Marqeta, Inc. (MQ) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

May 25, 2022

NASDAQ US Financials Financial Services conference_presentation 35 min

Earnings Call Speaker Segments

Tien-Tsin Huang

analyst
#1

Great. Thanks, everyone, for joining. My name is Tien-Tsin Huang. I cover the payments and IT services sector at JPMorgan, and really happy to have Marqeta Founder, CEO, Jason Gardner. Welcome.

Jason Gardner

executive
#2

Thank you for having me.

Tien-Tsin Huang

analyst
#3

Really excited to have Jason here. He's -- I've learned a lot talking with him over the years. And this whole modern card issuing space is really, really fun, exciting, high growth. And they basically invented it. So we'll go through some questions that I've gathered from the investment community. We'll take questions in the end. We'll also hit the portal, so I'll be checking that. This is being webcast, so feel free I already see a couple of questions coming in, which is great. So I thought, Jason, let's go back to the founding of the business. I'd love to hear you talk about the founding of the company, a couple of pivots that you made and how we got here.

Jason Gardner

executive
#4

So this is my third company, second payments company. I founded a company called PropertyBridge back in 2004, that led you to pay rent electronically. We simply integrated post-transaction data. The company was acquired by MoneyGram in kind of late 2007. And at the end of 2009, I had a contract to stay on for about 2 years. And really wanted to do another payments company. I am a bonafide payments nerd and decided I wanted to do something I had no sort of -- no ideas that I had. I was eating dinner with a friend in San Francisco. And he said, put a bunch of Groupon coupons on a card, and it was like being struck by lightning. So I felt like an idea had me, and I wanted to really try to figure out how to do that and found through talking with a lot of different people, I had to build this thing called an issuing processing system from scratch. And everybody told me not to do it, it's impossible. Nobody really builds these things anymore. I think the company before us was 12 years prior to Marqeta being founded. And just fell in love with the technology. So the first card we had was actually our own. It was the Marqeta card. It allowed you to pay in advance for things like your groceries and get a 5% to 7% return. And we did that by essentially solving the many Groupons on a card issue. Facebook called about 2012 and said, it's your birthday, 100 friends want to send you 100 different gift cards and -- to 100 different merchants and they all live on the same card. And that was our technology that we invented. I was telling Tien-Tsin last night, I thought it was actually one of my friends playing a joke on me. So I had to call the company back, and I got Ted Zagat's extension, and it was actually him. So we built that product. And we fell in love with the developers and the product folks that we were working with. We had always desired to have an open platform with APIs. But this just -- we made a decision, was the first really big pivot, was a shutdown all of the Marqeta card business and put all of our resources into delivering an open platform, which -- next company was eBay that called us. We released our APIs at the end of 2014 and found very, very crisp and clear product market fit. So as you said, we invented modern card issuing, which is we turned the entire issuing model on its head, and that companies had always gone to banks to go build products, but banks always deliver the same exact product. We put the bank in the back, and we put the technology in the front. So what we allowed engineers and product people and visionary entrepreneurs is to solve real problems at scale, arranging our technology and our APIs in the way to solve these areas. And we began really in the beginning was just focusing on verticals like expense management, on-demand delivery, e-commerce, buy now, pay later, kind of going down the line, so.

Tien-Tsin Huang

analyst
#5

You have an amazing client list, Jason. How did that come to be?

Jason Gardner

executive
#6

It was a DNA match in the beginning. I mean, it's interesting, a lot of these companies in the early days when we first started working with companies like DoorDash, they were doing $15,000 a month in volume. I mean they were -- had this tiny little office next to a veterinarian's hospital. Companies like Instacart, where I remember in the early days, talking to Sutton Bank, and their first question was, who would want to get their groceries delivered? So we found that the product market fit where solving the last mile using card products was a great fit for these areas, like on-demand delivery, like expense management. So it just happened that we were working with these companies who had built now large public companies and great brands themselves. And then we began to move down the line. So we started working with -- the first card we did with Square was back in 2013. It was sort of a [ hack quick ] project. Then Square called us in 2016 to build a card against the Cash App. And at the time, and I don't think either of us thought it would be what it is today. But we have found is clearly that DNA match with great technology companies, great engineers, entrepreneurs and product people allowed us to really attract these great companies, which today, I mean, our client list ranges from, obviously, JPMorgan Chase, and Citi, and Marcus by Goldman Sachs, to Expensify, and Afterpay, and Affirm. We've built a great client list. But it's really -- our customer list simply because of our DNA match and technology.

