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On Wednesday, 10 September 2025, Remitly Global Inc (NASDAQ:RELY) presented at the Goldman Sachs Communicopia + Technology Conference 2025, showcasing a transformative quarter marked by significant growth and strategic product launches. While the company celebrated achieving GAAP profitability and expanding its service offerings, it also acknowledged the challenges of moderating growth rates due to tougher year-over-year comparisons.
Key Takeaways
- Remitly reported a 34% growth rate and achieved GAAP profitability.
- New products like Remitly One and Remitly Flex aim to broaden financial services.
- The company is leveraging stablecoins for treasury management and customer stability in emerging markets.
- Digital marketing and AI-powered virtual agents are enhancing customer engagement.
- Remitly’s strategic expansion includes serving high-dollar senders and micro-businesses.
Financial Results
- Remitly achieved 34% growth, with a 16% EBITDA, maintaining a rule of 50 performance for two consecutive quarters.
- The company’s revenue less transaction expense dollars also grew by 34%.
- High-amount senders increased in volume by over 45%, marking a record growth.
- The LTV to CAC ratio for business customers is six times higher than that of consumer customers.
- Despite strong growth, the company anticipates a moderation in the second half of the year due to tougher comparisons.
Operational Updates
- Remitly’s platform now supports money transfers across 170 countries, billions of bank accounts and mobile wallets, and 470,000 cash pickup locations.
- 93% of transactions are completed in less than an hour, and 97% do not require customer support.
- New initiatives include the Remitly One membership program, Remitly Flex (a send now, pay later solution), and the Remitly Wallet, which will expand to multi-currency offerings.
- The company is launching the USDC stablecoin in its wallet to enhance treasury and cash management.
Future Outlook
- Remitly aims to expand its total addressable market to $22 trillion per year by targeting small businesses.
- The company is focusing on deepening customer relationships and leveraging stablecoins to address currency instability in emerging markets.
- Remitly plans to enhance its credit establishment product in the U.S. and expand its wallet capabilities.
- The company is exploring partnerships to improve its treasury and cash management strategies.
Q&A Highlights
- High-dollar senders are present across all corridors, with varying concentrations.
- Remitly Business targets micro-businesses and freelancers, offering affordable and instant payment solutions.
- Remitly Flex provides a $250 line of credit with a 90-day repayment period.
- A virtual agent embedded in platforms like WhatsApp helps streamline customer support and transactions.
In conclusion, Remitly’s presentation at the conference highlighted its strategic initiatives and growth prospects. For a deeper dive into the company’s plans and performance, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript below.
Full transcript - Goldman Sachs Communicopia + Technology Conference 2025:
Matt Oppenheimer, CEO and co-founder, Remitly: Yeah.
Unidentified speaker: All right. We are going to get started. Kicking off the day, we’ve got Matt Oppenheimer, CEO and co-founder of Remitly, as well as Vikas, who’s made a surprise appearance. Thank you for joining us today, Vikas.
Matt Oppenheimer, CEO and co-founder, Remitly: Thank you.
Unidentified speaker: All right. I wanted to just kinda kick it off high level with a review of the most recent quarter because on the call, you called this a defining quarter and a major inflection point for the company. I was hoping you could talk about what made you say that and why you’re so excited about what’s to come.
Matt Oppenheimer, CEO and co-founder, Remitly: Yeah. Defining quarter, in many ways. Vikas will talk about some of the financials, and how solid Q2 was from that standpoint. If you look at our vision, which is transform lives with trusted financial services that transcend borders, the announcements and the products that we talked about, specifically Remitly One, which is the umbrella for products like Remitly Flex, Remitly Wallet, and other products we’ll talk about, we’re incredibly excited because we know that with that product suite, we can move from transactional business to a business that has a wide range of financial services that we can uniquely offer to the 300 million individuals that live and work outside the country they’re born. Pivotal moment, a lot of great products in the market now, and we’re just getting started.
