-...
Lia showed in her presentation that when we break down that growth, when we look at the priority verticals, we still have robust and strong growth in terms of revenue lines, and this is driven by the increase in the number of stores and also the ticket. Where we're lagging in terms of revenue in the software more recently is on digital and enterprise, which again has more to do with macro conditions than the underlying performance of the business itself. The second area that we're focusing in terms of the software execution has to do with efficiency.
So over the past two quarters, we saw an uptick in terms of the EBITDA margin for the software segments that reached 20% in the end of 3Q. This is a trend that we should continue to see, which is, EBITDA margin is strongly improving, especially in the short term. As we drive more integrations, not only in the top line, which Lia mentioned, but also integration in the back office functions between the two platforms. So just to give you a bit of color in that sense.
Ah! Okay. Jorge, I'll take Jorge over there, and then I have one Carlos. Joe, okay. Please. Jorge? Jorge, yes. Sorry. Sorry.
Hi, thanks for taking the follow-up question. Sorry. Going back to the guidance, I think the market buys your TPV guidance. I was looking at consensus. Consensus is actually a little bit more aggressive at BRL 690-something billion. I'm at BRL 615 billion. So I think there is an agreement that, you know, the growth rate of the industry and your company could be as such, where there is a really big divergence is on the take rate. Consensus assumes 50 basis point take rate degradation until 2027. My numbers have, like, 40 basis point. And so I guess, you know, help us bridge that gap, right?
I mean, in, you know, just from my vantage point, you have an industry that has become more competitive because the challengers now are competing against each other, not only against incumbents. The incumbents themselves are getting a little bit better, and some of them kind of, like, just maybe don't even wanna care about pricing and profitability. They just care about keeping the client. You know, maybe Rede, maybe Getnet for them, you know, cutting prices in order to keep, like, a client is what really works out for them. So that in itself, you know, means probably take rate pressure across all of the different products in payment.
Then you have the new business, which is the discounting of receivables outside of the transaction, using the clearing house that now apparently works, using CERC, which is another clearing house that, you know, private money is looking after. So it feels that there's gonna be a significantly larger amount of money going after receivables, and that, you know, maybe also suggests pricing pressure over time. The mix of the industry is also becoming less profitable, right? So it's more Pix, it's more debit. Well, more Pix really, not even debit. Credit, hard to think that credit is gonna become more profitable over time. I think it's the other way around. It's gonna be less profitable.
You have pressure on the transaction take rate, pressure on the prepayment take rate, pressure from a competitive standpoint in everything that has to do with payments. You have all of the digital banks. You know, you have an incredibly successful Nubank, you know, doing SME banking as well. So how do we get comfortable that in this environment, you're not gonna see a 40 or 50 basis point take rate contraction over the next three years, but rather a 20 basis point increase? So if you just help us really walk through that math, I think it will be incredibly helpful for people to buy into the guidance.
Yeah. Maybe I can start, and then you can add. But I think something that we highlighted in our presentation is the difference in economics that we see between heavy users and the users that are less engaged. And if you remind the data, we're not showing a 10% or 20% increase in ARPAC. We're talking about 2.4 times. So I think this is something that most people probably underappreciate, that which is, when you offer a complete set of solutions, the competition is not about what is your MDR rates or prepayment or, you know, any given revenue stream. There is kind of a virtuous cycle that happens
Which is not only you monetize better through banking and credit, but also because the client is using a single solution, all of their volumes become concentrated with you being the main player, and so on and so forth. So I think probably the main answer to that question relates to the second priority, which is driving engagement. Second thing I would add, even though our market is indeed competitive, I think a lot of the topics that were mentioned is more about noise than actual threats in our view. So just to pick a few examples here, competition in regards to the registry of receivables. Again, this is happening for quite a while. When you actually do the math, it's very hard to justify.
To compete on prepayment for a client that transacts between BRL 10,000 and BRL 20,000 per month, the math simply doesn't work. In regards to Pix, Pix is indeed growing a lot, and we acknowledge that. But I think Lia mentioned this, and Vinicius also reinforced, we actually see Pix as an opportunity, not a threat. It's been driving healthy take rates, it's increasing the usage of the banking accounts, which in the end of the day, translates to this higher ARPAC and more engaged users. So again, I think the main point for me, is to keep in mind that the difference in our ARPAC is not 10, 20%, it's 2.4 times.