Tien-Tsin Huang

analyst
#7

Yes. I mean you serve some amazing categories, buy now, pay later, expense management. You mentioned neobanks. What about traditional FIs? You just mentioned JPMC and Citi. How real of an opportunity is that to serve their card needs?

Jason Gardner

executive
#8

Well, so we've always run a strategy where we focus on commerce disruptors. I'm a big believer, is focus on a vertical, specialize in it, build features and functions that allow us to capture that market, and then land and expand from there. So as we talked about on-demand delivery, buy now, pay later, e-commerce, expense management and many others. We then obviously went into digital banking. We then went into large tech giants like Google and Uber. And a majority of the volume today across the world lives in the largest banks. So it's a natural fit for us to move to that area. What was interesting is they were talking to us because we were the disruptors. We were providing the picks and shovels to the same companies that they were seeing really grow and gain more and more market share. So they're talking to us about, hey, what can you do for us? And we were finding value in that a few years ago, this is even before the pandemic, we were the first company to work with Square, Apple and Visa to instantly issue a card into Apple Pay. We thought that was a beautiful experience. We discovered that companies like JPMorgan Chase and Citi use TSYS. TSYS does not have the ability to instantly issue a card into Apple Pay. So we felt like this is a great opportunity for us to work with one of the largest issuers, if not the largest issuer in the world, and provide value to their customers. So these are long sales cycles. You have to prove yourself in your technology. That contract has obviously now completed. We've talked about that publicly. And now we're helping JPMorgan Chase and Citi provide a really good customer experience. So now as you would think is, are you going to go after the large portfolios? Or are you going to go after new card issuance? Eventually. But right now, it's about getting our foot in the door, proving our worth with the large financial institutions, and eventually providing more value, more technology, more services to them over time, simply because that's where the large pools of volume are. And we believe very strongly in our ability to service these large financial institutions at scale.

Tien-Tsin Huang

analyst
#9

Yes. It does seem like a lot of growth finds Marqeta. The one thing I've learned in following the company, especially when it was private, was that developers love to build on Marqeta. We always hear positive things about, okay, it's easy to build on Marqeta. If we want to build a card program, where do we go? Go to Marqeta. Same question. Why is that?

Jason Gardner

executive
#10

The DNA match. You have to build for a specific constituency. And I remember we were talking about this last night, in the early days, I used to go do some speaking engagements with Zach from Platt. And we would ask the audience, like how many people know what an API is? Maybe 10% of the crowd would raise their hand. And we'd have to educate them on what APIs were and why they were important to developers. An application program interface is rules and instructions on how engineers should be coding to these APIs to create a very specific consumer experience. And that didn't exist before. It -- they existed, APIs existed, but not in the issuing processing space. So we had this DNA match where we knew engineers who wanted to purpose-build products to solve problems at scale, whether they're consumer problems or commercial problems, whether that card is supporting their core business or is their core business. And that DNA match and that sort of how we build and document and focus allowed us to really work very, very well with the developer community, and we really fell in love with the constituency.

Tien-Tsin Huang

analyst
#11

Yes. No. That's very, very important. So let's talk about competition for a bit. So you've got in-house. You have legacy providers. TSYS, you mentioned. We have Fiserv coming in later on as well. You have modern competitors. You have some merchant acquirers that are extending into issuing as well. So how do you see the landscape?

