SoFi Technologies at William Blair Conference: Strategic Growth Unveiled

On Wednesday, 04 June 2025, SoFi Technologies (NASDAQ:SOFI) presented at the 45th Annual William Blair Growth Stock Conference, emphasizing its robust growth trajectory and strategic positioning in the consumer finance market. While highlighting impressive member and product growth, SoFi also addressed challenges such as rising interest rates and student loan moratoriums, showcasing its resilience and adaptability.

Key Takeaways

• SoFi has grown its member base to approximately 11 million, with product offerings exceeding 15 million.
• The company reported $666 million in adjusted EBITDA for 2024, with a 26% margin.
• SoFi aims for over 25% annualized revenue growth from 2023 to 2026.
• The Loan Platform Business achieved $1.6 billion in origination volume in Q1 2025.
• SoFi Money is positioned as a future billion-dollar revenue stream following its banking license acquisition.

Financial Results

• Adjusted Net Revenue Growth: From 2021 to 2024, SoFi achieved a 37% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) in adjusted net revenue.
• 2025 Revenue Projection: The company expects to exceed $3 billion in adjusted net revenue, tripling its 2021 performance.
• Profitability: In 2024, SoFi delivered $666 million in EBITDA at a 26% margin and $227 million in net income at a 9% margin.
• Fee-Based Revenue: This increased from 26% of total revenue in 2021 to 41% in Q1 2025, generating $1.2 billion on an annualized basis.
• Guidance: Adjusted net revenue is projected between $3.3235 billion to $3.31 billion, with EBITDA expected between $875 million to $895 million.

Operational Updates

• Member and Product Growth: SoFi added 800,000 new members and 1.2 million new products last quarter.
• SoFi Money Deposits: Deposits grew to over $27 billion, with over 90% from direct deposit members and 97% insured by the FDIC.
• Loan Platform Business: Originated $1.6 billion in Q1 2025, generating nearly $100 million in revenue.
• Capital Markets Activity: Sold and transferred $3.1 billion of personal and home loans through the Loan Platform Business.

Future Outlook

• Strategic Objectives: SoFi aims to expand fee-based income and position SoFi Money as a multi-billion dollar business.
• Loan Platform Scaling: The company plans to scale origination volumes without expanding its balance sheet.
• Tech Platform Diversification: SoFi seeks to diversify its client base for incremental growth, with significant revenue impacts expected in 2026.
• Student Loan Refinancing: The resumption of federal student loan repayments is anticipated to boost business.

Q&A Highlights

• Product Demand: Strong demand continues, driven by innovation and brand strength.
• Cross Buy: Approximately one-third of new products each quarter come from existing members.
• Loan Originations: Total loan originations reached $7.2 billion in the last quarter.
• Member Engagement: Annualized spend across debit and credit products is approximately $16 billion.
• Student Loan Refinancing: Positive momentum is expected as federal student loan repayments resume.

In conclusion, SoFi Technologies demonstrated a compelling growth story at the William Blair Conference, underscoring its strategic initiatives and financial resilience. Readers interested in more details can refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - 45th Annual William Blair Growth Stock Conference:

Andrew Jeffrey, Fintech Analyst, William Blair: All right. Thanks, Jim. I guess that’s my cue that it’s time to start. So let me just read off the disclosure here. My name is Andrew Jeffrey.

I’m the fintech analyst at at William Blair, and I’m required to inform you that a complete list of research disclosures or potential conflicts of interest, are available on our web website, williamblair.com. It’s it’s really my pleasure to be able to introduce Chris Lapointe, the CFO of SoFi. This is one of our favorite names. Anybody who’s talked to me about this knows how enthusiastic we are about SoFi. Very thematically, we believe that there’s a structural shift taking place in US consumer finance whereby younger consumers, especially as they become more affluent and advance in their careers, are increasingly going to be and have become dissatisfied with traditional banks.

