SOFI - SoFi Technologies Inc. (SOFI) Management Presents at Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference (Transcript)
2023-09-06 19:49:06 ET
SoFi Technologies, Inc. (SOFI)
Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference Transcript
September 6, 2023, 4:05 PM ET
Executives
Anthony Noto - Chief Executive Officer
Analysts
Mike Ng - Goldman Sachs
Presentation
Mike Ng
How are you doing?
Anthony Noto
Good. You?
Mike Ng
Good. Excellent. Well, we will go ahead and get started. Welcome to the SoFi presentation at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia and Technology Conference. I have the privilege of introducing Anthony Noto, CEO of SoFi since 2018. Anthony joined SoFi after serving as CFO and COO of Twitter. He was also the Co-Head of Global TMT Banking at Goldman Sachs and the CFO for the NFL.
My name is Mike Ng and I cover SoFi and fintech here at Goldman. We have about 35 minutes for today’s presentation inclusive of Q&A. So if you have a question, please raise your hand towards the end of the session and we will go ahead and get a mic run over to you.
First, thank you, Anthony, for making the time and coming out to be here with us today. Really appreciate it.
Anthony Noto
Thank you for having me.
Question-and-Answer Session
Q - Mike Ng
Great. So since obtaining a bank charter in February of 2021, SoFi’s steadily executed on its bank strategy with deposits of nearly $13 billion, leading to overall funding costs being lowered, increased lending capacity, improvements in NII, a more stable funding model. So to start things off, could you just give a little bit of background on the evolution of the SoFi platform from a student lending platform to a financial services one-stop shop that it is today and a tech platform. In success, what does SoFi ultimately look like?
Anthony Noto
Sure. When I was talking to the Board about potentially coming on as CEO, I had laid out what I thought would be a great mission and strategy for the company. And at the heart of it is I really wanted to help people get to the point that they had enough money to do what they want. Many people have been successful academically, professionally, but they couldn’t really live the American dream and how they define it we call that their ambitions.
And in order for them to get to the point they had enough money that they wanted to be able to own the home they wanted, have the size family they wanted, live where they wanted, the career they wanted and retire when they want it.
We really had to help them in every step of their financial lives. We have to be there for all the major financial decisions they made in their lives and all the days in between. And the reason why is, if you are successful academically and professionally and you are making above-average household income of $100,000 or $200,000, it’s really hard to get there.
And so we have to help them avoid overpaying for what their education is relative to what they can make when they get out, avoid overbuying a house in terms of it being too large relative to their income, because they make those decisions early in their lives then they miss investing in their 20s and they miss 10 years of compounding and it’s really hard to catch up after having lost those 10 years.
Similarly, if they actually don’t make those decisions, but they are spending all of their income and not investing, they are making bad choices or they run up their Credit Card debt. So at the end of the day, our job is to help them get their money right. That’s what they should hire us to do.
And for us to get their money right, we have to help them borrow better, save better, spend better and protect better, which is basically a one-stop shop and that’s what led to the strategy of being a one-stop shop on your mobile phone.
At the time, we were just desktop, just in student loan refinancing and just in personal loans. So 2018 was really about building the mobile platform and the foundation. It was also about building out the organization to build business plans and SoFi Money and SoFi Invest and SoFi Credit Card and SoFi Relay and then some other products that we have introduced like Lantern.
And 2019 was about executing against the rollout of all those products with the general manager structure. By the end of 2019, we have rolled out everything other than Credit Card and we are stepping on the gas to scale and it was really just a blitz creek approach to building our brand awareness and driving adoption and learning really fast.
2020 was about adding in the final products of Credit Card, but then also the acquisition of Galileo and the thought process behind Galileo was really leveraging our learnings in loans. We own the technology and loans from the servers to the glass, from the metal to the glass, it allows us to innovate faster than anyone else. We are a low cost operator. We can personalize. We can test.
I mean, it really allows us to really iterate and iterate, which drives innovation and gives us a competitive advantage. So we can drive unit economics, which also lends itself to better value in loans and better interest rates and more innovation.
As we thought about that, and we launched SoFi Money, which is a check and savings account in one, we have really struggled partnering with FIS. They couldn’t innovate as fast as we wanted to, they are expensive and I felt like we could never really win and gain a competitive advantage on unit economics or innovation, which led to the acquisition of Galileo.