Yeah. I just wanna maybe summarize what Mateus said and try to, like, bring two points, right? That I think explain this gap for you. Number one is really the stage at which our business is at regarding everything beyond payments. So I think to some extent, we're even steps behind in the journey, but the positive side of this is that there's a lot of upside. And we're seeing the early indicators that this is gonna continue to grow. And I think on the payment side, we do assume in our plan that this is a competitive market. So our pricing execution, I think, has shown that we've been able to price, as Mateus showed, historically, in the majority on payments, we've been able to maintain discipline on monetization, looking at return hurdles.
But naturally, we realize that we are in a competitive market, and that to the extent that we can, pull all of these levers, we will always maintain the discipline to grow with healthy returns. But if there are changes, for example, in interest rates, and interest rates go down, we will continue to price, maintaining healthy returns, which may mean prices will go down depending on the competitive environment. So, we have, as a central assumption in the model, that we are in a competitive market, and to the point that, Vinicius pointed out, we don't believe that there will be changes in the, interest installments structure of the market. So
At the back, and then John and Carlos. At the back, Julian, over there. Thank you.
Thanks. Yeah, Nicolas Riva from Bank of America. Thanks for the chance to ask questions. So one question on the use of your liquidity. So you spent BRL 300 million earlier this month to buy back shares. You just announced another share buy program, another billion reais. You know, the one point three billion reais, that would have been enough to buy back more than 50% of your 2028 bonds. So my question would be: Why do you see more value in buying back your shares, as compared to your 2028 bonds? And then the second question, the credit business.
Right now, your loan book is essentially zero, I think BRL 100 million, but in your 2027 projections, you have, I think about BRL 5 billion-BRL 5.5 billion by the end of 2027. So that's about $1 billion that you will need of new funding to fund that product. So I would assume that going forward in the next few years, your main funding requirements are gonna be related to prepayments, number one, and then number two, the growth of your credit book. So my question would be: How do you plan to finance all that growth in the credit book? And if it's gonna be similar to prepayments with the FIDCs. Thanks.
Do you mind if I just, Nicolas, we have received a lot of questions with regards to the same subject, overall, like capital allocation, to asking about dividends as well, and so on and so forth. So Mateus, if you could just
Yeah, sure. So first, first question is about buying back the bond versus buying back stock. I think we, we mentioned this in the call as well. We do believe that the current levels our, our bond is trading is not reflective of the creditworthiness of the company. Because when you look over the past many quarters and years, I think the company has been consistently generating cash, and as we improve the profitability, our cash conversion has been really high. So if we take the last 18 month- the last 12 months, the company has generated BRL 1.8 billion in cash, which when you compare to our market cap or, to the rating of the bond, I think it's, it sends the same message.
But here, when we think about capital allocation, we need to make choices in the end of the day. So given our belief in our strategic plan, when you look at the levels that our company is trading, when we assume that we're going to beat the plan, we're talking maybe about 4x earnings for 2027. So in that regard, it seems to us that buying back this stock now is more accretive than buying back the bonds. But again, as we generate cash in excess of what we need to fund the business, we have the duty to evaluate all the options and choose the one that we think will generate most value.
So I think that is a discussion that is always in the table. And then to address the point about capital structure in general, maybe Diego can come to give more details. While he's coming, I think you're probably right, that prepayment and credits are the biggest uses of funding going ahead. I would also highlight that we have a lot of deposits nowadays that we don't yet use to fund our operations, so this can be a big lever going forward as well. Diego?
Good afternoon. Thank you very much, Nicholas, for the question. I am Diego Salgado, Head of Treasury, joined Stone in April 2021. So as Mateus started, we're gonna be generating a lot of cash flow, as we have already started, especially during the past 12 months. If you see our cash conversion, it's pretty high compared to our net income, and we don't expect that to change in the near future. On top of that, yes, you're right, we're talking about BRL 5 billion in total assets on the credit portfolio, but you also saw that we're gonna have three times that amount in terms of deposits, on which we don't leverage, and we're going to start leveraging next year, once we get our license from the Brazilian Central Bank.
