Remitly at JPMorgan Conference: Navigating Growth and Innovation

Remitly Global Inc (NASDAQ:RELY) took center stage at the 53rd Annual JPMorgan Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference on Wednesday, 14 May 2025. CEO Matt Oppenheimer shared insights on the company’s robust growth and strategic plans amid a challenging economic environment. While emphasizing strong revenue figures and expansion plans, Oppenheimer also addressed potential challenges, including regulatory landscapes and competition.

Key Takeaways

• Remitly reported a 41% year-over-year volume growth and 34% revenue growth, surpassing $1 billion in revenue.
• The company is exploring stablecoins for treasury management and alternative payment methods to reduce transaction costs.
• Remitly is focused on expanding its geographic reach and enhancing customer engagement using Gen AI.
• The company is strategically prioritizing the P2P market while exploring opportunities in the micro-SMB segment.
• Remitly maintains a strong position with a diversified customer base and resilient remittance flows despite economic cycles.

Financial Results

• Year-over-year volume growth reached 41%, with revenue growth at 34%, surpassing $1 billion.
• Adjusted EBITDA margin stood at 16%, reflecting operational efficiency.
• The company exceeded the Rule of 50, showcasing its growth and profitability balance.
• Quarterly active users numbered 8 million, with transactions over $1,000 growing by 45%.
• A 300 basis point shift towards digital disbursement highlighted the move to digital remittance solutions.

Operational Updates

• Remitly is leveraging its expertise in managing FX risk and integrating stablecoins for treasury and liquidity management.
• Adoption of alternative payment methods like Interact and PIX is helping reduce costs and serve high-value senders.
• The company is expanding into new segments such as micro-SMBs, with updated compliance policies for high-dollar transactions.
• Direct integration with PIX in Brazil and a risk-based approach to tier limits are part of its operational enhancements.

Future Outlook

• Remitly aims to expand its geographic reach by adding new corridors and exploring value-added services.
• The company is investing in Gen AI to improve operational efficiency and customer engagement.
• Strategic focus remains on P2P remittances and the micro-SMB segment, with continued investment in multiple areas.
• Challenges include navigating the regulatory landscape for stablecoins and managing competition and pricing dynamics.

Q&A Highlights

• Stablecoins: Seen as beneficial for treasury and liquidity management, with potential for multi-currency accounts.
• Alternative Payment Methods: Interact and PIX are instrumental in lowering transaction costs for high-value senders.
• High-Dollar Senders: Tier limits are adjusted based on risk, with expansion into micro-SMB segments.
• Competition: Remitly emphasizes trust and reliability over merely offering the best price.
• Expansion: Focus on methodical corridor addition while growing within existing markets.

Readers interested in a deeper dive into Remitly’s strategies and insights can refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - 53rd Annual JPMorgan Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference:

Tien Tsin Huang, Analyst, JPMorgan: Alright. Sorry we’re a touch late. My name is Tien Tsin Huang. I follow the the payment sector at at JPMorgan. Of course, to have Remitly back with us.

Matt Oppenheimer, the cofounder and and CEO of Relamitly is kind enough to join us again. Welcome back, Matt. Thank you for being here. I know you came a long way to be here.

Matt Oppenheimer, Cofounder and CEO, Remitly: Thanks for having me. Wouldn’t miss it and good to see you all.

Tien Tsin Huang, Analyst, JPMorgan: No. Of course. We’ll we’ll try and be efficient with your time. I I took a lot of questions from investors. Let’s and get through it.

And you know, if you wanna riff on something else, feel free to, Matt. But again, thanks for for being here. So I always like leading with the same question, Matt. I don’t wanna be redundant, but I I always like hearing you talk about, right, co founding the company back in 2011, what the vision was then, but more importantly how that’s evolved and what it is today.

Matt Oppenheimer, Cofounder and CEO, Remitly: Yeah, yeah. So for those that are newer to the remotely story and don’t know the founding, I’ve traveled to close to a hundred countries. I lived and worked on three continents and most poignantly I was living in Nairobi, Kenya. And I was running mobile and internet banking for Barclays Bank Kenya. And I saw how inconvenient, expensive it was to send money internationally.