Jason Gardner

executive
#12

Well, I'll start with we have 12 years of operating experience at scale. And that's very hard to reverse engineer, especially in the modern card issuing space because it's a space that we invented and we know it intimately. And we've built extraordinarily -- extraordinary trust with our customers. Last year, we reported we had over 100 -- we had 175% revenue retention. We believe anything over 100% is really good. And we have attracted that because we have built trust, not only to your point with the developer community, but we have built trust with great companies at massive, massive scale. And we do that -- our top 20 companies, 50% of them -- 50% of our customers use us in different geographies. So we help them move around the world. And so yes, like issuing and processing is not a new, new thing. It's been around for decades. Companies like TSYS and like Fiserv, which owns First Data and FIS, they've been doing this at scale, but they've always sold to banks. And when companies needed to build products, they always went to banks. And the fact that we invented modern card issuing and turned that on its head, we've now built a great following over the 12 years as a private company, then going public on June 9. And we see still where -- we did process $111 billion in volume last year. And you have about $8 trillion in carded volume in the U.S. alone. So there's lots of greenfield, and we're a little fraction of that. So now we have these modern companies coming in focused on doing a whole host of different things. And issuing and processing is just one piece of what they do. We think because issuing and processing is so complex compared to everything else in payments, it demands focus. That's why we've always focused on issuing and processing and why we invented modern card issuing. And if you look at just the volume these companies are doing, it's de minimis compared to the volume we're simply doing today and what we'll be doing in the future.

Tien-Tsin Huang

analyst
#13

I think when we first met, I asked you to tell me how hard is it to do issuer processing versus merchant processing because a lot of us cover the merchant-acquiring world for quite some time and issuing is relatively new as a focus point. So can you spend a minute on that? Merchant versus issuer processing, especially in the context that, again, in Adyen and the Stripe extending into issuing, how hard or easy is it for that to happen?

Jason Gardner

executive
#14

Yes. So there, I think you just look at the pure numbers. I mean, there are thousands and thousands of acquirers across the world. There's only a few hundred issuer processors, and the reason for that. So acquiring is not programmable. Issuing and processing is programmable. It's where the ledger lives. We are ultimately responsible for the fraud. We're ultimately responsible for pointing where the money goes. So of something called settlement, which I've always described settlement as shoveling snow in a blizzard by people who are throwing rocks at you. It's a very, very complex business to run at scale. Acquiring is very different. It's not programmable. You can introduce 4 lines of code into your website if you ultimately want to do e-commerce. It's not -- it's complex, but issuing and processing is orders and orders of magnitude. It's complex. And that's why I think in the beginning, where I said I wanted to go build an issuing processing system from scratch, people thought I was absolutely nuts to go and do it. And we had always seen where tons of innovation was happening on the acquiring side, companies like Square and like Stripe and like dLocal and Adyen and Mollie and First Data, I mean we would be here all day talking about all the acquirers in the space. But very, very few issuing and processing companies and none before us that introduced modern card issuing.

Tien-Tsin Huang

analyst
#15

Yes. So maybe to add on to that, Block, Square, your biggest customer. They outsource both merchant processing as well as issuer processing, using you on the issuing side. So again, going -- building back on that question, given all the demands on what Square needs, how do we get to how large Square is and how much more wallet share is there to be had?

Jason Gardner

executive
#16

So you're right. So they use Chase Paymentech, I believe, on the acquiring side. They use Marqeta on the issuing and processing side. And like that's not unusual. I mean companies like Stripe use Wells Fargo to -- for their acquiring processing engine. So on the issuing processing side within Square, within Cash App specifically, we do ATM. We do ACH. We do the Cash App Card. And we do the [ redeem ] card. On the seller side, we do ACH, we do the seller card. And we do that both in the U.S. and we do that in Canada. And then most recently, through the acquisition with Afterpay, we've enable to Apple Pay at the Square terminal point of sale in the markets that they operate in. So we see where companies like Square, even though they use Chase Paymentech on the acquiring side, they use Marqeta in the issuing processing side. They continue to build beautiful experiences, and they build that on top of our infrastructure. And they are -- we just reported with the Afterpay acquisition, there are 66% of our volume based on the first quarter. And we want them to use more and more of our platform. They are a stellar customer of ours. And I think a testament to who we are as a company that really that DNA match. And there's a lot more to do. There's a lot more to do not only within issuing and processing, but what else can we be doing for our customers, not just Block, but all of our customers in regards to introducing new technologies to them so that they can take advantage of those and build -- continue to build beautiful experiences for their customers.

