From Wall Street to Fintech with MoneyLion CEO & Founder Dee Choubey | Okay, Computer.
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Welcome to a special, what is it called, Dan? A collab. That's a collaboration. With our own properties, by the way. Of the OK Computer podcast and the On The Tape podcast. Special drop. Special drop. We're here with Dee Chowbe. Dee, how are you? I'm doing really well. I'm glad to be a special drop, by the way. Well, I mean, this is special for us because we just started our relationship with Moneyline. You're the CEO and founder of Moneyline. By the way, a

approaching a billion dollar market cap, publicly traded company, cutting edge financial products, really exciting space, more importantly, a really exciting company. So thanks for joining us. - Thanks for having me guys. - Tell us about your journey because it's a fascinating journey from banker to founder and sort of

couple of things in between. Yeah, look, I started the company when I was 32 years old, 2013, and I had no business really being an entrepreneur. I was a New York City, Wall Street guy, worked at Goldman Sachs, went to London, came back, worked at Citadel, but all the while really had a front row seat to the evolution of consumer finance. And then of course, the formative experiences that got me to start this company was through the global financial crisis.

And if you remember the global financial crisis, the first thing happened was you started to see bread lines around banks for the first time since probably the Great Depression. And I happened to be in London when I was a banker at Goldman. We got a call from the HMT, Her Majesty's Treasury, to say, hey, look, Northern Rock is going to go belly up. We need...

advisors to come in and help us really figure out how to take this over. So it was the first bank to have failed. And that was a formative experience. And a lot of things that we do at Moneyline, the whole mission has been to give people access

and make better financial decisions. And we saw the banking system collapse in 08, 09. And you saw the government really step in. But it was those learning points that I had over 10 years of being a banker that really kind of gave me sort of the ammo to be able to talk the talk, but then

but then also have a viewpoint in terms of what was missing from consumers. I mean, there's always great tools for the top 1%, but it's the middle 90% that self-identify as struggling finances, right, that end up kind of picking up the tab. Well, it's interesting, you know, you mentioned that. There was a weekend over that period of time where I had people from Goldman Sachs, people I was friends with,

that called and said, things are really going pear-shaped here. So there was about a 48 to 72-hour period of time where it looked like things were really going to turn in a major way the wrong way. And that obviously, it definitely shaped me in terms of what I'm doing now, but it clearly shaped you. And you use that to create something that's basically...

Hopefully all that's in the rear view mirror, but to empower people that have been disenfranchised for so long. 100%. I was actually in some of those rooms. I was in the FIG group at Goldman. That was probably one of the more powerful investment banking groups because they advised all the banks on how to raise capital, how to survive.

So Lehman Brothers had just happened, right? So everyone remembers 745 7th Avenue, everyone kind of coming out with their boxes and banker boxes worth of documents and baseball hats and paraphernalia that now gets sold on eBay. But on the other side of Wall Street, you had Citibank and Goldman almost merging, right? The Federal Reserve and the Treasury were basically saying, hey, look, we don't want all this balance sheet, right? So you guys go figure it out by creating a

Those that had balance sheet and those that had risk assets, why don't we go combine some of these and take that systemic risk off the taxpayer? So look, I think that there were a lot of interesting things that happened then. But one of the things that really created the tailwind for Moneyline to exist and also broadly fintech was the fact that when the government takes over a lot of the banks, even if they didn't take it over, even if they had TARP funds,

and they own preferred shares inside of Goldman Sachs or inside of Wells Fargo or Chase or Capital One.

Those banks get paralyzed. So if you look at the technology that the banks owned for offering a personal loan or offering an insurance quote, that almost went on pause inside of the money center banks for five, 10 years. So it created this Cambrian explosion of FinTech, right? Because all of a sudden Silicon Valley can now invest in venture scale businesses and financial services. That was not possible because the financial services world is closed loop.

Chase was really good at doing what they did, and Capital One was becoming the behemoth that we know it is today through acquisitions. But Silicon Valley didn't have access to the financial services ecosystem. So you saw that happening in the early 2010s. I was sitting inside of an investment bank, and I was helping raise Lending Club and the early version of SoFi raise their primary capital. And I said to myself, wow, look, if I could get engineers together...

