Expensify at BMO 2025: Strategic Growth Through Innovation

On Tuesday, 10 June 2025, Expensify (NASDAQ:EXFY) participated in the BMO 2025 Virtual Software Conference, where CEO David Barrett outlined the company’s strategic direction. The discussion highlighted Expensify’s innovative approach to expense management and its focus on long-term growth. Barrett emphasized the company’s strong free cash flow and investment in brand awareness, while also addressing challenges in the small and medium-sized business (SMB) sector.

Key Takeaways

• Expensify leverages a bottom-up business model, acquiring customers through individual employee adoption.
• The company is heavily investing in brand awareness, including a Super Bowl ad and F1 sponsorship.
• Expensify’s mobile-first strategy and AI integration are central to its product innovation.
• The company maintains strong free cash flow, enabling share buybacks and debt repayment.
• Expensify is preparing for potential economic downturns while focusing on long-term growth.

Company Overview and Strategy

• Expensify offers a travel and expense management service used by tens of thousands of businesses globally.
• The company differentiates itself with a collaborative, real-time chat environment for expense management.
• It employs a freemium model, with basic services free and premium plans costing $5 and $9 per employee.
• Expensify’s employee-driven sales model reduces customer acquisition costs, enhancing profitability.
• The company targets the untapped expense management market, focusing on sustainable growth.

Product and Technology

• Expensify uses React Native to ensure functionality across desktop, iOS, and Android platforms.
• The app includes features like corporate cards, travel management, and real-time data updates.
• The company was a pioneer in integrated receipt scanning and mobile expense reporting.
• Expensify invests in AI, particularly its "concierge AI," to streamline user interaction and automation.

Pricing and Competition

• Expensify offers transparent pricing, with a $5/employee "Collect" plan and a $9/employee "Control" plan.
• The "Control" plan is tailored for larger SMBs and mid-market enterprises.
• Competitors often tie pricing to corporate card usage, limiting market reach.
• Expensify’s broad market awareness and employee-focused brand are key competitive advantages.

Revenue Model and Growth

• Revenue comes from subscription fees and interchange fees from the Expensify corporate card.
• Interchange fees are growing rapidly due to increased corporate card adoption.
• Expensify plans to drive growth by cross-selling additional products to existing customers.
• The company anticipates growth through marketing initiatives like the F1 movie sponsorship.

F1 Marketing Campaign

• Expensify sponsors Brad Pitt’s virtual F1 team in an upcoming Apple movie.
• The brand is featured prominently, aiming to reach hundreds of millions of viewers.
• Expensify is optimizing its platform to convert movie viewers into customers.

Profitability and Investment

• Expensify is profitable, with a business model focused on unit economics.
• The company increases free cash flow guidance consistently.
• Resources are used for growth, new opportunities, and share buybacks.
• Expensify is prepared for potential economic downturns, prioritizing sustainability.

For further details, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - BMO 2025 Virtual Software Conference:

Dan Jester, BMO Software Research, BMO: Alright. Well, good afternoon and good morning, everybody. Dan Jester, BMO Software Research here. Thanks again for joining our next session of our virtual event today. We’re very pleased to have Expensify joining us, and we have Derek David Barrett, is the founder and the CEO with us today.

So, David, thanks for joining us.

David Barrett, Founder and CEO, Expensify: Hey. Thanks so much for having me.

Dan Jester, BMO Software Research, BMO: Pleasure. Thank you so much. In terms of logistics, for those of you who are listening in, there is a way to submit a question within your video box. You can also just shoot me an email. And if I get it, I’ll do my best to get your question answered.

So with that, David, I think there’s a lot of folks on the line who are new to the Expensify story or who do not know the background. And so maybe I’ll just turn it over to you to give a quick background of the company, and then we’ll go from there.

David Barrett, Founder and CEO, Expensify: Sure. Well, we are Expensify. We do travel and expense, the speed of chat, we like to say. Basically, we are an expense management service for tens of thousands of businesses all over the world. We process expense reports, invoices, bills.

We have an integrated corporate card. We have integrated corporate travel. And so, basically, it’s a one stop shop for everything you need to process your travel and expenses. Additionally, as I said, we kind of write the speed of chat, meaning that it’s a very real time service. Everything you do in Expensify, and it’s a big differentiation for us, is that it happens in a real time chat environment.