We have sensed on the same thing in mortgages and we have the technology in Technisys to be able to provide an operating system for all of them and so 2020 was the beginning of building out the technology strategy.
So at the heart of what we are doing is we are trying to help people make all the best decision in their lives, have great choices in between and their day-to-day products, and then leverage our technology to differentiate those products, but also have the lowest cost and the best unit economics.
And the big reason why they have to have that innovation and best unit economics is, we are indifferent with what first product to use, but when you are picking that first product, we have to win, and if we do win, we will have great economics.
We don’t have to rely on you taking a second or third product, which allows us to be patient and meet your needs when you have them for that second product and build trust and reliability with you. If you take a second or third product from us, our economics improve quite dramatically and that’s where we gain competitive advantage.
Mike Ng
Okay.
Anthony Noto
And so here we sit in 2023, one, we are on track to do over $2 billion of revenue, up from less than $500 million in 2018. We will do over $330 million to $350 million of EBITDA versus losing close to $200 million in 2018 and 6.2 million members versus 500,000.
Mike Ng
Great. That’s a fantastic overview. And I did want to talk a little bit about your member growth. In the past, you have talked about the Financial Services Productivity Loop to outline SoFi’s approach and growing the member base but also serving existing members. For those who may not be as familiar with the Financial Services Productivity Loop, I was wondering if you could describe it a little bit, talk about what the typical SoFi member journey looks like and what is that typical first product, second part of the product as you work on that cross-sell?
Anthony Noto
Yeah. At the heart of the Financial Services Productivity Loop is building a best-of-breed product differentiated on fast, selection, content and convenience and we want our products to work better when we use them together.
So with each product on its own has to be best-of-breed versus competition and have the best unit economics at steady state. As I mentioned, they will pick one product along the way, and hopefully, we build that trust and reliability that will lend to a second and third product.
It was hard to know when we kicked off that strategy what would be the first or second product, but we had an intuition that the most broadly appealing product with the highest utility and daily engagement would be at the top of the funnel and the things that are less appealing or less broadly applicable at the bottom of the funnel and that’s exactly what’s happened.
So Relay and SoFi Money are at the top of the funnel. They are the two largest products that we have, fastest growing, both over 2.5 million today and growing quite rapidly. They have the largest contribution to cross buy into Invest, into Loans, into Credit Cards.
About 25% to 30% of our loans are from existing members. It used to be the case about 45% of Invest was from existing members, it’s up to 65% now from existing members and Money and Relay are the biggest contributors to that cross-buying. So that’s the typical pattern.
We will come in through Relay where they may check their credit score. They may connect a couple of accounts to start doing budgeting. We have data on them when they do that. We could offer them loans against their Credit Cards, a better direct deposit product, better Invest product.
When someone signs up for SoFi Money, we are very fortunate in that 50% of our funded accounts are direct deposit accounts. They have average balances of over $20,000, a direct deposit customer does.
We have their daily activity. So we know where they are spending, we know what loans they are paying, what Credit Cards they are paying, if they have student loans, if they are investing and we can use that data to give them great suggestions.
We try to answer for them every day what must they do in their financial life, what should they do and what can they do. We do that proactively through e-mail, but also within the app where it’s personalizing the member home feed. So that’s the typical journey.
Mike Ng
Great. In the past, you have talked about the ROE potential for SoFi due to the mix of businesses and the improving profitability across many of those businesses, the benefits from the Financial Services Productivity Loop, the bank license. Could you just talk about the path to get to that 20% to 30% target ROE level?
Anthony Noto
I mean, there’s two ways to look at it. One way is what does our EBITDA margin and net income margin need to be to get there and our EBITDA margin needs to be 30% and our net income GAAP margin needs to be 20%. The things we have between EBITDA and GAAP net income will be about 10% and that’s kind of where they are today.
So one of the things when I was a research analyst like yourself, I used to do to convince our investing partners about the long-term margins of a fast growing company was I looked at their incremental EBITDA margins. So change of EBITDA year-over-year divided by change in revenue.
And if the incremental EBITDA margin was 30% and it was consistent over time, add some topically, you get to 30% margin. Well, this year, we have driven over a 40% incremental EBITDA margin while growing over 40% as a company. So I am very confident our long-term margins can be 30%. In fact, some people may not realize this, our loans have a 70% contribution profit margin, and that steady state I wouldn’t expect it to go higher. If it did, I would reinvest to keep it at that level.