Unidentified speaker: Great. I also wanna talk about some of these new initiatives, but first, let’s go through some of the moving pieces in the core business. I think despite a number of headwinds related to immigration policy, the company’s results have still been very strong. As it relates to the core kind of immigrant-centric remittances business, where are you seeing the greatest amount of momentum?
Matt Oppenheimer, CEO and co-founder, Remitly: Yeah. I’ll talk about it at a strategic level, and then I’ll turn it over to you to talk through the financials. I think that folks are surprised when you think about global payments, one, how cash-based they are. A lot of remittances and global payments are still done in physical cash. That is obviously rapidly shifting, and there’s a macro, just structural change that Remitly benefits from. What we’ve recognized is the platform that we’ve built is incredibly extensible and incredibly valuable. What I mean by that is, you know, we have spent 14 years building out things like our global payment rails that enable us to transfer money across 170 countries, billions of bank accounts and mobile wallets, and 470,000 cash pickup locations. 93% of transactions go through in less than an hour, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. 97% don’t require customer support.
That kind of complexity of delivering money, I draw an analogy to, oftentimes, Amazon’s early e-commerce business. It’s very hard to do if you’re sub-scale, and it’s very hard to do quickly. Just like delivering a package gets more reliable and there’s a flywheel component, our business is benefiting from that. With that, I mentioned extensibility. We recognize that, and we actually had customers coming to our platform that were micro-businesses and freelancers saying, "I wanna use that platform for international payments as well." We had what we call high-dollar senders coming to our platform and saying, "That’s great that you can send $250 to the Philippines.
I need to send $10,000 to the Philippines or India or Mexico." That extensibility of moving up market where there’s actually greater profit pools is enabled by the fact that we have this valuable platform that we have built out over the last 14 years. When you think about the core business, we are 3% of the $2 trillion that’s sent every year. Adding small businesses, it 10xs that to $22 trillion per year. There’s an enormous amount of room to grow there. You layer on these other growth opportunities of deepening our relationships with customers. We often say we’re a growth company with no shortage of growth opportunities, and that’s a very fun business to run. Do you wanna talk a little bit about some of the financials and, you know, how the business is doing from a financial standpoint, Vikas?
Vikas, Remitly: Yeah. I think it goes back to the starting point, which is it was a defining quarter. Not only that, if you look at each one in general, we have had really strong momentum with 34% growth, 16% EBITDA, which is rule of 50, two quarters in a row, and we delivered GAAP profitability. Clearly, that gives us a lot of strength as we invest for the future. Now, as you look at the second half, it’s different because the comps from last year were very strong. This is where, as we have guided, the growth will moderate, as well as I’d say we have much more line of sight in terms of where our business will land, which makes our guide much more realistic as we think about the second half of the year.
As you look at even beyond that, a lot of what we shared in terms of the new products are early days. I just think about them as long-term growth drivers for our business. Clearly, we have built a capacity to invest. Even our expense guide includes all the new bets that we are making. It’s a very thoughtful approach where we are taking growth plus profitability plus investment as an equation, and being very realistic in terms of what we are sharing.
Matt Oppenheimer, CEO and co-founder, Remitly: That’s great. Okay. Let’s maybe dig into some of the new products. High-dollar senders, you’ve already mentioned once, and this one is a little farther along. We can already see it playing out in some of the numbers. We’ve seen volume per active increase over the last year pretty significantly. There’s been a little bit of an offsetting impact on take rate, but I think it’s all been a very good story. Just remind us what you’ve done so far to target this market segment and just what’s next on the roadmap.
Unidentified speaker: Yeah. When you think about high-dollar senders, as I mentioned, there’s extensibility to our platform. The things that are required to customize for that market are things like being able to send higher amounts without going through what historically in the industry has been rudimentary tier limits. With more data, we have the ability to improve our machine learning and other AI-related models to be able to delineate between good customers versus fraudulent transactions or any sort of bad actors. That enables a $10,000 transaction to go through very quickly, very seamlessly. That’s where we’re seeing opportunities, and it’s improving to where it’s not a tier-based system, but it’s very much risk-adjusted for each individual customer, leveraging the data that we have. There are lots of opportunities to do some of that to customize for higher-dollar senders to be able to send.
