Dave Feller
Analyst · Eight Capital. Please go ahead
Thanks, Craig. Welcome again to our second quarter 2020 results call. I'm joined today by Greg Feller, our President and CFO. No question that Q2 was a challenging period, broadly in the fintech space, with many companies seeing significantly declining revenue year-over-year. While we also faced some headwinds, our 27% revenue growth highlights resilience and diversity of our business, something we've worked hard to build over many years. In this difficult macro environment, with inflation and stock market volatility top of mind, consumers have less money to spend, and they're also looking for better value. These pressures mean our products are more relevant today than ever. This quarter was also one with a focus on expenses, cash flow and balancing growth with profitability. This is demonstrated by a 14% reduction in expenses and improvement in cash flow from operations, which Greg will go into more detail a little later. While we are reducing our cost structure and moving on an accelerated path to profitability, we are not losing sight of the tremendous growth opportunity and continue to invest in key growth opportunities like our new commission-free stock trading app, MogoTrade. Our mission continues to be a driving force, helping Canadians achieve financial freedom and positive impact. And in today's world, we believe this mission is more relevant than ever. We've turned the mission into a simple formula that helps guide our road map and our experience. Our goal is to build products and make it easy to follow a formula for achieving this. This formula ties into three key products: spend management, passive investing and active investing, which brings us to our newest product and the biggest product initiative in our history to date, MogoTrade. In Q2, we continued to advance the product and accomplished a lot in the quarter, which positioned us for the recent announcement that we have now removed the wait list. So that means the app is now available for anyone to download and sign up on Android and iOS. This is obviously a really exciting milestone, and I want to say a special thank you to the entire team that has worked tirelessly to get us to this stage. Not only has this been our biggest initiative we have ever undertaken, but the level of the product we have built, I believe, is truly impressive. We believe we have created something truly unique in the Canadian market. In fact, this is the only stock trading app that we know of anywhere in the world, where every investment you make has a very measurable impact on making the world a better place. This takes ESG investing to a whole new level. In addition to this, we've created a very simple and compelling user experience that also includes real-time streaming prices and one of the lowest FX fees in the market. At 0.75, this is less than half of what some of the competitors charge. I invite you all to sign up and see for yourself. Now this is just the beginning of MogoTrade. And as we continue to get valuable feedback from our customers and iterate and improve the experience as well as launch new features every quarter. A few of our upcoming features include things like real-time price notifications and stock movement, more funding options that enable our users to easily transfer money into their account as well as an account transfer option where users can easily transfer over accounts from other brokers. We plan to continue to evolve this product with the goal of becoming the most popular stock trading app in Canada. Longer-term plans include full crypto trading, fractional investing and many other exciting features. In addition to the work on MogoTrade, we also continue thinking through our growth strategy for our passive investing solution, Moka. We acquired Moka last year, and this product is one that we continue to get more and more excited about. As important as trade is, having a best-in-class passive strategy that enables anyone to automate their wealth building is critical, and for most people should be their primary wealth building strategy. Moka is just as big of an opportunity as trade, especially when looking at the size of the market. With approximately $2 trillion invest in mutual funds in Canada today, as you can see, our value proposition is very compelling. Because of our low fixed fee model, the same amount of money invested through Moka versus the mutual fund, assuming both track the S&P 500, as you can see with Moka, you'd end up with over 60% more and the difference continues to grow over time. Our goal is to continue to evolve Moka from a short-term savings app to one that also becomes our members' main long-term wealth-building solutions. From a product perspective, we continue to build products that we ourselves would want to use and be proud to share with our friends and family. This is also a solution that I wish I had when I first started out, and not only has it become my main passive solution, both my kids are now on their path to financial freedom using Moka. Lots of new features and improvements to come on Moka, and if you haven't already checked out yourself, I encourage you to do so. As always, we welcome all feedback, good and bad, to help us make it even better. Although we have been primarily focused on our digital wealth platform, we continue to be excited by the growth opportunity with our MogoCard, which has proven to be a highly effective tool to help people control their spending, which is a harder part of wealth building. Like trade, this product makes it easy for anyone to make a really big impact for their spending. Most of us have been experiencing the heat waves of late and climate change continues to increase and important, yet most people don't know what they can do to make a meaningful impact. The MogoCard, unlike any debit or credit card, makes it easy for anyone to not only eliminate their carbon footprint, but actually get climate positive. In fact, our average card user is climate positive, i.e., removing more CO2 from the atmosphere than they are contributing, all for free. Again, I challenge anyone to find a simpler and more effective tool for stopping climate change than the MogoCard. If 25% of transactions in Canada were down the mica today, Canada will be climate positive today, decades ahead of its 2050 goal. In terms of impact, we now have two partners that we work with, both of them focus on tree planning, but in different ways. Our newest partner is an innovative Canadian company called Flash Forest that uses drones plant trees. Through our Flash Forest partnership, we've already planted 100,000 trees in Canada, focused on areas that were devastated by wildfires. This tree planning is designed to not only help produce CO2, but also plays an important role in helping restore and maintain the natural ecosystem. So the benefits go beyond just carbon absorption. All of us want to not only achieve financial freedom but do it in a way that also helps build the world we all want to live in, making a positive impact has to be measurable and meaningful, which is one of the challenges with ESG investing. With Mogo, our members can clearly see the impact they're having and see with full transparency of the partners and the impact their actions have. Lots more to do on this as we continue to evolve and improve, but we're already proud of the fact that we've planted over 1 million trees as just the side benefit of helping our members get on track to financial freedom. With that, I'll turn the call over to Greg.