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On Wednesday, 14 May 2025, SoFi Technologies (NASDAQ:SOFI) presented at the 53rd Annual JPMorgan Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference. CEO Anthony Noto outlined SoFi’s ambitious growth strategy, emphasizing the company’s mission-driven approach to financial independence. While highlighting strong member and product growth, Noto also addressed challenges in the credit card market and international expansion.
Key Takeaways
- SoFi reported 33% year-over-year member growth and 34% product growth.
- Revenue growth is accelerating, with significant margin expansion evident in Q1 results.
- The company plans to disrupt the credit card industry and expand internationally.
- SoFi targets a long-term ROE of 20% to 30% and a 10% net income margin.
- AI and technology investments are key to operational efficiency and innovation.
Financial Results
- Member growth: 33% year-over-year
- Product growth: 34% year-over-year
- Revenue growth: Accelerating
- Margin expansion: Evident in Q1 results
- Fee revenue: Approximately 40% of annualized revenue in Q1
- Deposit growth: Over $27 billion, with 90% from direct deposit customers and 97% insured
- Long-term net income margin target: 10%
- ROE target: 20% to 30% long term
Operational Updates
- Loan Platform Business: Expanded partnerships and revenue streams by monetizing loan demand outside SoFi’s credit box.
- Investment in Technology: Emphasis on owning and innovating technology for faster innovation and cost reduction.
- AI Implementation: AI used internally for anti-money laundering, member engagement, and fraud prevention.
- SoFi Plus: Subscription product valued over $1,000, promoting additional product adoption.
- SoFi Pay: Expanded payment capabilities including Zelle, ACH, and self-serve wires.
- Credit Card Business: Restructured products with ongoing optimization efforts.
- Direct Express Deal: Significant tech platform deal with the government, expected to generate revenue in 2026.
Future Outlook
- Member Growth: Targeting over 30% growth
- Revenue Growth: Aiming for mid to high 20s percentage growth
- EBITDA Margin: Targeting a 30% incremental margin
- EPS Guidance for 2026: Ranging from $0.55 to $0.80
- Long-Term Vision: Aiming for 50 million members in five years
- Product Penetration: Targeting an average of three products per member
- International Expansion: Considering unique markets for growth
- Credit Card Disruption: Focused on lowering debt costs for revolvers
- Loan Platform Expansion: Extending beyond traditional credit box loans
Q&A Highlights
- International Expansion: Noto kept specific target markets undisclosed for competitive advantage.
- Credit Card Strategy: Efforts to improve unit economics and optimize existing products.
- Capital Partners: Confidence maintained due to disciplined credit approach and loan durability.
- Financial Targets: Commitment to achieving a 20% to 30% ROE while investing in growth.
For a more detailed understanding, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript below.
Full transcript - 53rd Annual JPMorgan Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference:
Reggie Smith, Head of FinTech Research, JPMorgan: Good afternoon. My name is Reggie Smith. I head FinTech Research here at JPMorgan and I’m happy to sit with and talk with Anthony Noto, CEO of SoFi. It’s been about two years since we saw each other last. Welcome.
How are you?
Anthony Noto, CEO, SoFi: I’m doing great. Pleasure to be here. I’m doing great. How about yourself?
Reggie Smith, Head of FinTech Research, JPMorgan: I’m good. I’m good. Good. So, I guess we’ll start high level. The SoFi mission to help people get their money right, Talk a little bit about that and how it informs your strategy, your product development.
Maybe kind of set the stage there and then we’ll go into the quarter and some other things.
Anthony Noto, CEO, SoFi: Sure. When I joined company back in 2018, had gone through interview process with the board and so forth and have presented to them something in late December twenty seventeen that’s really remained true till today. One, we’re building a mission driven company to help people achieve financial independence to realize their ambitions, which means we help them get to the point they have enough money to do what they want, have the size home they want, size family they want, the career they want, live where they want, retire when they want. In order for us to be able to do that, we have to have a lifetime relationship with them. We have to be there for all the major financial decisions they make and all the days in between.