Outside of that, the amazing thing is the network and the platform that we’ve built, as I mentioned, is very extensible. It’s really about marketing and reaching those customers with what we already have as a very trusted brand in the market.
Vikas, Remitly: A couple of additional thoughts there. More and more financials, as we have seen, our send per, you know, QAU has been growing really well. In fact, we had a record dollar amount as well as record growth last quarter. A lot of that is backed by our high-amount senders, which grew in volume north of 45%. That was, again, a record growth for us. A lot of great momentum there. Keep in mind, a lot of it is, as Matt has said, extensible on the platform. We have not made a very deliberate effort on the marketing side or from a targeting, and that just tells us that opportunity there is really strong. We are very excited about that.
Unidentified speaker: That’s great. Is this the same traditional sender with a different use case, like a one-off large payment that they need to make, or is this a different type of customer? Have you thought about, you know, it sounds like it’s been mostly a pull into this market segment. Have you thought about how that turns into a push over time through kind of marketing investments?
Matt Oppenheimer, CEO and co-founder, Remitly: Yeah. What we find is that there’s high-dollar senders in every corridor. There are people sending money to Mexico that, you know, need to send $10,000, $20,000 or more. There are some corridors where high-dollar senders tend to make up a greater amount. If you think about intra Europe, U.S. Europe, our largest transaction that we talked about, I think, in Q2 or Q1 was from Canada to the U.S. You’ll have different corridors have different weightings of high-dollar senders, but high-dollar senders are across the globe. Our recognized and trusted brands that we have, first and foremost, are already reaching those customers. They’re already coming to our platform. Now we’re just making it more purpose-built to be able to handle those transactions very efficiently and effectively.
Unidentified speaker: That’s great. Okay. Switching gears to Remitly Business, this is a real TAM expansion opportunity as you’ve mentioned. Can you talk about what you’re seeing in terms of early traction and just feedback from customers?
Matt Oppenheimer, CEO and co-founder, Remitly: Yeah, so one other contextual thing, both as we’re talking about high-dollar senders and Remitly Business, is, if you look at that vision that I mentioned, transform lives with trusted financial services that transcend borders, we’ve only changed our vision once over the last 10 or 15 years. What we did is we expanded it. It used to have the word immigrant specifically in it. What we found, I think this is important context, is that we had businesses, we had high-dollar senders in corridors across the globe that were coming to our platform and using it, but there was a cognitive dissonance with the team to say, "But if our vision is to serve immigrants, how do we think about Remitly Business? How do we think about high-dollar senders?" We expanded our vision just a couple of years ago.
That was in response to inbound customer demand that we had that were in these broader customer segments. With that context, the platform we built, you have Remitly Business, which, think about like a micro-business. There’s a customer, just to make it real, named Mary, who moved from the Philippines to the U.S., and she’s a bookkeeper. She moved here 20-plus years ago, and she has, as she’s built her business, 5 or 10 contractors in the Philippines that she needs to pay. She already went to Remitly and tried to use our platform before we customized it with things like eKYB, which is electronic know your business, as opposed to electronic know your customer, which we’ve done for over a decade. She went through the friction of having to call our customer support and all of that because, why did she do that?
My view is that the segment in between consumer and what I would call medium and enterprise-sized businesses is a segment that I think is underserved. When I say it’s underserved, it’s because what they want, what Mary wants, is the ability to send to 5 or 10 folks in an affordable, instant, convenient way with a wide range of disbursement options. In the Philippines, that means everything from GCash, which is a mobile wallet, to bank deposit, to cash pickup. When you look at other companies that serve the medium and enterprise space, they have large sales teams. They have a lot of bells and whistles that Mary does not need.
