MoneyHero Limited (MNY) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. And welcome to MoneyHero's Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2024 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] I would like now to turn the conference over to Miner Pan, Head of Corporate Development. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Michelle. Hello, everyone. Good morning and good evening, and welcome to MoneyHero's Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2024 Earnings Conference Call. Joining me on the call today are Rohith Murthy, CEO; and Danny Leung, Interim CFO. Our earnings release was issued earlier today, and is now available on our IR website, as well as via GlobeNewswire Services. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that, today's call will include forward-looking statements made under the safe harbor provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Please refer to the safe harbor statement in our earnings press release, which applies to this call. In addition, please note that today's discussion will include both IFRS and non-IFRS financial measures for comparison purpose only. For a reconciliation of these non-IFRS measures to the most directly comparable IFRS measures, please refer to our earnings release and SEC filings. All monetary references will be in United States dollars unless otherwise stated. Lastly, a webcast replay of this conference call will be available on our IR website. I will now turn the call over to Rohith, CEO of MoneyHero Group. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Miner. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us today to discuss MoneyHero Group's fourth quarter and full year 2024 financial results. We closed out the year with a robust quarter of financial and operational results, reflecting the clear progress we have made on our path to profitability. As we continue to focus on diversifying our revenue mix towards high-margin products, lowering operating expenses and improving operational efficiency. Adjusted EBITDA loss during the quarter improved substantially to USD 2.9 million, our best quarterly performance since going public. Underscoring our improving trajectory throughout the year, from losses of $6.4 million in Q1, $9.3 million in Q2 and $5 million in Q3. At the same time, our gross margin expanded by 25 percentage points year-over-year, while net loss narrowed sharply to $18.8 million from $94.3 million during the same period last year. Registered members reached 7.5 million, up 42% year-on-year, reflecting strong user engagement, while approved applications grew 21% year-over-year to 767,000, underscoring increasing user trust and robust demand across our platform. With such solid results heading into 2025, we are confident in our ability to regain top-line growth momentum and have set a target of achieving $100 million in revenue in 2025, and generating a positive adjusted EBITDA in the second half of the year. Now, these results directly reflect the impact and disciplined execution our efficiency strategy is having since we rolled it out in mid-2024. Our objective is clear, to transform MoneyHero into a leaner, more focused, resilient and sustainable profitable business. We've made meaningful progress across the 5 strategic pillars we outlined then, consumer pull, conversion expertise, operating leverage, strong provider partnerships and insurance brokerage. We remain the largest credit card digital acquisition partner for majority of the banks, across our geographies, and are leveraging the strong market position to strategically pivot towards higher-margin verticals. While revenue during the quarter fell as a result of the strategic pivot and the high base effect during the same period last year, it substantially improved in quality, and is fueling our transformation. We launched seamless end-to-end purchasing journeys in travel and car insurance and developed targeted strategic collaborations resulting in insurance revenue growing an impressive 40% to $8.2 million in 2024, now accounting for a double-digit share of total revenue. Wealth revenue surged by 138% to $8.5 million in 2024, driven by our deepening banking relationships and robust demand for investment products, stock and banking accounts. These verticals strengthened our margin profile, while generating consistent and recurring revenue streams, both of which are key pillars of long-term sustainability. We also laid the foundation for scalable growth by materially lowering operating expenses and improving unit economics, with an optimized cost structure across all markets, streamlined operations and reduced paid marketing and rewards spend. Now, looking ahead to 2025, we will maintain our focus on scaling higher-margin verticals, particularly insurance, while continuing to tighten cost controls and simplifying workflows. Our product and tech strategy continues to follow a buy-over-build philosophy, enabling faster innovation through strategic partnerships, including new initiatives in AI and automation that are already underway. Our commitment to becoming an AI-first organization is already translating into several impactful initiatives across the business. We are actively working on deploying AI-powered customer service tools, designed to significantly reduce inquiry volumes and achieve higher first contact resolution rates. Additionally, we're piloting generative AI solutions to accelerate and scale content production efficiently. Throughout the organization, we are exploring opportunities to automate workflows using advanced AI tools and agentic AI to boost productivity, reduce operational overhead and enable our teams to focus more strategically. We operate in a rapidly growing $1 billion addressable market across banking and insurance, where we've only begun tapping into our full potential. With a debt-free balance sheet, $42.5 million in cash, and a more efficient, profitable and scalable business model, we have considerable runway ahead and are ideally positioned to capture a greater share of this large and growing addressable market and deliver sustainable longer-term value to shareholders. With that, I will now turn the call over to Danny Leung, our CFO.