Tien-Tsin Huang

analyst
#17

Good. So you've got -- we talked about Block or Square really quickly. What about some of the other big verticals? I think you've given some updates on growth within each. What trends are you seeing in some of these like on-demand delivery expense management, et cetera?

Jason Gardner

executive
#18

Yes. So in the card space, and this is how we did so well, is I'm a big believer is focusing on verticals, going in, landing a top 5 customer, and then landing and expanding from there. Understanding what are you not getting from your current vendor. Like what else can we be doing from a feature and function perspective. Because we're a platform and because we're built from the ground up, we natively deliver APIs, there's a lot of functionality that we can add to help new verticals that we're focused on. And if you look at the verticals where cards are being used, there's a myriad of them. I mean we can spend a long time going through all the different verticals and the -- not only the rules and regulation and compliance associated with those verticals. I mean look at the medical and HIPAA compliance just for the sort of array of where cards are used in that space. But what else can we be doing in that area? So we've always focused on these commerce disruptors that are certainly building within these verticals. But again, because of disruption we've created, we've gone into digital banking. We've gone into the large tech giants, and then now the large financial institutions. That strategy, we invented 7 years ago, really when we entered the market with modern card issuing, and it's worked really well for us. So we're not going to move off that strategy of continuing to build in verticals and then attracting a lot of the large players because they're being disrupted in the space.

Tien-Tsin Huang

analyst
#19

Got it. So I have to ask you, I know everyone wants to know about the macro. And how cyclical is Marqeta's business? Do you have exposure to some of the pandemic beneficiaries? And of course, crypto has been coming up a lot with some of the devaluation of the assets there. Catch us up on how cyclical the business is. You've been growing very, very fast overall.

Jason Gardner

executive
#20

Yes. I mean people and businesses still need to buy things. It's -- I bet everybody in this room has a card in their wallet or maybe on their phone. And they pay things every day, whether online or offline, with that. That's -- I don't think it's going to change. We're not going to all of a sudden go back to using cash. In fact, as we've seen during the pandemic, cash across the world in double digits has actually declined and the use of electronic payments has skyrocketed. And we have seen just growth in our platform in the last 2 years has been tremendous, whether it's government stimulus, whether that's the rise of on-demand delivery, we see different things going on around the world. We have certainly been a beneficiary of the volume of not only new companies, but existing companies wanting to build new technologies. We talked about JPMorgan Chase and we talked about Citi using simply instant issuance because it's a safer method than inserting a card or tapping a card, which was -- or simply tapping your phone. And in crypto, we're in the very sort of early days. That's a great example of a vertical we went into. We thought, hey, the -- it's very kludgy to actually convert crypto to a fiat currency and then spend at the point of sale. So we work with our customers to create really a way to spend fiat currency at the point of sale and created this gateway between the companies using JIT, or Just-in-Time, which is a technology that we invented that a majority of our customers use. That just means that when a card or a phone is tapped at the point of sale or the number entered online, when we get the information from the point of sale, we can repackage that and deliver that to our customer. That did not exist before Marqeta. What that does is it allows a mark-to-market for crypto. And the consumer just sees them spending, using a Visa card or a MasterCard right at the point of sale, their crypto in their account or their wallet, which creates a very, very unique experience. So as we've seen, whether there's volatility in the markets, which obviously crypto, there's lots of volatility, we still see that volume at the point of sale. And we think, again, we're in the early innings around crypto. And a lot of the -- sort of the new companies, new technology and volume at the point of sale.