Our Technology Platform segment is a 20% contribution profit margin that will go to 30% over time. Our Consumer Products margin though, sorry, our Financial Services product margin though with CP is negative.
Second quarter, we lost $4 million in contribution profit in that segment, in Q1 we had lost $24 million and in Q4 of 2022 we lost $45 million. That improvement from $45 million to $4 million was largely driven by money.
In that segment, we said we will be contribution profit positive by the end of the year. That’s with us losing about $115 million in unprofitable businesses that if they went away, our total contribution profit and EBITDA would be $150 million higher. So that incremental margin I was mentioning of 40% this year, that’s with that investment and Invest and Credit Card still existing.
So I feel really confident in our long-term margin on an EBITDA basis. I know our equity base and where our revenue will be in the next several years and so getting to $1 billion of net operating profit after tax is something that will take us a while to get there, but when we do, we would be at that 30% ROE.
The other way to look at it is we are already hitting a 40% ROE in our loans. Our bank has been over 20% and our tech platform’s ROE really uses very little equity at all and so the ROE in that is well in excess of 35%. So we are on our way there and you can approach those two different ways.
Mike Ng
Great. And that’s a good segue into the next question, which is really about the success that you guys have been able to achieve today, right? You are a one-stop shop for Financial Services and that’s been operating through relatively volatile, I mean, very volatile recent times. Could you talk a little bit about the product development and your process of innovation during this period? You guys have launched seven businesses and in five years that you have been operating you are EBITDA positive. Organic growth in tangible book value is growing. You are about a quarter away from GAAP profitability while still growing the topline at a very rapid pace. So maybe if you could just talk through the innovation process and how you are managing to profitability?
Anthony Noto
Yeah. And I think about our innovation process in two ways; one is the product experience and that’s its core value proposition to the consumer; and the second is its financial value prop to us as a company.
When I looked at Twitter and what you saw from a lot of direct consumer technology companies and social media and otherwise is, they have built a big audience and then they figure out the financial model later.
Well, on the Financial Services industry, they are one and the same. The product by itself is financial in nature and so when we architect it, we have to differentiate it versus other products that a consumer would care about on those factors of choice.
But we also have to architect the right unit economics from day one, because if we don’t, we will just -- the magnitude of losses we will have beyond customer acquisition cost and beyond building that audience in that customer base gets exacerbated on a factor of 10.
And so for each one of our products, we look at the competitive set. We try to differentiate on fast, selection, content and convenience. We want to make sure that product appeals to a specific person. So I will take Invest as an example.
There’s a lot of different ways to appeal to an Invest customer. Our approach was, we are probably going to acquire people that are new investors or very novice investors and so we wanted our Invest product to be simple for them to use, so they could get in quickly, they could buy a stock for dollars, not in shares and get out quickly and so we architected that product to meet their specific needs.
And then over time, the team’s challenge to iterate in that product to not only continue to meet that member’s needs, but the next ring of potential adopted members in the next ring. And so the product started very simple, going after novice and beginning investors and we iterate like crazy across fast, selection, content, convenience over and over and over to continue to drive adoption and broader awareness.
At the same time, we are improving the monetization of that account, we are improving the variable cost of that account and on the customer acquisition side, we are fine-tuning what segments we are going after, in what channels, with what language, with what offers.
And so six and a half years later, we are sort of experts in differentiating on the consumer side of the equation, really good at marketing at an acceptable cost and delivering a great lifetime value. But we have a core value called learn, iterate, learn, iterate and then that will lead to innovation, and before you know it six years later you have something that no one else has.
So in Invest, we are the only place that you can buy single stocks without commissions, fractional shares, which we pioneer without commissions. We have six of our own ETFs, SoFi ETFs that are specifically built for our members and their needs. We have four different robo accounts, many of which are award-winning as cited by Barron’s.
We have cryptocurrency. We have IPOs. We have done a number of IPOs. We are on the Instacart IPO and we will soon be launching hopefully in early next year, alternate asset classes. We are the only place you could be a one-stop shop within Invest and get a free certified financial planner and have no fees.
Mike Ng
I know I talked with a lot of the market constituents around the financial elements of SoFi’s business. At times, it almost feels like that discussion overshadows the fact that SoFi is a consumer tech company and there’s a lot of value in the brand, the tech, the app, that probably doesn’t get an appropriate amount of airtime in discussions. So maybe you can talk a little bit about the app and how the app plays into the SoFi consumer value proposition.