Thank you, Rohith. Good day, everyone. Our strong results in the fourth quarter demonstrate the effectiveness of our strategy, as we continue to make significant strides in the diversification of our revenue mix, expand partnerships with our key providers and broaden our product offerings. We believe these adjustments position ourselves for sustained growth, and as providers scale operations in different regions. We see opportunities to further strengthen our revenue mix and deepen our market presence with them. This quarter, we remained focused on executing our growth strategy, and continue our comprehensive reorganization, and restructuring exercise to streamline operations and reduce costs. Total revenue during the quarter fell by 40% year-over-year to $15.7 million, driven mainly by a shift in focus on diversifying revenue mix for high-margin products. Such as insurance and wealth products, and the high base effect during the same period last year, with increased investment in marketing and customer acquisition to expand market share. Revenue from insurance products increased by 10% year-over-year to $2.1 million during the quarter, accounting for 14% of total revenue, comparing to 7% during the same period last year. Revenue from wealth products increased by 195% year-over-year to USD 2.4 million, accounting for 15% of total revenue compared to 3% during the same period last year. On a full year basis, the impact of our strategic pivot is equally pronounced, with revenue remaining essentially flat, while revenue from insurance and wealth products surged 40% and 138%, respectively, from last year. We will continue to explore new opportunities to offer more new high-margin product lines to build top line growth and further narrow our bottom line. Cost of revenue decreased by 62% year-over-year to $6.6 million during the quarter, with advertising and marketing expenses decreasing by 23% year-over-year as we focus on scaling high-margin verticals and optimize reward costs associated with the credit cards vertical and paid marketing spend across all markets. Total operating costs and expenses, excluding net foreign exchange differences, decreased to $25.2 million during the quarter from $45.6 million during the same period last year. This translated into adjusted EBITDA improving substantially to a loss of $2.9 million from $4.6 million during the same period last year. This was mainly driven by increased investments in customer acquisition, technology re-platforming and data infrastructure, to build a solid foundation for our future growth and profitability. These strategic investments were balanced by initiatives to streamline other aspects of our operations designed to enhance efficiency and drive returns. Looking ahead, we expect adjusted EBITDA to consistently improve, building on the significant progress we made during the fourth quarter. With margins steadily improving, we are well positioned to drive growth momentum heading into 2025, strengthening our confidence to generate positive adjusted EBITDA on a quarterly basis in the second half of 2025. Our comprehensive review of our organizational structure completed alongside a successful reorganization this year has strengthened our operational foundation and set the stage for continued sustainable growth. That concludes our prepared remarks for today. I will now turn the call over to the operator to begin the Q&A session. Operator, please go ahead.

[Operator Instructions] And the first question will come from Jin Yoon with New Street Research.

So a couple of questions from my end is that, first, what's the company's strategy to lower your acquisition costs? And how do you plan to leverage the growing registered membership base? Second question is related to insurance. Just want to understand what -- how much is the insurance revenue expected to contribute for FY '25? And what will be the key drivers behind that? And a third question, if I may, is that given the current cash position that you have, what's your capital allocation strategy?

