Q1 2025 Marqeta Inc Earnings Call

In This Article:

Participants

Stacey Finerman; Vice President, Investor Relations; Marqeta Inc

Michael Milotich; Chief Executive Officer, Chief Financial Officer; Marqeta Inc

Timothy Chiodo; Analyst; UBS

Tien-Tsin Huang; Analyst; JPMorgan

Ramsey El-Assal; Analyst; Barclays

Darren Peller; Analyst; Wolfe Research

James Faucette; Analyst; Morgan Stanley

Craig Maurer; Analyst; FT Partners

Cassie Chan; Analyst; Bank of America

Sanjay Sakhrani; Analyst; KBW

Andrew Bauch; Analyst; Wells Fargo

Presentation

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Marqeta Inc's first-quarter 2025 earnings conference call. (Operator Instructions) As a reminder, this conference is being recorded.
It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Stacy Finerman, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Stacey Finerman

Thanks, operator. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that today's call may contain forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties, including those set forth in our filings with the SEC, which are available on our Investor Relations website, including our annual report on Form 10-K for the period ended December 31, 2024, and our subsequent periodic filings with the SEC.
Actual results may differ materially from any forward-looking statements we make here today. These forward-looking statements speak only as of the time of this call, and the company does not assume any obligation or intend to update them except as required by law.
In addition, today's call includes non-GAAP financial measures. These measures should be considered as a supplement to and not a substitute for GAAP financial measures. Reconciliation to the most directly comparable GAAP measures can be found in today's earnings press release or earnings release supplemental material, which are available on our Investor Relations website.
Hosting today's call is Mike Milotich, Marqeta's Interim CEO and CFO. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Mike to begin.

