Steven W. Streit
Analyst · JMP
Thank you, Chris, and welcome, everyone, to our Q1 earnings call. With me, as always, this afternoon is Green Dot's CFO, John Keatley. So let's get right to the financial results. Q1 turned out better than we had internally modeled as we posted year-over-year growth in non-GAAP revenue of 8%, achieving our highest-ever quarter in terms of non-GAAP revenue at $156 million. Adjusted EBITDA was $34 million, representing a margin of 22%, a nearly 4-point increase over our Q4 margin. John and I feel that our Q1 results are encouraging for a number of reasons. So first, we're lapping what was a large record Q1 from last year. Recall that in Q1 2012, we still had a large number of TurboTax cards on file and benefited from a very large tax refund season. Second, last year at this time, the Bluebird program was not yet rolled out at Walmart. Third, we were still exclusive at most of our non-Walmart retailers and therefore, have the entire rack to ourselves at those retailers. Fourth, the Chase Liquid prepaid card had not yet rolled out at Chase branches nationwide. And finally, last year at this time, we had not yet deployed our new, more conservative risk controls, which had in fact, a dramatic negative impact to our new reloading card activation this year. In fact, as a result of these new controls, this Q1, we rejected about 20% of all customers who attempted to activate one of our reloadable prepaid cards. Last year, our reject rate was more around 9%. So to put it into context, it is likely that in Q1, Green Dot rejected more customers than when many of our competitors sold in their entire quarter. This doesn't mean that everyone we rejected was a fraudster. Unfortunately, the way in which risk modeling works is that you catch a lot of good guys along with the bad guys but at the end of the day, we believe that a clean portfolio will ultimately lead to a more sustainable business and a more efficient business. So given all this, to actually grow over last year's Q1 is certainly encouraging. Furthermore, not only did we grow revenue but we also grew many of the key usage metrics that drive our business. For example, enrollment in direct deposit increased significantly. The number of our customers on direct deposit increased 12% year-over-year. The number of cash reloads also showed strong double-digit growth, up 11% year-over-year. Average spend per active account grew by 7% and revenue per active account grew by 13%, which is a new record growth rate for that metric. To put all these results into context, remember that Q1 was a time when Chase, American Express, PayPal, Western Union, U.S. Bank, NetSpend, Univision's program, Blackhawk's PayPower brand, InComm's Vanilla brand and dozens of new celebrity entrants from Justin Bieber to Magic Johnson and more, were all actively trying to find prepaid consumers in the marketplace while at the same time, Green Dot's new risk controls were making it harder than ever for customers to buy a Green Dot product and activate it. So when you think about conducting the stress test on the company's business, I think it's fair to say that Q1 was a stress test for Green Dot. Of course, this is all good news and our results in Q1 provide us with some level of comfort that the Green Dot brand means something special and important to prepaid consumers and that our company remains a growing leader in the prepaid market. But I do want to continue to point out that there's still a fair amount of uncertainty in our business for the remainder of the year and our Q1 results should not necessarily be construed to imply that we're out of the woods for the remainder of the year. So John and I still remain conservative in our full year outlook until we get another couple of quarters under our belts. We know that many of you would like an update about how things are going with all the new competition in our retail stores and at major banks. While we still remain cautious about the future and we're not ready yet to draw any firm conclusions, we do feel that we're getting a better understanding of the impact of competition on our business and we'll now share some insights with the on that. So as it relates to competition at retail stores, we have now seen between 5 and 12 months of impact resulting from multiple competitors selling against us at various price points [indiscernible] So first, we'll talk about Wal-Mart. The Bluebird product has been in-store since mid-October of 2012. Despite this, we still saw solid double-digit revenue growth of 11% [indiscernible] over 2012. Despite this we still saw solid double-digit revenue of 11% [indiscernible] particular encouragement with the strong gains in direct positive enrollments. So the summary for Wal-Mart is that it also fair to say that the Wal-Mart MoneyCard program has loyal following, continues to grow and is successfully coexisting with Bluebird thus far. Now, we'll talk about our non-Walmart business. In nearly all of these retail outlets, we have seen a dramatic increase in new competitive offerings over the past year. Yet despite this increased competition, plus the impact of our new risk controls, in Q1, we grew revenues by 2% year-over-year in our non-Walmart business. The main driver of this performance appears to be the strength of the Green Dot brand, which outsells competitive products by a wide margin in every retailer for where we have -- for which we have category sales data. For example, at 1 major retailer that sells competitive products, we know that Green Dot accounted for 86% of new card sales in Q1. At another major retailer that sells competitive products, Green Dot recently accounted for 65% of new card sales despite our products only being displayed on 30% of the rack. Furthermore, as it relates specifically to the American Express prepaid card sold in our non-Walmart retailers and the PayPal card provided by NetSpend, our information shows that the Green Dot brand outsells these cards by at least a 10:1 margin. Of course, the nature of ongoing competition is dynamic and so we continue to reserve caution for how these results may evolve over the months and years to come. Next, let's talk about competition from major banks. Today, many banks, big and small, offer prepaid card programs and we expect that many more banks and credit unions of all sizes will roll out prepaid programs over time. The 2 most notable programs in our space are the Chase Liquid prepaid card program and the U.S. Bank Convenient Cash prepaid card program. Both banks promote these products heavily in their branches and in the case of Chase, the Liquid program has benefited from the most expensive, the most aggressive nationwide multimedia marketing campaign in our industry's history. Neither U.S. Bank nor Chase release active account numbers for their prepaid program, so we can say with precision how big or small these programs might be. And since they're not sold side-by-side our products in retail stores, it's hard to say with precision what, if any, impact these programs are having on our Green Dot for MoneyCard programs. But we can tell you that given the growth in Green Dot's usage metrics in Q1, including growth in direct deposit, reloading spend and revenue per card, we at least have comfort that customers are not abandoning our products in favor of the bank programs out there in the market. So in summary, uncertainty continues for the remainder of the year and we continue to hold a conservative view as we wait to get more experience in future quarters. But we do feel that given the results of Q1, we should update our revenue outlook for 2013. John will provide those details in his section of today's call. Now, we'll talk about GoBank, the launch -- beta launch of GoBank, our new mobile bank account product has gone as expected and we remain on track to make GoBank available to the general public this summer. We will be presenting the latest developments at GoBank at the Finovate Technology Conference in San Francisco to be held on May 14. Our new RushCard Live reloadable prepaid card product is now in the process of rolling out to all Rite Aid stores and CVS stores nationwide. While it's way too early to know how this program will perform, we think it's a good product that will appeal to a new segment of customers and we would expect that sales for the Rush product will help drive our overall category growth at participating retailers over time. And with that, I'll now hand the call over to John Keatley to share some more color on our performance and to discuss a revised revenue outlook for the year. John?