Anthony Noto
Sure. When we are developing the mobile app in 2018, I really wanted to have a reason for people to use the app beyond just sending money to a friend or checking their investments and how the stock prices are doing to buy a stock or to sell a stock.
I wanted to be more than individual products and I thought about our job to be done to help people get their money right, I thought there’s an opportunity for us to program by looking at all the data on them and all the data on other people like them to answer three questions for them in their financial life every day.
If I want to help you get your money right in all the big decisions and all the days in between, shouldn’t I be giving you solutions every day? And so interim member home feed, we are trying to answer three questions every day.
And think of our member home feed like you would the home feed on Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn. On LinkedIn your feed is about what’s going on in business that day, in Facebook it’s what’s going on with your friends in that day, and on Twitter it’s what’s going on in the news that day and in SoFi it’s what’s going on in your financial life.
We want to answer three questions every day in a personalized way. What must you do that day in your financial life? What should you do? And what can you do? And if you go into our apps and member home feed, it will look like those other companies’ feeds with cards and those cards will be addressing those three questions.
Now we don’t say this is what you must do, this is what you should do, this is what you can do, but that’s -- in answering that question implied in what we are saying. So, for example, I have a card that says your Credit Card is 90% utilized and it says how much I owe and it offers me a personal loan to determine out over three years at a lower rate, not 25%, but at 12%.
So I could save money or if there’s a big transaction that day, $2,500, it says there was a transaction in one of your external accounts, but it happened in the connected relay for $2,500, were you aware of this or I may have gotten a person-to-person payments from a bet I had on the weekend from one of my friends playing golf and it said, you were just paid by your friend.
And so that member home feed leverages all the data we have on you and everyone else. So as our member base grows, we have more data to personalize for you and help you get your money right every day and we ultimately want people to come to the app every day, not because they need to do a transaction, but they want to see what’s in that member home feed to help them get their money right.
Mike Ng
That’s great. And shifting gears a little bit from consumer tech but to the Technology segment, could you just talk about the role that Tech Platform plays in SoFi strategy and how would you assess the impact and give us a postmortem on some of the acquisitions inside Tech Platform, Galileo and Technisys.
Anthony Noto
Yeah. The first job of the Technology Platform is to help us innovate faster than we could otherwise. No one has the same approach in being a one-stop shop all just on a mobile platform as we have. So no one really understands what technologies we need built.
So having the Tech Platform allows us to control our own destiny, innovating faster than we could by just using other people’s technology. It also gives us an opportunity to be a low cost operator and being a low-cost operator typically becomes a competitive advantage. So we can innovate faster. We have better unit economics.
But because we are doing stuff that no one else is doing and we are in the forefront of being the operating system for the fintech world, other people could use that technology and we want to make it available to other people so they could serve their consistency as well. It allows the entire tech sort of platform of the industry to be elevated, and at the same time, we can make money from it.
A lot of people will ask me do you want to be an enterprise company or do you want to be a consumer company? I do want to be 100% perfectly clear. Our mission is consumer focused, is to help our members achieve financial independence to realize their ambition and everything we do is to serve them.
For the Tech Platform needs to serve us well so we can serve them well. It just so happens the tech we are building is world-class and other people need it and so we can make money off it, which improves our returns, but it will always be to serve our end mission of a company. Much in the same way AWS helps serve Amazon when people couldn’t build technologies for them that they need it.
Mike Ng
Right. And no better evidence of being a consumer company, I mean, than your sponsorship of SoFi Stadium, obviously, a very large piece of your annual marketing budget. Could you just talk a little bit about your strategic rationale there, are you seeing the benefits from that sponsorship as you have expected to when you guys made the decision to do it? What’s been the impact on member growth and other areas of the business?
Anthony Noto
Yeah. It was a very controversial decision. The controversy actually started with me. The marketing team, my first week at SoFi in 2018, I wasn’t actually even an employee yet, but I was coming in the office in early February 2018 and the marketing team came over, they said, hey, you worked at the NFL.
We want to name our -- the stadium down in L.A. SoFi Stadium and I was like, I haven’t even been here like a week, like, there’s no way we are doing that, like, those deals never work and we can’t afford it and they came back time and time again. In 2018 we built out our strategy, in 2019 I was presenting to the Board and we were about to launch all the products.
And I literally said to the Board, it’s a matter of when, not if we become a household name, when we become a top 10 financial institution. And as I was saying those -- and the reason why I said when, not if is, because I knew we were ahead of everyone else and being mobile and being a one-stop shop.
