Gen Digital Inc. (GEN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

I will read some very boring disclosures, and then we will get into more exciting conversation. For more important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley research disclosure website at morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative. I'm Meta Marshall. I cover cybersecurity here at Morgan Stanley. We're delighted to have Gen Digital here with us today. Vincent Pilette, CEO; Natalie Derse, CFO. So great to have you guys back at the conference after a year. Before we get started, it's been almost a year since you announced the MoneyLion acquisition, it brings kind of meaningful transformation to the business. What was it about this kind of trust-based business that was attractive and complementary towards kind of that consumer security business you traditionally had?

Maybe I'll take that one. It has been a long journey for the last few years where we really have broadened our Cyber Safety platform from about 20 million users to now over 200 million active users, 500 million endpoints. And we continue to evolve the value we provide it to consumers for a membership fee, you come, you come to the Cyber Safety platform, you come from many different entry doors. Some come from a security perspective and they want to protect their device, their data, their network. Some comes from an identity perspective and they want to protect credit score, understand what's about their personal data that's sitting out there in the web, making sure that there is no identity theft. Other came from a desire of privacy, control of data, understanding how do I use my data more. As the needs evolved, our consumers were asking more and more about, hey, what is it in the financial world that I need to protect it from. And one of the top 4 needs was about that financial health, if you want, protecting their financial health or improving their financial health. So we started to connect in our LifeLock app in our overall app, the ability to connect your bank accounts, your credit cards, other things, which we were monitoring, tracking and then restoring if there is any issues around anomalies, scams and others. We then introduced Norton Genie, which is an AI assistant -- initially doing AI anti-scam but I moved quickly into the assistant as our user we're using with the agent saying, "Hey, is this a scam", it evolved into what else should I be protected from? And what do you see in the noise? When we were isolated subscription transactions or other transactions, hey, on other things, they were asking, what do I do with that? How can I unsubscribe here? What can I do in consolidate my credit card. And we felt we were not really equipped to do that. And so kind of limited in our view. That's where we started to really double down on financial health. As the next need when you have your basic digital environment protecting, helping you both manage and grow your financials. We started organically, got many of our customers connecting their bank accounts and then quickly we're out of capabilities. That's when we acquired MoneyLion, which is a fully developed platform around this financial journey, if you want, from the initial needs of, hey, I need to understand my cash flow and need to bridge for cash needs all the way to an investment opportunity. And so we felt the technology were really built around an embedded view that can be white label and say that's the best way for us to go and acquire. Since we've acquired a year ago, we've been growing MoneyLion at 40% to 50% rate. We've been very focused on protecting the momentum they have in the financial wellness market, while we were driving the connection points with the rest of our users, 200 million of active users, 0 CAC, that can then be adopting the financial wellness view, and that's what we've been focusing on. In the last quarter reported, we've mentioned that our installed base have increased the connections of the bank account, which is the first step towards financial wellness from Cyber Safety at about a 15% rate. And we continue to go and drive that metric as we embedded the full view.

Got it. I mean, we regularly get questions just kind of on that core security market. And just how are you seeing that kind of core security market evolve with AI adoption or just maybe more concerns about kind of your own kind of consumer security?