Michael Milotich

Thank you, Stacey, and thank you for joining us for Marqeta's first-quarter 2025 earnings call.
To start, I'll briefly highlight our Q1 results followed by an update on the progress we are making on deepening our platform breadth and expanding the solutions we offer. I'll conclude with more details about our Q1 financial results and our expectations for Q2 and full year 2025.
Our first-quarter results demonstrate our ability to execute on our growth plans while simultaneously increasing our level of profitability. Total processing volume or TPV was $84 billion in the first quarter. This is a 27% increase compared to the same quarter of 2024, with the lapping of leap year reducing growth by 1 point.
Q1 net revenue of $139 million grew 18% year over year, driven by the wide variety of use cases we enable for our customers. Gross profit was $99 million, a 17% increase versus Q1 2024, resulting in a gross margin of 71%. Adjusted EBITDA was $20 million in the quarter, translating into a 14% margin fueled by both gross profit growth and operating expense discipline, efficiency, and scale.
Marqeta has been at the forefront of modern issue of processing, which started many years ago with de novo programs predominantly for fintechs with innovative and disruptive initiatives that leveraged cards in new ways. Over the past couple of years, we have heard from many prospects with existing card programs that they're interested in the capabilities, flexibility, and control that modern issue of processing enables, yet are reluctant to undergo what they perceive to be a complex and risky migration.
In response, in 2024, we deepened our platform depth by building a product to facilitate migrations to reduce the burden and the risk of moving existing programs to Marqeta. We completed the migration of millions of cards for Klarna last year, and this quarter, we began migrating a US consumer credit program and an innovative debit program in Europe.
While migrations and flips are still relatively rare given their complexities, we are building expertise and our track record with regard to this capability. The combination of our advanced capabilities, scale, expertise, and experience smoothly executing migration makes Marqeta's platform a strong candidate for more established brands and programs that are looking for a modern provider.
In Q1, we started migrating our first consumer credit program with Perpay, showcasing our ability to convert credit in addition to debit. Perpay has an excellent vetted finance offering as a unique credit builder card enables customers to earn rewards based on repayment via their paychecks. Perpay had already found product market fit in a significant client base. However, they were looking to switch from their processing provider to one that had more sophisticated, scalable, and responsive capabilities.
The program chose -- or the company chose Marqeta as due to our flexibility and ability to support their unique underwriting and repayment structure. As of February, Marqeta has been supporting all new issuances for Perpay and has started to migrate its active credit card accounts.
Platform Bread also means having product and solution parity when our customers operate in multiple geographies. We continue to see significant growth in Europe with TPV growth remaining over 100% in Q1. Adding program management is a key lever for enhancing our offering to provide a more holistic solution for customers operating in Europe.
We started by partnering with TransactPay before moving to acquire the company late last year. The acquisition of TransactPay is currently on track to close by the end of Q3 and we expect it to be a significant step in delivering our program management offering that is comparable to other geographies like the US and Canada. The transaction is driving significant customer interest, and it means more control of the entire card offering and seamless geographic expansion.
Our second migration this quarter was Bitpanda, a European crypto platform. Of the three recently signed European customers that we will support with program management, this program is the first to launch. We have been powering cards that allow consumers to spend their cryptocurrency via card for several years. Our early innovations with just in time funding allow fiat currency to be spent at the point of sale using a crypto wallet.
This flip had a tight turnaround due to the previous partner wanting an accelerated timeline to fully migrate the program. Our commitment and willingness to work quickly was also a key reason for Bitpanda to choose Marqeta. Not only did we sign and launch the full program in the same quarter, but the launch was executed simultaneously in 26 countries and 10 currencies.
In Q1, we also continued expanding our solutions to accelerate card program launches while minimizing customer development needs. A few quarters ago, we introduced our UX toolkit, a comprehensive library of pre-built UI components fully optimized for Marqeta's APIs and vetted for regulatory compliance. These SDKs make it easier for customers to embed payments into their existing mobile app or web experiences by offering product ready flows for onboarding, card management, transaction history, and more.
While the UX toolkit serves customers ready to deeply embed financial products, some customers want to launch a card program quickly without relying on internal app engineering resources or taking on the day-to-day management of the cardholder experience. For these customers, we expect to have a standalone white label app available later this year, giving customers a fully branded out of the box solution managed by Marqeta.
This mobile app will incorporate the same SDK components from our UX toolkit, enhanced with expanded banking and rewards functionality along with preconfigured flows for onboarding, account set up, transaction monitoring, and support. Customers will be able to tailor the app to reflect their brand identity and launch it alongside their primary application with the option to embed it later using the same SDGs.
The intended benefit for our customers will be the ability to establish a market presence quickly with our Marqeta managed app experience, then transition to a fully embedded solution over time without redoing compliance work or re-engineering core user flows. This dual path approach should not only accelerate speed to market, but also maintain continuity and consistency across the user experiences.