We are about to launch all these products that everyone had talked about launching but hadn’t done and to me they were better than everything else. It was just a matter of becoming trusted and gaining more awareness and more market share. But when I said the word a matter of when, not if we will become a household brand name, I literally said to myself, oh shit, we have to do that Stadium deal.
And the reason why I thought that at that moment was they said, what do you mean when, not if, and I said, it’s when, not if they trust us. It’s easy to give people money. They don’t have to trust you. They take the money and leave. But for them to give you their money, they have to trust you and they are not going to trust SoFi. They don’t know -- only two out of 100 people even mention our name when they think about Financial Services.
We need to be someone they mention 30 out of 100 times like JPMorgan Chase. And so I needed brand awareness is, when you think of a Financial Services product name three companies. Well, at the time two people out of 100 will mention SoFi, but 30 people out of 100 would name the top five banks in the country.
And so I saw the Stadium as an opportunity to have broad scale reach and notoriety really fast. And if you tried to buy, most people don’t realize this, but we did the Stadium deal for television exposure, not for game day exposure.
My view was that there would be at least four to six primetime NFL football games at that stadium a year and each primetime football game, because I used to be a media analyst and I worked with the NFL and we did the first live NFL games on social media at Twitter.
I knew a live Thursday night game, Sunday night game or Monday night game had about 20 million unique viewers. Now the only way to reach that many people in one TV show would have been Desperate Housewives or Grey’s Anatomy like in 2002. Today, nothing is over 2 million or 3 million.
So I knew if we could have the game at our stadium on Thursday, Sunday or Monday night 4 times a year, that was at least 80 million unique viewers or 80 million viewers 24 times. And that was much more than we were getting out of spending $20 million on four different sponsorships, the X Games, U.S. Open tennis, U.S. Open golf, Big East basketball.
So I thought to myself, we can move the $20 million from these inefficient things that only reach 15 million people entire year to reaching 20 million people at least 4 times a year and that would help drive our own native brand awareness.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that, if you have a game on Monday night, and it’s at SoFi Stadium week one, the same audience is coming back week two. So in week one they hear the name SoFi Stadium 15 times during the broadcast.
They come -- they may not know what we do. They come back the next week when we run ads at the end of the first quarter and in the second quarter. Then you come back the next week we run ads the end of first quarter and the second quarter.
And the formula when I was at Twitter is if you want someone to try a new brand, we have to hit them with the same ad 15 times. So all of a sudden, the Stadium tied into our media plan was tied into hitting people, the same people that we are going after 15 times or 20 times in a season every week with great frequency.
I also thought it would be the most ambitious stage in the world and the greatest action the world would want to play there. The World Cup would want to be there, the individual would want to be there. That was a little bit of back and stand, had to go out and win those things, and boy, he hit the cover off the ball.
Six shows of Taylor Swift, like, that wasn’t in the contract. The Olympics opening ceremony, that wasn’t in the contract. The World Cup, that wasn’t in the contract. So it was a big bet. It was one we had to make and the team has done a phenomenal job turning it into a great value for us, and it’s elevated everything we do.
In Q2, I mentioned that we are starting to see the compounding effects of the FSPL and the flywheel happening and we are sitting here in Q3 and it’s happening even better and I couldn’t be more excited about the growth we are seeing in members and products and it just continue to compound that itself.
Mike Ng
It seems like an incredibly efficient way to get a lot of impressions. Beats buying ad spots on TV, I am sure. Maybe shifting gears and talking a little bit about just the financials and guidance. Last quarter, you raised full year revenue guidance, EBITDA guidance and also reiterated a commitment to becoming GAAP net income profitable by fourth quarter of 2023. Could you just talk a little bit about how you expect the remainder of the year to play out and what you see as risks to the guidance both to the upside and downside?
Anthony Noto
Yeah. Our outlook called for an economic backdrop of unemployment going to 5% over the next year, having a relatively soft landing with flat to down GDP growth. So with that backdrop, Q3 is going pretty much as we thought it would.
We were very clear that as student loan -- federal student loan payments returned that we would see a slight uptick in Q3 and a much bigger increase in Q4. Payments aren’t -- their first payments aren’t due till October 1 and they will feather in throughout the whole month. Bills went out in September, we felt that once bills went out, we have seen an uptick in applications. We have absolutely seen that uptick in applications in line with what our guidance indicated.
