MoneyHero (NASDAQ:MNY) reported first-quarter financial results on Wednesday. The transcript from the company's first-quarter earnings call has been provided below.

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Summary

Full Transcript

OPERATOR

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to MoneyHero Group first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are on the listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you would need to press Star 11 on your telephone and you will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press Star 11 again.

Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would like now to turn the conference over to Gretchen Quan, Corporate Communications Lead. Please go ahead.

Gretchen Quan, Corporate Communications Lead

Good morning everyone and welcome to MoneyHero 2026 first quarter earnings conference call. I am Gretchen Quan, Corporate Communications Lead at MoneyHero. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that today's call will include forward-looking statements which are inherently subject to risks and uncertainties and may not be realized in the future for various reasons as stated in our earnings press release which was issued earlier today and is also available on our investor relations website.

In addition, please note that today's discussion will include both IFRS and non-IFRS financial measures for comparison purposes only. For reconciliations of these non-IFRS measures to the most directly comparable IFRS measures, please refer to our earnings release and SEC filings. Lastly, a webcast replay and the script of this conference call will be available on our investor relations website. Joining me on the call today is Danny Leung, Interim CEO and CFO, who will go over our strategy, business updates, operation highlights, and financial performance for the first quarter of 2026.

This will be followed by a Q and A section. With that, let me turn the call over to Danny. Thank you, Gretchen. Good day, everyone, and thank you for joining us to discuss MoneyHero Group's first quarter 2026 financial results. When we closed out 2025, we signaled that our multi-year strategic turnaround was complete. Today, I'm very pleased to report that our first quarter 2026 results reflect continued progress towards sustainable, profitable scaling. While we delivered encouraging revenue growth and improved operating efficiency during the quarter, we remain highly focused on executing against our broader full-year 2026 objectives while navigating a dynamic operating environment.

We delivered total revenue of $16.5 million for the quarter, up a solid 15% year over year. More importantly, what stands out is the quality of the growth. Our disciplined focus on optimizing unit economics has translated into meaningful operating efficiency gains and stronger monetization across our core markets and verticals. For the next few minutes, I want to take you on a deep dive into the mechanics of this performance. I'll walk you through our geographic markets breakdown, our vertical market product mix, highlight the structural leverage we are unlocking through our AI initiatives, and conclude with a review of our financial positions and capital allocation strategy. Let us begin with our geographic performance. Our strategy over the last year has been to ground our growth in the most mature, high-yielding markets while optimizing emerging markets for profitability rather than chasing low-margin volume. This quarter, our performance was driven by our two core markets, Hong Kong and Singapore, which together accounted for over 85% of our group revenue. Hong Kong had a particularly strong quarter.

Revenue surged 33% year over year to $8.5 million, further solidifying our market leadership. We are capitalizing on stronger consumer demand for higher-margin wealth and insurance products. And the real story is our unit economics. Because of our disciplined customer acquisition strategies, gross profit in Hong Kong grew substantially. We are acquiring high-intent users at a lower cost, resulting in meaningful margin expansion. Singapore delivered steady revenue growth of 11% year over year to $5.6 million.

This market is highly competitive, but our deep commercial partnerships and localized campaigns allowed us to also improve on GP. We view Singapore as a highly stable cash-generating foundation that funds our broader regional innovations. But perhaps the most compelling evidence of our strategic maturity is found in our emerging markets, Taiwan and the Philippines. In previous years, these markets were characterized by aggressive marketing spend designed to capture market share, often at the expense of profitability.

We have moved away from that approach. Taiwan and the Philippines continue to recover, supported by the structural leverage created through our strategic pivot to these regions. In Taiwan, we successfully optimized our localized product use, driving enhanced conversion efficiencies across our core verticals. In the Philippines, we prioritized core profitability by pulling back on lower-margin volume. These initiatives led to respective year-over-year revenue declines of 17% in the Philippines and 12% in Taiwan, reflecting our prioritization of margin quality over volume.

To accelerate our path toward group-level profitability, we are doing more with less, and it is driving adjusted EBITDA optimization. Turning to our product verticals, that same quality over quantity discipline applies, and it continues to accelerate our margin expansion story. For years, the personal finance comparison industry within our markets has been heavily reliant on credit card acquisitions. While credit cards remain vital to our business, they carry lower margins due to the heavy rewards and promotional costs required to drive volume.

Our thesis has been to compound our earning profile, we must transition our users into higher-margin protocols such as wealth and insurance products. That thesis is now being validated by our results. Combined revenue from our higher-margin wealth and insurance verticals grew 31% year over year to $4.7 million. These categories now represent over 28% of our total group revenue, up from 25% in the prior year period. Our wealth vertical was the highlight this quarter.

