Sezzle Inc. (SEZL) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, and welcome to the Annual Meeting of Stockholders of Sezzle Inc. Please note that today's meeting is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] It is now my pleasure to turn today's meeting over to Sezzle's Executive Chairman and CEO, Mr. Charlie Youakim. The floor is yours.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone, or to those joining from Sezzle's home in the U.S., good evening. And welcome to the Sezzle Inc. 2022 Annual General Stockholder Meeting, our third AGM as a listed company on the ASX. My name is Charlie Youakim. I am the CEO and Executive Chairman of Sezzle, and I will be chairing the meeting today. I confirm that we have a quorum for the meeting to proceed, and I am pleased to declare the meeting formally open. I'm also delighted to be able to extend a warm welcome to all of our stockholders and CDI holders who are participating through our online meeting platform. As was the case for the past 2 years, this meeting is being held virtually, which means there is no meeting taking place in person but rather by remote electronic means as is permitted by the company's bylaws. I would like to start acknowledging my fellow directors who are each joining the call. Joining from Sezzle's home city of Minneapolis is Paul Paradis, my Co-Founder, our Executive Director and President. Joining the call as well are our 4 independent non-executive directors, Paul Purcell from Chicago; Kathleen Pierce-Gilmore from the Washington, D.C. area; Paul Lahiff from Sydney; and Mike Cutter from Melbourne. We also have a number of people joining from our executive team, including our CFO, Karen Hartje, joining from St. Paul; and our Australian Company Secretary, Justin Clyne, joining from Sydney. Also online today is a representative of our auditors, Rachel Polson, from Baker Tilly in Minneapolis. The Notice of Meeting was distributed to all stockholders and CDI holders in accordance with the company's bylaws and the ASX listing rules and is also available from our website and the ASX announcements platform on the ASX website and the SEC's website. I will take the Notice of Meeting as read. In terms of the process for the meeting, we will begin the meeting with a presentation while voting on the resolution occurs in the background. The resolutions will be decided by poll. Voting on the resolutions is now open via the online meeting platform. The voting icon will appear on the navigation bar. Once you click on this, the resolutions will appear on your screen. You can vote any time during the meeting until I declare voting closed. You can also change your vote at any time throughout the proceedings. I will give you a clear prompt later in the meeting to warn of the close in voting. I do not propose to read each of the resolutions as these are clearly laid out in the Notice of Meeting. The proxies received in respect to each resolution prior to the cutoff time are contained at the back of the presentation, which has been lodged with the ASX and the SEC. We will also take the opportunity for questions, and you can start submitting those questions now, including any questions for the company's auditor, and we will address these later in the proceedings. We'll now move on to our presentation. You can find the presentation posted on the ASX website if you'd like to follow along. But before I begin the presentation, I first wanted to state that even though we won't be covering the merger with Zip in our presentation, we are excited at that outcome and working diligently with them to get through the merger process. I also wanted to point out that as a stand-alone company, we are also working with a singular focus towards becoming cash flow positive. We've entered a new era of the market where growth is not the main focus. We recognized that early on. Our team can tell you that profitability has been the core focus of the company since late last year. We've been focusing on it during our monthly town halls and in our quarterly and annual goal setting. We've taken this task seriously and in every department, every relationship in the company. You've seen it -- you've seen our divestiture from international activities and our layoff, but you haven't seen many other activities, which are internal only. We've been reevaluating every relationship with the #1 goal of reaching cash flow breakeven in mind. New product launches that help with cash flow and profitability are also a big focus such as our long-term installment offering and our premium subscription rollout. We're turning every stone and won't stop until we get to cash flow positive activities. Our view is that we're playing the long game; and right now, that game has a focus on profit. I hope that overlay helps you understand our positioning on the go forward. The presentation mainly focuses on 2021 and our successes over that time period. Let's go there now. If you have the presentation with you, please open it and proceed to Slide 5 where we'll cover the agenda. In today's presentation, we'll cover the following topics: First, we'll cover our mission and how we think about building a great company; Next, we'll talk about our vision and ecosystem; Third, we'll go over our financial performance; and finally, we'll move on to the votes. Let's get started. Please use Slides 6 through 8 as your guide as we discuss our mission. Our mission at Sezzle is to financially empower the next generation. We embrace that mission in every decision that we make at the company. It's at the heart of our core products and our product expansions. It's behind our credit building, Sezzle Up, and our recent expansion into long-term financing. We believe that we're filling an important gap in the financial ecosystems for young adults in North America as they get their feet wet with financial services. We also follow a stakeholder approach. That stakeholder approach drove many of the initiatives found on Page 7. That approach led to our B Corp certification and our scholarships for underrepresented students in technology. In 2021, we also supported Trees for the Future and received Climate Neutral certification by reducing our carbon footprint. One way we did this was by supporting a flexible