If we’re not there when they decide to pay for college and they over lever themselves for college, they’ll dig a hole that they’ll never be able to get out of. They won’t be able to invest in their 20s. They’ll miss compounding. If they buy a house and they pay too much for that house relative to their income, their ability to pay, again, they’ll lose the ability to invest. They’ll lose the ability to really kind of benefit from these early days of investing.
And so a lot of companies choose what products they’re in based on being able to make money. The products we’re in are 100% driven by a simple equation, which is we have to help people spend less than they make and invest the rest. Which means we have to be a one stop shop and be there for all those big decisions. As part of that, you know, we’ve entered the market in a unique way in that we started from a lending business. It is a really attractive business when done right.
But we wanted to make sure that that product was best of breed, best unit economics, greatest lifetime value. And each one of our products since then are really kind of built on four or five differentiators that are aimed at getting them to be best breed over time. Because we never want a member to be forced to do the one product with us. We want to be there for whatever product they need at that moment in time. It may not be until they need insurance, it may not need be be issued until they want a credit card, or they want a new check or savings account, whatever it may be.
So each individual product has to be best of breed on both a value proposition and and unit economics basis. And you bring that all together, we believe we have a sustainable competitive advantage in being the highest lifetime value customer. And if we have the highest lifetime value, then we can give people the best rates on loans, the best yields on checking and savings, the best features and capabilities, including free certified financial planners and all these other benefits that we provide. Rewards across all of our products, etc. Want to own our own technology because it allows us to innovate faster, allows us to be a low cost operator, which feeds those other two tenants of being best of breed and best unit economics reinforcing highest lifetime value.
Reggie Smith, Head of FinTech Research, JPMorgan: You’ve given me a lot to dig into there. I would love to start, I guess in the financial service segment. One of the things that stands out about you guys relative to the other fintechs that I cover is that product breadth that you talk about. Everything from relay to checking account investments, credit, debit cards. I guess, thinking about that segment, can you talk a little bit about how people are coming in and using the different products?
You know, what’s bringing them in? What’s resonating with folks? And maybe two or three products you’re most excited about?
Anthony Noto, CEO, SoFi: Sure. You know, some of this is driven by where we spend money and where we spend our marketing dollars. We spend the most behind SoFi Money and SoFi Relay. We really want those to be the tip of the sword as they’re a great starting point for us to build a primary relationship, us to have the data to help them get their money right, to help them look at what they should do in their financial life that day to get their money right. So, those are the two biggest products that we have and the SoFi Money generates revenue directly.
It’s been a huge success. We have over $27,000,000,000 of deposits, over $14,000,000,000 of point of sale debit spending and I think the sky’s the limit in terms of there is no limit to where we can take that business and how differentiated it can be. Relay is an important product and it helps you connect all of your checking and savings accounts, all of your credit cards, all of your brokerage accounts, so we can show you in one view where your money is and then what you’re doing on expenses, what are you doing with your cash. And we can build great products around that like the Cash Coach or ExpenseR, which are AI driven products that we’re working on. Again, to try to solve for that equation, spend less than you make, invest the rest.
So those are the two tip of the sword products. SoFi Invest, we just had our best engagement quarter ever in Q1. We made that a higher priority of investment this year. We’re at a unique point in our SoFi Invest product in that we believe we have the best selection. So we offer single stocks without commissions.
We’ve pioneered fractional shares. We have robo accounts, which we’ve had for the last seven years. We also launched a number of ETFs that are specifically architected for our members and diversification at a low price point. We brought IPOs to Main Street. We recently launched alternative asset classes.
We’ve done two private offerings, one for SpaceX, one for Anthropic, and alternative assets will add more selection there. But the point we’ve reached in the invest business, which is very positive, is we’re at a positive variable profit. What does that mean? That means in a quarter, the amount of money that we spend across all the variable costs including marketing, we’re now covering that with the profit from the installed base, which means we can really step on the gas and how much we invest in that product to grow it more significantly. The other product that we’re putting a lot of money behind is SoFi Plus.