So, basically, when you sign into Expensify, we recognize that the major part of expense management that sucks the worst isn’t necessarily the automation. It’s the human component. It’s tracking down all of your employees and basically trying to get them to submit that receipt and things like this. So we’ve built a system that goes beyond just the automation to actually engage the collaborative elements around expense management and build a whole experience which is better for your employees, better for your accountants, and better for your bottom line.

Dan Jester, BMO Software Research, BMO: Okay. That’s great. So you have a 120, roughly, employees and a 150,000,000, roughly, dollars of revenue. On a revenue employee basis, that’s that’s very, very high. And so you’ve engineered the company to be different on purpose.

And so maybe we just spend a moment about sort of how work gets done in Expensify and how that may be different than another company, some of the investors on the line look at.

David Barrett, Founder and CEO, Expensify: Sure. I mean, maybe it starts with basically what what we think the opportunity is. I mean, fundamentally, expense management is a very mature industry. I mean, Concur and Salesforce invented the entire concept of SaaS in, like, the late nineties. And so as long as there’s been basically Internet software, there’s been expense management software, which makes sense because expense management is the very accounting problem.

Long before you have revenue, you definitely have expenses. Like, before you’re an accountant or an accounting system, you definitely are tracking your expenses in some fashion. So it makes sense that expense management would be kind of a a pivotal foundational industry on online. But despite that, it’s really captured just a tiny fraction of businesses. It sounds wild, but there’s, like, 300,000,000 businesses in the world.

But if you were to add up all of the customers, ours and everyone else’s, of our entire industry, it’s a couple 100,000 businesses. So less than a percent of the global opportunity, we think, has been captured. And a reason for that is we think that the the actual the acquisition model of traditional SaaS software is fundamentally not able to achieve a global scale. When they look at businesses that have, you know, a billion users, they didn’t get there through advertising. They got there through viral word-of-mouth and employee driven sort of behavior.

So ExpenseVise’s entire design is about trying to capture this much, much bigger opportunity. And that’s this is not a new idea. That’s that’s what’s got us here. We’ve been around for about sixteen years, and we’ve been built through what we call a bottom up business model. Most of the customers Expensify actually are acquired because an individual employee downloaded the app for free and just started using it inside of the business before the company even realized.

And so this creates a very scalable and very cost effective sales model, and that’s what drives kind of this incredible free cash flow. Actually, we’ve been talking about that. Not just the revenue per employee, but the profitable revenue per employee. So we believe that’s basically the way that you capture this enormous opportunity is through viral word-of-mouth loops, and you can do so profitably. And so we’re a profitable company.

We produce free cash flow every month or in every quarter. We’ve paid off all of our debt. We do frequent buybacks. And despite all of that, we’re still growing to capture we’re targeting basically the this 99% of the untapped market that is this huge, huge opportunity. It’s the way that we view it is it’s it’s really a marathon.

It’s not a sprint. It’s not about just seeing who can burn the most cash in the altar of growth, basically, and to sort of show these short term results. We think the opportunity is so large. It requires a mentality that you can go out and go get it all.

Dan Jester, BMO Software Research, BMO: Okay. And so, that’s very interesting on sort of the the go to market side. On the actual product and technology side, there’s been lots of companies that have been launched in the last five, seven, eight years that are trying to attack this management. I don’t need to name their names. I think everyone on this call knows who they are.

But, you know, and if you pick up Expensify app and you download one of their apps, how does the look and feel different? How is the engineering different from your perspective? Like, what’s gonna capture that viral moment and push it through to completion from the technology side?

David Barrett, Founder and CEO, Expensify: That makes sense. I think that I’m I’m glad that you focused on the app there because, I mean, you know, shocker. We’re an increasingly mobile world, making an application that works not just, you know, trapped in your desktop, but basically out in the real real world is a big deal. And so our design is so we use a technology called React Native. It’s, it’s built by Facebook.

It’s it’s basically one of the most advanced or it is the most advanced cross platform sort of framework you can use. We are outside of Facebook. I think we’re the largest, deployment of, React Native. And so as a result of this, the benefit of this technology is it provides exact functionality, a parity between desktop and mobile, between iOS and Android. And so no matter who you are or where you you’re working, you can use all of our functionality on the road, on any app.