work policy during COVID, which we've continued to support as we exit COVID. We also have a charitable giving employee match program in place to further the positive impact our team members can make on the world. Page 8 shows that this work didn't go on unnoticed. We received positive accolades from numerous organizations in 2021, including being named a 2021 Inc. Magazine Best Place to Work. As we continue to work hard to please our stakeholders, we expect the positive recognition to continue. On Slides 10 through 18, we're going to cover our vision for the future. On Slide 10, we wanted to point out that our consumers and our merchants are both key stakeholders for our company. We are here to serve them both. Our view is that if both of these groups grow to love our company because of our desire to serve them well, we will enjoy great success over the next decade as we continue to scale up. We put a great deal of focus on the merchant side of the equation in our early days, and we continue to do so. Our ability to increase sales and conversions is a key driver of value to those partners. We've continued to grow that value over time as our user base grows through our affiliate impact towards those merchants. We're now driving significant volume to our merchant partners, which enhances our stickiness through increasing the inherent value to our merchant partners. We've also added and enhanced our solution with the addition of long-term financing. Our working capital lines and our virtual card in-store offerings are additional examples of how we continue to deliver for our merchants. As we know, our consumers have loved Sezzle from the start, and we feel like that level will continue to improve through our recent efforts on consumer product enhancements. Sezzle Up is an example, grew from around 170,000 participants to nearly 340,000 members in just over a year. You only get that sort of growth for the product that the consumer loves. Long-term installment is also a product that has grown since its launch 12 months ago. We've now brought on Bread Financial as a partner and plan to add Oportun and Genesis to the mix as lending partners in the next few months. Our long-term product -- as our long-term product matures, we believe it will become the most powerful long-term solution in the market for consumers and merchants alike. In addition to Sezzle Up and long-term installments, we'll be adding a loyalty program, a premium subscription offering, the ability to pay now and pay in two and a physical card offering. Our goal is to have all of these benefits available to our consumers within the next 12 months. These products will improve our products for our consumers and also improve our profitability. On Slides 11 and 12, we touch on the products that we're especially proud of and excited to launch. On Slide 11, we've already touched on credit building with Sezzle Up and long-term installment, but we haven't mentioned our marketplace and in-store growth yet. We've put a good deal of work into both channels, and the results are paying off. Our marketplace delivered 23 million leads to our merchant partners in 2021, which is a great number that we expect to best in 2022. Our in-store offerings took off in 2021 and in early 2022, with in-store volumes increasing by over 500% in the first quarter of 2022 alone. As consumers continue to return to stores, we feel like we've nailed the transition with that recent improvement. On Slide 12, we wanted to show off some products that we've just launched or are imminently launching onto our platform. Our loyalty program is now live with premiums -- with our premium subscription program launching the next week. Soon behind these launches, we'll be launching pay in two and pay in full. And before this time next year, we'll have a physical card in the hands of our customers that will allow Sezzle to obtain top-of-wallet status, which is the ultimate goal for any payments company. We want to be on hand wherever our consumer needs us to support their financial needs. Slide 13 shows everyone just how big the opportunity is for our company. We're really just scratching the surface on where we can go. In 2021, we processed $1.8 billion in volume. That's just a fraction of the market here in the U.S.; and buy now, pay later itself is just a fraction of the total volume available in commerce. We expect to continue to grow that potential as the years progress and the product continues to evolve. On Slide 14, you'll see that our repeat usage continue to grow throughout 2021 and into 2022. We have this repeat usage growth because of the love we feel from our customer base. Slide 15 highlights some of our more important merchant partnerships. Some of the newer partners include Rogers Sporting Goods, Princess Auto and Made In Cookware. On Slide 16, you see that clothing and accessories and beauty and wellness are where we got our start and are still fast growing retail categories for us. But we're starting to shift resources to other less penetrated retail categories where we feel BNPL is the need. The addition of our long-term financing offering fuels this diversification, bringing us into categories like travel, hospitality, furniture and higher-end sporting goods and electronics. Slide 17 continues to highlight our merchant count growth and our focus on the merchant experience, which has led to Sezzle being named a top BNPL provider by G2 Crowd for 4 quarters running. Slide 18 highlights a few of our more important partnerships. Bread Financial is a new partner and is now our primary lender for our long-term installment loan product. Oportun and Genesis will be added alongside Bread Financial soon to create more choice and accessibility for our consumers. We continued building integrations to all the major retail platforms to make it easier for merchants to add Sezzle as a payment option at checkout, and we continue to look for additional value to provide to these merchants. Through our partnerships with Wayflyer and Liberis, we're able to offer our merchant partners working capital, so they can continue scaling their businesses, which in turn leads to more processing volume for Sezzle. Now I'll turn it over to Karen Hartje, who will cover our financial update. Karen?