They want better experiences. They want better products. They want fairer products. They want faster credit decisions. And SoFi, by being a virtual vertically integrated digital bank that’s very thoughtfully built and thoughtfully run and continues to evolve its products, we think fits into that theme extremely well.

And, with that, I’ll let Chris walk you through the presentation.

Chris Lapointe, CFO, SoFi: Excellent. Well, thank you very much. Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for having me, Andrew. It’s a pleasure to be here at the at the conference.

Here’s our quick disclaimer as well, which is on our investor website, which you can all read at your at your leisure. But here’s what I’m going to cover today. So some of you may be new to the SoFi story. So today, I’m going to cover our differentiated business model, the significant growth that we’ve delivered over the course of the last several years, and the incredible opportunity that we have ahead of us. Overall, we haven’t been this excited or confident in our business than we are today.

So let’s start with our mission and strategy. At SoFi, we’re building a mission driven company to help people achieve financial independence in order to realize their ambitions, which means helping our members get to the point where they have enough money to do what they want. That means having the family that they want, the career that they want, etcetera. In order to do that, we need to have a lifetime relationship with them and be there for all of their major financial decisions and every day in between. Everything that we do at SoFi is guided by our focus on helping our members get their money right, and we’re achieving this mission by being the only digital one stop shop for financial services in the marketplace today.

We offer a comprehensive set of products and services to help our members borrow better, save better, invest better, protect better, and spend better, all of which are seamlessly integrated into our digital platform. We aim to be the best in class across each and every one of our products, but we also believe that our products work even better when they’re used together. Across each and every one of our products, we wanna differentiate them by providing the best speed, the best selection, the best content, and the best convenience. This means being the fastest, place to open an account, providing the most comprehensive selection of features, providing a number of ways to move money seamlessly, safely, and efficiently, and bringing products and insights that were once reserved for the ultra wealthy to everyday people in a digital and easy to use fashion. Unlike the traditional financial institutions, we have a technology DNA and are unencumbered by outdated technology or bureaucratic silos, that get in the way of the member experience.

This allows us to innovate and scale the business at a much more rapid clip. So our one stop shop strategy also leads to a sustainable competitive advantage, which is being able to produce the highest lifetime value per member at the lowest customer acquisition cost. So here’s how it works. We end up attracting new members to SoFi through any one of our new products and having a trusted brand name and exceptional products. Once a member takes out that first product, we build that trust and loyalty with them such that they are have a higher propensity to take out additional products.

For example, during the first quarter, nearly a third of all new products that were opened up came from existing members on the platform. When that member takes out a second product, we don’t have to pay the second acquisition cost, which essentially allows us to drive a very high lifetime value per member at a much lower customer acquisition cost. Having these, really good unit economics allows us to reinvest in our business, which provides with better provides the member with better products and better services, better pricing, and better selection. This flywheel effect, which we end up calling our financial services productivity loop, ends up powering our continued growth. And the opportunity in front of us, as Andrew mentioned, is is massive.

Half of the American population is digitally native, and at the same time, there’s a growing mistrust in traditional banks. We’re here to provide a much better option that is truly member centric. So so this next page shows how our business has evolved over time to becoming a strong diversified business that it is today. Starting around 2018 when when Anthony and I joined the company, we invested significantly in improving existing products and bringing new products to market. Over the past several years, we’ve launched our SoFi Money product, our SoFi Relay product, SoFi Invest, SoFi Protect, SoFi Credit Cards, in school student loans, home equity loans, and we’ve strengthened our capabilities with strategic acquisitions of Galileo, Technisys and Wyndham Capital Mortgage.

Along the way, we’ve consistently rolled out new products and innovative features. For example, we were pioneers in fractional shares and bringing alternative investments and IPOs to everyday people. Today, the SoFi platform has a full set of financial services products, but we’re never going to stop innovating and bringing even better products and features to our members. Just this quarter, we ended up announcing a new personal loan and a student loan refinancing new product. And given the changing regulations, we’re also actively exploring opportunities of bringing crypto and blockchain technology offerings across our business.