This is really a once in a lifetime opportunity where the hood of the financial services car is open and you can actually go tinker with a gearbox a little bit and maybe try to create a new engine. Well, it's interesting because the financial crisis, for all intents and purposes, obviously some of these massive institutions were at the brink of going under and some did. But it was really consumers here in the U.S. I can't speak to around the world that were left kind of holding the bag.

Right. And we know that. And a lot of it has to do with the fact that these were very state institutions. They didn't actually know how to deal with consumers in a crisis sort of environment. If you think about a lot of financial services over the last 40 years, it was kind of bottom left, upper right in the sort of opportunistic.

they had to serve consumers until it went pear-shaped, right? And so when you think about the opportunity that you had, that you conceived after having a front row seat for this, what was the impetus at the end of the day? Because was it taking on incumbents in a kind of move fast, break things, ask for forgiveness rather than permission? What was the impetus that caused you to leave the seat that you were in and say, I want to start something and really focused on consumers? Well, look, I think a couple of the tailwinds, really, if I looked

back in time where the American consumer was getting really comfortable with taking his or her data and putting it into a mobile app, right? If you go back to 2013, the idea of having your avatar on a Facebook profile

was a very novel thing, right? Most people didn't want to be seen. There were privacy elements, but all of a sudden we all lived our lives, probably even more so than we do today. Look back at 2010, 2011, all of like our family vacation photos, our high school photos were all on Facebook. Now I think people have really kind of taken a step to bring all that back.

But the 2010s, you had this massive explosion and basically consumers getting very comfortable doing everything online. But what didn't happen online was getting a personal loan or a credit card or a mortgage quote or having personal financial management software where your bank data can be visualized for you in nice ways so you can kind of save money elsewhere. All these apps that are out there now kind of helping you kill subscriptions or invest, none of that existed because the consumer wasn't ready.

For their financial lives to be exposed on a digital device, computer, laptop, mobile device, just like their Facebook was. So that was what was needed first for the consumer to get educated. And then you do your financial services online.

Yeah. So once you recognize that fact, were you going after incumbents or were you trying to serve consumers first? You know what I'm saying? And then give us a sense of how you started. What was the initial offering? And then how quickly did it evolve to some of these other areas from lending to investing and the like? Well, first of all, to be honest with you, for all the entrepreneurs that are listening, I had no idea what I was doing initially. By the way, Guy and I are used to that.

Every day we podcast. You say that now, but I'm going to ask you a question that actually is going to fly in the face of what you just said. So please continue because you know exactly what you're doing, but please. Well, look, when we first started the business, what I saw was a market that was troubled by just some structural things, right? And we can talk about the technicals of it. The banks just had no desire to invest in technology for the American

consumer. So you're 100% right, Dan, right? That the 90 million Americans that self-identify struggle with finances were the ones carrying the bag. So we definitely saw that, and I definitely saw that as a key problem. Those that needed access to credit were the ones that were paying the highest interest rates. Those that needed to get their car financed were the last ones to be actually able to get that auto loan, right? So the world was very different. I mean, the economy was much smaller than it is today, even in the United States. And

All those problem sets for giving access to a portion of the population whose FICO scores had just gotten wrecked by the global financial crisis. But they had cash flow. They were making $2,000 every two weeks, but no bank would give them a loan.

because their FICO scores had just been wrecked because they just defaulted on a mortgage. So what we wanted to do is we wanted to basically say, "Well, can we use this incredible amount of alternative data? How you pay your utilities, how you pay your cell phone, how do you behave in life? How do you behave on Facebook?

Can all that data be used to create alternative signals on ability to pay, willingness to pay, skill to pay? And that was the original idea of Moneyline is that we're going to go take all this alternative data that's available from a consumer. They're going to consent to give it to us.