When you look at our consumer platform, because we’ve optimized the unit economics to serve a $500 transaction very efficiently, very profitably, and very quickly, adding the minimal features that Mary needs to pay those 5 contractors is relatively easy for us to do. That’s what we’ve been investing in, not only the eKYB, but there’s a variety of other basic product suite features that Remitly Business customers like Mary need. We’re just starting to be able to get going in that space. Over time, I think while we start with micro-businesses and freelancers, we can continue to move up market because from our standpoint, those customers are way more profitable, where for a business serving medium and enterprise, they’re going to look less profitable.
To put just one number around that, 6 times the average LTV to CAC ratio for a Remitly Business customer than consumer, than an average Remitly consumer customer. Huge opportunity there and just getting started. Anything you’d add on that?
Vikas, Remitly: No. I think the financials are great where we are addressing now $22 trillion in TAM versus the $2 trillion. Similar to what Matt said, you know, the LTV is great. One sender sends to multiple receivers. Average transaction size is 2x what we see in consumer. Early signs are great where we are seeing thousands of customers, you know, join the platform. We launched in the U.S. in Q2. We had a fast follow and launched in the U.K. a couple of weeks back. The product momentum is well off the T. Customer adoption, early signs are all positive. We feel really good about the long-term opportunity here.
Unidentified speaker: That’s great. You said 6 times your standard LTV to CAC, which I think is also 6. Is that right?
Vikas, Remitly: It is.
Unidentified speaker: It’s like 36. Okay, that’s a lot.
Vikas, Remitly: You’re talking about the ratio.
Unidentified speaker: Yeah.
Vikas, Remitly: You’re talking about LTV.
Unidentified speaker: Oh, the LTV.
Vikas, Remitly: This gives us.
Unidentified speaker: Okay.
Vikas, Remitly: Yeah, the LTV.
Unidentified speaker: This gives us more opportunity to be front-footed on marketing. Okay. Got it. Got it. That makes more sense.
Vikas, Remitly: Yeah.
Unidentified speaker: All right.
Vikas, Remitly: The LTV.
Unidentified speaker: All right. On the VAS opportunity, you alluded to it already in kind of a payroll context. When you move into business, there’s clearly a lot more opportunities for value-added services around just the cross-border payments. We’ve seen other companies in the coverage kind of pursue these. How are you thinking about, you know, more products to kind of surround the Remitly Business platform?
Matt Oppenheimer, CEO and co-founder, Remitly: Yeah. I think that there’s features like bulk payout. There’s features like scheduling, be able to do scheduled kind of payroll to a wide range of features that micro-businesses and freelancers specifically need. It also connects some to our Remitly Wallet strategy that we’ll talk about in a minute. I think that there’s a desire for folks to be able to hold value in addition to disburse funds immediately. There’s a synergy with our overall consumer product roadmap with some of what we’re building and what we hear from our Remitly Business customers that they want and need.
Unidentified speaker: Great. Great. Okay. You are on the heels, flying back from New York, from a big customer event this week where you announced a number of new products, including Remitly One. I wanted to maybe, if we could just hand the floor over, can you give us an overview of the new products that you’ve announced, and kind of what you’re most excited about?
Matt Oppenheimer, CEO and co-founder, Remitly: Yeah. That third part of our vision, financial services that transcend borders, is really important to understand because it’s our belief with a lot of data from our existing customers that financial services are not built for the 300 million individuals that live and work outside the country they’re born. What we announced yesterday is Remitly One, which is a membership product starting in the U.S. for customers that pay a $9.99 monthly fee. In exchange for that $9.99 monthly fee, they get a variety of benefits that we announced and then benefits that we will be launching soon. That helps us move from a transactional relationship more into a deeper relationship that solves a wide range of financial services needs for customers. What are a few of those? One of those would be Remitly Flex, which is a send now, pay later solution that we launched earlier this year.