To wrap up before moving to the details of our financial results, the business had nice momentum ex in Q1 and puts us in a good trajectory for the remainder of 2025 and beyond. Specifically, both Perpay and Bitpanda showcase our ability to migrate programs in a timely and efficient manner, the core capability we added in late 2024. These program wins also demonstrate that our customer base and prospects in the market are looking for a technology partner that is flexible, responsive, and has experience with innovative solutions.
As the wave of card issuing modernization accelerates in the coming years, the experience of migrating platforms and programs while solving specific pain points with flexible solutions will serve us well in the future. These capabilities give us confidence that as more established brands with both de novo and existing card programs look to offer their customers new modern experiences, Marqeta will be the partner of choice.
Now let me transition to discussing our Q1 financial results which reflect a strong start to the year, outperforming our expectations across all metrics. Q1 TPV growth of 27% remains strong and steady, coupled with outperformance across net revenue, gross profit, and operating expense, delivering higher adjusted EBITDA of $20 million in a quarter.
Net revenue and gross profit growth outperform the midline of our guidance by 3 and 5 points respectively, primarily due to favorable business mix. This business outperformance, combined with moderating expense, delivered an improved adjusted EBITDA margin of 14%.
G1 TPV was $84 billion, an increase of 27% year over year, despite a 1 point growth headwind due to the lapping of leap year. This growth on an ever-expanding base continues to show our ability to grow the business at scale. Non-Block TPV grew more than 2 times faster than Block TPV fueled by a wide range of customers across several use cases.
Consistent with the last several quarters, financial services, lending including buy now pay later, and expense management drove the bulk of our TPV growth. Growth within financial service use cases was in line with the overall company and continues to be fueled by the rapid expansion of our non-Block neobanking customers where our TPV almost doubled year over year. Both lending and expense management TPV continued to grow over 30%, and both accelerated a bit from last quarter.
Lending, including buy now pay later, growth is driven by the combination of Klarna's migration to our platform in Europe, our BMPL customers benefiting from the increased adoption of pay anywhere card solutions and distribution through wallets, both are supported in part by newly available flexible network credentials and strong user growth among SMB lending solutions.
Expense management growth remains driven by our customers sustaining strong end user acquisition as AP automation and modern corporate card platforms continue to gain share. On-demand delivery growth remained in the single digits due to the maturity of the use case. Despite the changing macro environment, we did not see a shift in the mix of spend on our platform in Q1. Breaking down the spend by low, medium, and high discretionary TPV based on merchant category reveals no meaningful shift in the mix of spending in Q1 versus the past several quarters.
G1 net revenue was $139 million, growing 18% year over year. Although this growth was approximately 3 points higher than we expected, the outperformance would have been 6 points, which is more in line with the gross profit beat, had it not been for one unplanned change in terms with a partner.
Very similar last year, we recently renegotiated a platform partner agreement with reduced pricing, improving our economics. Based on the terms of the Cash App contract and the associated revenue presentation, we pass through the proportional savings to Cash App, which reduces our revenue but has no impact on gross profit. As a result, our net revenue growth was reduced by 3 points in Q1 versus our expectations.
Again, this is a very similar situation to last year and another reminder why we focus more on our gross profit when discussing our business performance. Block net revenue concentration was 45% in Q1, decreasing 1 point from Q4 2024, and down 4 points from Q1 2024. Non-Block net revenue growth was on par with last quarter and remains over 10 points higher than block net revenue growth, driven mostly by strong performance among our larger non-Block customers and the ramping of new programs launched since the start of 2024.
Our net revenue take rate of 16 basis points was 1 bp lower than last quarter, which is the typical seasonality following the holidays. Q1 gross profit was $99 million, resulting in a year over year growth of 17% and a gross margin of 71%. This growth was approximately 5 points higher than we expected at the end of the last quarter, primarily driven by two factors.
First, more than half of the outperformance was due to favorable business mix. Our Q1 TPV growth was slightly above our expectations, despite the fact that a few of our largest customers underperformed. As a result, our gross profit take rate was higher than expected since our pricing is generally commensurate with the amount of volume on our platform.
Second, as I mentioned earlier, we are pleased with our ability to migrate significant programs on our platform efficiently and expediently, enabling these new customers to benefit from the capabilities, flexibility, and scale of our modern platform. Unfortunately, one of our planned migrations later this year will no longer take place as we reach an agreement with Varo to terminate the deal we announced in 2024.
Instead, Varo has chosen to focus on its existing products. The early termination lifted Q1 gross profit growth by approximately 1 point.
Non-Block gross profit growth continues to grow many points faster than the overall company and is in line with non-Block revenue growth. Our gross profit take rate was 12 basis points consistent with last quarter. Q1 adjusted operating expenses were $79 million growing 5% year over year, a little better than expected. We continue to be focused in our hiring and utilizing multiple geographic locations to find the best talent.