Given our broad product offering and technology platform, we believe that there could be meaningful benefits for our members and our business. So what has been the result of all of this innovation and and brand building? We’ve seen exceptional member and product growth. Since we went public in 2021, we’ve scaled both our members and products at a compounded rate of over 50%. We now have approximately 11,000,000 members and over 15,000,000 products, and we believe we’re just starting.

In fact, the last quarter was our best quarter ever in terms of overall member growth and product growth. We ended up adding 800,000 new members, which was up 34% year over year, and we added 1,200,000 new products, which was up 35% year over year. Our member and product growth are the leading indicators of our overall financial performance. From ’twenty one to 2024, we ended up growing adjusted net revenue at a 37% CAGR. And this year, we expect to generate well over $3,000,000,000 in adjusted net revenue, which is up more than 3x of what we delivered back in 2021.

We also meaningfully improved our profitability by delivering $666,000,000 of EBITDA in 2024 at a 26% margin, while net income was $227,000,000 at a 9% margin. And I’m going to provide a little bit more detail on profitability in a moment. But first, I want to start by talking a little bit about the diversification of our revenue. So as we’ve where’s it going? So as we’ve grown our business, we’ve also taken action to diversify our revenue streams.

This has meant broadening our sources of income to include more fee based revenue, which is capital light, has a higher ROE, and gives us greater durability throughout cycles. Our fee based income comes from a variety of sources, including origination fees, referral fees, interchange revenue, brokerage free revenue, and our loan platform business, which I’m going to hit on here in a minute. In 2021, our fee based revenue was about 26% of total revenue, and in the first quarter of twenty twenty five, it comprised 41% of overall revenue. On an annualized basis, we generated $1,200,000,000 of fee based revenue in the first quarter, and we continue to see meaningful upside there. Beyond the top line growth that we’ve exhibited, we’ve also strengthened our return profile.

We ended up turning profitable in q four twenty twenty three and have since delivered six straight quarters of net income profitability. Our annualized ROTCE was about 6% in the first quarter, but over the long term, we see our business as being capable of generating an ROE in the 20% to 30% range while still generating significant growth. Ultimately, we’re focused on generating an attractive mix of durable growth and strong returns for our shareholders. Let me now turn to the segments, starting first with our Financial Services segment, which has been a key driver of our overall growth and revenue diversification efforts. Our Financial Services segment includes our SoFi Money and SoFi Invest businesses, our credit card business and our loan platform business.

Year over year, revenue has doubled while also nearly doubling our contribution margin to roughly 50%. Noninterest income in this segment, which is primarily fee based income from loan platform business fees, brokerage fees, and interchange, has increased 4x. Let me now spend a few minutes talking about Relay and SoFi Plus, two of our financial services products that are integral to our strategy and demonstrate the power of our one stop shop model. Our Relay product allows members to understand their spending patterns across their accounts within and outside of SoFi. We’ve seen tremendous scale in in indirect value creation from Relay, which is now over 5,000,000 products and grew 41% year over year.

Relay is an important product because it serves as the top of the the tip of the sword, attracting new members to SoFi and then driving attractive cross buy patterns into SoFi products. As an example, a third of RelayFirst members that cross buy adopt over three products today. SoFi Plus, on the other hand, is our premium membership tier, bringing together the best of all we have to offer across our products and creating over $1,000 in value for our members each year. Until recently, these benefits were accessible to members by setting up a direct deposit, but more recently, we’ve created a subscription fee option where members gain access to these premium services and more through a $10 monthly fee. While this subscription option is still new, we’re seeing very promising behavior among our new subscribers.

