Good evening, and welcome to the Sezzle First Quarter Financial Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Charles Youakim. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Sezzle's 2024 First Quarter Earnings Call. My name is Charlie Youakim, I'm the CEO and Executive Chairman of Sezzle. I'm joined today by my Co-Founder and President, Paul Paradis, our Chief Financial Officer, Karen Hartje; and our Head of Corp Dev and IR, Lee Brading. In conjunction with this conference call, we filed our earnings announcement with the SEC and have posted along with our earnings presentation on our investor website on sezzle.com. If you have not done so already, please go to the Investor Relations section of our website. There, you'll find the press release and earnings presentation under quarterly earnings within the financial section. Now that we're all sorted, let's get started. We've had a number of extraordinary quarters in our short history, and I think you'll agree that this quarter could be among the best thus far. Now let's dive into the presentation starting with the left side of Slide 3. Q1 turned out to be another strong quarter of top line growth as total income increased 35.5% compared to the prior year's quarter. Net income for the quarter came in at $8 million, which is larger than the $7.1 million in net income that we posted for all of 2023. Because that result puts us at nearly 50% of our guidance for the year, you might guess that we're raising 2024 guidance, and you're correct. I'll get to that in a moment. The $8 million in net income represented a 17% net income margin and resulted in a 31% return on equity for the quarter. To emphasize the return on equity is for the quarter. It is not annualized. Our total subscriber count increased to 371,000 at the end of the quarter, which represents a net increase of…

Thank you, Charlie, and hello to all. On to Slide 9. As referenced several times already, we had a very good start to 2024 as reflected in our year-over-year results. Total income increased 35.5% year-over-year, led by a 33% increase in UMS. Net income came in at $8 million for the quarter compared to $1.7 million the previous year. The improvement was driven by a combination of driving top line growth through UMS growth and subscription sign-ups while also lowering operating expenses. Those actions are further reflected in our EBITDA margin of 31.9% and our non-transaction-related costs declining to 34.5% of total income compared to 55.7% in the prior year. As shown on Slide 10, we typically see a drop-off in UMS from fourth quarter to first quarter due to seasonality. The seasonal drop-off in UMS was consistent with what we have experienced in the last couple of years. However, I would like to note that we did not see that same drop-off in total income, which only fell 3.9% from fourth quarter to first quarter as we had a pickup in subscriptions during the quarter. The combination of UMS and subscription growth drove total income higher year-over-year by 35.5%. On Slide 11, transaction expense, which is primarily payment processing costs, rose to 2.4% of UMS. Although we did see an increase partially attributable to our average order value declining during the quarter compared to the prior year, we believe we can lower this back to recent historical levels as a percentage of UMS. Seasonally, first quarter is a healthier quarter for a provision because of the tax refund season. We do expect the provision for credit losses as a percentage of UMS to rise over the remainder of the year as it did in 2023. However, we expect it…

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from Nico Sacchetti from RBC.

Reading through your earnings report here. I thought last report was good. This was -- you guys knocked the cover off the ball. So I just wanted to say congratulations. And thank you for breaking out the earnings per share guidance. I think it really helps to clarify and expose how cheap your stock is here. So I think that's a great addition in that slide. Can you give us any information on the stock buyback as far as average price per share that was paid?

Karen, do we have that detail outlined anywhere?

At this point, we have repurchased the $3.5 million worth of stock.

I was just curious. So out of the $5 million, you bought back $3.5 million. I was just curious if you add on it and what you were paying per share on average?

Nico, I think you'll see that in the 10-Q. I mean, it show the detail view in there.

All right. Very good. As far as -- and I asked the question, but maybe just to clarify for anybody else listening, you mentioned warrants on the call. I'm just curious, is there something outstanding that if exercised would be significantly dilutive?

I'll take that one. We have about [ $54,000 ] in warrants. They're already reflected in the diluted share count, and that's less than 1%. So no, it's not significant.

Okay. And a follow-up to that is I'm looking through the outstanding shares, and I see a jump almost of 10% in the dilutive number from the year-over-year reported, call it [ 5.55% to almost 6% ]. Can you give -- can you educate me on what happened with the increase in diluted shares outstanding?

Karen, do you want to take that?

Well, it includes both warrants and employee options, and there are more options in the money compared to year-end at this point because of the increase in our share price.

So your $5 a share earnings guidance is based off of, we'll call it, roughly $30 million of net income divided by almost $6 million shares. Is that the math that you're doing?

Exactly.

Okay. Let's see. You kind of covered it, but I mean, you look at it and it's almost shocking to see how profitable you are, especially when you get a real-life comparison with a firm coming out this morning and showing how much they're losing on operating income. You touched on it, but I mean, my question would be just how are you able to be so profitable when other players in the exact same space and maybe it's not an apples-to-apples, they're doing things different revenue streams. And I just -- I wish there was a more eloquent way to ask, can you expand on just how you've been able to create so much net income off of this revenue base where others are struggling to turn a profitable penny.