I see some smiles and understanding in folks’ eyes as I’m saying that. And it was a lot more important and a lot more inconvenient for a lot of my Kenyan friends who were receiving money from their loved ones, you know, across borders. So that’s why I started the business fourteen years ago now, and our vision now has really expanded, to answer your question. It is to transform lives with trusted financial services that transcend borders. And if you break that into three parts, transform lives, very impactful, very, very impactful, $2,000,000,000,000 is in remittances are sent every single year.

We’ll probably weave some customer stories in to make it real.

Tien Tsin Huang, Analyst, JPMorgan: Mhmm.

Matt Oppenheimer, Cofounder and CEO, Remitly: It’s huge. Trusted. Trust is very hard to build and very important in this segment. And then financial services that transcend borders, that’s the biggest part that’s expanded beyond payments and remittances, just huge opportunity to add a wide range of value to our customers’ lives.

Tien Tsin Huang, Analyst, JPMorgan: Yeah. And you’ve been laser focused on the mission, Matt. So thanks for going through that. I I guess let’s get into the growth figures and then we’ll get into some of the thematic stuff, if that’s okay. Just thinking about send volume revenue, you know, you’ve been one of the top decile growers in our coverage.

I know there’s always this macro uncertainty that comes up. That’s, of course, a conversation in every meeting here, but just detail for us why, Matt, the business is resilient in up or down markets, and including some of the geopolitical stuff that’s out there. Why is that? Why do you see it that way?

Matt Oppenheimer, Cofounder and CEO, Remitly: Yeah. Well, first just to put some numbers around the growth, you’ve probably already seen it, but 41% year on year volume growth, 34% revenue growth on over a billion in revenue and balancing profitability. So we had 16% adjusted EBITDA margins, so surpassing the rule of 50. So really proud of that. Why is there that growth?

I think one is the fact that there’s a secular just, you know, broad shift to digital remittance players from physical cash players. Sounds obvious, but I was talking with an investor earlier today trying to quantify how much is still sent in cash. It’s still pretty large. Mhmm. So that’s number one.

Number two is the fact that scale really, really matters. And I will tell you, as a founder over fourteen years, I’ve learned that the hard way. Being subscale in this business is painful. Having scale, there’s a whole bunch of we shared a flywheel a couple quarters ago that I encourage you to look at, but with scale we can drive lower cost, we can drive better prices, we can drive better customer experience via the data and analytics that we have, the amount of product investments we can make. And as a result, what we have is a really sticky product with our existing customer base.

93% of our transactions are delivered in less than an hour. If you look at the continued just retention of our of our base, it continues to remain strong. And if you look at stats like we have, you know, over two or close to 2,000,000 iOS and Android app reviews with a four point nine and four point eight stars respectively. Think about that for a second. That’s that’s almost 2,000,000 app reviews on a quarterly active user base of 8,000,000 quarterly active users.

And so, customers love our product. It’s hard to deliver a fast seamless experience. And so, that’s driven that growth. And then the very last thing I’ll say that ties to the macro part of your question is, there’s a resilience in remittances. People are sending money to their parents, to their loved ones, and you know, you look back whether it’s the February, you look back at COVID, you look back at various economic cycles, the consistency of sending money back to one’s loved ones is always there because it’s non discretionary and because our customers who kind of resilience defines them in a lot of ways, they’ve moved to new countries, new places, gone through a lot of hardship, They have the resilience to find new work if they need to, saw that during COVID.

And then once they have employment, they send money back home on a regular basis, and we’ve seen that through a lot of economic cycles. So that’s why we raised raised our guide and have a lot of confidence in the business right now.

Tien Tsin Huang, Analyst, JPMorgan: Alright. Good. I’m gonna go in little bit different direction, Matt, in terms of the the types of questions I’m gonna ask you. But I wanted to actually start with FX, if that’s okay. On the call, you said you manage foreign exchange, right?

And that’s become a competitive advantage. And you mentioned scale.

Matt Oppenheimer, Cofounder and CEO, Remitly: Yep.

Tien Tsin Huang, Analyst, JPMorgan: Right? In in your in your growth discussion earlier. And this concept of decoupling funding from FX risk. Can you elaborate on that? Right?

Because there’s there’s so much FX volatility going on. We heard about it from Visa, Master Card, etcetera. But I felt like that was interesting that you called that out. Why?