You can use it in a browser and things like this. And so value of this is that when you pick up pick up our app, it’s not just an app for scanning receipts or whatever it might be. It’s an app for doing everything. You can provision cards. You can manage travel.

You can update your NetSuite settings or whatever it might be all from the palm of your hand. And that’s a really powerful technology that we think is really important for this increasing the mobile workplace. So let’s say, one, the app itself is just just literally just more powerful. You can just do so much more with the mobile app than you can for no one else. And then two is designed in this real time fashion.

So, basically, it’s always pushing data down to your app such that when you open up the app, the data’s already there. So if you don’t have a bad or flaky network on a plane or wherever maybe you have no network, whatever it might be, Our app already has the data you need, so you can go through and work on an offline fashion. And it’s really important, especially for the business traveler that needs to scan receipts or process expenses, whatever it might be. Again, out in the real world, out where the the the Wi Fi connection is nonexistent, the the the cell tower is really far away, things like this. And so from a technology perspective, I think that we’ve always been kind of a tech forward company.

Again, Expensify was we were the very expense reporting mobile app, which sounds wild. We were the to do any kind of integrated receipt scanning. So we’ve been the for a huge range of technologies, and I would say probably, you know, we can’t have any conversation in this world without talking about AI. We were the to really invest in what we call our concierge AI, infused out the entire service, is our concierge AI, which you can talk to anywhere in the application on any object. Meaning that, basically, when you’re when you’re in an expense report, you can talk with other people on the platform.

You can talk with the other users, talk with your co colleagues. And then soon, we’re releasing a feature where you can actually talk with concierge in the context of an actual expense report and ask questions about that expense report. Like, know, when was the last time this person submitted this receipt, or what’s the average cost of, you know, a taco in the city? Whatever it might be, things like this. And so we think that we’re always led with a technology forward approach from the start when we launched the expense report in mobile app and to now when we think we’re launching the most integrated AI forward application in this industry.

Dan Jester, BMO Software Research, BMO: Okay. A couple quarters ago, you’d spent some time outlining to investors about the new Expensify app and sort of the world of the future, which is chat centric.

David Barrett, Founder and CEO, Expensify: Sure.

Dan Jester, BMO Software Research, BMO: Yeah. So can you link that sort of link us together through the iterations of Expensify? You know, what are customers using today, and what is that future state that you’re driving towards?

David Barrett, Founder and CEO, Expensify: Sure. That makes sense. Because I as mentioned, Expensify has been around for a while. I mean, we’re, you know, very, you know, mature expense reporting app. It’s, again, tens of thousands of customers, millions of users all over the world.

And so as we’re building this application, we’ve learned a few And as I mentioned earlier, one of the things that we learned is that automation only goes so far. You can automate, let’s say, 80% of the problem. So it’s that when we got it down to a new Expensify, when you swipe the card, that’s all you need to do is we will capture the expense. We’ll create an e receipts directly from the transaction. We will code it correctly using AI based upon the history of how it’s been categorized in the past.

We will add it to the, correct expense report based upon whatever reporting period you want. We’ll submit it. We’ll approve it. If it’s a personal card, we’ll re or a a res scanned receipt, we’ll reimburse it. And and we can just do all this in automated fashion, and so it works pretty magically.

However, there’s that last 20%. And last 20% can’t really be automated because that’s based on information that’s not in the system. So we can pull a lot off of your credit card or off the receipt, but we’re not mind reader. We can’t figure out basically, like, what client were you talking with or what was the intention behind what you’re doing, things like this. That’s typically captured in chat somewhere.

That’s captured in a conversation between you and the accountant, and that conversation can take forever. Even if it takes only, like, a second to answer the question, tracking down that employee to ask the question and get them to answer it could take a month. And so that’s a month where the accountant can’t close the books just because they’re waiting for a one second response from the user. So our new design is all about trying to reduce that one month down to one second by engaging directly with the employee around these sorts of questions in real time. And so when you’re using the Expensify app, to a large degree, it feels like a chat app because they were trying to streamline the chat based component of expense management.

This is a new not a new thing in the sense that we’re not inventing conversations. We’re not trying to convince you to talk about things that you don’t typically talk about. These are conversations you’re already having, and you’re probably already having online. You’re just doing it in a very, very slow and cumbersome fashion. We’re integrating the entire process into expense management such that the whole conversation or expense reporting happens in the tool, and then it unlocks the potential for truly automating a 100% down the road.