That said, most of our capital allocation is still going to be deployed on the prepayment business, and we're gonna keep funding that with the tools that we have today, and the additional diversification, strategy that we have, for the business. We don't rely heavily on any specific funding source. As a matter of fact, the strategy is really to keep diversifying and having a balanced approach towards all different markets, so that we don't have any specific dependency.
Okay. I think we can J ohn and Carlos, I'll give the microphone here. John. Carlos, you're the next, John.
Thank ou. This is, John Coffey from Barclays.
Hi, John.
So basically, so, you know, historically, you've provided great disclosures on financial services, very easy or very helpful for us to model the company. But when it comes to software, it's been a little bit more opaque and, and forecast successfully. And I know, Mateus, you said that it's still to be determined whether or not you're gonna release more financial more metrics on software going forward. That being said, as we look out to 2024 and 2027, for the guide the, either the guidance or milestones that you had laid, laid out, is there any way you could help break out what software would be? Like, how much we should think of net income being driven by software, or anything on EBT, or any other metrics you could give us on how the corporation splits between financial services and software going forward?
Do you wanna talk about margin
Yeah, yeah
trends, and then we can talk about metrics.
Yeah, for sure. So I'll start by the bottom line. Like I said, one of the main drivers behind the administrative expenses expansion in terms of profitability that we're going to see, is integration between our software segments and our financial services segments. That's something that we are already starting to yield the benefits, and this was one of the main drivers behind the margin expansion we saw over the past two quarters. But as we move ahead, we do expect EBITDA margins in our software segment to reach upwards of 23% next year. So I think that can give you a sense of how the profitability for the software business evolves as a percentage of the overall business in the short term.
I think regarding growth, we showed numbers that break down software revenues within the bucket, so high-priority verticals versus enterprise versus the other assets. Aside from just considering the fact that we're gonna allocate most of the capital to grow in the priority verticals, there is also a macro context that is impacting revenues within enterprise. But our software enterprise business is also a business where we already have very high market penetration. So there's less upside in growth within enterprise than there is within the four priority verticals. Exactly because of the fact that those verticals serve more the large SMB clients.
So I think regarding growth ahead, a good way to look at it is to look at that breakdown and consider that those are more arrays that are more in line with what we're gonna continue to see: lower growth in enterprise, higher growth in the priority verticals. And maybe, I don't know, Sandro maybe wants to talk a little bit about metrics, because we do have a discussion or consideration to do regarding disclosure, but that doesn't mean that we don't measure software metrics, right? I think there's a discussion around the disclosure, but maybe Sandro can talk a little bit about what are the software metrics that we do like to monitor within the business, because that can provide some color.
Hello. As Lia mentioned, we will separate the enterprise business. We're gonna create a business unit for this. This business unit are gonna focus on keeping the growth rate that we've been having in the last years, but also EBITDA margin. So it would be this combination of growth and EBITDA margin that we're gonna focus on that enterprise and the other assets that we manage. They don't have much synergies because they are like car dealers softwares or educational softwares or healthcare softwares, so we don't need to integrate them.
And regarding the main KPIs that we keep we'll be following and giving as targets for the team, you have ARR, net revenue retention w ithin net revenue retention, we have cross-sell, upsell, churn, active stores, and of course, NPS, that we're gonna follow very strongly, mainly in the four, in the four verticals, and also EBITDA margin, cash conversion. So it's a little bit what we'll be following. Great!
Good. Carlos, I'm sorry, the mic was taken.
Hello. Carlos Gomez, HSBC. I have another financial question about the use of capital, and I completely understand what you say about your assessment about the value of the shares. But then looking at, you know, the BRL 1 billion that you are paying, and I'm thinking, why don't you pay a dividend? And more important, why don't you pay interest on capital? I mean, as it happens, you have a large equity base of BRL 40 million because of your acquisitions. I mean, maybe the equity is not in Brazil, and you cannot... maybe there's a technical reason for it, but in principle, I would think that you could save, like, BRL 300 million by doing that.