Thank you, Charlie, and hello to all. Before I start the financial update, please keep in mind that our financial statements are prepared in accordance with U.S. generally accepted accounting principles and are presented in U.S. dollars. The year-end 2021 financial results have been audited, but the first quarter financial results are unaudited. Moving to Slide 20. Since we last met, we've seen changes in our sector and the market, and in response, we have sharpened our focus in pursuit of profitability. More specifically, we are optimizing revenue with existing relationships for improved profitability. We are also working on new sources of income, including expansion in our long-term partnerships, adding premium subscription, launching physical cards and providing pay now as payment option. Regarding operating expenses, earlier this year, we announced a workforce reduction that will achieve an annualized cost savings of approximately $10 million. This reduction was across all departments to streamline the reporting structure and create more precise lines of accountability. Additionally, we are scaling back in international operations in Europe, India and Brazil, resulting in annualized cost savings of $7 million. Moving to Slide 21. While we are honing in on profitability, growth remains a high priority, and we are still growing. UMS more than doubled from $856 million for the full year 2020 to over $1.8 billion for 2021. In the first quarter of 2022, UMS was up over 20% from the same quarter last year. Total income was up over 95% for the full year 2021 versus 2020 and up 6% for the first quarter of 2022 compared to last year. The decline in total income as a percentage of UMS for the most recent year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter periods is driven by the increase in enterprise merchant volume with a lower fee rate as a percentage of total UMS. Last year at this time, we were running a pilot with what is now our most prominent enterprise merchant with a full-scale rollout announced in June 2021. This change in mix has driven the overall merchant fee rate down. On to Slide 22. The increase in UMS is driven by increase in active merchants, active consumers and repeat usage. Active merchants totaled 47,000 at the end of 2021, up 76% from 27,000 at year-end 2020. For the first quarter of this year, active merchants totaled 49,000, up 43% from 34,000 at the end of the first quarter 2021. Active consumers totaled 3.4 million at year-end 2021, over 1.5x the 2.2 million at the end of 2020. Active consumers totaled approximately 3.5 million at the end of first quarter '22, up 33% from 2.6 million for the same quarter last year. Repeat usage increased by 308 basis points from 89.8% at year-end 2020 to 92.8% at year-end 2021 and increased 251 basis points from 90.7% in first quarter '21 to 93.3% in first quarter '22. On to Slide 23. From the charts on the left, you can see the growth momentum that we experienced in 2021 with record-high numbers in UMS for each quarter. Generally, fourth quarter will represent the highest volume for the year as it follows the sales cycles of our retail merchants. First quarter '22 UMS was higher than last year's same quarter by 20.1% and is a record high for first quarter performance. As previously noted, total income as a percentage of UMS declined as more significant share of transactions was driven by large enterprise merchants with a lower fee rate. On to Slide 24. Transaction expense as a percentage of UMS totaled 2.6% in first quarter '22, reflecting an increase of 20 basis points from the same period last year. Transaction expenses comprised primarily of payment processing costs. The transaction expense percentage grew because the proportion of card payments relative to ACH payments increased. The provision for uncollectible accounts as a percent of UMS and first quarter '22 was flat to the same quarter last year and improved by 120 basis points from fourth quarter '21. In 2021, increased enterprise volume with nonintegrated product offerings drove adverse selection resulting in higher provision expense. We have since implemented a number of new underwriting strategies and expect to see year-over-year improvement in the provision as a percentage of UMS for 2022 compared with last year. Slide 25. First quarter '22 operating expenses totaled $31.5 million and rose to 114% of total income. The increase in first quarter '22 operating expenses was driven by $4.1 million in nonrecurring legal and professional fees associated with the Zip merger; headcount growth, which was up 55% year-over-year; and greater co-marketing spend with enterprise merchants. We will continue to see higher legal and professional fees related to the Zip transaction for the next few quarters. We already spoke about the workforce reduction we undertook in March of this year resulting in $10 million of annual savings. The