And then we're going to use that instead of a FICO score, any credit score from a credit bureau to make an underwriting decision. And we said, okay, you know, there were two other co-founders I started the business with. They all came from the artificial intelligence world and they were, you know, tethering together large PCs back then to create compute power to do parallel processing, right? Which now you can do

and a simple iPhone, right? But back then you needed hundreds of thousand dollars of compute power to be able to do that. And I was kind of just like this verbalizing to them the fact that this is, it's crazy that, because FICO scores can't be relied on,

a good portion of the United States doesn't have access to credit. And being a good entrepreneur is like, is there a business idea there? I was an investment banker at the end of there. We studied P&Ls all day long. And I said to them, I was like, could we potentially just go hack together your Facebook profile data, how far you live away from your house, what type of job do you have, how long have you had it? And can we use that basically to go create these algorithms to be able to predict

you know, loan default better than a FICO score. And lo and behold, the whole premise of a lot of FinTech today is that, yes, we can.

But it didn't start off with, yes, we can. It started off with, well, we don't know. We got to try, right? I assume FICO knows what they're doing. And if you look at FICO, it's been probably one of the best performing stocks ever. So clearly- It's funny you mentioned that because we actually talked about it earlier on one of our market call shows. But I'll ask you this. I mean, you're talking about a group of people that not only were underserved, but were never served.

So how large do you think that target audience potentially could be here in the United States? And my sense is age-wise, they probably find themselves in a similar bucket. Well, look, I think historically they were underserved for sure. There were millions of diamonds in the rough. They would have been absolutely perfect clients of Capital One and Chase and Wells Fargo that just weren't found by the system.

So a lot of what FinTech is doing is they're finding those consumers and Robinhood's done an investing, right? They made what 40, 50 million Americans that no one thought would invest investors. They have 25 million funded accounts. That's crazy. You know what I mean? So they're a great partner of ours too. And when you think about that, they were found and they were brought in because of tech platforms, because of democratization of information and the like. So that's a great example. Yeah. And look, it's the same thing that we've done in sort of the credit access world.

right? So we started off, the first product was we're going to go lend. We got a Utah license out of personal capital. We didn't raise any venture capital and we kind of created an algorithm. All it did was it would predict, did Dan get paid on Thursday? Yes, he did. And did Dan spend the paycheck by Sunday? Yes or no. And then how much more decayed from then Sunday to next Thursday when Dan was going to get the next paycheck, weekly customers, right? And then we did that 1,500 times because that's

My co-founders told me that you needed 1,500 outcomes to be able to create an AI model. So we funded the first 1,500 loans by ourselves. And then we went from there. And then we never looked back because then we were able to take that to the VCs and get that funded. So it's fascinating. My sense is the move in interest rates, obviously when the Fed pivoted and started raising rates, that probably impacted your business. When we saw rates at their peak in the fall of last year, it probably had...

some impact. But I'll also speculate that your default rates were probably better than you expected under those set of circumstances. Is that fair? Well, look, I think the... If you take a slight step back from when we founded the business to when we took it public in 2021, we pivoted the business to a point where we just wanted to be the underwriting layer. We wanted to be... We didn't want to take a lot of balance sheet risk because... But you would see though defaults. We would see that. But the first...

call it nine years of Moneyline's existence, we lived in Zerp. Zero interest rates. Billions of dollars went into FinTech. Capital was relatively cheap. You could raise a lot of venture capital money to go build these platforms. We took the company public in 21, September of 21. Very quickly thereafter, we learned that inflation was not transitory.

And then we started seeing spikes. And then absolutely what we saw there was less a problem with defaults, but more a problem with substitution effects. Because when the American household is used to 8%, 9% personal loans and

all of a sudden they're seeing a 15 or 16 or 18% sticker on that same loan, what they're going to basically say is, you know what? I don't need to remodel my kitchen just yet. Right. So the pandemic created a lot of different consumer behaviors that were really odd and had never been seen before. And then with what you're describing, when the rates started going up, it was substitution effects really that-

crushed the fintech world. And we saw Moneyline, we went public in September 21, probably height of Zerp. And then we took a rollercoaster ride through the next two and a half years. And it's taken almost three years to recover from that really precipitous rise in interest rates. Building on some of those early tech investments that you made and giving you the opportunity to kind of