We’ll probably have separate questions on Flex, but really excited about the progress there. It’s our anchor benefit. The second is a Remitly Wallet, so being able to store within the Remitly app a U.S. dollar balance in the U.S. context. Over time, we’ll roll that out to multi-currencies, and we’re also launching a USDC stablecoin in that wallet later this month. Customers, by specifically becoming Remitly One members, can earn things like a 4% boost. They can earn, via various activities and being a Remitly One member, things like $5 monthly cash back. Customers are not only able to send money, they’re able to also manage their finances through tough times with things like Flex, and they’re able to grow their funds via that 4% boost, the wallet, $5 cash back.
We’re starting in the U.S., but we’ll expand this to other countries across the globe to really meet the needs of the customer that lives a global life but historically has not had specific financial services that have met their needs.
Unidentified speaker: Got it. Before we dig into some of the specific products, do you have any high-level thoughts on what percentage of the user base might be, what would this be, like an appropriate, like, what do you think penetration could get to on the Remitly One product?
Matt Oppenheimer, CEO and co-founder, Remitly: Yeah. I draw the analogy to when I think about Amazon Prime. They launched with their anchor benefit, free shipping, if you remember, a long time ago. Then they added a range of benefits that different customers are attracted to, different elements of that. Right? Free shipping might be the core part, but they have everything from, you know, Prime Video to the many other benefits that Amazon Prime has. I view Remitly One as that umbrella. I would see if you look at a benefit like Flex, I would see that being more beneficial for somebody who’s maybe a lower dollar sender who needs to smooth that payroll. That, by definition, is going to be different than a Remitly One member that might be interested in a multi-currency account, and managing their kind of global treasury, so to speak.
Obviously, a consumer wouldn’t call it treasury, but their global kind of savings, to not only hold a USD account if it’s somebody who’s moved to the U.S., but also their Indian rupee account and potentially stablecoins and other stores of value that are more stable than the local currency that they hold. With that context, I think that there’s a wide range of customers that we can serve with a variety of benefits that’ll be under that Remitly One umbrella. We’re seeing that, especially with Flex, our anchor benefit that we launched earlier this year. We’re seeing, you’ll probably ask about Flex separately in a minute, but we’re seeing really good customer adoption and unit economics for that product, which gives us a lot of confidence that there’s customer demand.
Unidentified speaker: Let’s go there then. Basically, a send now, pay later product, as you mentioned. How are you thinking about the use case, and also how are you thinking about terms, financial profile, and any kind of credit concerns that you guys might have? I know you’re very good at managing that on the fraud side.
Matt Oppenheimer, CEO and co-founder, Remitly: Yeah. So, we launched that earlier this year. We wouldn’t be talking about it as our anchor benefit if we didn’t both see the customer demand and we didn’t have a lot of data and analytics around repayment rates, which are high, as well as the overall, just unit economics, which is how we’ve always thought about the business. Looking at it, and the profitability of it, taking out cost of funds and credit losses, etcetera. When you look at those metrics, it’s very encouraging. I’m also encouraged. You’re right. We have an expertise, I would say, in risk management, compliance, fraud prevention. Credit risk is different. When I look at our management team and when I look at our board, we have built out a lot of expertise in that area, and we’ve actually had a lot of expertise in that area over a long period of time.
You look at Nigel Morris, who’s on our board, who’s the founder of Capital One Bank. He’s been an amazing adviser and mentor of both the opportunity and the risk management in this area. Philip Reese was kind of second in command under Ken Schnall at American Express. We’ve actually opened an office in the Arlington, Virginia area to recruit a lot over the last couple of years, really, of strong analytical leaders from places like Capital One. That’s where the head of our Flex business is located, in the DC area. I, as CEO, think a lot about risk management, just given that we’re a fintech company. I feel really, really encouraged by the expertise we have, the repayment rates, the unit economics.
It makes logical sense too because if you look at our data, I talked about this at the announcement yesterday, but if you look at the unique data that we have, which is what I think is going to be critical in terms of differentiating in an AI world, what’s the proprietary data or tokens? We have a lot of proprietary data when you think about transaction data, when you think about identity, when you think about behavioral patterns. Those things can be used to broadly improve our risk management systems and just give us a right to win in this space and a right to serve a credit invisible segment that has just not had other options, which is why they’re willing to pay that $9.99 a month to be able to have all of the benefits that are offered within this Flex product suite.