Dan Jester, BMO Software Research, BMO: So that’s the engagement with the platform. And so then let’s talk about the functionality of the platform. Right? You started with expense management, and then you added the corporate card, and that was sort of a a a multiyear journey to ramp that business, scale it to the place it is today. Then you launched travel, which is still relatively new but out there.

So, you know, I guess, one, maybe we can talk about travel and early sort of early data points there. Yep. But, two, just maybe step back and help us understand, like, you could you know, what’s the limitation from continuing to offer adjacent revenue opportunities on the platform, and where could you go over time?

David Barrett, Founder and CEO, Expensify: Sure. That makes sense. Well well, and foremost, I mean, the name is Expensify. I mean, I think that that that’s a well chosen name because expense management is kind of the core of a corporate back office. And and in fact, it’s the most connected of your sort of ERP suite, which sounds wild.

You don’t typically think of expense management because it’s kind of a humble industry. But there’s no other system out there that’s simultaneously connected to your corporate card, your GL system, your CRM, your payroll system, your HR system. It’s in your company’s bank accounts. It’s your employees’ bank accounts. It’s it’s bringing in personal credit cards.

It is truly the nexus of basically your entire back office, and that provides a a great vantage point for automation, quick visibility into all these sorts of systems. And so as such, it’s really a strategic high ground for cross selling additional functionality. Now you mentioned a few of the functionality features that we’ve offered. So expense management is the key. We need to have the best expense management system in the platform, and that’s where our focus is at.

But when you have that, it’s very easy to move into ancillary industries. Now corporate cards are a good example of that. Now, again, most of the world either does reimbursements out of their personal cards or already has a corporate card. And so to be clear, Expensify is clearly the best option if you’re doing reimbursements or you have your existing corporate card. Yeah.

It’s fine. We’re not gonna force you to use ours, but ours is pretty great. And I think that we’ve seen that we’re getting strong traction of our corporate card even though it’s not mandatory. We have something like a I think it’s like a 43% year on year interchange growth because we’ve just been expanding the number of customers that opt in to our corporate card. And in in doing so, they just get a much more streamlined experience.

I think you also mentioned our our travel feature. Now, of course, travel is travel is called T and E for a reason. The those go hand in hand, and they always have. And so we don’t force you to use our travel solution. Most people, you know, book through Google Travel, Expedia, whatever it might be, and that’s fine.

And so we’ll work with those customers, and we’re the best for those customers. But increasingly, customers are choosing our own integrated corporate travel as well. And so because we have a strategic vantage point, it is very difficult, very critical sort of mission critical function of expense management. This allows us to move into these additional industries and cross sell corporate cards, travel. I also mentioned that we do invoicing, bill processing.

And so I think there’s a wide range of ways that we can kind of use this position to move on to other industries. But, again, it’s really important to recognize that it all starts by having the best expense management, and that’s where our focus is at. Okay.

Dan Jester, BMO Software Research, BMO: So maybe this is a good time to pivot and talk a little bit about how you acquire customers and how you cross sell them. Like, if I go back a few years ago, I think it was it was at the time, it was kinda clear that sort of the pipeline creation of new customers, if you’re waiting on viral moments, you can’t have a viral moment every moment of time, and you need to rationalize to some extent how you create pipeline, how you get new customers to a drop adopt the tech and then how you cross sell it. So beyond the viral acquisition of of clients, can you help investors understand how you’re going out and trying to cultivate new customers and Sure. For the already have, how are you convincing them to use other parts of the platform?

David Barrett, Founder and CEO, Expensify: Yeah. Of course. And so as mentioned, expense wise business model is very different than the rest of the industry. And our our model is about reaching out to the employees, recognizing that employees outnumber admins a 100 to one. And so as a result, building a brand that resonates with the average employee means that you can capture word-of-mouth far beyond, basically, a brand that’s focused on the CFO, whatever it might be.

We’ve done brand studies that show, and I I was gonna get that was exactly right. It’s, like, a huge fraction of or relatively huge. So let’s call it, like, 9% of, I think, like, the American workforce knows the expense by name, which is like, that’s pretty good. And that’s, what, 9% higher than others in our industry. And so as a result, we’ve built this brand through things like we did a Super Bowl ad.