identify these opportunities, take on incumbents. You just used the example of like a Capital One, which is a great organization, but for whatever reason, they weren't tapping into a customer base that you guys were finding. How did you like kind of broaden out your offerings? Like when you think about, okay, you started this kind of ability to kind of identify these customers, offer these services on the lending front. You know, like you said, it was definitely a

a tailwind as it related to the interest rate environment. What were some of the other products and services that you built on top of that as you were maybe anticipating a slightly different interest rate regime and maybe even a regulatory regime? Yeah, look, I think a lot of fintechs start off with a monoline product, a beachhead product, as they say. Ours was the ability to lend to a segment of the population that, not that they were bad payers, it was that they were unknown payers.

Credit quality, right? So our USP, our kind of moat or differentiator was that we could, without an ounce of doubt,

use alternative data to go figure out who were good payers. So that was remote. And what we realized was that the consumer who thought about credit twice a year, but we wanted to be a brand that helps consumers on a daily basis. So the next product we built was a robo-advisor. In 2017, we launched Moneyline Plus, which was a subscription product that gave you a full investment account, a full kind of yield capabilities, as well as when you needed it, the ability to borrow, right? So think of it as a private line that you...

very wealthy Americans have with their wire houses, right? With Morgan Stanley or UBS or JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs type of product. And we made that available to the household that was making $30,000 to $40,000. And then what we realized was, okay, let's also add cash management capabilities. So we added a, we gave them a debit card.

When we took the company public, it was actually a full scale, I hate using the word, but a neobank. It was a full scale ability to lend digital wallet, roundups, investments into an investment account. For millions of families, it was their first investment account. You can start off with 50 bucks, maybe even five if you really wanted to.

We recommended 50 bucks. Put it in weekly or monthly, whatever you can do. And we saw that that went viral because people were waking up a year later and was like, oh, I've got 900 bucks in my account. Just that sort of default setting habit setting ended up being a really, really popular and viral product that's still there today. Millions of people use it.

But we realized over time is that we would never be the mortgage provider. We would never be the student loan provider. So we started going and building out a full marketplace, both by ourselves and through acquisitions. We now have 1,200 partners in our marketplace. Everyone from the largest banks could start with the cities, the largest fintechs, the SoFi's of the world, all the way down to specialty lenders, auto finance, auto insurance. Everything's on the Moneyline marketplace now. My instincts suggest...

Once somebody is a customer client, whatever term you use, the stickiness is pretty significant. Can you speak to that? My sense is people don't leave is my point. It's absolutely true because you can use this many ways, right? If you don't want to be using Moneyline for your primary financial management, you can use it as a co-pilot.

And this is where there's been a massive AI craze, but the AI companies that are going to do well are the ones that have the white truffle, which is the data. So we now have 150 million Americans worth of data. So if you come in and use Moneyline and you ask it a question, if you ask our artificial intelligence, we're training at 150 million people's worth of habits, if you will. So we can get you to the best answer.

pretty quickly. And very soon you'll start kind of seeing us really promote that from a marketing perspective, our AI capabilities, where just like you would with Google or Amazon, you could come use it for free and get a lot of insights. And then, of course, we would hope that for some portion of the population, we would say, okay, now use your digital wallet, now use some of our other capabilities. But really, we want to be marketplace first.

And the business model now is marketplace first, where it relies on affiliate fees, it relies on commissions, it relies on taking what we've built from a marketplace perspective and embedding it in other people's websites. So the CNBCs and the Fortunes and the Forbes of the world, they will embed our white labeled marketplaces

marketplaces into their capabilities as well. So let me ask you this question. This is an interesting decision, I think a management decision. Are you going to be in the forefront of, hey, by the way, we're an AI company, or are you going to allow the market to figure that out on their own? For example, I think Palantir, it's not your world, but I think they allowed the market to sort of figure it out. And now you're seeing the subsequent move in their stock. I mean, is that

the type of strategy that you have? People will start to figure this out on their own and then you'll see, I hate the term, but that hockey stick in terms of valuation growth. Yeah, look, I mean, I think what I have learned operating Moneyline in the public markets is oftentimes when you tell someone that we are X for Y or A for B, it invites a lot of scrutiny. The shorts come in and they try to bet against you being that.