And SoFi Plus is meant to be the best subscription product you can have in financial services. It’s over a thousand dollars of value. We’re giving you high reward points. We’re giving you unique services. We’re giving you discounts on different products to really allow you to benefit from using more and more of our products.
The most interesting thing about SoFi Plus that we learned after launching it is it’s actually triggering adoption of existing members to SoFi Plus, and then they’re taking out a third or fourth product, which is kind of shocking given they already were SoFi members and they weren’t taking out those products until they actually signed up for SoFi Plus. So we’re very excited about that and a number of other initiatives on on smaller things.
Reggie Smith, Head of FinTech Research, JPMorgan: You’ve got a a very impressive slate of products within your investment offering. Curious. I think about, like, my own investing. It’s pretty simple. I do ETFs, mutual funds, a few stocks.
How how penetrated or how aware are your customers of some of those products? And maybe talk about what it takes to educate them and to get them onto robo investing or things like that. Am I just a dinosaur or
Anthony Noto, CEO, SoFi: No. You’re definitely not a dinosaur. What I’d say about SoFi Invest is is two things. One, we’re sort of making new investors. Cause this equation we’re trying to solve for, spend less than you make, invest the rest.
We’re helping people invest for the first time. Novice investors, beginning investors. So it’s really important that we have that complete suite of products so that we can help them dollar cost average to drive diversification. But also to experiment with new things like IPOs or with alternative assets as an example. We’ll soon be launching, not soon, but we will be reintroducing buy, sell and hold cryptocurrencies as another form of selection.
One of the things that we’re investing in is not just the marketing of that product, but overhauling the user experience. One of the changes we made in the last year within invest was single page, single page tear sheets is what we call them. But it just shows you the information on a given stock or a given asset. And it’s driven a significant increase in engagement. And it’s also highlighted to us how much more iteration we have to do on the user experience on discovery within Invest to bring those things to the forefront.
So you’ll see a lot of changes in that regard. But because there is so much selection, it’s sometimes hard to find and we find the more that we spend on improving the user experience, the more engagement, the more net flows that we get and the more we benefit.
Reggie Smith, Head of FinTech Research, JPMorgan: And I’m gonna I’m gonna do one more question in this segment. Thinking about Relay, I know you guys have a trove of data there. I feel like you’re just now scratching the surface on on really leveraging that to surface different offers or products to consumers. Like, how are you guys using that data? Obviously, the consumer is is is benefiting from having you help, you know, measure their financial performance or or standing, but, like, how do you guys use it for for distribution and and
Anthony Noto, CEO, SoFi: Yeah. It’s a it’s a critical product for us to really have all of your data to help you decide what you must do in your financial life that day, what should you do, what can you do. Saying those things to consumers doesn’t really resonate. But if you launch something like an AI driven cash coach that’s looking at the cash in every place it sits for you and it’s looking at your debt and it’s looking at your investments and it comes back with a recommendation on what to do with that cash. For example, if you’re sitting on $12,000 of cash and you’re direct deposit customer with us and so if I money, but you also have a personal loan for $3,000 that’s paying 12% interest, we’re going to suggest to pay off that personal loan with 12% interest and instantly get a 12% return on cash that was getting no return.
Similarly, there’s cash that’s not in a savings account and it just needs to be moved over, making that suggestion. We also have a thing called autopilot that will do those things for you automatically. But cash coach is meant to look at all of the places you have cash on SoFi and off of SoFi and recommending where do you allocate that to optimize that equation of spending less than you make to invest the rest. Expenses are similarly, it’s something that’s more in the come, but we’ll be able to look at where you’re spending across the entire network of financial products that you have, benchmark that to other people your age with your income, and let you know where you’re overspending. It could be on gas, it could be on transportation, could be on subscription services, and then offering you simple solutions for canceling subscriptions or changing your service provider.
I recently changed from DirecTV to YouTube TV primarily because I looked into Relay and I saw all the places I was playing for DirecTV, which I only had for the NFL Sunday ticket, which was no longer at Direct Express. And even someone that may be sophisticated financially can overlook places where the expenses that are no longer necessary because of changes in their lives. And so this product doesn’t directly drive revenue, but it drives a lot of value for us and it leads to cross buying.
