Dave Feller
Analyst · Eight Capital. Please go ahead
Thanks, Craig. Thank you and good morning. Welcome to the Mogo's third quarter 2020 results conference call. I'm joined today by Greg Feller, our President and CFO. We're pleased to report another quarter of strong results in our key profit measures including positive net income of a $1 million and a 346% increase in adjusted EBITDA. These results reflect the success of our efforts to quickly adapt to an uncertain environment this year, and really shine a light on the fundamental health resilience and profitability of our business. In a world where many FinTech's have unproven business models and no path to profitability we have shown we do. I would also like to call up the team at Mogo for the great work in 2020. It's certainly been a challenging year in many ways, and the team has done a great job during these difficult times. And because of all their hard work, we feel good about how the businesses position heading into 2021. The adoption of digital banking, digital wallets and financial health are all powerful long-term trends that have accelerated in 2020 and Mogo squarely positioned to benefit. We still have a lot of work to do, and the team is hyper focused on execution of our plan. And we're pleased with the things we're seeing including an 89% growth in members from our previous quarter, and a 237% growth year-over-year in Bitcoin accounts. Given the pandemic along with the increased pressure on consumers' finances, the shift to digital continues to be in hyper drive, the problem of financial stress has only gotten worse. It's clear that for most people, their existing banking solution doesn't solve their problem. So what does the next generation banking look like? We believe it looks more like a gaming app than a banking app. We see Gamification is one of the keys to winning in this space and we're focused on making Mogo not only the best, one of the best games to play, but a game that helps you get financially healthy and achieve your important life goals like getting out of debt, buying a home and saving for retirement. In fact, we believe this is one of the keys to solving wealth gap in Canada. It's one thing to have a great products, it's another thing to have an engaging experience makes it fun. The highest form of human motivation is doing things because they're fun, not just because they're good for you. As you'll see in today's presentation, Gamification is key element of our strategy, and something we're proud to be pioneers of when it comes to personal finance. As you may have seen in the broader FinTech landscape, players, such as cash app in the U.S. are seeing huge growth and demand for Bitcoin. PayPal also recently announced that's its customers in the U.S. will be able to buy crypto currencies, including Bitcoin directly from their PayPal account. While Canada typically lags the U.S. with these trends, demand is growing here too. We are seeing in in our metrics, Mogo Bitcoin users are up 237% year-over-year, and in October we're already seeing doubling from Q3 levels. Once more, we achieved this growth with little to no marketing around Bitcoin. As more and more Canadians look to participate in Bitcoin, we believe that Mogo is uniquely positioned, unlike other crypto apps, we are only focused on Bitcoin, and we have a much broader value proposition. But perhaps most important is that we have the trust and credibility of being the only publicly traded company that offers everyday Canadians. A simple and low cost way to buy and sell Bitcoin. We believe this can be an increasingly meaningful part of our member and revenue growth and our focus on increasing our focus on this product, including yesterday's announcement of our new Bitcoin rewards program as well as origin stacking Sats campaign. Stacking Sats is a term used to describe the act of regularly accumulating small amounts of Bitcoin, also known as satoshis. We believe reward programs like collecting points and Air Miles are losing relevancy especially among Millennial and Gen Z. And Bitcoin is a perfect platform for modern rewards program. There are 100 million satoshis in a Bitcoin which is a great structure for a rewards program. And unlike old school reward programs, satoshis are offered the added benefit and excitement of being something that had potential to appreciate in value. If you're a gamer, you'll know the rewards are a key part of Gamification. And we will now have a way to reward members for good financial behaviors as well as rewarding them for engaging with our products. We are starting off with rewards for improving your credit score, as well as rewards for activating and funding your Bitcoin account along with earning Bitcoin for referring friends to Mogo. This is just the beginning and our plan is to bring this rewards program to all our products in a way that not only helps members improve their finances, but helps drive more engagement to all our products. We are excited about this new program believe it can be a meaningful driver of engagement, monetization and long-term retention similar to other successful reward programs. In order to participate members was activated Bitcoin account and download the Mogo app. Our free credit score offering continues to resonate with members and our new rewards program helps to make it even more engaging. Every month members will now have an opportunity to earn bitcoin. Our credit score experiences evolving from simply monitoring someone's score to really helping them improve it, something that millions of Canadians are focused on doing. All members can now earn bitcoin by achieving what we call Rockstar status, which is a credit score of 850 or above, something that only about 10% of Canadians currently have. We also have a category for most improved monthly player i.e., the member that improves their credit score the most, this player can win 1 million Sats which is worth about $200. This now directly ties credit score with our bitcoin account, i.e. to participate members need to sign up and activate their Mogo bitcoin account. This new reward program is the only one of its kind in Canada where Canadians who want to improve this score, or simply just monitor it can earn when bitcoin, truly differentiated and compelling value proposition. In Q3, we launched our new carbon offsetting feature for the MogoCard. This is the first card in Canada that helps you control your spending while also offsetting your CO2 as you spend, and all for free. CO2 continues to be the primary cause of climate change and recent surveys show that it is a top concern of both Millennials and GenZ. Still early days in this new product, but we're very pleased with the initial results. We've seen a 66% increase in average spend per user. And this is especially impressive considering we took away a cash back incentive and replace it with a more profitable carbon offsetting model. We're also excited about a new feature that we just launched called Rainforest mode. Users who log into the dashboard get to experience the sounds and even the visuals of the Amazon Rainforest. This brings our carbon offsetting project of protecting the Amazon Rainforest to life and creates a very cool experience. It also helps our members be more mindful around their