Matt Oppenheimer, Cofounder and CEO, Remitly: Yeah. We wanted to highlight the advantages we have when we think about our FX treasury cash management. And last year we sent over 40,000,000,000 in volume. Our customers sent, we enabled them to send Vera platform. And I think that when you’re sending that much volume through the system, we have the ability to continue to invest in what we call our finance product to be able to do have analytics that give both our treasury and our business management teams the the ability to look at things like real time cash balances, which might sound basic, but when you’re dealing with a lot of emerging markets, banks, and you know, we have countless integrations across the globe with banks, telcos, other remittance providers.

Doing all of those integrations, having it in a centralized place to have real time, you know, data that shows the exposures and balances we have, and then layering on the fact that we have business management team, which really leads the various regions that we’re in across 5,200 corridors. Corridor means country a to country b. 5,200 corridors enables that partnership between that business management and treasury team to very much price and adjust pricing in a way that matches, you know, changing foreign exchange rates. So we’ve always kept the risk low on the foreign exchange side, but I think we’re starting to see just ability to optimize and improve our pricing and foreign exchange with our scale. And I think we still have a lot of room to go there.

Tien Tsin Huang, Analyst, JPMorgan: Okay, good. That’s good to go through. I think just because I asked about FX, I know that volatility is always a discussion and we’ve seen a lot of that recently. Illiquidity is of course a discussion. I know stable coin has come up a lot, we’ve heard it in some of the sessions.

Matt, just for your benefit here. So it is a hot topic in tech and it’s this whole friend or foe discussion as it relates to remittance. How do you same thing, how do you see that? What’s your thesis on Stablecoin?

Matt Oppenheimer, Cofounder and CEO, Remitly: Yeah. Well, first I think it’s a really exciting space and I haven’t felt that across a lot of areas in crypto. I think Stablecoin is an area where I see there being actual potential use case. I think that that use case could mean us as a business and helping us from a treasury and liquidity standpoint, especially with, you know, longer tail or or or more exotic currencies. But, it also could be our customers in the sense that if customers have the desire to store different currencies or have multi currency accounts across the globe, maybe a more stable currency like USD as opposed to a local currency that might have inflation or less predictability, I think there is the demand for that across the globe.

Now, we haven’t seen that demand reach material levels. If we do, to answer your question on Friend or Foe, I view stablecoins as a technology and a tool to solve a customer problem, so I think neither, it’s a technology that we can leverage to solve those customer problems. And that could mean instead of dispersing into a traditional bank account, we disperse into a stablecoin wallet if we see that being, you know, gaining traction. It could be us leveraging it from a treasury standpoint or it could be us leveraging stablecoin to offer a wider suite of services to our customers as we think about our you know broader vision of financial services that transcend borders.

Tien Tsin Huang, Analyst, JPMorgan: So how quickly are you running towards that, And especially on the leveraging treasury, you know, we’ve heard more, not to mention peers, but I think it’s what’s interesting, right, Stripe, buying Bridge, and Visa talked about Yep. Something exactly like what you’re doing today. How far along are you in that?

Matt Oppenheimer, Cofounder and CEO, Remitly: Yeah. I think we’re actively exploring, working on it, and we haven’t mentioned it in a ton of detail just because it’s not material, but you know we’re doing more than looking at it. We’re talking with the right partners, integrating and launching in a lean way, you know ways that we can actually leverage it from a treasury and FX standpoint. And then I think when it comes to consumer standpoint, we haven’t done anything there yet, but because we haven’t seen the customer demand. Understood.

But we’re well positioned to act on that should we see customer demand happening there. And the biggest question on that front is how much of the problem of somebody who is in country x, let’s take The Philippines, how if they have the desire to store USD, much of that is a regulatory problem versus a technology, I e, stablecoin problem? It would be really interesting to see how it evolves from a regulatory standpoint. And when I say that, I’m talking more about the globe than I am The US because I think it will vary depending on the country in terms of how much regulators allow stable coins to be used more broadly.

Tien Tsin Huang, Analyst, JPMorgan: Yeah. And then it feels like you’re on the front line of that. Going get where your customers go. I I don’t worry about that side of it. But I think the treasury side is, you know, it is it is interesting.

And I know Yep. You know, the developers have said it’s easy to work with you guys. And and when the crypto craze first happened, you were right there

Matt Oppenheimer, Cofounder and CEO, Remitly: Mhmm.

Tien Tsin Huang, Analyst, JPMorgan: As a partner, which is why I wanted to make sure I ask you. So

Matt Oppenheimer, Cofounder and CEO, Remitly: For sure.