Thank you for those questions. I'll take the first 2 questions, and then I'll pass it to Danny for the last one. So, your first question on our strategy to lower our customer acquisition costs. Now, lowering our customer acquisition cost is central to the efficiency strategy, and it actually directly aligns really well with all our strategic pillars. But the one thing, I want to point out is that CAC optimization for us is not a one-size-fits-all approach. So what do I mean by that is, we are willing to strategically invest at various CAC levels based on the potential lifetime value and also the renewal revenue stream from different customer segments. Now, a few things to note about this is, we have our centralized data platform now fully operational. And what this does is it gives us now the capability to accurately segment our customers, so we can run more personalized marketing campaigns. And this really significantly boosts our marketing efficiency. This will enable us to direct our resources towards higher value, higher intent customer segments, and this should help us lowering our overall CAC. The other key aspect is our growing registered member base, now over 7.5 million. It's a powerful asset for us. And we are now actively investing in loyalty-based strategies, because this will drive deeper customer engagement, but also effective monetization. A key initiative, which we recently announced is we are launching the Credit Club in Hong Kong in partnership with TransUnion, because the Credit will allow us to build a valuable member base with enriched credit profiles. And this also enables us to run very highly personalized, targeted recommendations that match more precisely to our user's eligibility, and credit needs. And this is not just enhancing the customer experience, but we end up improving our conversion rates that will also again significantly reduce our marginal CAC. Also, by leveraging these personalized recommendations, and enhancing our eligibility, and having these insights, we can also drive more targeted cross-sell and upsell. We spoke about how we are really focused on higher margin and recurring revenue verticals such as insurance and wealth, this will again boost the customer lifetime value. Now, taking the segmented approach, we selectively accept higher CAC for specific segments, where we see there's a clear opportunity for us to generate recurring revenue streams, car insurance being one of them. This sort of long-term renewal economics will justify initial CAC investments we would make for these segments, and the renewal revenue streams will carry minimal incremental acquisition cost. And finally, we're really intensifying our focus on SEO-driven high-quality organic traffic. What this means is it substantially reduces our reliance on paid channels, and this sort of sustainable organic growth strategy will also continually decrease our CAC, and it allows us to reinvest those savings in growth and innovation. Your second question was on the insurance revenue and how much we expect it to sort of contribute. Now, we don't provide specific product level revenue guidance, but let me speak about insurance. Given it's already grown into a double-digit contributor now to our revenue in 2024 and we really expect insurance to become an even more meaningful driver in '25. And here are the sort of drivers that will fuel this growth. One is the real-time car insurance platform. We recently announced the launch of our car insurance marketplace in Hong Kong in partnership with Bolttech. We've introduced real-time pricing capabilities, and a seamless end-to-end purchasing journey. And this is a really unique and differentiated offering that boosts customer convenience, engagement and ultimately, our conversion rates. Second, fast and friction-free travel insurance. We are continuously enhancing our travel insurance offering with simplified and now a 3-click purchasing journey. This again, significantly removes the friction from the whole buying experience. All of these things will boost conversion rate, it really encourages repeat purchasing behavior, creating that strong revenue -- recurring revenue potential. The other few opportunities with insurance, which are really interesting for us is embedded insurance opportunities. Again, leveraging our partnership ecosystem, particularly with Bolttech, we're looking at embedding high-demand insurance products, such as device protection plans, directly into the consumer purchasing journey. And as I mentioned, we have over 7.5 million registered members and growing. There's rich customer insights now we get from our data platform. So we're also looking at executing cross-sell and upsell strategies. And with the Credit Club initiative, we are confident we can match insurance offerings to also these highly targeted customer segments. And finally, while some of these segments, we will be, as I mentioned, looking at initial upfront customer acquisition costs, what they offer will be a predictable and a substantial recurring revenue stream, and car insurance is going to be one of those high-value segments that we want to strategically invest in acquiring these new customers. Danny, I'll pass over to you for the third question.