And it's either that or it's the markets find it hard to believe hyperbole. So what I want to do is I want it to show up in the margins, right? Because ultimately artificial intelligence is going to make the business more efficient. It's going to extend the lifetime value of the consumers. I would rather show, not tell on the AI side, right? I mean, look,

Everyone's got to be artificial intelligence at this point in its cycle is it's like air, right? It's like everyone's got to have their proportion of NVIDIA chip access, whether you could do it yourself or you could go partner with Google or Amazon or others or CoreWeave or others to go get your access to the AI chips. But I think AI for us is going to show up in our margins, right? And it's going to be able to it's going to show up in sort of the capabilities we're providing for our partners.

I think it makes sense. Again, it's my point of allowing the market to figure it out on their own. It's not you telling them that, but you pointing them in a direction that allows them to think, hey, I discovered this without being told that, which is far more powerful than having somebody tell you it than trying to punch holes in it. Anyway, that's my two cents. Yeah. It's interesting that you mentioned on the margin. I mean, we spend a lot of time talking to folks like yourself who run companies, investors. We opine on it on CNBC's Fast Money and

and the like, and a lot of folks are trying to, like they're struggling a little bit with the use cases for the investment, the return on investment. And you know, you just mentioned that 10 years ago, you started investing in machine learning and AI, right? Before it was really generative in a way. When I think about a marketplace, it really like lends itself, right, to generative AI, which is a next evolution of some of the stuff that you've already invested in. And then you just mentioned margin. So the marketplace, how does that affiliate fees you just mentioned,

advertising, there's a whole host of things that go into it. I have to assume like that's drops right down to margin versus let's say operating lending platforms and the like here. And so how have you shifted your focus from some of those earlier FinTech services to more of a marketplace? Yeah, look, it goes back to the cost of capital. We made a strategic decision in 2021.

to go really invest in B2B. Because at the end of the day, we're a data company, we're a technology company. We've got 150 million consumers worth of consented, permissioned data, right? But when we were a newly minted public company, we had a fork in the road. We had the opportunity to take

$350 million that we raised in the IPO and go invest that in marketing. We can go raise more name stadiums. You could go do TV ads. And what we realized was that even if we did that, we would not be able to generate the lifetime values that a long-term bank would be able to do because they would have cheaper cost of deposits and they would be able to lend at rates that we would not be able to lend at, right? So what we said was, let's go really be who we are, which is a technology and data company and take everything we've built for our direct-to-consumer capabilities and

and make that available through a marketplace to some of the financial institutions that don't have our wherewithal in digital customer acquisition. Let them be the balance sheet. We will be the co-pilot for the customer. So I think that decision then allowed us to really go into the enterprise side, which is taking our data assets and now really enhancing the customer who's coming in and looking for a credit card or personal loan or mortgage and using all this AI to say, hey, given everything that we know about your income, your bank balance, because you've linked it all to us through open banking,

We've got over 23 million bank accounts linked to Moneyline. So the amount of data that we're seeing is incredible. How many tacos get eaten in Texas, how much gas goes into cars and trucks in Ohio. We know all of that.

And based on that, we can recommend to the consumer that, hey, given your credit score, your income, your preferences, and what you want to do with your goals, we have found the exact basket of personal finance products that you need today. And not only that, these are the ones you'll get approved for. So we take it one step further with our... That's really the power of AI.

Hi, everyone. It's Guy. You've probably heard me mention Current before on the pod, but we can't stop talking about how easy managing all your money is with their app. It helps you grow your savings, you can build your credit, and it works for the entire family. Plus, with their new Paycheck Advance feature, you can get up to $500 before payday when you switch your payroll and qualify. No credit checks or mandatory fees required.

It's super easy to sign up. Just go to Current.com slash OK. O-K-A-Y. That's Current.com OK to get the app.

For more information, visit Current.com or call 888-851-1172 for more information.