Tien Tsin Huang, Analyst, JPMorgan: Thank you for that. So thinking of building off of Stablecoin, maybe quickly on alternative payment methods, especially Wallet’s new rails. You rolled out Interact, right, Pay by Bank with Plaid. I think you know, Visa at the at the lunch session talked about remitly leveraging Visa Direct. Mhmm.

Mhmm. What does all of that mean for you from a transaction cost standpoint, from a servicing Yeah. Standpoint or, you know, engagement? What what does it mean? Is it are you seeing some of the benefit?

Is there more benefit to come?

Matt Oppenheimer, Cofounder and CEO, Remitly: Yeah. Well, I think it’s it’s another part of our flywheel. So, when we were tiny, we’d have to work with global aggregators. We’d pay a bunch of different costs associated with collecting or dispersing funds, and that’s one of our largest variable costs, collecting funds or dispersing funds. As we’ve got more scale, we’ve been able to do everything from launch Interact, as you mentioned, to Pay two to so forth, Ideal, you could go through so many different countries.

What that enables us to do is offer a faster lower cost, you know, way to fund a remittance transaction than using like a card. And so we’re excited about those launches. And where we’re especially excited that I talked about in our last earnings call is the way that card transactions work oftentimes is the higher it’s a percentage based in terms of the variable cost, things like interchange, and so the higher amount sent, the more variable cost, and I e the more cost a customer is paying. Where with some of these alternative payment methods, when you’re launching them, it tends to be not always, but oftentimes tends to be a fixed fee, which means that we can serve higher dollar transaction transactions or higher dollar senders more seamlessly, more affordably, more quickly. And so, it’s it’s been a key strategic priority for us to launch alternative payment methods like the ones I mentioned, and oftentimes go directly to the rails within a country when that exists.

And so this is more on the payout side, but like in Brazil, we have a direct integration with PIX, which is the local payment rails there. It’s exciting to see the way that that that payments are evolving and given that we’re operating in a 70 countries, we can strategically look at how they’re evolving in each market and then do direct integrations in the right way in each of those countries.

Tien Tsin Huang, Analyst, JPMorgan: Gotcha. So it’s lower cost, so it should benefit transaction expense. Helping consumers because they can then choose to pay the way they want to pay like ideal. Right? And the last point is that it opens up the chance to do more high cost trends or higher ticket transactions or higher average value So let’s talk about that.

I think that was that’s been a trend shifting more towards higher transaction sizes. I wrote down, and my eyes could be failing me, greater thousand principal value, up 45%.

Matt Oppenheimer, Cofounder and CEO, Remitly: Right?

Tien Tsin Huang, Analyst, JPMorgan: So you you got a lot of high growth there. So this this traction you have with high transaction amount senders, that would include SMB users, right? So what is the opportunity here? Is this something you want to lean into more? I know there’s more risk associated with it.

Just what’s your vision on how this evolves?

Matt Oppenheimer, Cofounder and CEO, Remitly: Yeah. Yeah. First off, I’m impressed with your ability to quote those stats and to keep all of the fireside chats that you have done today This is remit has be like your 30 yeah, exactly. I was gonna say. This has to be like your thirty fifth, so but kudos to you and your team for for prepping for prepping so well.

One one other sidebar and then I’m gonna get back to it. I was talking to a team member of yours right before this, and he was saying how he left and came back to JPMorgan because of how much he’s enjoyed working with you. So kudos to you and the shop that you Thank

Tien Tsin Huang, Analyst, JPMorgan: you for that, sir.

Matt Oppenheimer, Cofounder and CEO, Remitly: Alright. So High Dollar Sender. So High Dollar Sender, think is it’s it’s what I would call a high ROI way of expanding the types of customers that we can serve. And so we’ve done a few things to help with that segment. One is we have adjusted how we think about our tier limits or high dollar senders in terms of we we used to and I think it was a industry standard to have in p to p remittances pretty like blunt force tiers.

So if you send $10,000 within thirty days or $30,000 within ninety days, there were specific things that were collected at those certain limits. What we’ve done with the track record we have from a compliance standpoint, with the data and analytics and with our regulators, we updated our compliance policies and worked with them to say, there’s actually a better way of doing this that’s risk based. Right? So there may be a customer that’s sending only $500, where we actually need a lot more information from that customer. But they’re on on the inverse side, there may be a customer who’s sending above $10,000 that we can make it more seamless.