Reggie Smith, Head of FinTech Research, JPMorgan: Got it. You you mentioned a buzzword AI a second ago, more towards the customer side, but how are you thinking about it internally? And and does it change your headcount growth expectations going forward?
Anthony Noto, CEO, SoFi: Yeah. AI presents a lot of opportunities internally for efficiency. And so one place we’re experimenting with it right now is on anti money laundering and BSA responsibilities to help our agents be faster at doing investigations when we have accounts that are restricted to unrestricted those accounts more quickly, but also having less false positives. And so it’s an efficiency driver. It’s also a friction reducer and hopefully will improve the member experience as well.
We’re also experimenting using it with our member engagement team. So we have members in our buildings that are answering inbound phone calls or answering chats that are coming in. We have a lot of SOPs. There’s a lot of regulation. And so we can take all of our SOPs and ingest them into an AI agent and allow the person that’s actually answering the phone to be given responses that are prompted by quick queries of all those SOPs on the particular question someone’s asking that can be recognized through speech recognition.
Fraud’s another big area. We spend a lot of money on combating fraud, both transactional fraud and account takeover fraud. AI is a big help in that area as well. So, we’re excited about its applications. The one area that I often laugh about is people asking the question, well are you using AI for underwriting?
No, we’re not using AI for underwriting. Well, why not? Well, underwriting is about actually measuring the cash flow of a person relative to all their liabilities and how much can they afford to pay on debt. Well, everyone knows all the cash flow that you have is measurable. They’re known facts.
We don’t have to generate anything new. We just have to ask you those questions. So you don’t have to generate any artificial information to do underwriting. You just have to be willing to ask the right questions and look at it in the right way.
Reggie Smith, Head of FinTech Research, JPMorgan: Got it. So you guys just reported results a few weeks ago. Great quarter. What if anything surprised you about the quarter? I know something surprised me, but I’m seeing if we have the same answer here.
Anthony Noto, CEO, SoFi: You know, I’m surprised every quarter by our team’s ability to be tenacious and gritty. I was really proud of the results that we have in q one. The business is doing great, and I couldn’t be more optimistic about the environment we’re in and our position in the marketplace. You know, I would say Q1, you know, from a standpoint of looking at the big things we focus on, member growth, product growth, which ultimately turns into revenue growth and profitability, we’re growing our members 33 and our products 34%. We’re growing revenue.
It’s accelerating. Our margins are expanding. It just really highlights the fact that the markets we’re in were barely scratching the surface. And the more investment we put behind the business, the more we grow and the more profitable we become. And it’s really great productivity loop to be in at this moment in time with rates likely coming down, a stable economy, I think a a legislative branch and executive branch that are the most positive for a business environment.
So I’m really optimistic about the backdrop, but, you know, the fact that we can still invest at these high rates and drive acceleration and growth and margin improvement is a direct indication of how early we are in the game.
Reggie Smith, Head of FinTech Research, JPMorgan: So two things I wanted to to dig in there. You talked about investment and you guys have given guidance this year which caused for some margin expansion more next year. You came in above the first quarter. What are you investing in this year that you’re most excited about? And and how should we think about that investment in in in the returns on that into ’26 and ’27?
Anthony Noto, CEO, SoFi: Yeah. So these are not in priority order, but we’re investing sniffly to getting back into the crypto business within invest, but also going beyond buy, sell, and hold crypto services. We’re looking at a number of different areas across for crypto across all of our businesses. So the application of asset backed lending in lending from a crypto standpoint, infrastructure opportunities for the tech platform as it relates to blockchain and cryptocurrency, the invest products which I mentioned and there’s some ancillary invest products outside of just buy, sell and hold. In addition to that, SoFi Plus is a huge strategic initiative for us and so we’ll invest significantly in the awareness and adoption of that product.
I mentioned accelerating the investment that we’re making in growing our invest business, but also in the product experience and discovery capabilities there. In addition to that, we have some really significant opportunities under the umbrella of pay and the concept of SoFi Pay. Today in SoFi Money, we allow you to pay via Zelle. You can pay just by having someone’s phone number or their email address, ACH, and we think we can continue to add. And we also just recently launched self serve wires.