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podcast today. So about 13 minutes ago, you said, I'm paraphrasing it, you probably weren't equipped to be an entrepreneur and start a company. Am I accurate? And I said, you know what? I'm going to come back to that because I think you're wrong. And

Your background, your Goldman background, I think set you up to do what you did about a week or so ago. You restructured some senior debt, lowered your cost of capital by 550 basis points, which is remarkable. I'm not quite sure how you pulled that off, but that sets you up extraordinarily well. Can you speak to that? Yeah. Well, look, I think that's a testament to just the profile of the business. When we put that senior financing facility, the

business was losing 63 million of EBITDA a year. Our midpoint of the range is now over close to $90 million of EBITDA this year, right? So that just changes the complexion of who your financing partners can be. But overall, we've taken the approach that we don't want to

be a balance sheet intensive businesses. I think there are many other public companies that are better bets for just taking balance sheet. We want to be a balance sheet light technology company that's helping consumers make good financial decisions with a lot of the data assets that we have. And I think that's a testament to just kind of the balance sheet getting lighter and lighter as we go along and kind of move forward.

That's an understanding, again. I mean, that goes back to your roots as a banker and what you lived through, again, 08, 09. I mean, you saw things that have, you said it yourself, that have shaped you to where you are today. And I think you probably hearkened back and said, you know, this is the way we should be setting ourselves up. Yeah. Look, and, you know, we've done, you know, my CFO and I, we joke that we've financed, you know, Moneyline in multiple different innovative ways. When we went public, we actually had a mini hedge fund. We used to call it the Invest in America Credit Fund. Yeah.

Now I know Brad Gerstner is trying to do invest in America bonds for almost every child. I love that idea, by the way. So have you seen this guy? I saw him on with Scott recently. We have a lot of content on our platform about how that may be so beneficial for. I mean, it makes so much sense. You know, one of the things, and Guy mentioned our partnership. I mean, we're going to focus on some of – we get –

We get a lot of requests for this on personal finance stuff. And I know that there's a lot of great resources that you guys have on Moneyline. And I know that you have newsletters that go out to hundreds of thousands of people. And you're using, like to your point, a lot of that data that gives you the opportunity to kind of be educational when it comes to that. I mean, the last thing you want people to do is come to a marketplace like yours and make bad decisions. You have all the data, but you need to help them kind of think about that. I wanted to hit on one thing going back to, again, what you said about when you started the company.

What has it been like over the last few years as a publicly traded CEO? And again, I know that your management style evolved in the private markets, but you have the ability to not do that with hundreds or thousands of investors. You probably had a couple dozens. So look, what's changed over the last few years about how you run this company with your team? Look, I think you said it very well right there.

is when you're a private company, you've got 12, maybe even less. Maybe there are two or three real main investors that you have to convince to believe a vision. But when you're in the public markets, the amount of vectors that you have to manage and everything is public. Everything you do, whether it's reviews, whether it's comp, whether it's strategy, everything goes into the 10Q and the 10K. So the management approaches have to be completely different. It's been a very humbling experience, right? Because every day the stock price

whether you wanna say as many times, you wanna scream it into the wind as many times as you can, that it doesn't matter. In the long run, it's a weighing machine. In the short term, it's a voting machine, the famous Warren Buffet line, right? But at the end of the day, it's a game played by humans.

And no matter what, it's going to bother you when it's down 8% a day. But it's transparency and all that sort of stuff. It's transparency. When you just mentioned Buffett and a lot of investors, they revere him. And there's a handful of other folks who have that sort of track record that he has. What are some of the influences that you have from the management side of things?