bottom graph depicts the breakout of cash operating expenses, and you will see that the most significant component for first quarter '22 is personnel expense, represented in purple, which was 45% of the total. This is followed by general and admin expense in light green at 28% of the total, including those legal and professional services. The next largest category of expense is marketing, represented in green, including co-marketing at 19% of the total; and third-party tech and data in salmon at 8% of the total. On to Slide 26. At the end of March 2022, cash totaled $60.6 million with $52.8 million drawn against our line of credit and $39.7 million in unused borrowing capacity. This compares with our year-end results, where cash totaled $78.9 million with $78.8 million drawn against our line of credit and $29.8 million in unused borrowing capacity. Earlier this year, our credit facility was amended to replace LIBOR with the U.S. Federal Reserve secured overnight financing rate, SOFR. As a reminder, the line of credit carries an interest rate of SOFR plus 3 3/8% for the Class A lender and SOFR plus 10.7% for the Class B lender, which resulted in a weighted average interest rate of 5.53% as of March 31, 2022. The $125 million committed line of credit facility matures in June 2023. That wraps it up for finance, and so I'll pass it back to Charlie.

Thanks, Karen. We will now take questions from stockholders. [Operator Instructions] I will now begin responding to the questions that have been submitted and will direct any questions to our auditor as relevant.

At this stage, Mr. Chairman, no current questions, but I'll update you later in the meeting if that changes.

Okay. Thanks, Justin. The first item of business relates to the tabling of the company's financial reports for the year ended the 31st of December 2021, and I note shareholders have been given the opportunity to ask questions concerning the financial statements of the company. A vote in respect of the financial statements and accounts is not required, and I will move to the resolutions contained within the Notice of Meeting. I appoint Donna Bent of Computershare Investor Services as a returning officer. As I mentioned at the start of the meeting, voting on the resolutions is currently open, and you can vote at any time until I declare the voting close. Results will be released to the ASX after the conclusion of the meeting and filed in a current report Form 8-K on the SEC within the next few days. Please note that only stockholders, proxy holders or authorized stockholder representatives may vote. Any directed proxies given to you by the stockholder will automatically be cast as directed when the poll is closed. If you have any issue trying to vote, the voting icon will appear on the navigation bar. Once you click on this, the resolutions will appear on your screen along with the voting options that are relevant to that particular resolution. Simply select one of these options to cast your vote. When voting is closed, your final voting selection will be recorded. If you have any difficulties, please refer to the Notice of Meeting. I now move on -- I now move to consideration of the resolutions. I advised at the beginning of the meeting that we will vote on the resolutions by way of poll. Any undirected proxy votes given to the Chairman will be voted in favor of the relevant resolutions. Voting is already open and will remain open until I direct otherwise. The resolutions to be considered in order are: item 2, reelection of Charlie Youakim; item 3, reelection of Paul Victor Paradis; item 4, reelection of Kathleen Pierce-Gilmore; item 5, reelection of Paul Purcell; item 6, reelection of Paul Alan Lahiff; item 7, reelection of Michael Cutter; item 8, ratification of independent accounting firm selection; item 9, advisory vote on executive compensation; item 10, advisory vote on the frequency of advisory votes on executive compensation. The Board's recommendation in respect of each resolution is outlined in the Notice of Meeting, and included within the presentation released to the ASX and SEC this morning are the details of the proxies received prior to the proxy cutoff date for each resolution. I would like to advise that, shortly, the voting on all resolutions will close. We will take a few moments now to allow you to finish voting. Please complete your voting now. Voting will automatically close in 1 minute. [Voting]

Voting is now closed. Please note that the final results will be advised to the ASX and filed with the SEC on a Form 8-K and also made available on Sezzle's website along with all of our ASX announcements and SEC filings after the meeting. Thank you all for your attendance online today. As the business of the meeting is now completed, I declare the meeting closed, and thank everyone for their participation today.

This concludes the meeting. You may now disconnect.