Yes. So the AI topic is a fascinating one. And I think every investor asking me is AI going to eat software companies. And we're not really defining ourselves as a software company, even though we are a software company. And we see really ourselves addressing a pain point from a consumer standpoint. You want to have that at a high level peace of mind when you use your digital world. And maybe you guys are techies and have easy peace of mind controlling it. But many of our customers, they just don't want to be techies. They want someone that's going to be the digital companion, the digital concierge that's going to take that complexity, that fear away from them. That's our mission. And we see AI as a fantastic tailwind for us. On one side, as the Agentic world becomes more and more prevalent and consumers started touching it, the angst of what it does for you or what you don't know it does for you is actually increasing. And the need for simplicity and peace of mind is actually increasing. Over the last 2 months, we've seen in our installed base, the number of consumers or machines on which AI tools or OpenClaw platform was downloaded increasing, which surprised us because we didn't think our customers are the early adopters of these new things. Immediately triggered in us that they actually don't know what it does. They're playing with it. Some are stopping because actually, if you try OpenClaw after 20 minutes, you get like a headache. But if you are able to move further, some of our customers calling me and say, "How do I install? How do I know it doesn't do that? How do I do my machine?" That's when we came up quickly and say, well, there is a play here that we didn't even think about. We had moved from device to user. We need to move from user to agents, which as a TAM is exponential. And how do we use then our capability, consumer-facing software capabilities to make this Agentic world safe, reliant and easy to use for consumers is actually a fantastic opportunity for us. It's one that's moving fast. We are readjusting the company to be all in on that opportunity, and we're going there. The second tailwind for us on AI is it actually will change the way software is developed. That investor are not wrong. Today, I can come with a prototype in 72 hours when in the past, it was taking 3 months, 6 months, 9 months, a lot of testing. And that can change on the fly based on real-time feedback from consumers. What an opportunity for us. Now you're worried that my engineers will be without a job. And inside the company, we said, wow, as we equip our engineers with all of those AI tools, now have, rather than having 1,000 engineers developing software, I have 1,000 engineers thinking about the upstream problem statement and can churn a super fast pace, quality software that will be then used by consumers and adjusted in real time. And now suddenly, you see, oh, my moat is changing. What is my moat. It's the understanding of the customer problem. The agility to be able to define that requirement upstream, be first, be agile, adjust it and real-time go and address that need. And I think that, for me, is a super, super opportunity. So we're rewiring Gen as an AI-first company, which is not easy. I'm not starting with one person building it AI first. I'm starting with 5,000 people and 2 years of legacy to change it on its head, and we are real time now thinking about how do we collapse functions, how do we enable a product manager that in the past had to go to the engineering to develop to the Q&A to go and test it, to the legal to check legal, to marketing to build the marketing. As a stand-alone man or equipped with AI tools to go and put that prototype in the hand of the users in 72 hours. And so those two things creating a super need and it's enabling us, we see AI as a fantastic opportunity.

Okay. All right. Well, we're definitely going to dive more into that because that sounded good. So maybe circling back to kind of MoneyLion for a second. You've talked about kind of the first-party and third-party solutions. Just how do we think of kind of that marketplace developing on the MoneyLion side?

The MoneyLion business is incredibly healthy and very, very diverse. There's -- I would say, two main segments of that business, the PFM business, which would be the early wage access, and that's growing 40% in the past quarter, even faster earlier in the year. And then we've got the engine in the marketplace side of the business, which really brings to life the Gen -- the strength of the Gen brands and really brings together the supply and demand for the increasing expansion of the financial tooling, whether it's credit cards, whether it's mortgages, whether it's tax services, et cetera. And they're both growing approximately 40% as of our last reported quarter.

And so just how do we think of kind of what clearly has been a really great success so far. What drives that kind of continued growth going forward as you kind of expand out the portfolio set there?

Yes. On the PFM side, definitely, it's the economy. In terms of the demand is there. We have -- we see great healthy acquisition through PFM, but we also see retention and the recurring customers that come from the PFM side of the business, which is 60% of the MoneyLion business today is really, really robust, and we just see that -- I guess, that continuous business momentum there. And then on the marketplace side, I think it's endless in terms of the diversification. That engine that the MoneyLion team has built is just based on really sharp technology and very, very robust. It powers not only our on asset or our in-house app. It's also white labeled with many of the brands that you would think about when you think about financial tooling and instruments. And now with the strength of the brand, bringing the supply and demand together in a very easy marketplace is just really, really powerful.

Okay. One of the things you guys kind of talked about early on was introducing the subscription-based model that you guys have had on the consumer security side into the MoneyLion business, which has traditionally been more transaction-based. Can you just walk through kind of what approach you're taking to this and just what that feedback has been so far?