And so, that’s number one. And I think that customers are able to send more and a risk based approach as opposed to that blunt instrument is also lower risk, and so our regulators have liked that.

Tien Tsin Huang, Analyst, JPMorgan: Okay.

Matt Oppenheimer, Cofounder and CEO, Remitly: Two has been expanding into new segments like micro SMB. And when I say micro SMB, these are customers like there’s a customer that I’ve talked about a few a few quarters ago named Mary, who moved from The Philippines Twenty Five Years ago. Mary is an outsourced bookkeeper. She provides bookkeeping services to other, you know, companies in The US. In order to do that, she’s from The Philippines, she has 10 contract employees in The Philippines, she needs to pay them.

And she already had come to our platform, but because our platform was designed to do KYC, know your customer, as opposed to KYC, know your business, She had to contact our customer support and it just wasn’t easy. So, we’re not going after mic small micro businesses in a huge way, we just updated our flow so that there’s a KYB process for customers like Mary that wanna use But that means customers like Mary are sending more, so high high so that’s why you’re seeing volume grow faster than than than revenue. And the last I’ll mention is high dollar senders exist in every market. They exist in US Mexico, they exist in US India, they exist, you name it. But, we’ve also turned on other corridors that were really high ROI to turn on, like Canada US or US Europe or intra Europe.

And that has been great for us because it was relatively low effort, what my team would say. Super easy, nothing’s easy, but it was really relatively easier, I think they would say. And and two, we’re already advertising in areas like, take Heathrow Airport as an example, where customers from a broad range of countries are seeing those advertisements, and so you get a higher return on the marketing investments in dollars that we’re that we’re actually spending. So that’s why you’re seeing high dollar sender segment grow, and we’re excited about the opportunity. It’s just leveraging a platform for broader use cases that we can, I think, uniquely do?

Tien Tsin Huang, Analyst, JPMorgan: Yeah. I mean, that that begs the question, you know, why not pursue things like SMBs, not just micro, but SMB or pursue business bill payments. If you can do higher ticket transactions, can do all the alternative payment methods. It feels like a natural extension, and cross border is hard. We’ve seen value I mean Mastercard is investing in Corpay’s cross border business, is also high ticket.

So there’s a lot of evidence of that, is that a consideration? Is that a priority for you Matt to lean harder into that?

Matt Oppenheimer, Cofounder and CEO, Remitly: Yeah. I think, quite frankly, I think there are other companies that do that well. And for us, when I think about I said this a couple I said this two three quarters ago, but it stuck with me, it’s really important to stick with all investors. We are a growth company with no shortage of growth opportunities. So while we might be able to go up market on things like SMB, when you look at the fact that we’re less than 3% of $2,000,000,000,000 in p to p remittances, there’s huge amount of room to grow there, there’s a huge amount of room to grow in adding that last part of our vision, financial services that transcend borders, and then there’s a huge market, I believe, in that micro SMB segment that we can serve, you know, for for the foreseeable future.

So, listen, we have a bold vision, but we, I think, have been successful by combining that with intense short term focus, and that’s how you get to the metrics like the rule of 50 that we’ve shared.

Tien Tsin Huang, Analyst, JPMorgan: Yeah. And look, I respect the focus, Matt. I’m trying to push you to do something, right? You’re way smarter about this than I am, but it just feels like you’ve built a lot of those elements from the scale and the platform and the network, but again, I respect the focus. Let’s go back to the focus of quarterly actives.

Think what, 8,000,000 ish users and you’re close to 30% growth there. Any change in the type of user that’s coming into the system as you’ve observed it?

Matt Oppenheimer, Cofounder and CEO, Remitly: No material like short term changes. There’s shifts in the sense that you can see in our financials we have US, Canada and rest of world. Rest of world has continued to grow faster. On the receive side, we continue to diversify away from our top three receive corridors, which are India, Philippines and Mexico. But that’s all continuation that’s been happening in the past several quarters and years.

I’d say continued geographic diversification is is one. And I’d say the second is just the continued trend of, you know, shifting digital that I already mentioned, so I won’t I won’t repeat.

Tien Tsin Huang, Analyst, JPMorgan: How about the cost to acquire them?