These are all capabilities that we’re offering to SoFi Money members, but we’re also going to continue to offer outside of SoFi Money through the tech platform. And there’s a couple of new areas there that we haven’t announced yet that we’ll invest significantly in. In addition to that, these GYMR, which is get your money right applications with AI, we’ll invest in those areas as well. And then the last area which doesn’t get a lot of attention is we want to be frontline obsessed. We’re a culture trying to build and maintain a founder’s mentality.
And one important element of a founder’s mentality is ensuring your frontline obsessed. So our member engagement team is the start point for our product. And how do we enable those member engagement team members to not just solve people’s problems on the first contact and quickly, but to go on the offensive and help them understand what other products and services we can provide for that member based on their unique data in a personalized way.
Reggie Smith, Head of FinTech Research, JPMorgan: Sounds great. One of the things we talked about surprises in the first quarter, fourth quarter as well was your loan platform business. That’s something that is growing very quickly. There are a lot of ways that it kind of unlocks value for for SoFi whether it’s accepting more members in through loans, monetizing things, it’s very asset light from your perspective of your balance sheet. Talk to me a little bit about that business, how large it can be, what’s driven some of the strength there, and what you’re hearing from your partners in that channel.
Anthony Noto, CEO, SoFi: Yeah. The loan platform business is the evolution of something that we started to focus on in 2018. We drive a lot of demand for loans, a lot of applications and we fulfill a small percentage of those loans. Sometimes because it doesn’t meet our credit box, sometimes because it’s above the level of risk and capital that we want to use. And so back in 2018 we said how do we take that exhaust from the business and put it back into the engine to drive further growth.
And we created partnerships where people got the leads that we weren’t willing to underwrite. That evolved itself over time to actually ingesting into our decision engine other people’s credit models, not just our credit model. And then this is the further evolution where we go to asset managers, insurance companies, investment banks and lay out for them the range of applicants that we have for our loans and the range of credit and yield spectrums they could go after. And then they design the credit model they want, the yield that they want. We go out and drive that demand.
We fulfill that demand on their behalf and we get paid a fee for it. So far we’ve been only offering that product or delivering that product to things that are generally in our credit box, but maybe at volumes above what we want to do. There’s a huge opportunity to do it for things that we decide not to underwrite for whatever reason. We generate about a hundred and $20,000,000,000 of loan demand a year. We fulfill, call it 20,000,000,000 of that.
That other hundred billion dollars is very attractive to people. And so you see you’ll see us expand into that area as well. But the market for the loan platform business is deeper and wider than we ever thought it was. And the fact that we have someone that’s taking those loans before we’ve underwritten them gives us great visibility and it generates a fee revenue stream. One of the things we’ve really worked hard on over the last seven years is diversifying the business.
We benefit from being a one stop shop in that some of our businesses do well in high rates environment. Some of our businesses do well in low rate environments. And so we diversified along the way, so that less of our business is driven by capital intensive and credit risk. And the loan platform business is one of the ways that we’ve done that. Our fee revenue in Q1 was about 40% of our annualized revenue and we want that to get up into the 60 to 70% range.
And the loan platform business is also a way to get there.
Reggie Smith, Head of FinTech Research, JPMorgan: Has has so, know you started initially in ’18 and you you were doing something similar to this where you would kind of sell your loans off. Has has the buyer changed over time or or their their goals or objectives? What can you tell me about about that?
Anthony Noto, CEO, SoFi: Yeah. The possible areas for liquidity for us have changed dramatically over time. In 02/1819, we were in an environment where we’re basically selling to hedge funds. And they were the asset buyers. We expanded that to money managers and asset managers and insurance companies and now investment banks.
And primarily we did it before in whole loan sales, the asset backed security market had gone away for a while, that’s back now. We just rekindled a recent deal that did very well and really reinforced our view of our balance sheet and its value. And now we have the LPB business. So it’s really evolved over time. The one thing I’d say generally is our disciplined approach to credit has shown that our loans are durable through the cycle.