For new subscript subscribers to the program, 90% of them were existing members on the platform, and a third of those took out an additional product within thirty days of enrolling in SoFi Plus. And then of the remaining 10%, at least 75% have taken out a second product, and 40% have taken out a third product within just thirty days of enrollment of the of the subscription service. The success of these products obviously shows that members truly value our one stop shop model and further demonstrates our financial services product loop, which is a key part of our overall strategy. So I now want to spend, just a minute discussing our SoFi Money business, which we see as our next multi, next billion dollar revenue business. In 2022, we ended up receiving our banking license, which gave us the opportunity to provide deposit products, to our members, which is critical in becoming their primary financial services provider, while also significantly reducing our overall cost of funding for our loans, which historically were funded through, warehouse providers.

This was a critically important, development in our strategy and has been one of the key differentiators versus our peers. In just a few years, we’ve grown our deposit base to over $27,000,000,000 in deposits, which has strengthened our balance sheet with durable, sticky consumer deposits. Today, over 90 of all of our direct or all of our member deposits are coming from direct deposit members, and over 97% of those deposits are fully insured by the FDIC. How have we been able to grow, these deposits so quickly? First, by providing an unmatched value proposition that is both easy to use and is very fast.

We’re the only company that allows our members to move money in a frictionless way through digital person to person payments via a phone number or an email address and via Zelle ACH or self serve wires. Second, we’re offering in a very attractive APY to our members that is typically in the top quartile, while the big banks are offering a couple of basis points. Because of our business model and the attractive loan yields that we generate, we’re able to offer a strong APY while still maintaining a healthy net interest margin well above 5%. In addition to the member, benefits, we have a strong deposit base that has enabled us to lower our funding costs, saving us an estimated $515,000,000 per year versus what we would be paying for warehouse funding had we not obtained the banking license. SoFi Money has has essentially become a game changer for our business.

Turning now to our lending segment, which is currently our largest and most profitable segment overall. Within this segment, we offer personal loans, student loan refinancing, in school loans and home loans and home equity loans. In the first quarter, this segment delivered over $1,600,000,000 of annualized adjusted net revenue and has consistently delivered a contribution margin in the range of about 60%. Our largest category of loans is our personal loans, which are used to consolidate more expensive credit card debt and a variety of other, uses. Personal loans saw our best quarter ever in q one with over $5,500,000,000 in total originations, and we continue to see really strong demand in that product.

Our student loan, business is primarily student loan refinancing, which has meant that we’ve faced headwinds, in recent years from the student loan moratorium and higher interest rates. However, with student loan payments, starting to resume, we’re starting to see, positive momentum in that business and an acceleration in originations. First quarter originations were up nearly 60% year over year. And then our Home Lending business, faced some headwinds from higher interest rates over the course of the last few years, which has given us the, operational and servicing, which has, provided some real headwinds, but we haven’t just sat there idly. We took that time to redesign and redevelop that product.

First, in 2023, we ended up acquiring Wyndham Capital Mortgage, which has given us the operational and servicing capabilities to scale our home loans business. And then second, in 2024, we ended up introducing a home equity loan product. And this product has diversified our growth, which has made the business much more durable through various rate cycles. This product, which we didn’t have just a year ago, accounted for more than onethree of our overall home lending volume during the first quarter, and it was our best quarter ever for home equity originations, and this should only improve from where we are today. When interest rates come down, we do expect to see an acceleration both in our student loan refinancing business as well as for demand in our home loans as we’re well positioned to capitalize on the opportunity.

So let me now zoom out for a second and discuss a relatively new business that has really transformed our lending platform capabilities. Historically, we would originate loans, hold them on the balance sheet for a period of time and then sell or securitize through the capital markets in order to manage our balance sheet capacity. We continue to do this through our lending segment today, and it’s a great business, but it is also capital intensive. Last year, we ended up creating more optionality, to meet the strong demand that we have both from members as well as capital markets participants through our loan platform business. Here’s how this business works.

So we end up partnering with loan buyers in the capital markets such as Fortress and Blue Owl, and we deliver loans that meet their specific investment needs. We earn a set fee per loan that we deliver, and we retain the servicing of those loans and the membership relationship, giving us great cross buy opportunities. Importantly, we move these loans to our partners in a matter of two to three days so we are not bearing any of the ongoing credit risk or capital requirements. Our loan platform business is allowing us to significantly scale our origination volumes without growing our balance sheet beyond our our stated targets. This has been a huge unlock for us over the course of the last few quarters.