Unidentified speaker: I guess to add on that, I think dovetails on what you were just saying, one of the other things that was announced yesterday was Remitly Credit. Can you talk about how, you know, how does that differ from the Remitly Flex product and, you know, what do you see as the main benefit there?
Matt Oppenheimer, CEO and co-founder, Remitly: Yeah. Great point. To be specific, Remitly Flex is a $250 line of credit, or not a line of credit, but an ability for customers to send now and then pay back that transaction within 90 days. In order to get benefits like being able to do multiple draws, being able to put autopay, all of those things, you have to become a Remitly One member, which costs $9.99. If you don’t pay the $9.99, you can still become a Flex member, but you have to wait for 3 business days for the funds to be received. You can only do one withdrawal at a time. We see really high adoption rate, again, because this segment of customers is very underserved, of customers willing to pay that $9.99 to be a member. That is what the, and then customers have 90 days to pay it back, up to $250.
I think that’s all the kind of nuances of the specific product for Flex. You mentioned that we have a credit establishment product, which is also trying to solve the problem that many of you probably know or have experienced, which is you move to a new country. Even if you move from the U.S. to the U.K., which I did working for Barclays, there was a large variance between credit access and credit worthiness because I had no credit history in the U.K. What the credit establishment product is, is leveraging things like the transactions that we’re already sending to be able to report those to credit bureaus and be able to help our customers build credit with the credit bureaus, and specifically in the U.S. to start, actually establish a credit history and try to reduce the time between the variance between credit access and credit worthiness.
That is going to be launched in the coming quarters. Flex is already out there, but we’re giving the market a sense of the wide range of benefits we’ll be offering as part of this Remitly One membership. That’s another benefit that’s coming down the pipe, and there are a few others I can talk about as well if it’s helpful.
Unidentified speaker: Yeah. No, that’s great. It came up similarly in our conversation with the firm yesterday about the importance of making sure that people using alternative credit get their information reported and they get credit for it.
Matt Oppenheimer, CEO and co-founder, Remitly: Exactly.
Unidentified speaker: Awesome. All right. Let’s pivot over to the wallet. You know, I’ve been really focused on this. I think it’s really interesting to have this kind of multi-currency stored balance functionality as well as a card attached to the platform. What’s your vision for the product there? Maybe if you could talk about, like, do you see the wallet being used more on the sender or the receiver side or both over time?
Matt Oppenheimer, CEO and co-founder, Remitly: Yeah. The wallet’s the ability in the U.S. right now to hold a USD balance within the Remitly app. We’ll be launching stablecoins later this month, as I mentioned, USDC specifically. Important context with how Remitly has grown as a company: 14 years ago, bold vision, bold ambition, we started just with the U.S. to the Philippines, the only corridor we did because it helped us get the product right and then scale up in a very efficient and effective way. To answer your question about the global need, yes, we will take what we’ve built in terms of the Remitly Wallet in the U.S., and we will add it not only to other countries where we already originate funds from, but we also are very serious about solving the problem that exists in a lot of emerging markets, which is the currency in that emerging market is less stable.
That’s where stablecoins come into play, which is being able to offer a stablecoin balance like a USDC balance in markets where there is inflation. Folks think about countries like Argentina or Zimbabwe, and they forget about countries like Turkey. Turkey, if you look over the last several years, the Turkish lira has devalued by 80%. Think about that for a minute right now that whatever you have in your bank account is now worth 20% of what it was just a few years ago. Things like 4% boost in those markets don’t matter relative to can I hold a stable currency that doesn’t devalue. When you think about the infrastructure that we’re building with the wallet, with Remitly One, and as we think about going into 2026 and beyond, we’ll also leverage stablecoins specifically to solve that customer pain point, which is holding a stable balance in emerging markets.