We also had a belief in thesis that we have two type of refinancing members, one of which would have a lower rate and so they refinanced with us, because they would save on rate and that’s absolutely been the case. One of which that may not have a lower rate, but they needed to lower their monthly payment, so they are going to extend the term of the loan even if it was at a higher rate and we have seen that as well.
So we feel good about our outlook for student loans and we are excited about having that piece of the puzzle back in place. It brings people to the site. It drives other activities in addition to being a really great product and helping people solve their financial needs and getting their money right.
I mentioned the compounding effect that we are seeing on member and product growth from our native brand awareness, from being more efficient at marketing, more cross buying that’s continued to play itself out.
The Tech Platform, the pipeline is as robust as it’s ever been from big financial institutions. We said we wouldn’t see an acceleration in the fourth quarter, but things would be relatively flat between here and there, and that’s been the case, but with improving margins and we feel great about that still.
The home loans business rates are high, but we are really, really happy with what we are seeing from an operational standpoint and reliability standpoint in time to fund and home loans, but there’s a clear headwind there from high rates and no refinancing market and just purchase marketing, but I think we are set up for great success in 2024.
And then on the Financial Services side, we talked about $2 billion of deposits each quarter and feel super confident we are on that track and continue to have a very differentiated product in driving direct deposit and more spending and we are on that track and it’s helping us out with the Invest product.
As I mentioned, 65% are cross buying and Invest is seeing good net flows and run Instacart IPO, which will be very nice to have as an additional benefit here in September and wishing our partners at Instacart great success on their IPO. So we feel really good about the performance of our loans and the demand that we are seeing as well.
Mike Ng
Great. I just want to dig into a couple of elements of that and I do want to leave some time for audience Q&A. So maybe I will just sneak one or two more in. But just on the student loan side, could you just talk a little bit more about your expectations around recovery, not only for this year but also into 2024 and beyond? Is there an opportunity to get back to pre-pandemic levels of refinance demand and originations, does the kind of specter or prospect of future loan forgiveness create some sort of overhang?
Anthony Noto
No. I think we will see the demand for student loan refinancing continue to sort of move back to where it was in 2019. It may take several quarters for that to happen. We said, we would see a small increase in Q3 and a bigger increase in Q4. We are not looking for returning Q4 to 2019 levels. It’s probably half of that or less than half of that.
But there’s 40 -- over 40 million people that’s still have federal student loans and it’s a real problem for them, $200 billion of that -- $200 billion of the $1.4 trillion that’s outstanding is at rates higher than we currently offer in our demographic.
And so that’s a really big TAM at this price, at the rate that we are offering now versus what their rate is. That TAM only increases as rates go down, which they will over the course of the next couple of years. So we think it’s a really good market for us to continue to build great relationships.
But one thing people don’t really understand is that in our entire history, we have refinanced less than 1 million people’s federal student loans. We have 6.2 million members, which means the bulk of our business is coming from SoFi Money, SoFi Invest, SoFi Relay and our Technology Platform revenue. We are not really growing our members significantly from loans.
It’s a great product. It’s a great lifetime value product. We make about $800 in LTV day one if it’s a new member. If it’s a cross buy member that comes in through Relay at a very low CAC or comes through Invest or comes through Money, that profit goes from $800 to $1,600 to $2,000.
So it’s a great revenue generating product, great LTV product, but it’s not going to drive our member base, it’s going to be part of our members. We get hundreds of thousands of new members in the other products and we get tens of thousands members in product -- in our loan products.
Mike Ng
Great. And you mentioned the momentum in deposits, which has been really impressive to-date. Could you just outline the strategy for ongoing deposit growth, how sustainable is it? Where are you gaining share from?
Anthony Noto
Yeah. So 90% of our deposits from direct deposit customers and that’s the key to our success. So we want to have an unmatched product so that we drive direct deposit customers. We are going to have top-tier APY, no fees, best functionality, free certified financial planner.
We give rewards across a lot of the activities that can be redeemed into the money account at 2X what they would get redeemed into Credit Card. We just launched SoFi Travel, which is a better way to buy travel with reward points and discounts.
We will add other categories like entertainment tickets. So we are helping people use their money the way they want without paying us anything and we are giving them maximum value. As Fed fund rates go down, non-banks that are competing with us on APY are going to have their APY go down as well.