In the first quarter of twenty twenty five, we ended up originating $1,600,000,000 of LPB volume and generated nearly $100,000,000 in total LPB revenue. In the second quarter, we expect another meaningful increase in both volume and revenue. So far, the vast majority of loans that we’ve originated through the loan platform business have similar characteristics to what we would hold on our balance sheet today. However, we see further opportunity to originate great loans that are outside of our very narrow credit box, which would open up in an entirely new market for our business and allow us to monetize a portion of the roughly $100,000,000,000 of loans that we’re currently turning down in the personal loans business on an annualized basis. When we add our LPB to our originate to sell business, we now have the continuum of options that allow us to generate consistent growth and attractive returns in a variety of economic environments.

I would note that the capital markets demand for our loans continues to be extremely robust, and that continues into Q2. During the first quarter, we sold and transferred through our LPB business $3,100,000,000 of personal and home loans, and we have not seen any signs of slowing. Turning now to credit. I want to reiterate that we do not retain any credit risks associated with our LPB loans since we moved them to our partners shortly after origination. For our balance sheet loans, we’ve seen credit improve with net charge offs for our personal loans and student loans continuing to decline this past quarter and sequentially.

Our borrowers continue to be really strong and healthy. The average FICO score of our borrowers are around 7 50, and they have strong average incomes, averaging about $134,000 for student loan borrowers $158,000 for our personal loan borrowers. Staying on credit here for a moment, we underwrite on the personal loan side to a seven to 8% average life of loan loss. If we compare our recent vintages back to 2017, the last vintages to reach that or close to approach the 7% to 8% level, we see that losses are trending well below that level. In fact, the gap between the newer cohorts that we’ve originated ended up widening, by a more favorable 16 basis points this past quarter after widening, of about 15 basis points in Q4.

Additionally, looking at our q one twenty twenty through q four twenty twenty four originations, 59% of principal has already been paid down with 6.7% in cumulative losses. Therefore, for our life alone losses to end up coming close to that 8%, the charge off rate on the remaining 41% of unpaid principal balance would need to be approximately 10%, And this would be well above past cohorts at similar points of seasoning, which further underscores our confidence in achieving life alone losses below our 8% threshold. Turning now to, capital. On top of our regulatory minimums, we maintain an internal stress buffer, which determines the minimum capital level where we feel comfortable operating given the composition of our balance sheet, our growth opportunities and the current environment that we’re in today. At the end of the quarter, we had a total risk based capital ratio of 15.5%, which included incremental capacity beyond our internal stress test buffer and is well above the regulatory minimum of 10.5%.

Turning now to our Tech Platforms segment, which offers businesses the ability to launch and run financial products from bank accounts and debit card to ACH and wire payments to BNPL and more, as well as offering a cloud based core banking system. Our tech platform business also underpins our SoFi product offering, allowing us to launch customized products for more wrap and expand more rapidly and effectively. For example, we have a Pay in four product in our self-service wires that we recently rolled out. Those were built entirely on our in house tech platform. We were able to build and launch these products in a fraction of the time and at a much lower cost compared to a bank operating on a legacy platform or by partnering with with another third party.

Our revenue generation and margins have been steady. However, we have recently diversified our client base to provide incremental growth opportunities, and we’re seeing really good momentum today. We’ve had a diverse set of client wins, including financial services firms, government programs and and, large consumer brands. In this business and the opportunity we will see as these newer deals start to generate more meaningful revenue, over the course of 2026. So over the past few years, we’ve overcome significant headwinds, including the sharp rise in interest rates, that brought down several major banking institutions, as well as a moratorium that we faced on on our largest, profitable business in student loan, refinancing.