We’ve had this, you know, very employee centric brand. We’ve we’ve engaged with, you know, activations at conferences that basically reach out to the individual employees and try to sort of really stoke an application built for the person on the road and making sure that they’re able to, one, use us at all times. So one thing is the Expensify app, anyone can download. It’s a free app. It’s a free app that you can start using without asking your company’s permission.

Because we recognize if you use us to submit an expense report to your boss, we’ve turned your expense report into a highly targeted marketing message directly to the decision maker. And so this is what we call our bottom up adoption strategy, which is one, we build an employee focused brand. Two, we promote that brand with very large brand awareness campaigns, like, again, our Super Bowl ad. And three, we allow people to act upon that awareness without having to ask permission of anyone. And so you can always download the app and start using it inside your company.

And what we see is that over time, we get sort of a critical mass of people inside of a company, and then that pressures the company just to adopt the company the product overall. And what’s nice about this is we’re bringing companies into a pipeline that we’re never looking for expense management in the place. And so we’re not going we’re not limited to the companies that have management that have identified this as an internal problem and who have begun the sales process. We’re putting it on the agenda because employees are demanding that they use Expensify by name. And in that sort of context, we sort of bypass the sales process.

And so we’re talking to leads that are not evaluating any alternatives because their employees have already vetted Expensify, and they’re requesting it. And we’re such an inexpensive tool in the place. There’s kinda no reason not to do it. The way that we view this is we capture businesses while they’re small before they’re looking for anything, and then we just have our foot in the door, and we grow with them and hold on to them forever.

Dan Jester, BMO Software Research, BMO: Okay. And then once they start using them for expense management, how do you introduce the card and the the travel?

David Barrett, Founder and CEO, Expensify: Oh, yeah. I mean, that’s a really organic thing. So, like, for example, when you go to re set up reimbursement for your employees, you may say, hey. That’s cool. Now you’re all set to reimburse employees.

If you’d like, you can also just issue them a corporate card right here. It’s it’s it’s it’s here. It doesn’t cost anything. Just click this button and it’s ready to go. And so it’s all about basically making it really, really straightforward for companies to adopt the functionality that we want with even if it’s not something they’re specifically asking for.

Likewise, we also engage employees in the process. And they’re saying, like, well, would you like a corporate card? Your company’s already provisioned for them. Hey. Maybe you should ask this you know, ask your your boss for it or click here to say, this is why I want the corporate card.

And so it’s all about basically engaging everyone in this process because expense management isn’t just for the CFO or the accountant. It’s a tool that everyone in the business uses.

Dan Jester, BMO Software Research, BMO: Okay. That’s great. Maybe we can spend a little bit of time on the competitive environment and and your pricing strategy.

David Barrett, Founder and CEO, Expensify: Sure.

Dan Jester, BMO Software Research, BMO: So maybe we’ll start on pricing. So last quarter, you made some announcements to sort of shift some prices around. Can you help us understand sort of what the drivers for that was and what kind of impact do you think that’s gonna have on the business?

David Barrett, Founder and CEO, Expensify: Great. Yeah. ExpenseFly is super cheap. It’s $5 per employee. I mean, it’s $5 per employee.

It’s $5, and you get expense management, corporate cards, travel, invoicing, bill pay. You get real time integrations with your accounting package. You get integrated receipt scanning. You you’re getting all this access to our you know? You can talk to a salesperson.

You can talk to account manager. It it costs $5 for employee. And so, again, we’ve we’ve built a a system that even though again, we’re extremely profitable company, but we’re kicking off free cash flow constantly. We’re raising our free cash flow guidance, you know, consistently even in these difficult times. And we do that because we’ve created a business model, that engages employees in the sales process, and that dramatically reduces the cost of sale for every new customer and allowed us to create a super profitable company even on these incredible low price points.

Now, of course, there’s multiple options. It’s, like, it’s $5 to start. If you want to upgrade for more advanced accounting flows, you wanna go to NetSuite, SAP, whatever it is, now it’s $9. And as you there’s sort of basically two plans. There’s our collect plan, which is good for basically every business in the world, and then our control plan, which is for a larger SMBs, mid market enterprise companies, and things like this.