The reason Remitly can uniquely do that is because when you look, in my view, several years out of how the stablecoin journey will emerge, it is a valid store of savings. I think in most markets, and the world’s a big place, every regulator and every market will react differently. If you look at in most markets, there is still going to be the need to actually take that USDC or stablecoin balance and then be able to get it into a local currency or local account to be able to use it, whether that’s cash pickup, whether that’s bank accounts, whether that’s mobile wallets. We are uniquely good at that last mile, that last step of being able to get it from a stablecoin balance into a local currency and local store of value that folks can actually be able to use.
That’s where we see ourselves being able to really drive adoption across the globe. Yes, the ambitions for the Remitly Wallet are very much global.
Unidentified speaker: Very good. Okay. I think that takes us to stablecoins next. You know, we called this stablecoin summer. It seems like we’re just getting started on the implementation side of things. Talk about how, you know, what you’re doing on stablecoins and what investors, you know, what else can we expect to see from Remitly on that front?
Matt Oppenheimer, CEO and co-founder, Remitly: Yeah. With any technology, I always work back from the customer. The first I already answered, which is solving the problem of being able to hold a stable currency in emerging markets. That’s number one.
Unidentified speaker: Yeah.
Matt Oppenheimer, CEO and co-founder, Remitly: Number two is the only one to add, which is the problem that corporations have when it comes to being able to manage their global global treasury FX cash management. We’ve already launched in the U.S. to Mexico corridor the ability to improve our treasury and cash management via what’s called a stablecoin sandwich, leveraging partnerships with companies like Bitso to be able to see if we can improve some of our FX spreads. The benefit of that is primarily during evenings and weekends when banking hours are closed because, as you can imagine, given that we’ve sent $65 billion in the trailing 12 months, we get very good rates and we have a lot of efficiency.
If you can reduce the amount of working capital on nights and weekends, you save the interest, and if you can reduce the FX volatility and spread, then there’s marginal opportunities for us to improve some costs and reduce a marginal amount of FX risk. That being said, I think it’s super important to understand that the cost in remittances is less that area and more in the on-ramping and off-ramping of currency and funds. The amount we pay to collect funds via a bank account or debit card and the amount that we pay to disburse funds at that endpoint, to be able to do it 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, those are the two largest costs.
If there’s marginal benefits when it comes to the FX treasury cash management via stablecoins, we are going to participate in that and test and be on the leading edge. Where I’m more excited is that first customer problem, which is being able to give customers around the globe the ability to hold a more stable currency.
Unidentified speaker: Anything you’d add on the treasury side or related?
Vikas, Remitly: The benefit is both on the consumer side as well as internal operations behind the scene. The good news is that we have already created systems as well as processes where we can execute stablecoin for our treasury functions. I think it’s just a good learning experience, and we see good potential, especially if liquidity expands. It becomes a good alternate option for us.
Unidentified speaker: Got it. I’m going to skip ahead a bit because we’re talking about, you know, parts of the network and the continuous investments that you’re making. One of the things that we focused on a lot coming kind of around the time of the IPO was just the opportunity to see higher transaction margins over time, more efficiencies on some of those payout partners or pay-in partners. Where are we in that journey? Could you just talk about the state of the union in terms of, you know, where you’re looking to invest to deepen the network?
Matt Oppenheimer, CEO and co-founder, Remitly: Yeah, still relatively early in the journey. When I say that, the unique global rails that we’ve built out have taken 14 years, but that’s because we go to specific bank or financial services institutions in emerging markets. We do a commercial agreement, and we do an integration in the right way so it’s not only instant transactions, but also sharing of compliance and other information that prevent the delay of any sort of transaction. While we operate across 170 countries and while we are proud of the fact that 93% of our transactions are delivered in less than an hour, we’re not going to rest until we get that as close to 100% as possible. There are a lot of opportunities for us to continue to reinvent those rails. By doing that, we build an even larger moat because it’s very hard to do.
It gets easier, though, with scale. If you look at our global money movement team, they are continuing to improve and increase the velocity of integrations. You have partners around the world that are knocking on our door to want to work with us, which I will tell you is very different than 14 years ago when I started the business.