Tien-Tsin Huang

analyst
#21

Okay. Good. I know that -- just to stay with the market a bit, right, there's a lot more focus on profitability, balancing growth and margins. And you've talked about disciplined growth, I think, on the last call. So update us on the thinking on path to profitability and how you're balancing that, the growth and margin side.

Jason Gardner

executive
#22

Yes. I mean we're a growth business. And if you simply look at the market share that we have, from a pure volume perspective, is tiny. I mean, it's less than 1%. So it actually demands that Marqeta invests -- continue to invest in verticals, continue to invest in digital banking, large tech giants and large financial institutions. As Mike talked about in our last earning call, we're -- and I think you did the earning call before that as well, is long term is the focus on 20% plus EBITDA. And that is the goal of the company. But if we look at how we operate today, simply because the opportunity is so immense within modern card issuing, it demands that we continue to focus on headcount, to continue to focus on spreading our wings in new geographies, new technology, new features, new functions, simply because the opportunity is there, and we want to capture more and more of it.

Tien-Tsin Huang

analyst
#23

Right. And you've raised a lot of capital, right? $3 in cash per share. Is inorganic a part of what you just described, to build great product, to expand geographically? What are you thinking on that front?

Jason Gardner

executive
#24

Yes. So what you see today is pure organic growth. We have not acquired a company at Marqeta that, in any way, provided revenue to the bottom line. But you have to look at what's going on in the market. There's lots of -- there's an entire cottage industry that's been built around Marqeta with a lot of great technology. There's great companies being built within fintech. And as we've talked about in the past, we'll always be strategic in regards to M&A and using that capital to bring more technology into the company, possibly revenue, possibly new verticals and new areas to go spread our wings. It just simply demands it. Now if you look at how the market has changed significantly, if you see money is drying up, it's also opportunistic for us. So strategically, first, opportunistic second. We are looking at a whole host of different companies and technologies. But to your point, we have $1.6 billion in cash, and we want to put that to work from an M&A earnings perspective. We'll see organic growth.

Tien-Tsin Huang

analyst
#25

Very clear. Any questions from the audience? I have a bunch of questions here in the portal. Happy to take them in the room first. So Jason, a couple of questions, it looks like, around company morale. The stock has come in. Thinking around equity, stock comp, things like that.

Jason Gardner

executive
#26

Yes. I mean if you look at the broader market, a company that's newly public. And I say this to the company in almost every town hall, because a lot of questions come up around the stock price. And I always say, continue to execute, and the stock will follow. And it happens to be true. And we reported great earnings in the last quarter. We upped guidance in a couple of areas for the future. And as I've talked about with the company is we've reached a milestone. Going public is a stop in the adventure of building a business, which I started by myself back in 2010. And look what we've all created together. This is just being a public company. This is how things operate. And I think because we have stability in the market and we're continuing to execute as a business, we also have become a platform for employees that they want to come and do the best work of their lives. I think now the attraction of a Series C or a Series A company, knowing that VC money is drying up, the sort of the morale or the focus on the company has changed. We have a lot of folks that come here to do the best work of their lives, and we want them to continue to do that. My goal is to create the environment for them to go and do that, while we're focusing on and continuing executing in an area where we are the market leader. And we want to continue defending that market leadership by building deeper moats and taller walls around our technology. And to do that, we need to attract the best people, and we will do that.

Tien-Tsin Huang

analyst
#27

Good. So let's talk about the product side and credit. I think you talked about credit a bit on the last call, the Greenlight deal. So what's happening on the credit side? What can we expect? And I know there's some partnerships. I get questions around how does FNBO play into things. So can you just level set us on that?

Jason Gardner

executive
#28

Yes. So we as a company have been talking about credit for a long time. So those in the room that understand how the card arena works is you have prepaid, you have debit and you have credit. We have always focused on the company even from the early days was prepaid and debit. Credit is very different. So you -- from a regulatory perspective, there's something called Reg Z, which is if you look at it, and there's the CARD Act. There's lots of information about how you do interest calculations, what gets paid off first, even the font size on the monthly statement that a consumer receives. So the way our world works is you have issuing and processing, and then you have what's called program management. And we've talked about, we have basically 2, say, columns of services that we have. We have either powered by, which is just processing, or we have managed by, which is all of the features and functions, us managing the network relationships, us managing the bank relationships, all the compliance and regulatory. That is a very heavy lift within credit. So we started with credit card issuing and processing, which is Greenlight, which is M1 Finance. Then getting into the program management side, which we're going to continue to build out. Today, we're partnering with Deserve and we're partnering with FNBO on that piece.