spending. Think about it like a mindfulness app like calm integrated into our spending account. The initial feedback on this experience has been excellent and it's something that until you experience it, you won't appreciate how impactful it can be. I promise you this isn't anything like login to your banking app and takes Gamification of money to the next level. Also starting to get some really strong and positive feedback from users and how much they're loving this new experience. The market opportunity is massive with almost a trillion dollars a year in spending happening between cash, credit and debit cards in Canada. We also believe that we will continue to see a shift in consumers moving away from credit cards towards a control of prepaid cards like mobile card. Given the improved ability to control spending and avoid debt. As well as a continued trend and moving away from cash and a prepaid card like Mogo is equivalent of digital cash. Like our other products, we are also planning incorporating a new bitcoin rewards program, beginning with rewarding new users for signing up and becoming active card users. Again, the goal is to reward members for becoming active users of our products, while also helping them get control of their spending and financial health. As I mentioned earlier, free ID fraud protection launch in Q3 has been a key driver in helping us achieve the 79% increase in new member growth in Q3 versus previous quarter. This is a must have product for every Canadian, as every one of us is more at risk of ID fraud than ever before as our lives continue to go more and more digital and in fact recent data shows that 75% of Canadians have had their data breach in the last 12 months. This is also something that you would have to pay about $240 a year to get from the credit bureaus and Mogo is that first offer for free. So if you haven't signed up for it yet, get on it. Today, there are about 20 million Canadians, who are eligible for this product in the markets we serve. And we are currently protecting less than 2%, so lots of room for growth. To-date, we've already sent out over 370,000 alerts, and 30% of our new members have received an alert in the first 60 days. And we're just beginning to hear from our members and how much they're loving this. Alerts let who has done an inquiry in your bureau. And it's here that you have a chance to stop ID fraud from happening, i.e. stopping someone from getting a loan in your name. None of us can prevent ID debt, but we all have an opportunity to minimize the risk of ID fraud before it happens. And if you become a victim, it can cause a lot of problems including preventing you from getting a mortgage or qualifying for a loan. We're also excited to see that the given the nature of this product we're actually seeing close to 100% retention rate. Lending is one of our business was initially built on and we believe remains one of our key strategic advantages. After selling our liquid loan book, we are primarily focused on growing loan through our partners. Our goal is to ensure we have a best-in-class loan offering across the full credit spectrum and expect partnership and referral model to continue to expand. The more we grow our member base and the more engaged these members are the more opportunities we have to convert them into loans which upgrade economics. We saw 63% increase in partner loans to Goeasy in Q3 over Q2. We're also planning on integrating our bitcoin rewards program as another way to reward incentivize members. This could also include earning bitcoin for staying in good standing on their loan payments. Again, lots of opportunities leverage this program. Another way, we are monetizing members is through a partner referral program. During the quarter, we announced that we partnered with EQ Bank to promote their industry leading savings account. Although still early days, we've seen some really strong results from our initial tests with above average conversion rates. Although not a primary focus today, this will continue to be something we look to grow and improve on, and a great way to bring a broader offering to our ever-growing member base. As with our other products, we plan on bringing our Bitcoin rewards program to our referral product, so members can earn Sats if they sign up with one of our partners. Our goal remains to curate best-in-class partners, so we can offer best-in-class products for our member base. The high interest rate savings account from EQ is a good example of this with rates that are up to 30 times higher than other banks. We also recently announced that we're working on a new P2P product that we anticipate launching the first half of next year. Although most Canadians have access to email money transfer the experiences a lot of friction, and lacks many of the convenient features that the leading P2P solutions have in the U.S. market. We believe there's a big opportunity to bring this type of solution in the Canadian market and think that we are well positioned to do it. The roadmap for this product incorporates a lot more than just a P2P solution. There are many significant enhancements that are part of this plan, and will dramatically improve the convenience of the Mogo app to our members and make accessing our other products a lot easier. This feature will also enable our prior customers to do things like split the bill, so they can pay and have their friends easily pay them back. Lots of excitement internally for this new product and we're working hard to bring it to life. We'll continue to keep you updated on as we move along. Perhaps the single biggest challenge for a start-up in our space is customer acquisition. The reality is banks spend hundreds and even over $1,000 to acquire customer. But given the long-term lifetime value, this still produces a positive ROI. We believe we have an advantage compared to many of our peers that enable us to have a relatively low customer acquisition cost. Our unique value proposition including free credit score and now free ID fraud protection, along with our mobile card Bitcoin account helps us acquire customers in a fraction of the cost of what banks pay. This is also helped by our unique partnership with post media, that gives us over $30 million a year in marketing spend. This helps gives a halo effect to all our other marketing channels, which ultimately result in low customer acquisition costs. Improving our marketing performance continues to be a major focus of ours, and we have many initiatives helping us achieve this. We're also about to kick off a new influencer campaign, where they will begin promoting the mobile app and various products. Obviously, influencer marketing is increasingly becoming important, as many of the younger generation are making decisions based on the people they follow. Our business model continues to be driven by a formula that helps drive low cost customer acquisition engagement, combined with multiple ways to monetize. Our team is hyper focused on executing this strategy, including a product roadmap that is designed to continue to increase utility to Mogo app for our members, helping them improve their financial health while also driving revenue and profitability growth. With that, I'll ask Greg to cover the financials in more detail. Greg?