They’ve been durable through a recession, durable through the pandemic, durable through 500 basis point rate increase. Now rates are coming back down. So we’ve kind of lived through a lot of different worlds. Different asset managers and buyers exist in different cycles and right now we’re in a sweet spot where it seems like everyone’s interested.
Reggie Smith, Head of FinTech Research, JPMorgan: You know, you mentioned that, I guess you guys did a ABS deal after the quarter and even more recently thinking about the loan platform business and the buyers, one of the things that struck me that I was happy to hear was that even through controversy and uncertainty around tariffs, you were still able to execute sales and and your buyers remain there. Can you talk a little bit about the resiliency and the confidence you have in your capital partners being there for you through
Anthony Noto, CEO, SoFi: Sure, absolutely. The important part of our loans is they’re durable through the cycle because my view is we want to be able to sell those loans regardless of what environment that we’re in. And if you look back at the last three years and as rates went up 500 basis points, we’re one, able to show that we could pass on the higher cost of capital to a higher price to the consumer and still drive high quality demand. We’re able to reduce the origination volume we were doing based on the macroeconomic environment. We underwrite to eight tiers.
We eliminate tier eight, seven and six which are the lower tiers to make sure that our life alone loss stayed below our target life alone loss at 8%. And so being able to you know maneuver in those in that environment is really critical to showing the durability of the loans and why our capital partners have remained. I think the most important thing we’ve probably done in the loan business that we haven’t talked about yet was that we’ve built $27,000,000,000 of deposits. And those are high quality deposits. They’re 90%, ninety % of the 27,000,000,000 is from direct deposit customers.
97% of the deposits are insured. And that’s a great backstop if and when our liquidity providers may not be there for us to be able to hold more loans on our balance sheet and make sure we’re driving the right returns for ourselves or them.
Reggie Smith, Head of FinTech Research, JPMorgan: So, talked personal loans, we’ve talked the financial services segment. Want to talk a little bit about the tech platform segment. I know you guys are working you’ve a few deals in the pipeline that will probably roll in ’26, but talk to me a little bit about what you’re hearing from clients, what’s resonating in the strategy there?
Anthony Noto, CEO, SoFi: Yeah. What I’d say is the in terms of the demand picture, it’s improved quite dramatically. You know, as rates were going at 500 basis points, we had high inflation, there was uncertainty about the economy, the demand for the tech platform business became pretty challenged. At the same time that we decided to move away from smaller deals and focus on big financial institutions with bigger stickier long term deals. I’m happy to say, you know, the last six to eight months have been very robust in terms of demand generation and it’s pretty it’s been pretty broad based.
I was looking at the numbers last night. We’ve announced a number of deals. The Direct Express deal is huge home run for us. It’s a diverse deal. It’s a government backed deal.
It’s got great visibility in terms of the revenue it will generate. We’re investing heavily in that transition. We’re excited to start it in 2026 as an example. We announced another deal that we couldn’t name the name of which I’m excited about. We’ve made great progress there.
But last night I was looking at what deals have been announced, what deals have been signed but not announced, and what deals are pretty close to being signed that will generate revenue in 2026 and Q1 that didn’t generate revenue in Q1 of twenty twenty five. And there are 10 deals, now a couple of them may not get signed, but right now they’re high probable deals. There are 10 deals that will produce revenue in the first quarter of twenty twenty six that produced no revenue in the first quarter of twenty twenty five. And it’s been a long time since that’s happened. So I’m super excited about what the team has already accomplished and what we’re about to roll out.
But I’m even more excited about the amount of demand that we’re seeing from big consumer brands that understand the opportunity in financial services, especially digital. We’ve announced some of those like Wyndham. There’s a couple of other deals that we’ve announced there. The other exciting thing is there’s some deals that we lost four years ago. And if you think about our value prop in the tech platform, you can have differentiation on price, price per transaction as an example, and you can have differentiation on the quality of the services and sophistication of your services.