Ours may or may not. We -- because we are a bank, we charge an APY that helps us fund our loans at about a 200 basis point margin. We could bring the APY down when Fed funds goes down, leave our loans where they are at, expand that spread to 300 basis points or leave it where it’s at and gain massive market share, because no one else can actually fund the APY where we can. We have a huge competitive advantage because we have the origination product and the deposit product.
And so a world in which rates go down, we are only going to increase our market share gains or increase our spread, which allow us to invest more money in acquiring even more customers and we are acquiring them a great LTV and 12-month payback now.
The share we are taking is from the top five banks in the country. We are -- they probably don’t even know that we are taking share because they are so big and we are so small. But we see where the ACH is coming from.
So we know who they are, but it’s the largest banks in the country that are offering nothing in APY and they don’t have mobile products that are very good, they certainly don’t have the added value that we have across our platform with free certified financial planners and the ability to do these other products at great discounts and great value.
So when rates go down, I think, our advantage only increases, and if they keep going up, we can continue to pass on higher rates in loans to fund the deposits, which we have been able to do. So it’s a very synergistic competitive advantage that no one else can compete with.
Mike Ng
Great. And I will sneak one more in before I see if there are audience questions, but you talked about Financial Services segment being contribution profit positive by 2022. What’s the path look like to get there?
Anthony Noto
Yeah. So we only lost $4 million in contribution profit in absolute dollars in Q2. The path to get there is continuing to scale money, which is very, very variable profit positive. The Invest business and the Credit Card business I mentioned, those two businesses together are in an annualized basis are losing about $150 million. That will start to come down as their variable profitability improves as well and next year even more so and so there’s a lot of leverage in the model and this last leg is really just about scaling the profitable customers relative to the unprofitable.
And when I say they are unprofitable, just because it’s early stages in their monetization and early stages in getting all their operating costs down just like it was in our Loan products and just like it has been in SoFi Money. So we have been driving over 40% incremental EBITDA margins this year despite growing over 40% and I think you will continue to see that happen and that will also contribute.
Mike Ng
Great. Any questions from the audience? I will pick up the last question. So I just wanted to talk a little bit more about Tech Platform. You talked about accelerating year-over-year growth in the segment by 4Q, particularly as you start to see revenue contributions from recently onboarded customers. Could you talk about some of the cross-sell traction between Galileo and Technisys and also talk about some of the success that you have seen among larger financial institutions?
Anthony Noto
Yeah. So the cross-selling or introductions that we thought would happen will happened, in LatAm, Galileo was getting a lot of introductions to Technisys’ partners and that’s bearing fruit for us.
The area that’s been surprising on the upside is we have the Galileo platform for two years before we bought Technisys and we really weren’t getting into major conversations with big banks in the U.S.
But as the big banks have started to do more RFPs for more modern technology, which has been driven by just a wave of challenges for them managing real-time assets and liabilities, we have been invited to those RFPs because of the core technology in Technisys.
But as we have gotten into those discussions and been able to explain our capabilities, some of the big banks are just interested in our processing from Galileo now or the APIs from Galileo and those introductions wouldn’t have happened before, they wouldn’t have really known to reach out to us about Galileo. So that’s helped us with the big banks.
The combination of both have definitely helped us with non-financial institutions that have big customer bases in non-financial categories like airlines or other areas that want to get into checking and savings in the next sort of frontier of financial products.
One of the things that has not been the case with these big consumer brands is they found ways to leverage their brands in a bunch of areas, but some have never gone into the financial segment and they don’t want to be in Credit Cards per se and have their customers owe them debt. They would love to have daily engagement and opportunity to give offers and checking and savings account, brand in their name is a way to do that. So there’s been a lot more interest there as well.
In addition to that, it’s allowed us to spawn new products. So Buy Now, Pay Later is a product that we offer on SoFi we call Pay in 4 that was built completely on Technisys and Galileo and SoFi full stack and we are now offering that to Galileo’s customers that may just have a debit offering they can now offer Pay in 4 or Pay in 6 or Pay in 12. So I couldn’t be happier with having made the strategic decision to buy those assets and now seeing the benefit from it strategically it has been really great.
Mike Ng
That’s great. That’s an excellent way to cap off the session. Anthony, it’s been such a privilege to be able to host you here. Thank you so much for your…
Anthony Noto
Thank you.
Mike Ng
… support and participation.
Anthony Noto
Appreciate it.
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SoFi Technologies, Inc. (SOFI) Management Presents at Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference (Transcript)