Matt Oppenheimer, Cofounder and CEO, Remitly: Cost to acquire has been trending favorably. And I think that the and you saw that in some of the leverage that we had in the first quarter. Mhmm. And I think that that is largely because of the fact that one we have an amazing marketing team that’s continuing to optimize it. But two, I think that the word-of-mouth, which is not due to marketing, word-of-mouth is due to the app ratings that I mentioned, it’s due to ultimately my definition of brand is a promise when delivered creates preference.

And, I think we have a product that really very much delivers on promises and gets better every day. And because of that, and because our business is based on trust, so many new customers now find out about us because a friend in their community said, why are still going to that branch? Like, why don’t you try out remotely? It’s immediate, it’s affordable, it gets there as promised, they protect your identity. So I think that word-of-mouth has helped our overall marketing costs come down.

That being said, we’ve made sure that we’re investing enough in marketing in the quarters to come, and that’s included in our guidance, such that we can drive the kind of growth for, you know, quarters and years to come in the future.

Tien Tsin Huang, Analyst, JPMorgan: Okay. Good. How about all this immigration stuff? I know there’s lot of geopolitical around immigration and policy shifts. So your sensitivity there, is there anything you see that’s concerning?

Matt Oppenheimer, Cofounder and CEO, Remitly: Yeah, Yeah, it’s definitely top of mind for a lot of investors including myself. I think that when you think about our business there’s a few things that give me comfort why we had a lot of confidence in our guide this year. One is diversification. I mentioned we’re in 30 origination countries, 70 countries overall. Rest of world is growing faster.

The second is that if you look at our customer base, our customers are linking a bank account or a debit card in order to for us to collect funds. So what that means is they’ve already gone through a KYC process at a financial institution. And so, if you look at that that signals a more established presence in the country. And so, when we think about deportation elements like that, I think it’s not squarely our customer base. It might be for other segments of remittance companies, but we feel well positioned there.

And the third, it’s a huge market. So even if immigration slows or changes, there are 250,000,000 immigrants that live and work outside the country they’re born. As as I meant, know, as you mentioned, 8,000,000 quarterly active users last quarter. If you look at it from a volume standpoint, we’re less than 3% of the $2,000,000,000,000 that’s sent every year. So, certainly watching all of that closely, but feel feel well positioned and very grateful that we don’t have things like tariffs or other things like that, you know, directly impact our business.

Tien Tsin Huang, Analyst, JPMorgan: Sure.

Matt Oppenheimer, Cofounder and CEO, Remitly: But actually, one last thing too is, when we think about it from a, you know, risk of recession standpoint, that non discretionary point, huge, huge. It’s one of the, I think, benefits of being in a business that matters a lot to people. But, having gone through COVID and having gone seen the 02/2008 cycle and the World Bank and others did studies during that remittances are this predictable resilient flow through economic cycles, which gives me a lot of, honestly, gratitude for our customers, but also comfort as CEO of the business.

Tien Tsin Huang, Analyst, JPMorgan: Yeah. The World Bank data supports that. Right? I mean, migration trends have generally been pretty stable and even through the cycle, so I think there’s a lot of history and data behind that. So you mentioned 5,200 corridors, Matt.

I think Western Union has 20,000, so the opportunity to expand corridors is still in front of you. Is this an area where you can we’ll see step function change or you’ll ease into growing? Or is there a choice here that you’re making to stay selective with corridors?

Matt Oppenheimer, Cofounder and CEO, Remitly: Yeah. I think the first premise that’s important to understand is so much room to grow in the existing markets we’re in. So much room to grow. That’s point number one. Point number two is so much room to grow in those corridors for quarters and years to come, but we’re also in this for the incredibly long term.

And so we will continue to add corridors, but it’s from an offensive standpoint and thinking years ahead, not quarters ahead. And the third point is Focus has been the name and game of our company. Like, for context in the audience, we’re in 5,200 corridors now. We’ve been around fourteen years. The first two years, one corridor, The US Philippines.

First Three Years, we just added one, which was India, then Mexico. So we’re four years into the journey, we were in three corridors. And we didn’t have any, like We didn’t be like, oh, God, we’ve to add more corridors then because we’re running out of growth opportunities, but we methodologically continue to add corridors. And I think over time we’ll get to the 20,000, but we’re also in no hurry to get there because I think focus from here to there will help us execute in the right way.