Yeah, look, I think that whether it's Bezos or whether it's Musk in terms of how quickly you bring product to market, but ultimately the biggest kind of boss you have in the public markets is your cash flow generative capabilities. And that's what I've learned is any time that we've slipped on cash flow generation, which in our world is EBITDA, we get penalized for it.

right? So I think now we're in a great cadence where we're putting $12 to $15 million of free cash flow into the bank every quarter. It's reducing your cost of capital and it's giving a lot of discipline as well internally. I just got back right before this podcast, I was with my team and every North Star KPI now is, you know, how do you save consumers money? And the next one is that a

good outcome or is that a good decision for the ultimate shareholder of this business, right? So it gives a lot of discipline to be in the public markets while executing on the vision, right? You have to have a hybrid. I think that's why founder-led public companies are, at the end of the day, they still follow that original mission, that original vision in a way that sometimes, whether it's professional CEOs or management teams, sometimes miss the mark on that. Not always, right? I mean, you have great examples like Microsoft that have created more value with professional CEOs than they did with their founders, but

It is amazing how much market cap has been accrued in Microsoft, Google, Apple. Exactly. When these companies- But when you're small like us, I think you've got to set it up to the right spot, and then you want it to be in its kind of flywheel. Yeah. How do you think about, you just mentioned white labeling your tech, right? So this is this kind of B2B-

I'm sure you've learned a lot about how different fintech enterprise companies work. And then obviously you have all this great data on consumers. What's next? Where do you think you kind of take this platform? Because it sounds like you've really learned a whole heck of a lot about both of those verticals and, you know,

You just mentioned about how the business is inflecting a bit. What does that give you the opportunity to think about next? Yeah, look, we have a track record and we're very good at building new features and new capabilities. We've got a great tech team. We've got a track record of building almost every feature that you can think of in financial technology. I think now is the time for us to really scale. We want to pick our winners. We want to pick three or four capabilities that we're really, really good at. We have a right to win.

And we want to scale them, right? You know, the business will do just around 540 million of at the midpoint revenue this year, right? So how do we get that to a billion dollars a calendar year revenue? And we want to take existing things that we do. And we want to really scale that over the next 18 to 24 months into being, you know, kind of a really scaled business in the public markets.

because we're still kind of in that small cap world. Not a lot of companies that are in small cap make it to large cap. I want to be the exception, right? I want to be in the large cap world. Let's be fair. Some of that is M&A, a good part of it, right? Because when you think about this sort of incumbents, and Guy and I have talked about this, think about a Goldman Sachs, okay? Obviously, you worked there, you worked there. I mean, it's got one of these reputations that I think it would take a whole heck of a lot of stuff, more than a financial crisis, to kill that reputation. They went into consumer.

four years ago, five years ago or something like that. - Unsuccessful. - And then they left consumer, you know what I mean? With their tail between their legs. And so it almost lends itself to some degree for upstarts to do that, right? To kind of push the boundaries, to kind of take on those incumbents. And when done properly, that you either become a big company

doing billions of dollars in revenue and having multiples of that in market cap, you get bought or you just kind of let your guard down and you miss it, right? And then you kind of wrap it up. So when I think about that, like going at these big incumbents, you partner with a lot of fintech companies. They're part of your marketplace. They use Moneyline Engine, right? How do you think about competing with, let's say, incumbents and disrupting these large incumbents?

Well, look, I think the incumbents are really good, as we've talked about, the balance sheet management, the operational elements of financial products, right? And they'll continue to be... And their unit economics are pretty much baked at this point in terms of how they make money.

If we can be helpful to them on being the sort of the co-pilot between their product and the consumer, we're the number one followed brand on TikTok, financial brand on TikTok. We've got an ability to go meet the consumer where they are. We're able to create content just like this studio. We have some of our own where a lot of financial conversations and financial content are being created. And in the vernacular of today's youth, today's Gen Z, today's

millennials, even Gen X, we're finding a lot of success meeting them where they are. If we can play that role, I think there's a $10 plus billion company that can be built just being the aggregator and sort of the marketplace for that.