Yes. So I can take that one. Before I answer the membership question, I want to add on the marketplace because I don't know if everybody fully understand the power of that business model. And many times when I talk about marketplace to invest in the marketplace, I don't really fully understand why you have a marketplace. For us, it's a fantastic expansion of the possibility to addressing needs from the consumers. We're already protecting from a customer perspective, your devices, your data, your financial lives. Now I know, for example, in an Agentic world, I could know automatically, but I know that you have an insurance coming for renewal, you may have forgotten because insurance is you buy it and you forget about it. The agent can not only alert you of this coming for renewal. But You can go to the marketplace and search the better rate and say, "Hey, I propose a better rate". If you don't trust fully your platform, you want to be alerted and have the opportunity to [ try switch ] insurance. Or it can be fully automated. And every year when your car insurance come for renewal, you can have your agent search, it has access to marketplace and it can go and renew that for you. So it's an enabler, if you want to. I'll never be an insurer. So I don't know what insurance exist. The marketplace suddenly becomes the opportunity for me to provide to my customers this full end-to-end experience without having to develop the product myself. And now suddenly, you can think about many other products that are related to that financial health that I'm not going to provide. And so for us, the growth of engine, we're also about building different pillars of partners coming in and say, you fit at the right time in my customer journeys financial journey, I'm going to be able to offer this. And we've seen Equifax change from a discussion on buy data and credit from you that I then use into my alert and overall modeling, to let's partner together. With the marketplace and you provide the data, we can really develop and expand the set of opportunities we can offer to our consumers. And as I mentioned, in this new world, the moat is what is about the ability to really understand new consumers and be at the right time in a personalized way in their journey. That is critical. And a bank, a mortgage company will not spend the time to try to get to understand every customer. It's difficult if it's just related to a onetime transactional review. So I brought that up because I think it's very important to understand that. I mean it's super powerful. It moves from a product or a membership sold to a customer to a full ecosystem, providing an end-to-end value to the customer. Back to the membership now I'm going to relate it. Of course, we don't want to be just purely transactional -- transactional fees. But we know some customers will always like that will want that. And so we will move towards membership at the pace the customer will adopt but it is our mission. Why is it? Because we want to move into that full Agentic world, where you pay a membership, you forget about it, you set your agents, you forget about them, and you have the trust that, that will deliver that value for you in this world. So MoneyLion was all about transactions, which I say, okay, they had developed the system to be with the ability to move to membership. So we have the technology and the capability. Cyber Safety is 95% membership. And now we want to extend that membership into financial wellness. And it's really about testing and creating the right value for the consumers. Finding those payments and say, you know what, at this point in time, it is more benefit for me to pay a membership $20 a month and be able to use the agent we just developed to be able to use the unsubscribed in an automatic way. And then benefit from those criteria that if I wasn't a transactional model, I would have to each time select. Now would pay as you go, which is also a model you could have. But the ease, the peace of mind if you want to bring. That is why the membership is so critical. We won't force a back-end force or go suddenly say, by next quarter, we'll be 50%. We will continue to develop our membership to more and more provide that value to the consumer then they will adopt at their own pace.

Okay. Not only one of the interesting conversations that we had on the last earnings call was just about kind of your guys' positioning in a K-shaped economy. And I thought it was a particularly interesting conversation about how you kind of see yourselves benefiting from both trajectories of that. Just wanted to kind of get a sense of maybe rehashing that conversation a little bit.

Yes. I mean, from a K-shaped economy, we have solutions, and we have protection. We have services for all ends of that. And so really, when you think about the people that are really struggling as inflation continues to scale as things just cost more on a daily basis, people are really struggling. There are stats out there that would tell you 70% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. And so then we're right then and there, helping them put food on their table, so to speak, with the PFM solutions that we've got. They're incredibly easy to use. It is honestly just you set up an account with us. We validate your -- the sources of wages coming from your employer. You're on direct deposit, and then we're able to allow you to scale with us. And as you continuously repay or reimburse those funds, you're able to get more and more funds are more frequent. And so that's a really, really a helpful set and a healthy alternative for folks that don't necessarily either qualify for those credit cards or qualify for the actual short-term or long-term loans that they need to be able to live their life and feed their family. And then on the other side, I would say, swing the pendulum really, really far and you think about people that are on our broadest LifeLock identity protection and 360 Suite probably have a lot of assets to protect, probably have a lot of money that -- people that typically have assets to protect want those assets to grow and that money to grow. And so that's where the marketplace and engine comes really into play in terms of -- there are some interesting stats, how many people pull credit card -- new credit cards every single year, even over $100,000 of annual income. They're pretty alarm -- in a good way, alarming stat for us in terms of the demand is out there. And so now we take it upon ourselves to really make sure that we've got the most dynamic supply out there to really to feed that demand and to fill that demand. And the engine is just incredibly powerful and the marketplace is incredibly powerful. And economically for our business, it's powerful. Of course, as we do any kind of marketplace model on the supply side, demand side, there's affiliate or referral fees on both sides of that, that we can benefit from. But imagine when we take a LifeLock customer and we put them into that engine, first of all, the supply goes through the roof because who doesn't want that type of 800-plus credit score with a lot of assets to protect just a lot of financial health there. So on the supply side, we get increase there. We'd love to bring a buyer that way. But then from our company economics, it's 0 CAC. And because we've already got that user or that customer in our ecosystem.