Tien Tsin Huang, Analyst, JPMorgan: Okay. So competitively, I have to ask you about competition and if you’re seeing any change there, and always the pricing question. We do our best to track that, and curious to see if you’ve observed any changes in pricing and how you benchmark it.

Matt Oppenheimer, Cofounder and CEO, Remitly: Yeah. The macro shifts continue that I’ve already mentioned, but shift to digital. Really important though to understand. I mean that is a big part of the thesis. And that shift to digital is both on the send and the receive side.

So last quarter, there was an additional 300 basis points of growth in our disbursement to digital, bank account and mobile wallet. That’s great. Brings down the variable costs, increases reliability. So those shifts are occurring. Not a lot within quarter in terms of competitive shifts.

And when it comes to pricing, because we don’t deal with physical cash in and because it is shifting to more digital disbursement, you’re seeing a new industry take rate. But once you’re within that new kind of take rate range for the same average transaction size, we see a lot more stability because, again, the business comes down to trust. You’ve to have a fair transparent price, but customers are providing us with a lot of their sensitive personal information and a big percentage of their funds. And so providing a fair price, which we can do uniquely with our scale is important, but beyond that it is about building a trusted reliable product. And that is the brand positioning we have with our customers.

It’s not the best price, but it’s fairly priced, and we’re going to give you peace of mind when you send that transaction back home to your family.

Tien Tsin Huang, Analyst, JPMorgan: Okay, good. And now it’s a little bit going backwards on the corridor front, and pricing is always important, but is that something you consider, Matt, when you’re thinking about entering a new country or adding new country pairs? Just what’s on the ground competitively? What are the pricing dynamics? Is that a consideration as you think about the expansion?

Matt Oppenheimer, Cofounder and CEO, Remitly: It is as it ladders up to the size of the market. So there’s the volume and then you have to obviously multiply that by the take rate or revenue per transaction in those markets or total revenue in those markets. So in that respect, yes. And that might lead us to lower volume markets that have a higher take rate.

Tien Tsin Huang, Analyst, JPMorgan: Right, exactly. But

Matt Oppenheimer, Cofounder and CEO, Remitly: beyond that we’ve proven that we can compete in some of the largest most competitive markets and we’ve done that for ten years. And so if anything as we get down the list of countries that we can launch it becomes a little less competitive.

Tien Tsin Huang, Analyst, JPMorgan: Is there a temptation then to solve for some of those gaps potentially through acquisition? It’s been a bit since you’ve done something. Rewire was the last one you did in size. I’m just curious if that’s something on the radar.

Matt Oppenheimer, Cofounder and CEO, Remitly: Yeah, and Rewire was helping us expand to a new product suite as we think about financial services that transcend borders. We have a pretty high bar for acquisitions. I think our default has been organic. Really the only sizable acquisition we’ve done is the Rewire acquisition and even that was small relatively speaking. So yeah, our default’s organic.

We’re obviously constantly looking at the market, but I think that unless there’s a lot of conviction on the strategy as well as the culture, default of organic expansion often has the lowest risk and best ROI.

Tien Tsin Huang, Analyst, JPMorgan: Yeah, I know some of the traditional players are sometimes in the mode of buying their agents and getting more integrated or vertically integrated as a solution. But for you, is it going to be more product driven versus adding scale or geography? Can you solve more easily organically on the geography side versus product? That’s my question.

Matt Oppenheimer, Cofounder and CEO, Remitly: Yeah, I think that the question is like is it easier to do that organically, that being both geographic as well as value added services or product And I think it’s lower risk to do it organic. There’s got to be a lot of conviction to do acquisitions. It doesn’t mean they shouldn’t happen, hence we acquired Rewire. But our default position is always going be can we do this organically.

Tien Tsin Huang, Analyst, JPMorgan: Right, because you’ve done that in a disciplined way with margin expansion, you mentioned it upfront and rule of 50 plus now, but does it feel like you’re constrained in investing in some of these other Horizon two, Horizon three opportunities and delivering on profits. Is that

Matt Oppenheimer, Cofounder and CEO, Remitly: fair, what I’m most proud of the team for honestly is to deliver in Q1 thirty four percent growth with 16% adjusted EBITDA margin. So no small feat. And what that also means is from a balance sheet standpoint, our balance sheet continues to get stronger. And we just have a lot of optionality as a business. And again we’re a growth company with no shortage of growth opportunities.