My remedial math skills suggested current trajectory, you'll be a billion-dollar revenue company by late 25, early 26. Again, no need to comment, but that's the way I look at it. Number two, let's get a little granular here because I don't think a lot of people realize inflation is hurting everybody. But one of the biggest components of that is auto insurance, and people feel like

They have no alternatives. I think you're about to offer them some alternatives there. Can you speak to that? First of all, I agree with you. The last couple of years, the Mannheim Index has completely gone through the roof. Used car prices are finally coming down. It wasn't worth insuring a used car at one point. They got so expensive. But 100%, it's a big part of the inflation basket.

that sometimes gets overlooked. Homeowner's insurance as well. So we've got a great partnership with a bunch of aggregators as well as direct relationships now with the Geico's and the Progressives of the world. So just like what we do with personal loans, we can look through now into the data of what type of car you drive. A lot of Americans will pay the same rate throughout the course of their car's life as they do if it was a new car. But the car depreciates, right? But you don't upgrade your insurance, right? The ideal thing is you upgrade your insurance every year. But

Most households don't want to go through the hassle of finding a quote. We've got an amazing auto insurance marketplace inside of the Moneyline experience. We also now make it available to our publishers. So you can now embed that white label into if someone's got a car blog or if you can embed that right into Inline.

in sort of that content experience. So I think that's really where we'll continue to do that. And Otto will continue to do that in mortgages and credit cards. It's the same strategy. Yeah, before we get out of here, and again, we look forward to the opportunity for you to come back on a quarterly basis and kind of give us a sense of what you're seeing as it relates to consumers or where some of your enterprise partners are kind of focused. But we'd love to get a sense of the framework for...

FinTech right now, obviously we're going to have a new administration in a couple of months here. How do you think about regulatory? In the public markets, at least, we've seen a lot of companies inflect a little bit over the last month and a half or go thinking about maybe a softer regulatory environment. This goes back to, let's say, Elon Musk, who

doesn't generally like regulations and he's going to be participating in this DOGE, Department of Government Efficiency or something like that. How are you thinking about that? And generally, what do you think that means for fintech? The majority of skilled fintech players have to be ready for all weathers, right? So when we started the business, Obama was president. So we built under that regime, Trump 1.0, Biden, now Trump 2.0. So you almost have to be a little bit prepared for all different types of

regulatory environments, right? Just because you see a little bit of a deregulatory bend at the federal level doesn't mean the states are going to go away, right? So we've got great relationships with the state of New York, California. We have over 110 licenses, so we've spent a lot of time creating a belts and suspenders compliance management system. We have an OCC level look through on our digital bank. So I don't think regulations aren't going anywhere. I think it's important for consumers to feel that their money is safe and secure and they're dealing with a trustworthy counterpart.

So I think a little bit of, you know, kind of just making sure common sense regulation is there makes a lot of sense. And we're ready for that. I do think that sometimes there may be repetitive oversight by multiple different organizations. If we can have some clarity on that or some cleanup of that, that's always welcome. But at the end of the day, I think consumers want trust and security, especially with their data. So I think there's got to be a sort of equilibrium spot.

for the right amount of regulation. I think that hopefully we get there. Yeah. My final question, you mentioned you're a mature company, but you're starting to see the growth initiatives start to kick in. For example, I mean, you reported third quarter on November 7th, customers grew 54% year over year, originations 38% year over year, products 51% growth. That's pretty impressive given the maturity of your company. So you're hitting this inflection point now a decade or so in. So can you speak to that? Yeah. And we're doing that without a lot of brand spend.

Which goes back to sort of the ultimate differentiator is we're able to acquire a lot of customers because we have a dual strategy of direct-to-consumer and B2B2C, where we're able to take the consumers that are coming in from these publishers and offer them financial product.

And that's really been sort of the success that we could have put those numbers up as a direct-to-consumer neobank, but we would have had to spend 10x the marketing dollars that we do today, right? So that's really the elegance of the Moneyline business model. And that's why over the long run, we should be, if we do our execution right, able to show margin accretion into the 25% range.

in the medium term. - All right, Dee, it's great for our listener, our viewer, to get to know you a little bit. We really look forward to kind of having you jump in here and spend some time on, A, the updates to your products and services, but also your insight as it relates to the FinTech space and maybe a little macro here and there. - The next time it comes back, I'm sure there'll be things to talk about. - Let's do it. And obviously we're really excited about our

partnership. So thanks for being here, Dee, and let's do it again soon. Thanks for being good partners and having me on. Thanks, Dee. Appreciate it.