I think you were kind of pointing out like you thought that it was kind of giving you the share advantage in the marketplace with you kind of outgrowing your peers.

Yes, absolutely. And I would say just from an overall financial wellness and I would zoom maybe even further out and say Trust-Based Solutions, we love how competitive advantage we are. There's not a lot of customers that you -- or competitors out there that you can point to that have our entire solution set. And so we're really trying to take that and use that to our advantage and really cut through from a customer demand perspective.

Okay. The cross-sell opportunity between Cyber Safety and the Trust-Based Solutions is kind of the key area of focus you guys have talked about. Can you guys just talk a little bit more about the strategies that you're taking? And what are the -- like what innings are we in from the monetization standpoint?

Yes. And monetization is a big word. I would start with adoption. The most important for us is for Cyber Safety customers to understand that a full protection of their risk include the financials. Now they know it because one of the top 4 needs is protecting against financials. And so the adoption, the #1 metric is about Cyber Safety customers that get monitoring, alerts on deviations and other incremental services on that protection of financials. And we've seen growing that at double digit. We have over 100 million bank account connected from Cyber Safety side. That doesn't move yet to, of course, monetization. The second step is about making the engagement on the financial wellness side, call it not just the protection, but the manage and grow, I manage your financials, important. So we are working on three initiatives. The first one is to put the marketplace in a creative way into the LifeLock applications. LifeLock becoming more and more of your protector, if you want, of every asset you have. And trying to move that application into a more engaging company -- engaging application, sorry. That then really having that discussion on the journey. So we have that embedded now into LifeLock. We're coming up with a new redesigned app that also provides content, educational content on that full aspect. The second initiative is about launching Norton Money into our employee benefit solutions. The EB channels. That is the channel that, at this point in time, is the most hungry to always consume the entire set of the portfolio. In which, of course, one element they really interested into the early wage access, that can be connected to payroll. So I won't call it risk-free, but very low risk. And having the employer promoted that into the environment. We have the product. We started to launch it into the broker environment that then moved to our customers subscription in the fall during the onboarding period. And then the third one is the Norton Money really providing the first incremental step in Norton, which is different than LifeLock around your credit score and your capability to track and have visibility on your financial features, which we have only launched into our installed base as a free tool of free feature adoption with installed base or they pay a subscription, but free one to kind of familiarize with the financial ones. Monetization will follow as people start to really understand that between Cyber Safety, having a peace of mind in digital world and using new money digitally, if you want, will become more seamless.

Yes. Okay. Perfect. The cyber margins obviously remain very robust at over 60%. Trust-Based Solutions remains kind of solid at 30%. Can you just give some additional details around kind of the margin trajectory of the business and reinvesting for kind of all of these initiatives that you guys have laid out.

Yes. We've had just a real strong thread in our DNA to just run our company very efficiently and really focused on how can we do more with less, just as an always on. And that really, really helps. It just sets the expectation and we've got the alignment at [ ELT ] so that it doesn't really make it a specific phase of our company or a specific exercise. And so the team knows that we're going to ask them to do give us double-digit efficiencies in our over $1 billion marketing spend, and we're going to really leverage the tools and technology, whether it's AI, whether it's just a modernization of how we allocate marketing and look at those ROIs. We're going to do -- we're going to continuously focus on that. And so then it allows in both segments, both the Cyber Safety grown 61 -- margin rate of 61% in the last quarter. We're really proud of that, but we believe the team can run even more efficiently and create the capacity for investment. That's what we want. We want to never operate status quo, always focus and earn those efficiencies, and so then we can deploy that back into fueling sustainable growth. That's the Cyber Safety, even 2.5 years ago when we did our AID, that's what it was all about. And then in Trust-Based Solutions, even at 30%, look, there's a mix factor there. When you think about where Gen is and overall versus Trust-Based Solutions. But I'll tell you, when you get into that sector, we're industry-leading margins, and we're very proud of that. We've already moved the MoneyLion side up from 15% to over 20%, and we'll continuously earn even more efficiencies in that business as we continue to operate together, but we have every intention to deploy that right back into the innovation, the ideation and really bringing some of these test use cases to full scale so that we can really win in Trust-Based Solutions.