So then it’s for us just about prioritizing those as opposed to searching for growth because our existing areas are running out of growth. It’s all about how do we fuel to your horizon one, two, three, how do we fuel investments in those areas in a high ROI way. And that means both growing in not both but all growing in existing markets, adding new geographies, adding new customer segments and then adding new value added services and complementary products to our existing customers. It’s a lot of opportunity. That’s why I’m excited not only about this year, but the team’s thinking about ’26, ’20 ’7 and beyond.

Tien Tsin Huang, Analyst, JPMorgan: Sure. So I have to ask you now about Gen AI and sort of your sitting in the CEO seat. Is that a priority to automate more of what you do or even externalize some of that with agents so you can interface better with consumers? What are your thoughts on that?

Matt Oppenheimer, Cofounder and CEO, Remitly: Yeah. I think oftentimes, Gen AI, especially investor conferences and all that can be talked about more from a cost saving standpoint. And I think it will save us, but oh my gosh, I’m so excited about it. I think that there’s opportunities for engineering teams just deliver more product faster. I was told recently that 50% of our code delivered or engineers are leveraging some tools that we’ve given them to be able to write code more efficiently and effectively.

I think that there’s ways of leveraging it from a customer support standpoint. We have we’ve had a virtual AI assistant, and that’s great. Like, our customer support costs have come down. But what I’m really excited about is leveraging that to then say, well, how do we expand it to interact more directly So we integrated into WhatsApp.

And the reason we can uniquely do that is we have a virtual AI agent that has spectacular customer satisfaction scores. Now it’s embedded into WhatsApp, which is an easier way, an easier front door, especially for maybe offline senders that want to kind of interact and get to know remotely without having to download an app. So I think there’s big opportunities to embed our virtual agent into other experiences like WhatsApp. And I could go on and on, but the last one I’ll mention is I think our marketing team is thinking pretty innovatively because you’ve got to have marketing that rolls out across 5,200 not 5,200 corridors, it’s a little too specific, but we’re in 170 countries. Each country has a different language, different creatives, different merchandising that needs to be there.

And the ability to create faster, more nimble and culturally relevant marketing materials, I think is another example. So, lots of opportunity. And I’m not one to I’m actually sometimes skeptical of new technology, because I think technology has got to solve a customer pain point. Gen AI, incredibly excited about. Okay.

Tien Tsin Huang, Analyst, JPMorgan: Good. We’ll keep asking you about it as things develop. And we’re almost out of time, I have to ask Horizon three stuff, Matt. I know the answer is you’re focused on a lot of growth ahead and what you’re doing, but the theme of embedded finance and embedded banking and sort of banking your base is still out there. We’ve been hearing it throughout the conference.

And I know you have Circle and some whatnot, but there’s so much trust that you have with your user base. What’s the latest thinking on pushing into that?

Matt Oppenheimer, Cofounder and CEO, Remitly: Yeah. If you look at that last part of our vision, financial services that transcend borders. So we’re not going to go and try to disrupt a local financial services institution. But I think we can all agree that for the two fifty million folks that live and work outside the country they’re born, when they move to that new country, everything I experienced this when I moved to London. Like, I worked for Barclays Bank, I was trying to get a consumer bank account set up.

It was not easy. I worked for Barclays Bank, consumer bank. So you think about our customer base, that’s an even bigger pain point. And where I think there’s opportunities is to continue to expand the services that we offer beyond the transaction, to think about other what I would describe as value added services, being able to store value, being able to bridge credit access and creditworthiness and help with liquidity needs, lots of opportunity there. So what I’m excited about the team’s approach on that front is being able to invest in multiple different areas in parallel, given that we’ve re architected our technical platform to what we call our North Star architecture, increases the velocity of being able to innovate in multiple areas.

Not all of them will work. Some of them, I’m more confident than ever will, and I’m excited about talking more about some of those areas in the not too distant future.

Tien Tsin Huang, Analyst, JPMorgan: Alright. We can end. Do have a customer testimony you want to share, Matt? You usually have one, but put you on the

Matt Oppenheimer, Cofounder and CEO, Remitly: spot.

Tien Tsin Huang, Analyst, JPMorgan: What was that on that?

Matt Oppenheimer, Cofounder and CEO, Remitly: Yeah. There was a

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