The control plan has a variety of pricing options that you can pay basically $9 a piece of per month if you’re using an annual commit or a corporate card. Or if you don’t want a corporate card, we can adjust the pricing and things like this. And so, fundamentally, it’s about really straightforward transparent pricing, that you can just buy in a self-service matter without needing to talk to a salesperson and without having to think too much about it.

Dan Jester, BMO Software Research, BMO: Okay. And your competitors do it differently. Some of them only have cards, and their business is sort of funded by other parts of the business. Sure. Some of them have subscription fees recently.

And so, I guess, are there I guess, how much is pricing? It doesn’t seem like it’s a barrier to adoption here, but how much is that a consideration as you think about the adoption in sort of large midsize companies and larger companies? So I I I think that that’s where a lot of your competitors are really

David Barrett, Founder and CEO, Expensify: Well, I think that pricing I mean, there’s always a factor. Don’t get me wrong, but I’d say it’s it’s a complicated Again, our pricing has been pretty consistent. We’ve been, like, $5 $5 collect plan, $9 control plan. That’s been the case for, like, a decade. And so I would say the rest of the industry is largely adapted to our pricing.

However, I’d say our competition has kind of been pretty volatile. Like, it started off and it’s, like, completely free, and then it’s $15 per employee. And then it’s basically a custom negotiated thing or whatever it might be, and I’m actually not even sure what their current pricing is. And so they’re kind of all over the board as they figure out their business models, and that’s fine. I mean, they’re a younger business.

They’ve gotta go through those growth pains. I I understand that. But I think you you hit on a really important part. Most of our competition depends upon you using their corporate card, which means, one, they’re not really an option if you like your Amex or Chase or or literally any of the corporate card out there. And so I think they’re targeting a much smaller market of companies that don’t like their existing corporate cards, which I think you know, there’s certainly a market for that.

Our customers like their corporate cards. They like their Amex. They like their points. And so that’s fine. That’s one is we don’t require that they or they’re really requiring to use a corporate card.

Two, as a consequence of that, they’re really limited to the subset of the biz of the industry that they can underwrite. Any business that’s too small that doesn’t fit risk profiling, they just literally don’t talk to. So I’d say a lot of our competition’s really focused on kind of, like, the larger established SMBs or something above that, which means they’re they’re pretty much cut out entirely of the smaller SMB market and the for the the the new market. Like, they’ll and so as a result, we just are going after a much larger part of the market because we don’t have to underwrite every single customer. We’re company we’re comfortable just reimbursing or using existing corporate card.

Pricing’s certainly a factor, I mean, in every discussion. But I would say in in the case of all these customers, it really doesn’t come down to price is not the deciding factor. I think it really comes down to, one, who do you even hear about Most of the market has never heard of any of us, and that’s why I would say it’s primarily an awareness in the lead generation game. And that’s why we lean so heavily heavily into broad awareness campaigns, and then, an employee focused brand that can really capture word-of-mouth.

Dan Jester, BMO Software Research, BMO: Maybe we can spend a moment talking about the revenue model. So you have subscription revenue. You have interchange fees. If I look at the two over the past year, your interchange fees have grown very briskly, and the rest of the platform hasn’t grown really as much. And so as you think about the composition of growth going forward, what are the variables that we should be considering?

Sure. Is it mostly gonna be coming from interchange, or should we be seeing other things evolve over time?

David Barrett, Founder and CEO, Expensify: Well, I would say I mean so, I mean, elephant in the room. So, clearly, we would love the core subscription and, like, the paid user account to be going up. I mean, it’s been sort of flat for a while because I mean, there’s a lot of reasons. But I’d say, fundamentally, our customers are SMB, and now is not a good day for SMB. It’s a difficult world out there for a lot of, you know, a lot of the industry.

And so we grow when our customers grow. Now to be clear, we’re adding new customers every single day, but it challenges our existing customers just aren’t as active as it used to be. A huge fraction of our historical growth has come from basically the growth of our customers themselves. However, right now, customers are not growing. If they’re even if they’re doing small layoffs, even if every they do one last business trip a year because of how sort of that that filters through in our product.