Okay. So the third question that we have is the capital allocation strategy of our current cash position. Okay. Given that, we have a debt-free balance sheet and cash position of approximately $42 million, we're taking a disciplined, prudent, yet proactive approach to capital allocation. Firstly, we ensure robust liquidity to completely fund our core operations. Such, includes maintaining sufficient reserves for operational expenses such as payroll, strategic reward programs, professional services and general corporate purposes. Secondly, with available excess cash, we are placing funds into conservative interest-bearing instruments, to yield capital preservation. This aligns with our commitment to responsible stewardship of capital and prudent risk management in the current macro environment. And also at the same time, we actively assess growth opportunities that can deliver clear strategic value to our business. This might include considering target investments such as bolt-on acquisitions, strategic talent additions, innovative technology partnerships, or growth initiatives with high return potential, especially those aligned with our high-margin verticals, technology platforms and AI first strategic direction. And ultimately, our approach balances financial discipline with strategic agility. We remain well positioned to capitalize quickly on attractive opportunities, while staying cautious and deliberate to ensure all allocations drive meaningful long-term shareholder value.

If I may have a follow-up with that. Just wondering what markets do you expect to drive that growth in 2025? And if you can provide any outlook from that one, that would be great.

Sure. I mean, this question, I would like to sort of tie it back again to our strategic pillars. And just to recap our strategic pillars being consumer pull, conversion, expertise, strong provider partnerships, operating leverage, and insurance brokerage. And when we look at our sort of markets, we look at our right to win across the strategic pillars. So I'll start first with Singapore and Hong Kong, because these are mature digital-first markets, and they really offer a very sort of ideal environment for us for simultaneous sort of investment across all these pillars. Both these markets, they're sort of characterized by, firstly, financial hubs, advanced digital infrastructure, a very -- a strong consumer adoption of digital financial products. There's also a really highly developed ecosystem of local and international financial institutions, many of whom are now fully API integrated. And that really enables us to also do seamless product integration and real-time user experiences, and purchasing journeys. And finally, when you take a look at these 2 markets, it comes with the consumer sort of sophistication where we can drive a higher intent organic traffic, and also sort of a robust demand for personalized offerings. So with these dynamics, we will continue to invest across our pillars, whether it is enhancing our brand awareness for leveraging our expanding membership sort of base on the consumer pull pillar, ongoing optimization of our UX and UI, the data platform we have for personalization, the strong partnerships that we are leveraging on, including recently with TransUnion for credit products, and our partnership with Bolttech for innovative insurance solutions. And finally, as we think of insurance, we really feel both these markets are primed as we expand into car insurance and other higher-margin verticals, including wealth, where we can offer a very frictionless sort of experience. So we feel looking at our pillars and these 2 markets to begin with, we can really drive profitable growth driven by a diversified higher margin and recurring revenue stream. Now, let me talk about the other 2 markets we have, Philippines and Taiwan. So Philippines is really emerging, as a really critical sort of digital financial services market, significant growth potential for us. And here, we are especially focused on the 3 of the pillars, conversion expertise. In Philippines, we are investing substantially in our tele sales capabilities, where we're able to optimize our conversion from an inquiry all the way to purchase. And this really enhances our unit economics and profitability. Also, we're really focused on stronger provider partnerships. We recently onboarded a major local bank and this significantly sort of expands our partner network, but also strengthens our ability to offer differentiated financial product in the market. And our influencer-driven platform, Creatory, is driving cost-efficient customer acquisition in Philippines and also increasing our brand recognition in this fast-growing market. And finally, Taiwan. Taiwan presents a really unique opportunity for us given its existing already substantial consumer pull. We have one of the highest levels of organic traffic and brand recall in Taiwan across all our markets. So here, our strategic focus is again on conversion expertise. So we're really investing in our UX and UI and our user journeys, targeting sort of friction points when users leave our platform, post product selection. We are exploring generative AI solutions here to improve the funnel efficiency. Again, a market where we want to deepen our ties with local financial institutions, so we can come up with more product offerings. And this is a market where we currently don't have an insurance brokerage license, but we're also exploring an entry strategy, leveraging also our sort of existing partnership with Bolttech. So I think in summary, we really have differentiated sort of growth strategies. We look at the local market maturity and the dynamic and the strategic pillars, and we look at various ways in which we invest in these markets. And finally, as Danny had sort of mentioned, we've really restructured and reorganized ourselves. So we are leaner and more horizontal when it comes to our operating model, and that significantly enhances our operating leverage across all these markets. So that means we can simultaneously invest across these markets, but also more efficiently allocate resources as we drive growth.