Tien-Tsin Huang

analyst
#29

Okay. Got it. So -- sorry, I just want to make sure. Anyone has questions before I keep going? So on the managed by, powered by, since you mentioned it, right? There are different dynamics on take rate as well as gross margin.

Jason Gardner

executive
#30

Correct.

Tien-Tsin Huang

analyst
#31

Can you detail that?

Jason Gardner

executive
#32

Yes. So powered by today is about 10%. Managed by is 90%. A majority of our customers use that. Because they're not in the card business, they use our products, either support their core business or it is their core business. So they want to focus on creating great experiences. And they use us to help them manage the -- all of the intricacies and complexities of doing these card products. Powered by is less revenue but higher margin. Managed by is higher revenue, less margin is the way to think about it.

Tien-Tsin Huang

analyst
#33

Good. So we have 2 QR code questions, Jason. So I'll ask them together. Does Marqeta support QR code payments, specifically for the Lightning Network, like for Cash App? And then there's another question is, do you play a role when QR codes come through? Or is another provider potentially being used to process QR codes amongst your clients?

Jason Gardner

executive
#34

Yes. So not today. If you look at companies like Xendit in Asia, where they even have a card with a QR code on it to do account-to-account transfer. So you're paying at the point of sale. And they're actually using the network rail to go move that money. We don't see it here in the United States. So paying -- which is 98% of our revenue today, we don't see it in the U.S. of using QR codes to pay at the point of sale. Now we do believe, at some point, account-to-account transfers will come into play here in the U.S. We do see it within Asia. We don't necessarily see it within Europe. So very early days for us. We sort of mix of what our customers need to be successful, and we focus on that from a technology perspective. Also, we're entrepreneurs. We think about like where the world is headed in our vision, and we do a vision match between the two. We don't see QR codes today as being something that is at least a near-term focus for us.

Tien-Tsin Huang

analyst
#35

Two questions on M&A. Why is M&A the best use of cash? You've grown organically in the past. Similar question, what type of company would you look to acquire? Is international top of the list?

Jason Gardner

executive
#36

Yes. So M&A is useful in several different areas. So the payments ecosystem is immense and especially within the card space. I mean there's all host of things from dispute management, to risk and compliance, to different forms of moving money, especially outside the U.S. So we all know Visa and Mastercard, Amex, Discover, China UnionPay, but they are just 5 of hundreds of networks around the world. So there's local schemes in every different countries. So as we spread our wings and especially in countries where we see a lot of volume, we would want to look at a company that maybe has integrated with local schemes that allows us to get a foothold within that market specifically, how we look at other forms of money movement. So we talked about modern card issuing. Now we're talking about global money movement. So global money movement is not just cards. There's many other ways to move money in around the world. So how we would use M&A or capital to do M&A to enter different parts of the market, we would essentially look at that. So as payment geeks and as leaders in modern card issuing, look at many different ways around the world, how money moves, and then again, talking to our customers and then finding that vision match of the other areas that we want to get into. So because of that capital we have, we wanted to put it to work inorganically of looking at M&A. And ultimately, that would be our first desire, our first use case to use it.

Tien-Tsin Huang

analyst
#37

From a growth constraint standpoint, I think I've asked you this before, internationally, getting connections to schemes and getting the payment license, is that big in terms of the bottleneck? Or is it really more things like resources and time?