I think each company probably has a different strategy of how to approach things, depending on their cash balances, et cetera. Our view though was we just kind of talked under the basics of the company. And I'm like, in our view is, you've got a lemonade stand, let's make sure that we've got a great lemonade. And we've got some great profitability on that lemonade before we start to sell it to the masses and really expand operations. And so we spent the last couple of years doing that, making sure that we've got great lemonade. We've got some great profitability on it. And now we want to really hit the gas where I think some other companies view it as, let's just keep our hitting the gas and building an airplane while we go, and we just don't believe that's the right approach. We think the safe approach is making sure that you've got everything in order before you start to really expand it.

Is there an opportunity now for you to hit the gas without sacrificing the profitability metrics that you've built here?

Yes, absolutely. I mean our view is that we keep on working on lifetime value, increasing lifetime value of customer. And then what that does for us is we have this symbiotic relationship with merchants where we're helping them with their sales on their sites. We're also driving traffic to their sites. So we've got this fantastic symbiotic relationship with merchants. And what we can do, though, is be more aggressive with them as the consumer lifetime values of the Sezzle customer continue to increase post that purchase. So our belief is that we can continue to have strong growth while maintaining strong profitability goals of the company.

I mean that's maybe a decent segue into what happened around the Walmart situation where it looks like they're trying to do this in-house. And what -- the follow-up question would be, do you have a concentrated relationship that would be a material loss if this became commonplace. And then maybe is it -- do you foresee this being something that large retailers, at least will try to just do this themselves? And then a second follow-up would be is that a potential acquisition as down the road where someone would look at buying you to incorporate you into their existing business?

Personally, I don't think so, Nico. I think that the Walmart situation is quite unique, and we're not -- at Sezzle not highly concerned because we don't have a direct relationship with Walmart. I think this is going to be few and far between -- I mean, I always talk about internally in the company, I always talk about private label credit card as like the precursors to what we're doing with merchant relationships, et cetera. And in that private label world, you find that almost no retailers do their own private labels. They work through banking partnerships. And I think that buy now, pay later will kind of follow that same path. So I think this will be unique. And then on the M&A, you just never know on M&A. We basically build a business to build a great business and right, don't really focus on that.

Can you educate me on this Canadian opportunity. Same competitors that are here, is that something that -- I mean, it was definitely a positive press release. Can you give any additional information on the opportunity there?

Yes. I mean I would actually recommend investors take a look at the app stores in Canada and look at their account of reviews for the competitors. First of all, not all the competitors in the United States are present in Canada and what we tend to find is our competitors have degradated offerings in Canada because of a lack of focus in that market where we really fight for parity in our product offering there. We view it as an important part of our overall business. So I think that we have a -- I guess, we indexed higher in Canada in terms of success and size versus the U.S.

Okay. Very good. Last question is it looks like you're sitting on a really solid balance sheet right now. In terms of the cash, are there investments that can be made to help with the growth story? Is this an appropriate number to be sitting on? It seems like you've been generating and adding to the cash position. I'm just curious what the end use is or what the end game is?

We'll never make a hard rule about anything. I think our view is keep on piling on cash with profitability. And then if we find an opportunity where the ROI makes sense, we'll take a deep look at it. Just like we do with our marketing initiatives. We're always looking at CAC to LTV ratios. Does this make sense? What we tend to find is that the merchant relationship is still by far and away, the best relationship for us, and it makes sense because of the symbiosis of the relationship. So we look at return. And I think we've looked at return with our cash, if we can find some return for it. We'll definitely take a look.

Okay. Congrats again on the quarter. And any way I look at this and try to work the numbers, I mean, I'm getting close to $1 billion valuation, you start overlaying even conservative metrics. And so I really look forward to continuing to own the company here, and I'll jump back in the queue here.

Thanks, Nico.

[Operator Instructions] This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would now like to turn the conference back to Mr. Youakim for closing remarks.

Thank you. In closing, I'd like to thank the Sezzle team again. We continue to all roll in the same direction, which is leading to these great results. This quarter, I'd also like to send a special shout out to the product and engineering teams as much of what we're seeing in these numbers is due to the amazing and innovative work created by those teams over the last 2 or so years, great job to you all. And in honor of the late Charlie Munger, I'd also like to thank the true investors out there that follow us and sit on your ask method to investing with Sezzle and have invested and held our shares through it all because of their belief from what we're doing as a company. Please know that we keep you in mind as we continue to innovate and deliver. Thank you all, and have a great rest of your day.

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.