Got it. You guys are obviously very cash generative. Just how should we think to your approach with M&A. MoneyLion has obviously been a great success. Software valuations as we kind of started with are slightly more depressed. Just how are you thinking about M&A as kind of an overall part of the strategy?

Maybe I'll take it first. You didn't want to quote the number, but the ROIC on MoneyLion acquisition is through the roof. And frankly, we could say this because we were a great operator, it was a great asset, but timing is everything as you guys know. We are not focusing on that. I'm not going to try to time things. It's great that software valuation is depressed. It's not great for me, to be honest. It was great for my investors. But from an opportunity, maybe it's great, maybe it's not. We start M&A way upstream around innovation and customer need. I'll come back on the same topic. Our moat is the trust from the customers the understanding of our consumers, with consumer and consumer only focus on that and the agility to go and continue to develop and evolve our portfolio to address that need, broadly defined around protection and empowerment of that digital world. Starts there always. It always starts with organic and consumer research and organic testing. Now AI has even shortened that -- or increased the ability or shortened time frame to go and do a lot of that testing. Financial wellness started with financial wellness features into LifeLock. And we saw some adoptions and different behavior than we expected. It was like, oh, there's something bigger than we can play here. And that's where we did. Are we constantly looking at once we have that consumer and we have invested a bit organically? How long it would take for us to develop the best product? Or is there something in the market that exists and that could maybe be easily brought in and accelerate the growth. Of course, we are. And when we do that, we look at many parameters. And as you know, may sound good on its face. Valuation may be great. Technology is not great. Culture is not great. Maybe it's not the time that they want to buy it. I'm wondering if today, I get a proposal to have Gen bought at $21, I'm going to turn it down for sure. And so he actually valuation may actually may not be a helper in M&A. And then we're going to look and we're going to look at balancing it, "Hey, shared my M&A today used as cash to do buyback" and what's that return. And I want to make sure when we do investment on cash, we have the highest return proposed. And so that makes the M&A topic if you want something that's always ongoing and never really a focus, if you want. In today's environment, with the cash we generate, it's great. We have plenty of growth to deliver. We're very focused, as Natalie has told you many, many times around delevering below [ 3x ] by FY '27, and we are here today. We will continue to do that. But when we do that, we balance it with also the opportunity to buy back at $21, which is super accretive. The organic investment is built into our P&L. And if we see from time to time, some tuck-in opportunities, say, hey, this is a better return, will go and do that.

I would just build on that it's definitely diverse and it's disciplined. And Vincent makes my job really easy. Of course, when you think about capital allocation, when we generate over $2 billion of free cash -- unlevered free cash flow, we've got a lot to deploy. But as it pertains to M&A, it's massively disciplined. I mean although he's using with innovation, diversification and it's not even game-changing. It's creating the game in many capacities. He does it with a disciplined approach, and we're very, very clear and aligned on the criteria of when we're going to do a deal, we're massively disciplined about it. And I think if you look at history, every one of our acquisitions has made enormous economic and financial sense.

Okay. So we've talked a lot about the portfolio. We've talked a lot about kind of optimizing that. Just -- and we've talked about cross-sell. But just in terms of kind of additional go-to-market strategies, can you just walk us through kind of the partnership channel and who you're primarily working with and that process of getting towards this $500 million target in annual partner revenue.