And our next question will come from William Gregozeski with Greenridge Global.

I have a couple of questions, I'll ask separately. The first kind of touches on your last answer about the reorganization and allocating resources. Can you talk a little more about the impact that's had the reorganization on the cost structure and margins and what you're able to do?

Yes. Danny, do you want to take that?

Okay. So over the last year, we implemented significant changes aimed at creating a leaner, more efficient organization and tightly aligned with our efficiency strategy. This restructuring was mainly focused on optimizing our cost base and improving productivity. It positioned ourselves for sustainable profitability. This restructuring is largely complete, and I believe the benefits are clearly reflected in our results. Specifically, our employee-related expenses during the quarter decreased by approximately 45% year-over-year. These savings resulted from strategic head count reductions, eliminating role duplication and restructuring teams horizontally across markets. This allows us to scale efficiently without compromising growth potential. And by doing so, we have effectively optimized our cost structure, creating operating leverage that enables us incremental revenue growth with minimal additional fixed costs. As a direct outcome, adjusted EBITDA loss improved significantly to $2.9 million in Q4 of 2024 and reflecting a $1.7 million improvement year-over-year. This underscores our disciplined execution in reducing operating expenses, while continuing target investments in critical areas such as technology innovation, product enhancement and customer acquisition. Looking forward, we will continue to prioritize productivity and margin expansion with investments in technology, particularly around AI-driven automation, workflow efficiencies and precision target marketing. We expect ongoing productivity gains throughout 2025. The restructuring completed in 2024 provides a robust foundation. It enables us to further enhance margins and achieve greater operating leverage as we scale. So in short, the restructuring was not just a cost-cutting exercise. It was a strategic realignment that has significantly improved our efficiency and positioned us for profitable and scalable long-term growth.

Okay. Great. My next question is another modeling-related question. The advertising and marketing expenses were up quite a bit from last year in terms of absolute dollars and percent of revenue. Can you kind of give your thoughts on how you expect that going forward, especially with the $100 million revenue target?

Yes, certainly. Yes, you're correct. Marketing expenses increased in 2024. This was the result of a deliberate decision to capitalize on target growth opportunities in key markets. However, I want to emphasize that every dollar spent is carefully measured against key performance metrics. Since quarter 2 of 2024, we've implemented a more focused and efficient marketing strategy to ensure we are driving sustainable growth. The results are already visible. For example, in Q4 of 2024, we saw a 23% reduction in marketing spend year-over-year as we optimize campaigns and reward costs. And also advertising marketing expenses in Q4 fell by 20% sequentially. We've also shift investment towards high-margin verticals where we see better returns, and our team has streamlined operations, improving cost structures across all markets. That being said, marketing remains essential to our business model. Because we operate in a competitive digital space, we must continue investing in such as, for example, user acquisition to grow our platform traffic, promotional campaigns that drive engagement, and partner incentives to maintain strong commercial relationships. And looking ahead, we will maintain disciplined spending, we will keep optimizing campaigns to improve ROI, ensuring marketing dollars generate measurable revenue, prioritize high-margin growth. We are focusing on verticals where customer value justifies the acquisition cost. Also to balance short-term and long-term gains. Some expenses like brand building takes time to pay off, but with disciplined spending, we will directly align with profitable goals. While we have reduced spending from peak levels, we won't cut marketing to the point of starving growth. Our strategy is about smart spending and not just less spending. The improvement in Q4 proved we can scale efficiently, and we'll continue refining this approach to target a positive adjusted EBITDA on a quarterly basis beginning in the second half of 2025. Thank you for your question.

Okay. Great. On the AI and automation, you touched on it in the prepared remarks. Can you give a little more color on what the plans are for that and the rollout -- and what kind of top and bottom line contribution you expect to have from that?