Unidentified speaker: Oh, that’s great. Okay. A consistent theme, another consistent theme since the IPO has been the strength of the digital marketing program. It’s continued to drive CAC efficiency over time. I was hoping you could talk a little bit about some of the marketing investments that you’re making and, you know, any color on some of the recent trends in CAC.
Vikas, Remitly: Yeah. I can jump in. I’ll just add a little bit more from the previous question also, which is we look at the revenue less transaction expense dollars as our north star when it comes to managing the pay-in payout costs. We have seen really good efficiencies there. Last quarter, our RLT dollars grew 34%, and we have seen a good solid growth consistently. As you look at the marketing investments, it’s a similar story. We have continued to leverage really well, especially over the last 4 to 6 quarters. Especially if you look at marketing per QAU, one metric we really find very insightful, especially given a lot of upper funnel marketing as well as just the ability to retain customers through marketing. That’s been a very promising metric for us as well.
Of course, we are coming up against tough comps given we had really solid second half of last year on that metric. Overall, our marketing investments, especially as we scale bigger, the flywheel kicks in, and we get the benefit of that. We feel really good.
Unidentified speaker: Great. Okay. I wanted to talk a little bit about Agentic, and kind of dovetail in with your WhatsApp product, which I think is really interesting. In the spirit of this being the San Francisco Tech Conference, AI has been the theme for the last 3 or 4 years running. What are you doing on the Agentic front, and could you talk a little bit about the WhatsApp product that you have?
Matt Oppenheimer, CEO and co-founder, Remitly: Yeah. We built our virtual agent, which we started with customer support use cases. We saw incredible customer satisfaction scores, and we continue to build out those use cases. We then recognize that a way to reach customers is to embed that same virtual agent that we can uniquely train with those tokens and transaction and other customer data that we have into platforms that customers already use, like WhatsApp. We’re also in the process of adding it to other messaging apps so customers can start their dialogue and interaction with Remitly in a more seamless, low-friction way. Sending money becomes as easy as, you know, having a conversation. We’re seeing good uptick there in terms of new customer adoption. I think it can help with things like managing CAC and bringing down marketing spend as well as continuing to accelerate growth.
Unidentified speaker: Great. Okay, we got about a minute and a half left. You have been really successful in sustaining really elevated growth since the IPO. I think for longer than what many thought was possible at the time of the IPO, the growth has remained very consistent. Margins have also expanded nicely. You hit earlier that you’ve reached GAAP profitability. Can you just talk a little bit about how you think about longer-term profitability and sort of the priorities around, you know, getting to more consistent GAAP profitability over time?
Vikas, Remitly: Yeah. Yeah. Look, as I shared earlier, our equation is growth plus profitability plus investment, and we want to make sure that we have balance across all of the 3. As we look at the future, we think deeply about profitable growth as a very important means rather than just growth for the sake of growth. As you look at even a lot of the bets that we are making, we are being very, very deliberate and thoughtful about the rollouts, and we want to make sure if you take Flex, unit economics is really important for us rather than just driving the growth. If you look at Wallet, we want to really get the implementation right, the product market fit right. I’d say that the long-term bets create a huge TAM for us.
I’d say those are long-term bets, and we’ll be very, very purposeful in making sure that we continue to drive profitability and continue to expand our EBITDA. As we get larger and larger, just the mathematical law of large numbers will kick in. Overall, we feel that there’s a long-term durability in our business, especially as we diversify into multiple different monetization machines.
Unidentified speaker: That’s great. I think with that, we’re just about out of time. Thank you so much for the conversation today. Congrats on the new products that you’ve announced, and hope you guys get back home. I know you’ve been doing a lot of traveling.
Matt Oppenheimer, CEO and co-founder, Remitly: Thanks, bro.
Vikas, Remitly: Thank you. Thank you, Vikas.
Matt Oppenheimer, CEO and co-founder, Remitly: Thanks.
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