That just results in fewer paid active seats on a product basis. And so it really, it’s about we need to use this time to cross sell existing products into our existing customers. So for example, the the expense by car travel, that’s why you’re saying we’re we’ve made a great traction in getting customers to adopt these additional revenue streams. That’s why we’re saying even though the paid user account has been flat for a bit, because interchange has been going up, and now we’re adding travel on top of that, we’ve been able to increase our free cash flow guidance again and again. Now that of course, in the long run, we have to be adding the art we need to get our customers growing again because once our customers grow, then that’s the rising tide that floats the entire business model.

Now but that’s a challenge. There’s a lot of macro and economic effects going on right now. It’s a difficult time in the world. So it’s really about making sure that during this difficult sort of macro environment that we can still extract more and more value from our existing customers through cross selling while using this time to invest in the next generation of growth through this platform that we really think is gonna be pretty revolutionary. Okay.

Dan Jester, BMO Software Research, BMO: So later this month, you’re gonna try and create a new viral moment and doing some some pretty significant marketing relative certainly to the size of your company. And so maybe just remind everybody what’s on tap and why did you decide to do what you’re planning to do.

David Barrett, Founder and CEO, Expensify: Yeah. So years ago. So I I think I mentioned how our one thing we found for effective marketing is just broad consumer brand marketing, which, you know, a SaaS companies can’t typically do because if you were doing something like a Super Bowl ad, most people watching the Super Bowl are not CFOs. But a lot of them do expense reports way more. And so as a result, by having a brand that reaches out and appeals to individuals, we can capture much more of kind of the awareness of these brand campaigns.

And so after doing that, we, you know, we’ve tried a million different things like everyone else. But we really, really resonated. We saw that, basically, their Super Bowl ad just created kind of a an uptick in awareness overall. And so we’re looking to the next thing. How do you go even bigger than Super Bowl ad?

And so early on, we’re talking with Apple, and they had, you know, a little movie that they’re called f one. And so at the time, you know, Apple TV is kind of, you know, a new thing. It’s it’s one of their major movies and things like this. And so we got in early as the sponsor of, basically, Brad Pitt’s virtual f one team in this f one movie. And so if you look at the if you look at the the movie, look at the ads, you see the expense by name on Brad Pitt’s chest, on the side of the car, on basically the the background.

It’s absolutely everywhere. Like, they’re announcing it in in the movie. And so, basically, the movie itself is is about Expensify, which is wild. It’s like, imagine that you were to make a, it’s kinda like imagine you’re gonna sponsor the Super Bowl, but you’re going to rename the team to be Expensify. And, also, you knew that team was gonna win.

That’s basically what the f one is because it’s an f one movie that reaches, you know, hundreds of millions of users around the world or of viewers around the world. And throughout the entire movie, you’re seeing the expense of my name again and again. We were super happy to get in as early into something, and then it blew up so huge. Now it’s basically I think it’s Apple’s biggest movie ever, the most, you know, advertised movie ever. It’s it’s huge.

It’s a huge cultural moment right now, and the expense files there at the center of it. And so this is the kind of opportunity that we’re very excited by because, you know, when we did chose this years ago, it was a big swing. It’s the same kind of, like, kinda random. But we’ve always tried to look for these opportunities, these unusual, distinctive opportunities because that’s how you build a distinctive and recognizable brand.

Dan Jester, BMO Software Research, BMO: So not that this is gonna be a just one Sunday event. Right? Movie’s gonna be out there for a while. But movies have big big sort of initial bangs. And so what is the company doing to prepare to convert the investment made in this event in this marketing campaign or event?

Mhmm. Translate that to improving the profile of the business.

David Barrett, Founder and CEO, Expensify: Yeah. And and I think that you’re right. It’s not just like unlike the Super Bowl, which is, you know, you get, like, a thirty second spot and you’re done. This is obviously something that’s gonna be in theaters for months, and it’s the the movie is gonna be here forever. And even on top of that, the movie hasn’t even come out yet, and there’s been a bunch of crazy stuff.

I think it’s like, Dams and Idris showed up to the the Met Gala. he drove up in an Expensify f one car. That’s cool. And then he walked into the Met Gala wearing an Expensify, you know, a track uniform, which they tore off, and he had a super sweet suit underneath it. But you can’t buy that kind of just cultural awareness.

It’s it’s it’s a wild like, I just saw you know? Anyways, again and again, you’ll see the expensive brand appearing in a million different places, merely be oh, the the Apple WWDC yesterday. It started off with an inexpensive branded f one car at the Apple conference, which is wild. And so it’s a huge thing already, and it’s only gonna get bigger still. Now how do we capture that moment?