Yes, we've already achieved it. So thankfully. So if you don't mind, I'll just use a second to go back to our last Analyst Day, we said we wanted to build our business non-money line, nonfinancial wellness to a sustainable mid-single digit, and we've done it ever since we said it. And it's through the levers of growth, we said 5 points -- 5 levers for 5 points of growth. . Cross-sell has been huge for us. It's been a revenue driver. It's been a retention driver. Upsell has been a broadening out in terms of as we learn and grow through these stand-alone products. Now how do we optimize and blend them with the membership to drive into what you heard earlier from Vincent, just an enormous engagement and expansion opportunities when you've got them in a membership. Partner has been a diversification channel for us as well as an acquisition channel for us. It's only circa 10% of our business, pre-MoneyLion. And -- but very, very diverse. It allows us to go global quickly. It allows us to go through partnership that allows us to go through affiliation. Two of them that we love because of the customers that we're able to engage with through these channels are employee benefits we already touched on. It's our highest ARPU solution that we're able to go into those channels and really expand our reach and really get highly retaining, highly engaged customers through. We love it. It's been growing double digits and we'll continue to do so. And then telco. Telco has been a way for us to get into global expansion, especially lower-penetrated countries that have high hurdles of entry. And so we've really been able to figure out first with the telco in Canada, and then now have really expanded into Latin American countries, some of the other Eastern countries. And it's really been one that has low acquisition cost in terms of entering the market. But then we're able to expand through our membership offerings and really understand the local solutions that really resonates with the customers.

Okay. I mean, Vincent, I think you mentioned Equifax kind of in one of your answers earlier, but just kind of we talked about just further on go-to-market. Some of these expanded partnerships, you have one with Equifax, just are there other opportunities we should be kind of thinking of?

Yes, and we're constantly working on trying to expand the pie, as you imagine. This is where engine is another one, right, that really brings another benefit. It goes to partner and say, "Hey, I can not only bring all of those customers but I have really a modular offering and you can bring into it from the marketplace to those customers". That opens up a lot of doors. And so you should continue to look for more ways of distributions from partnering with AI companies to partnering with telcos and financials that go and touch directly to customers. And we've taken an approach where we want to make sure it fits into the overall ecosystem. Does it enrich the product? Does it enrich our [ anti-scam ], for example, is the customer being able to either see the brand or not or being retargeted for the value that we provide. And so the game and the discussion with those partners has really changed from in the past, I buy your security solution, I embedded into mind and I resell it to my customer to how can we be part of that ecosystem. So just stay tuned as that continues to evolve.

And then maybe just last question. You gave kind of a great way of all of the ways that you're transforming the business. Like what do you think are the best ways that we should be kind of monitoring the progress on some of these initiatives?

The multiple is a little bit like our customers. We still have our investors that came from many, many different doors. Some come from, hey, I know you from being the security subscribers and having a very stable cash flow through a membership, the deviation is like it's like 2% and no more. And I would say, for those investors, that business is healthy and you can continue to look at the continued increase in customers we have, and we're publishing that number, and we'll give you that core business, how is it doing anything is doing well. Then we have some investors that come to say, hey, that's pretty cool, you come from a fintech angle or you provide financial wellness and they really see, okay, what's the advantage when you compare to other of those fintech companies where you bring trust, you bring scale, you bring multiple things, how are you doing? Well, we're growing at about 40% to 50%, and we're delivering best-in-class margin of that market above 20%. And so those are two set of investors, and you can continue to monitor, we monitor those. And then we have those who are a little bit more in between and don't fit one of the category and say, how does it fit together? And is there something special coming here? And there, the monitoring is really, as I mentioned, really understanding how the Trust-Based Solution is adopted by the Cyber Safety and that converge. And that's critical because if that is successful, and we continue to report on progress, you're going to see certainly the opportunity to expand that TAM in an accelerated way. That's pretty significant, which is very different than those security-oriented investors or the fintech-oriented investors. It would be kind of an Internet platform where moat is this protection and empowerment, the brand, the data, the ecosystem, not specifically one specific features of our product. It's more difficult to comprehend, as you know. And it is what it is. We're going to go. And then I still have the investors that are really interested by AI. They come to me more to get some intelligence, not really to look at our business yet. So I cannot say we are yet really approach from that perspective. I do feel, though, we have a critical role to play in how the economy is becoming Agentic. And that we're not the sexy player today, it's fine by me. That gives us plenty of time to really try to capture that opportunity.

All right. Perfect. Well, Vincent and Natalie, thanks so much for being here today.

Thank you.

Thank you.