Well, suffice it to say, when someone just wants a low priced service without any sophisticated add on products, we’re not going to compete in that area. It’s not a good area. We’re investing in significant technologies and great sophisticated capabilities to innovate. If someone just wants to use it as a gateway, we’re not going to want to do that business. That’s a business that’s probably going be a lost leader.
But if someone wants to innovate and drive consumer experience and they’re not an expert and they haven’t scaled, we’re going to be able to get a fair price with them, but we’ll be able to add a lot of products over time. And so a couple of deals that we launched lost four years ago, where people decided to prioritize cost over functionality, those partners are coming back to us. And there’s two deals in particular that we’re about to close that are pretty significant. They’re highly visible, already have installed bases, where the partner optimized for price, not for the level of sophistication that we have, not for the innovation that we provide, and they’re coming back to us. And so that’s another example.
And there’s still a significant level of demand from large financial institutions, although decisions you know have been harder to get from them.
Reggie Smith, Head of FinTech Research, JPMorgan: So confidence stays high in that segment there.
Anthony Noto, CEO, SoFi: I I feel really good about the outlook and our positioning. There’s obviously bumps along the road. We’ll lose some deals. We’ll win some deals. You know someone was pointing out yesterday of about two relationships that existed and had left more than you know eighteen months ago, two years ago.
The funny thing about both those companies, one of which was switching off of Galileo before we bought it, so it wasn’t part of the service that we provided and one switched off while we owned the business and it was someone that was focused on just the gateway. Neither of those two companies have had any success.
Reggie Smith, Head of FinTech Research, JPMorgan: Got it. Okay. I wanted to talk I guess the financial model a little bit more. Thinking about your ROE targets, profitability targets, like I said you guys are GAAP profitable now. How should we think about ROE, leverage ratios, capital ratios, things like that, like how are you thinking about running the business?
Anthony Noto, CEO, SoFi: Yeah. So you know as we look over the horizon we gave a three year outlook and earnings range for 2026 EPS. You know we want to continue to drive 30 plus percent member growth, continue to drive revenue in the mid to high 20s which we’ve talked about before and a 30% incremental EBITDA margin. We want to make sure we’re investing in the business and making sure we have future growth and planting those seeds and not just driving profitability. But we also understand investors want to see improving returns on the investment that we make, which is why we’re only investing 70% of incremental dollars back in the business and dropping 30% to the EBITDA line because that’s our long term margin.
So if we keep doing that over time, we’ll get to that level. And we’ve talked about 10% long term net income margins. We do believe we can achieve the mix of business and capital efficiency to have a 20% to 30% ROE and that has not changed. As we think about our earnings potential, someone asked the question about 55¢ to 80¢ in 2026 and why such a big range. This isn’t the exact scenario because there’s many different permutations, but you can imagine the 80¢ being a scenario where our growth slows more than we would like and it’s, you know, going into beyond ’26 and it’s in the low twenties and maybe going into the high teens.
Well that’s an environment where we’re going to drive a lot more profitability. Probably even profitability above our long term margins because the growth is not there and we can’t keep investing in growth that’s not there, so we’ll drop the profitability. On the lower end of the spectrum, the 55¢ end of the spectrum, see that as a higher growth environment where we’re growing in the 20s and it’s pretty stable, and the investment’s justified to keep investing in that future growth to have longer revenue growth and therefore longer earnings potential. And I believe we’re still early days. It feels like day one.
There’s 500,000,000 accounts in The United States. You know, we’ve announced our quarter. We’re over 11,000,000 members. I really want to get the 50,000,000 members over the next five years. It’s not going to be easy.
It’s an aspirational goal, but it’s definitely possible. And to get there we have to keep innovating, we have to keep building our brand to be a trusted brand name. And I think we’re in the products and services to get there over time. And so my hope is that we’re still going to grow 25 plus percent revenue growth for the foreseeable future by penetrating these different markets. There’s an opportunity for us to expand internationally, we haven’t talked about, but there’s some really unique markets that I think are interesting based on what we’ve seen in the credit card business and the lending business.
And so, international expansion is also a potential area for us to go into.
Reggie Smith, Head of FinTech Research, JPMorgan: Sounds good. We got a few minutes left. I’m gonna open up the floor to questions. I ask if you have a question raise your hand, we’ll get the mic over to you. And if not, I will keep asking questions.