Is a good question. And I would say the way we capture it is we’ve been focused on making sure that the application, new expense files, perfectly dialed in for f one. So, basically, when you sign up, everyone’s going to see the new experience. Everyone’s going to see an optimized AI driven experience where, basically, you can talk to the concierge AI from day one. You can pick up the phone and talk to one of our sales team.

You can get an account manager assigned. And, basically, you can experience the entire the dream of a real time again, travel expense at the speed of chat. Like, that is a real thing, and we’re launching it at f one to coincide with this f one movie. And it’s built on the built on the idea of capturing every movie viewer that walks out and wonders is like, is that a real company? What is the sense if I do?

We wanna make sure that where wherever they search on social, online, wherever it might be, they see that we’re a real company. We see they see what we do, and they’re pulled into highly optimized funnels to convert them into customers quickly. Will it work? We’ll see. But we do have some experience in this.

We did pretty good with the Super Bowl ad, and we’ve learned a lot from that. And I think we’re doubling down on that. And so, honestly, it’s one the most exciting times I’ve ever been in this company, and I’ve been here for a while. No problem.

Dan Jester, BMO Software Research, BMO: Alright. Well, apologize everyone for the technical difficulty. I’m back on my phone. So we have just another minute or two, and I wanna make sure we wrap up the conversation with David properly. So when we left, we were talking about, what you’re doing to optimize the opportunity around the f one marketing campaign.

So I think we finished through that. So then I think the last thing I wanted to touch upon is around, the profitability of the business. And you’ve talked about that several times in the conversation, David, about your ability to consistently increase your guidance around free cash flow.

David Barrett, Founder and CEO, Expensify: Mhmm.

Dan Jester, BMO Software Research, BMO: Maybe just help us understand from your perspective how you’re balancing investments. You know, you’re making a big splash with this f one. How do you make sure you put enough, you know, wood behind the arrow to make sure you get the full opportunity from this?

David Barrett, Founder and CEO, Expensify: Sure. So off, I like that you’re able to make this work on your phone. I think that’s just a great live example of how important mobile apps are in this world, and so that’s why we’re so leaning forward in mobile apps. But as far as profitability and so as mentioned, I think that the business model itself is just designed around unit economics. Again, it’s when I started to Expensify, it was at the bottom of the, you know, biggest depression since the last depression.

Like, the the Great Depression. And so we knew that winter was coming at any point in time. And so as a result, we’ve always paid attention to the bottom line, and we’ve always talked basically made sure that every customer is profitable on a cash basis, which, you know, is a wild thing for a start up. I think we’re the, I don’t know, the only profitable expense management company ever so far as I know, and I think that there’s a reason for that. Now as for how do we, use those resources, step one is always just funding the business, funding growth.

We’ve always been aggressive on taking big swings on growth opportunities when we see them, like the f one, Super Bowl, and things like this. You know, we’ve done massive up by up outbound campaigns, advertising campaigns. We we tried a million different things, but we’re also not frivolous. I think we really doubled down on the things that we think work, and we’re really cautious, and and we’re good stewards, we think, of the money itself. So when it comes to how we invest this money right now, I mean, do you think that we are building our balance sheet or holding on to some cash?

We’ve been doing buybacks opportunistically for years, and so we’ll continue basically on that sort of buyback process. But, fundamentally, it’s about investing in big opportunities as they come up, supporting the just the business itself, preparing for things that’s like, who knows? The economy can get worse. It’s possible. And so I just wanna make sure that we’re always ready for whatever comes.

Again, it’s it’s a marathon. It’s not a sprint. We’re making sure that we are here for the long run because the opportunity is truly enormous, and we’re really focused on building a business that has the product and the unit economics to go get it all.

Dan Jester, BMO Software Research, BMO: Great. Well, I think that we’re gonna have to stop the conversation there to David. David, so thank you so much for your time. Apologize for the technical difficulties. And for any of the folks who are on the line, if they have any follow ups for Expensify, please let me know, and I’ll get you in contact with the company.

So again, David, thank you very much for your time today.

David Barrett, Founder and CEO, Expensify: Thank you. It’s always a pleasure.

Dan Jester, BMO Software Research, BMO: Take care.

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