Yeah, that's a great question. I think you already answered most of the question, which is, given our capital structure, most of our equity is not onshore, it's offshore, and that already generates a positive effect in our tax rate. I think we spoke about this in the earnings release as well. But when we look at the evolution from the 2018 until the 2020 that we just released, part of that was small enough in the quarter. The remainder had to do with basically where the profits were coming from. So we did evaluate this extensively, and we think that now what optimizes our returns is not to pay interest on equity. Rather, I think our capital structure is better optimized in that way.
Do we have any? Sorry, please. And then, just for matter of organization here, we're approaching the end, so I think we'll take one question here. I'll just take another one from the website, and then we finalize. Please.
Hi. Hello, my name is Alan. I'm from Ace Capital. So I think I have a question on the more of the credit portfolio, a few public questions. First, I think is, I know it's very small right now, but the NPL looks extremely low, and how should I compare to, like, similar products existing in the market? And the second one is, are they like, you know, could you provide, like, a breakdown of the current, like, 4,000 clients by various cohorts
S uch as, like you know, TPV or average duration this client stay with StoneCo, so we can get a better understanding when you scale it up? Like, will the NPL stay the same, or would that, like, you know, gradually trend up? I think lastly is, like, I would like to know how the risk-adjusted margin and return on equity of, like, the credits, you know, portfolio compared to the prepayment?
I'll start by the last part, then maybe Gregor can join us to provide a few insights in terms of the credit product as well. But the answer to prepaying, prepayment versus credit, I think, is the same answer to the take rates questions we received. We don't see really our take rates or monetization by lever. The only difference in that regard is that when it comes to credit, it has a different risk profile. Therefore, we have a separate hurdle in terms of return for credits.
But other than that, we're really focused on the monetization of the client relationship as a whole, and not on individual lines. Now, if I got the question right, I think the question was around profile of our credits disbursements by cohorts and what you expect going forward, and also how our NPLs compare to the market, right? Gregor, I think, can give a lot of detailing in that. Maybe, Gregor, you start, and then, I'll join you.
Okay, well, we don't have any specific concentration. Our portfolio right now, we are talking about companies of loan sizes in the range of BRL 30,000, spread all over the country in all segments. And what we do here, we use our scoring process, and sorry, and we target our clients on the expected losses that we have in each cohort. So we are not driving any kind of specific segment, but rather the risk involved in each one of our clients. So this is how our policy is being written right now. And the first part of the question was?
Like, how does the current, like, the NPL compare to the bank stock or comparable markets?
I can compare to what I had in my last job at Banco Santander, and so far, the performance of our vintages is extremely positive. I mean, it's below what I've seen in the market, specifically talking about this smaller clients. So we have a much better performance than what I've seen so far. And the collateral that we have also is very strong in providing this better performance to the portfolio we are building up.
Okay, thank you.
Okay.
Thank you, Gregor. Okay, Alan. So as I've mentioned, I'll take just the last question. And just to make clear for the ones who sent questions through the webcast, we are gonna be answering I think I've tried to aggregate all the main topics, but if there is anything specific, the IR team will reply shortly, okay? But the final question is like: Do you believe the earnings growth will be similar to the one of EPS growth? Just trying to understand here if we should expect any material increase in the share count on the back of employee compensation.
Um, about
Pedro.
To be very straight, no, there is no material change in terms of employee compensation that would affect EPS.
Short answer.
It's a short one
That was easy.
to finalize the event.
That was easy.
I'm sorry about that.
That was easy.
So, Pedro, would you like to do, like, final
Yes. Well, I think it's again, appreciate the time you guys spent with us today. I think it was, for us, a great opportunity. At least for me, it was amazing to have the time to engage with some of you. And again, hope to see you more often, and we're gonna talk more and more about the company, provide more disclosure, and discuss the guidelines and the targets for the company as we move ahead. Thank you very much. Again, amazing holidays for all of you, and Merry Christmas, okay? Thank you, guys.
Thank you, everyone.