0/ Yesterday was $AFRM's 3rd earnings call as a public co but @mlevchin treated it like Day 1 articulating the vision for AFRM to "unbundle the credit card," discussing TAM, product roadmap, the 10-year+ vision, & recent trends / consolidation
Worth a listen given BNPL debates.
1/ For FY21 $AFRM facilitated 16M+ transactions & $8B+ in GMV for 7M users with merchants +5x YoY
Initial FY22 guidance of $12.75B of GMV vs. high-end Street at ~$12B (doesn't include $AMZN, or Debit+, modelling $PTON (-30-35%) YoY vs. Street +, $SHOP is implied at ~$600M-$1.0B.
2/ He spent a lot of time talking about the @Returnly acquisition & looking at other ways to add value for their merchants.
He highlighted their merchant marketplace (~1/3 of FY21 tx's occurred here)
3/ In his view the next frontier of "unbundled payments" is daily spend: groceries, restaurants, incidental purchases
This is why they're rolling out Affirm Debit+ card (1M+ waitlist already) this will connect to existing bank accounts & turn any tx into a pay over time product
4/ $V CFO spoke at DB yesterday & was asked re: BNPL & ACH payments to create a parallel network w/ SKU level-data & disintermediate the card networks:
Full transcript below but a couple of highlights
5/ $V will enable money movement & credit anyway in which merchants, issuers, and consumers want to offer, accept, or borrow money.
He points out the MDR fees & that at some point merchants will need to decide about the cost of BNPL vs. traditional credit
6/ He also mentions the tailwinds from BNPL for $V (e.g., large ticket items they may not have gotten, multiple usage of credentials for multiple transactions)
In models where the BNPL provider has to pay the merchant, they offer a virtual card solution that allows them to pay
7/ In other use cases they also want to be issuers where they issue our own credentials into their apps, & when a purchase is made, it all happens on V credentials, including repayments; this adds new issuers to their network.
8/ Re: routing over ACH railed & offering a competitive closed loop network
9/ They also answered questions on open banking highlighting their network of network strategy:
"We want to be interoperable across networks. We want to be able to get your money wherever it needs to go....If you need to get your money through an ACH network, an RTP network...."
10/ "We're also going to be interoperable across blockchains. We've already started to settle in USDC. We will settle in additional stable coins over time. We will be very interoperable across currencies, we'll be interoperable across cryptocurrencies."
11/ He kept emphasizing the size & omnipresence of the $V network....credentials are accepted at 70m+ merchants, with 3.6B+ cards globally.
Going to be a lot of twists & turns of how these business converge / compete / work together, etc...
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0/ In a podcast with Druckenmiller @DavidNovakOGO coined a few "Drucks Nuggets" advice that he has given over the years & had him extrapolate on it:
1. Do not invest in the present. Always imagine where the world will be in 18-24 months and invest for that.
1/ 2. Put all of your eggs in one basket and watch that basket carefully 3. Invest & then investigate 4. Look at leading & lagging industries (e.g., market internals such as housing, retail, trucking) 5. Be imaginative of what can go wrong (and what can go right...pick up change)
2/ 6. Be dispassionate about decisions.
Druck echoed similar sentiments to his Palantir interview where he says this is the hardest macro environment he's ever encountered to try to have any confidence in a forecast 6-12 months ahead.
0/ Last month JPM published a piece on payments entitled "Payments are eating the world" introducing their "POWER+" framework.
These 5 themes (& 20 micro themes) are responsible for ~$54T of the ~$240T in global payment flows:
Platforms
Online
Wallets
Embedded
Real Time
1/ When looking at the opportunity for FinTech / Crypto to disrupt banks there's the view that payments are a "solved" problem despite a ~$2T+ rev opportunity
Jamie Dimon notes JPM moves $8T/day across 52M payments of which ~98% is same day & 78% is real-time.
2/ JPM pegs global payment volume for platforms / super apps at $36T ($32T in China & $4T ex-China).
-The avg adult has 80 apps on their phone but uses 9 daily
-Super Apps aggregate complexity into a single destination & embed payment capabilities enabling txs w.o leaving the app
0/ @nubank filed their F1.
-They have 48.1M users as of 3Q21 w/ a NPS of 90+, adding 2.1M new customers / month on in 3Q21 & 80--35.3M MAU (73%)
-They are the 1st credit card or bank account for 5.1M+ users & have 1M+ SMEs.
1/ They position themselves as a better solution for consumers & SME's across "Five Financial Seasons":
-Spending (CC, Mobile Payments, Rewards)
-Savings (Personal / Business Acct)
-Investing
-Borrowing (Personal Loans)
-Protecting (Insurance)
2/ Not only do they have 48.1M users but they are the primary bank account for 50%+ of their active consumers who have been with them for 12+ months. They have 28% of the Brazil population age 15+ (and have been rated the #1 Bank in Brazil by Forbes each of the past 3 years).
0/ @patrick_oshag had former Notre Dame CIO Scott Malpass on the pod, Malpass took ND's endowment from a 3 person team (a priest, a receptionist & himself) & $425M in 1989 to ~$14.0B when he stepped aside last year w/ endowment spending going from $19.5M to $425.7M over that time
1/ He became CIO at 26 w/ 2 years of work experience & is one of the more underappreciated capital allocators of the last 3 decades.
Malpass was one of the first CIO's to embrace the Endowment Model having a greater equity allocation, diversification, & investing into alts.
2/ He thinks there are maybe ~40-50 institutions in the world that can implement this model successfully (which is why most endowments underperform) as it requires significant resources, access, continuity of the team, buy-in from the capital base, etc...
0/ We had Druckenmiller give another warning this AM about more gov't spending.
"In Spring of '20 economy was in a black hole & it was the most uncertain period [Druck] has seen in his lifetime. Congress did the best they could do & spent $2.3T. Fast forward 5-6 months & we
1/ didn't have a great depression, it turns out we had the sharpest V recovery in history.
By early Fall the 30 year trend in retail sales was above trend, this took 5-6 months, in the Great Depression it took 10 years, post GFC it took 5 years, this was a very different animal
2/ than precedent economic periods. It wasn't until after retail sales were back to trend that $575B of the $850B of transfer payments were spent. Over 1/2 the $5.2T spent on COVID was after economic crisis was already over."
0/ Leading FinTech co's are seeing CAC decrease as they scale.
$SQ finished '20 w/ a CAC <$5 & 36M MAUS (up from 24M in '19) while $HOOD saw CAC hit $15 in 1Q21 down from $20 for '20, $32 in 1Q20 & $53 in '19 w/ 18M accounts in 1Q21 up from 12.5M, 7.2M & 5.1M respectively
1/ These customer bases are starting to surpass incumbents: E.g., $BAC has 39.3M "digital users" (12.9M Zelle) while $JPM has 63.4M households, 55.3M digital / 40.9M mobile customers
$SCHW has 32M active broker accounts with $7.4T in clients assets & $IBKR at 1.4M /$363B
2/ The CAC associated with legacy broker accounts has ranged from ~$750-$1,000 while bank accounts ranged considerably from ~$350-$1,500 per @ARKInvest