Nothing from the audience. Okay. Cool. Perfect. So, you talked about international.
You didn’t mention the market there. Was that intentional?
Anthony Noto, CEO, SoFi: Yeah. It was intentional because, you know, we don’t want it we don’t want people to see us coming. We have no no plans right now, but let me talk about The US market for a second that will give you some insights. I think the credit card industry is one that is ripe for disruption. If you look at the ROE of the credit card business, it’s pretty significant.
And there’s a relatively well known statement that says your profit is my opportunity. And what I’ve learned from the credit card business is the following. We’ve restructured our business and relaunched products and our our new product and go to market is performing very well. Our back book is still a hindrance and, you know, we’re living with that back book and we’ll optimize it over time. But what I’ve learned along the way is that credit card companies make the most money in a really bad way.
They like revolvers. They don’t like people that pay off their credit card every month and all they do is get reward points. Cause people that do that, they lose money on. But people that maybe have a $20,000 line that have they’re revolving on $10,000 and they’re only paying the minimum every month, they’re paying 24% interest. And many of those people have a FICO score that’s in our credit box.
And we have an opportunity to lower their cost of debt, help them pay that off quicker, and make a great ROE equivalent to what we already have. And so the ROEs within the credit card industry are quite frankly really ripe for disruption. And we’re going to go after that in The United States in a big way, and I see it as an even bigger opportunity outside The United States in areas where people are driving ROEs in the 35 to 50% range, and they’re charging 35 to 50% interest rates on those revolving credit lines. And the fact of the matter is, if they cut out that credit line that had capacity on it, that person would default on their loan. But they’re not defaulting on their loan because they want to make sure they keep the availability of that credit for a rainy day or for whatever reason.
And the banks continue to fool themselves into thinking that’s a good credit. It’s not a good credit. They just prolong the inevitable, which is that person’s going to probably not be able to pay back that revolving amount and they’ll just keep paying the minimum for as long as they can.
Reggie Smith, Head of FinTech Research, JPMorgan: It’s funny you mentioned the market there, like I would imagine that you’ve got some late potential within your existing consumer base. I know you talk about the salaries and your FICO scores for your average borrower within your personal loan segment. There would seem to be a pool of potential credit card users within your existing base. Am I right there? And what’s the challenge with activating those people?
Anthony Noto, CEO, SoFi: It’s really not a challenge. It’s making sure that we have the right unit economic model just like we have in money and just like we have in invest. So, you know, the big focus in resource allocation will be to invest this year and to SoFi Plus and to SoFi Relay and those get your money right AI applications I talked about. Credit card, we’re still honing, we’re still working on it. A lot of people don’t realize this, but we lose over a hundred million dollars a year in investing credit card.
And that’s profit that will come back to us as we scale, invest in credit card as we optimize the back book. So, know, we’re investing a ton in our different businesses. Credit card is one where we’re going to continue to be very methodical and make sure we bring in the right types of partners and customers there and fix the back book.
Reggie Smith, Head of FinTech Research, JPMorgan: We’ve got sixty seconds left. I would love to hear your vision of the company five years from now. Are we still sitting here talking? What are we talking about in five years?
Anthony Noto, CEO, SoFi: You know, think five years from now I’d love to be in a position where we’ve exceeded expectations on the intermediate term earnings outlook that we’ve provided. I’d love to be at the point that we have 50,000,000 members. I’m not saying that’s easy. It’s going to be very hard to get there. We’d have to accelerate from where we are today in terms of number of new member adds.
My hope is that our products per member at that point are on average at three, which means our most heavy loyal people are at five or six and our least loyal are at one or two. I hope to be delivering an ROE that is around that 30% range in five years and still growing quite meaningfully with revenue growth still over 20% in five years.
Reggie Smith, Head of FinTech Research, JPMorgan: Perfect, sounds good.
Anthony Noto, CEO, SoFi: Great, thank you Reggie.
Reggie Smith, Head of FinTech Research, JPMorgan: Thank you.
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