In addition, the combination of our size and growth continues to afford us better economies of scale. Q1 adjusted EBITDA was $20 million a margin of over 14%, a new all-time high for both metrics as we progress on our path to profitability. We feel the adjusted EBITDA margin on the basis of gross profit, which was 20%, better reflects the nature of our business and profitability.
The Q1 GAAP net loss was $8 million including $10 million of interest income. We ended the quarter with approximately $1 billion of cash and short-term investments.
Subsequent to reporting our Q4 2024 results, we restarted our share repurchase activity as we continue to believe the current valuation does not fairly represent the company's value or the market opportunity ahead of us. In Q1, we repurchased 26.2 million shares at an average price of $4.22. As of the quarter end, we had $270 million remaining on our buyback authorization.
Now let's transition to our expectations for Q2 2025. We expect Q2 net revenue growth to be between 11% and 13%. This is approximately 4 points lower than we anticipated at the time of our last call due to the impact of the renegotiated platform partner agreement I referenced earlier that has no impact on gross profit.
Consistent with what we shared last quarter, Q2 gross profit growth is expected to be in the range of 23% to 25%, with an 8 point lift from the incentive accounting change we discussed last quarter. As expected, even if you put the incentive accounting changes aside, we expect Q2 will be our highest gross profit growth quarter as new programs ramp and new services are adopted, but we don't yet have headwinds from renewals, and we have the easiest year-over-year comparison.
As a reminder, starting in Q2 2025, we will accrue incentives each quarter based on the forecasted annual contract tier we expect to achieve. As a result, we expect that there will be much less variation in the quarterly incentives recorded in the P&L even though this does not impact what we earn in any given incentive contract year. This change will create noise in our gross profit growth rates as we grow over the previous incentive methodology.
We continue to be focused with our investments which are primarily directed toward platform capabilities and innovation. We are also focused on hiring additional resources in key areas like go to market to meet growing demand and compliance to further enhance our expertise and service levels.
Q2 adjusted operating expenses are expected to grow in the low- to mid-single digits due to an easier year-over-year comparison. Q2 adjusted EBITDA margin is expected to be 10% to 11%, 1 point higher than we had shared last quarter due to lower adjusted operating expenses. We continue to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of our resources and technology investments.
For the full year, while we recognize the increasing levels of macroeconomic uncertainty, we are not currently seeing any notable shift in spend behavior. As such, we are seeing consistent macroeconomic conditions for the remainder of the year, but noting the risk. We expect 2025 net revenue growth to be between 13% and 15%, 3 points lower than what we shared last quarter, due to the renegotiated platform partner agreement. I want to reiterate that this impact is accounting related based on our Cash App agreement and does not lower gross profit.
The impact of this new agreement should be relatively consistent each quarter. Therefore, we expect net revenue growth to be 13% to 15% in Q3 and 14% to 16% in Q4. Since the impact of this new platform partner agreement is due to our revenue presentation with no impact on gross profit, our expectations for the underlying business trajectory for 2025 remains unchanged from last quarter. We still expect 2025 gross profit growth to be between 14% and 16%.
While Q1 did come in higher than expectations, the bp was not large enough for us to revise our gross profit out upwards for the entire year, given the new levels of macroeconomic uncertainty. We want to be clear that our gross profit projections for the remaining nine months of the year are essentially consistent with what we guided to at the time of our fourth-quarter call. Therefore, we expect to be on the higher end of the original 2025 gross profit growth range based on our Q1 outperformance.
We do, however, expect 2025 adjusted EBITDA margin to be approximately 1 point higher than what we shared last quarter at 10% to 11%. This upward revision of our expectations is due to lower expenses as we grow more efficiently as well as the smaller revenue denominator due to the accounting for the renegotiated platform partner agreement. The Q3 and Q4 adjusted EBITDA margin is expected to be in line with the full year.
In conclusion, we are starting 2025 on solid foundation as our Q1 results outperform across all our primary metrics. Even as our TPV continues to rise, we are sustaining a relatively stable TPV growth rate with increasing levels of profitability, which keeps us on our desired path to profitability.
Our confidence to continue this trajectory is primarily driven by four factors. First, our portfolio migration abilities and growing track record executing flips makes us a strong candidate for established programs and brands that are looking for the increased control and advanced capabilities of a modern provider with proven scale. The combination of de novo program wins and a shift toward modernization among existing programs should result in Marqeta capturing an increasing share of the market.
Second, our customer base and large prospects in the market are looking for a true technology partner that is flexible, responsive, and innovative to solve the card issuing and money movement pain points, as well as driving increasing levels of engagement with their users. We believe Marqeta is relatively unique in our ability to meet those needs.
Third, our European business continues to expand rapidly, and our recent launch of program management in Europe is a promising and valuable expansion of Marqeta's platform breadth and capabilities.
Finally, our platform continues to reach new levels of economies of scale. The rapid adjusted EBITDA margin expansion is evidence of our ability to reach our profitability potential and fuel long-term value creation as the business grows.
I will now turn it back over to the operator for questions.