But despite those headwinds, we grew substantially. We ended up strengthening our returns and also built a more durable and diversified business. We’re now an even stronger business, better positioned to take advantage of the significant opportunity in front of us. And as we approach the midpoint of 2025, we have really, really good momentum. Our first quarter was one of our best quarters ever with record member and product growth, record revenue, record originations, strong credit, strong capital, and new product innovations across the board.

Our strong Q1 in terms of overall financial performance has allowed us to increase our outlook for the remainder of the year across all key measures, and we stated that during our last earnings call. In particularly, we were able to raise guidance on an adjusted net revenue to $0.33235000000.000 to $3,310,000,000 which equates to year over year growth of approximately 24% to 27%. We now also expect adjusted EBITDA of $875,000,000 to $895,000,000 adjusted net income in the range of $320,000,000 to $330,000,000 and adjusted EPS of $0.27 to $0.28 which is above our prior guidance of $0.25 to $0.27 We’ve also increased our medium term revenue guidance covering the period of 2023 to 2026 to now be above 25% annualized growth. And we’re really excited about the opportunity ahead of us and looking forward to the rest of the year and the year ahead of us.

Andrew Jeffrey, Fintech Analyst, William Blair: Thank you. Thanks, Chris. Awesome. So we’ve got about five minutes left in the formal session before we go to breakout. So I’m gonna ask you a couple questions just for for the group’s benefit.

So clearly, you’ve you’ve seen really good demand for your paper. Can you talk about product demand? You know, get a lot of sort of macro questions. And and I guess part of that is sort of broad product demand, and then part of it is to drill down on sort of the dynamics within student loans. I mean, on one hand, you could see increased demand for student loan consolidation, I’m assuming, and or personal loans.

On the other hand, there may be some concerns about sort of the credit quality associated with those products. So a couple of questions in there.

Chris Lapointe, CFO, SoFi: Yes, absolutely. So overall, across the board, we’re seeing really strong demand for our products, which is obviously a reflection of the relentless focus that we have on innovation and brand building. Like I said, we just reported our best quarter ever for member and product growth. We ended up adding 800,000 new members, 1,200,000 new products, growing to nearly 11,000,000 members and 16,000,000 products. Cross buy that we’re seeing from existing members continues to be extremely strong and it accounts for roughly a third of all new products that are taken out in a given quarter.

That’s been consistent for the last few years. And then we also had our best quarter ever in terms of overall loan originations at $7,200,000,000 in total. Our members today remain extremely strong and active. During the first quarter, we ended up seeing about $16,000,000,000 of annualized spend across both our debit and our credit products, and that continues to grow and accelerate. And then on the tech platform side, we’ve diversified our business beyond the traditional fintechs and are now working with large government programs, consumer brands in addition to the traditional banks and fintechs.

Our recent wins and others in RFP processes are going to have a meaningful impact in, 2026 and beyond. As it relates to some of the student loan, stuff that that you’re talking about, overall, we see a few dynamics at play. The resumption of student of federal student loan repayments, we view as a positive tailwind to our business. As federal borrowers go back into repayment, many are gonna look to us, to refi at a at a at a much better price that we can offer relative to where we are. Right now, there’s about a $280,000,000,000 total addressable market that we calculate for borrowers who are directly within our credit box and where we can price the product today.

And we have a very large market share of north of 60%. So we feel good about continuing to be able to scale that business, particularly as people start to resume payments. I think the second tailwind that we expect is if rates do in fact come down, we view that as another really good tailwind to that business when rates when Fed funds was in the 1.75 to 2% range, we’re originating at a quarterly clip of about $2,400,000,000 which is about $9,500,000,000 annualized. Today, we’re at about $1,000,000,000 So meaningful upside in that business. And overall, demand for our products and our consumer remains extremely healthy.

K.

Andrew Jeffrey, Fintech Analyst, William Blair: Awesome. So I think we’ll call that the end of the formal presentation. And, for those of you who would like to stick around for a breakout, please do. We’re gonna do it in this room since it’s the last presentation of the day.

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