Jason Gardner

executive
#38

It's people. I mean, people is the precious resource I think every company has. You want to go out and hire the best people and have them do the best work of their lives. And so you talked about -- I think the part of the question there was continuing doing organic growth, like -- sure. But opportunistically, if we look at what's going on around the world and then strategic nature of what we're trying to do, we can really speed things up. So our idea is that getting licensure in Europe from an e-money license perspective, most companies go and do that. We have banking infrastructure here in the U.S. There's 5,000 mid-market banks. There's a number of banks that kind of fit under the Durbin cap that we work with because it allows us to share more interchange back to our customers as we think about growing around the world. But interchange and different methods around the world are different. So we would create different models for revenue, which means helping our customers be more successful without going out and getting the specific licenses to move money. But we'll get them where we need to, and then we're focusing on applying the risk and compliance and technology and platform for our customers.

Tien-Tsin Huang

analyst
#39

Another question here was someone's asking about, not surprising, Adyen, Stripe, Checkout? How does their tech stack, stack up against yours? Because I think Checkout talked about getting into issuing here and then Adyen has been talking about it as well. I see some people nodding their heads.

Jason Gardner

executive
#40

Yes. So they talk about it, but it's actually a very, very small part of their business. Compared to Marqeta's volume, it's actually de minimis as well. And that's -- as I talked about, they probably compete with 50 companies a day in the acquiring space. There are thousands of companies in the acquiring space. That is their battlefront. So are they going to stop investing in that to invest in something which is -- where is the magnitude more complex, especially from a technology perspective, which is issuing and processing, and sort of take their sort of vision off what's going on from a situational awareness perspective as an acquirer and constantly focusing into issuing and processing? Stripe has been in the market for 5 years now, still a de minimis part of their business. I believe Adyen has been in the market for close to 3 years now. Again, a de minimis part of their business. They have a different battlefront within acquiring. We are solely focused on issuing and processing because it demands that level of focus. And again, simply because it's orders of magnitude more complex than the acquiring space.

Tien-Tsin Huang

analyst
#41

Here's one, what keeps you up at night? Is there regulatory change risk, competition or the Square renewal?

Jason Gardner

executive
#42

People keep me up at night.

Tien-Tsin Huang

analyst
#43

People still #1?

Jason Gardner

executive
#44

People still #1. Yes. It's -- that's the competitive advantage. Like we are who we are because of people. Our customers are who they are because of people. Being able to have a connection with them and people doing the best work of their lives and listening and writing code and understanding where the world is going is something -- is the main thing that keeps me up at night. I mean our competitors are our competitors. I'm just simply as a company, as a CEO and a founder in the business as well, we're just focused on doing the best work of our lives within modern card issuing. We know that we continue to execute like we've been executing, then we're constantly going to be the market leader, and we will build deeper moats and taller walls as time goes on.

Tien-Tsin Huang

analyst
#45

Okay. Good. We're almost out of time. So what are you excited about then, Jason? You've gone through a very long journey. It's always fun to hear about it. What's next for the company? What milestones should we be tracking here?

Jason Gardner

executive
#46

Well, the milestone is volume. So if we look at the fact that we're less than 1% of the carded volume in the U.S. and like you're talking slivers of basis points globally, the opportunity is immense within modern card issuing and immense within global money movement. Now we have been -- as a company, have been focused on commerce disruption. We believe that's still going on. There's a lot of new companies being invented around the world. And then on the opposite end of that is the large financial institutions and them wanting to more and more modernize. I mean Jamie Dimon has said, they're spending $1 billion a month just simply moving into the cloud. We're already there. So we see -- we can do a lot more not only today, but where not only constituencies are headed, both commercial and consumer, new verticals, new areas of digital banking, tech giants deciding that, hey, we have this large constituency, how do we monetize it in a way with different types of services? And then the large financial institutions where the -- where most of the volume lives. So there's a lot to be excited about. For us, it's simply about where are we going to focus right now so we don't spread ourselves too thin.

Tien-Tsin Huang

analyst
#47

Good. Look, it's a fun and exciting name to cover. We've learned a ton talking to you and the team. So grateful for your time. Thanks for being with us.

Jason Gardner

executive
#48

Thank you for having me. Thank you, everybody.

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