Sure. Let me take that. Look, I think, one is we're very clear we have an AI-first strategy. And we strongly believe this can enhance our operational efficiency, as well as drive the efficiency strategy that we spoke about. And what we're doing is we are really actively beginning to embed AI into our workflows and processes. This will allow us to scale our business, while we continue to maintain a stable head count and an operating cost structure, again, drive that strategic pillar operating leverage. Now, a couple of areas where we've already started seeing some results. One is an AI-powered customer service. We've introduced that. Significantly, now we are reducing our customer inquiry volumes, much more sort of improved self-service and proactive support. We are seeing also, I would say, improvements in first inquiry resolution rates. So that's one such initiative already underway. The second, generative AI for content creation. We are rapidly scaling our content production capabilities. In markets like Singapore, more than half of our content now we are leveraging Gen AI. And this really enables us to deliver very highly personalized and targeted content to our users, at a fraction of the previous effort and cost and turnaround time. So again, this is something that we're really doubling down on. A couple of other areas which are really interesting for us is, how do we start deploying agentic AI tools. As you'll appreciate, there are a lot of also repetitive tasks and workflows, we ourselves undertake this is a good great opportunity for us to really -- in a very autonomous way, manage these tasks. And what it essentially does is it will free up our human resources to focus on more strategic and creative activities. Ultimately, it's all about driving the productivity, and that is something that we're very focused with our AI-first strategy. And then finally, the data platform I spoke about, we have AI capabilities, where we can look at much better segmentation, personalization. And as we grow this member base, this will be quite critical to drive the monetization of the space. Now, you all would have recently seen Shopify CEO, Tobi Lutke, he recently sort of emphasized how AI usage has become like a baseline expectation now for every digital organization. This is equally true at MoneyHero Group. And the point I want to make is AI is just not a tool for us, it's a core capability that everyone in the company is now expected to master. And we really feel by using this incredible capability now at our disposal, we can scale this business more efficiently, and essentially, we can turn tasks that required months and days now into hours and even minutes. So we're really sort of doubling down on AI, because we feel this will enhance our productivity and eventually our profitability.

Great. Last question is, can you just talk about your plans to leverage the NASDAQ listing and how you plan to get the stock back up over the $1 threshold?

Yes, sure. Just give us a couple of minutes. I think, Danny you can take this.

Okay. Yes. I'll take this.

Yes.

So the $67 million one-time share-based payment expenses incurred in 2023 related to our NASDAQ listing was a significant, but essential investment in our long-term growth trajectory. Becoming a publicly listed company has substantially enhanced our strategic position by, firstly, enhancing credibility and building trust among investors, customers and partners with the high standards of governance, and operational transparency expected from a listed company. Secondly, providing flexibility for target M&A, and attracting and retaining key talent by using our shares as currency to accelerate growth in high-margin segments such as insurance and wealth management. And also to increase our brand recognition, exposure and reputation in international markets. Regarding our current share price, we believe our stock remains undervalued and does not fully reflect our efficiency, strategy and the impact it is already having in improving the quality of our top line and narrowing the bottom line. While market has been challenging, we remain confident that our ability to capitalize on the enormous addressable market opportunity. And our primary focus remains firmly on executing our efficiency strategy, driving revenue growth in profitable verticals, controlling costs, having a clear path to profitability and steadily expanding market share through strategic partnerships, innovative product offerings and leveraging our AI-first capabilities. We firmly believe the market will recognize and reward the underlying strengths of our business model and operational performance, translating into sustained long-term shareholder value. Thank you.

I show no further questions at this time. I would now like to turn the call back over to Rohith for closing remarks.

Well, thank you for all your questions and for your time. I just want to finally end by thanking the entire MoneyHero Group team for all their hard work and dedication and commitment to our consumers, to our business, to our partners. We're really very much energized to continue this performance in 2025, and I really look forward to sharing the results the next time we speak. So thank you, everyone, for your time.

This does conclude today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.