Revenue expanded by an impressive 53% year over year to $2.5 million. This growth is being driven by successful compliant partnerships with licensed digital asset platforms and top-tier retail brokerages, which are highly efficient and require minimal customer acquisition subsidies. Insurance revenue grew 12% to $2.1 million. This is a direct result of our transition toward end-to-end real-time pricing journeys. By utilizing EM-backed architecture such as our partnership with Votek, we keep users on a platform to complete the purchase.

This reduces frictions, eliminates drop-off to third-party sites, and locks in high-margin recurring renewal revenue. Meanwhile, our core banking products continue to perform well. Personal loans and mortgages deliver 13% revenue growth, rising to $2.8 million. Because we are targeting high-intent borrowers, GP in this segment grew substantially. Finally, credit cards generated $9 million, growing 10% year over year and remain our primary volume engine.

As part of our reward optimization strategy, we intentionally recalibrated our promotional spend here. While this slightly compressed credit card GP, it ultimately drove a much healthier, more sustainable lifetime value for the accounts we acquired.

OPERATOR

Press star 11 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. And to withdraw your question, please press star one one again. And our first question is going to come from Kelvin Wong with Spica Capital. Your line is now open.

Kelvin Wong, Spica Capital

Good evening and thank you for taking my questions. I'd like to have three, if I may. First one is about your financials. It's just. EBITDA law actually narrowed significantly by 68%, bringing you very close to breakeven. However, the statutory net loss widened to 6.7 million US. Can you walk us through the main bridge items explaining this divergence?

Danny Leung, Chief Financial Officer

Okay, thank you, Kelvin, for your questions. We welcome the opportunity to share the operational reality of our business, which we believe is best reflected in our shifting adjusted EBITDA trajectory. Our focus remains entirely on disciplined executions, and our adjusted EBITDA loss narrowing by 68% year over year to 1.1 million gives us clear visibility on our path to sustainable profitability. This major step forward is a direct result of our permanent efforts to improve cost efficiencies, streamline our headcount, and optimize revenue quality across the group.

To understand the statutory net loss of 6.7 million, it will be helpful to look at the macroeconomics and non-cash accounting factors and one-time items that impact our P&L but did not affect our actual cash run rate. To answer that specifically, these include during the quarters a 1.1 million non-cash fair value accounting adjustment from warrant liabilities. We also have $2.4 million in unrealized FX fluctuations, which was mainly due to the stronger US dollars compared with our other functional currency within the group, and another $1.6 million in non-recurring legal and professional fees.

So if you strip away these non-cash and one-time items, our core operating cost base actually declined compared to the same period last year, even as our top line grew strongly by 15%. This proves that our management team is scaling the company responsibly, protecting a healthy cash balance of 28 million and keeping core spending strictly under control.

Kelvin Wong, Spica Capital

Okay, very clear. My second question is more on the key performance metrics. Your total applications actually fell from 434,000 to 329,000, and the absolute clicks dropped from 2.1 million to 1.4 million. And you lost significant traffic in Taiwan and the Philippines. So does this drop in your operational funnel and user base mean your brand engagement is collapsing? And how can you sustain your 15% revenue growth?

Danny Leung, Chief Financial Officer

That's a very good question. Thanks again, Kelvin. The trends you see in our user traffic reflect our deliberate transition from a model focused on raw volume to one that actually focuses entirely on revenue, quality, and profitability. In the past, our traffic numbers in markets such as the Philippines and Taiwan were inflated by expensive broad digital marketing campaigns that brought in millions of visitors who had no near-term intent to actually apply for financial products from our website.

So by stopping those low ROI campaigns, we allowed our traffic and unique user metrics to normalize to their true baseline of high-intent consumers who come to our platform to actually actively compare and select products. Our Q1 performance is a very strong indicator of that. This stabilization effort is working beautifully as group revenues still increased by 15% year over year to 16.5 million despite the drop. What is most important is that our revenue mix has shifted rapidly toward high-margin products, with our wealth and insurance segments growing 31% year over year on a combined basis.

So in fact, our total MoneyHero group members, which track users who actually register and build a relationship with us, grew 24% to 9.8 million. We didn't lose our core consumers; we simply stopped paying for empty clicks that allow us to narrow our adjusted EBITDA loss by connecting high-value users with our commercial partners.

Kelvin Wong, Spica Capital

Okay, that sounds good. I would like to have a follow-up question on that. You can see that Hong Kong and Singapore are effectively carrying their entire business with a revenue contribution of approximately 85%, while the Philippines and Taiwan's revenue contribution actually contracted to 17% and 12% respectively, alongside of course a massive collapse in monthly unique users. So are we witnessing an intentional strategic soft exit or downsizing of these secondary markets due to unviable unit economics?

Or on the other hand, are you rapidly losing market share to local competitors there?

Danny Leung, Chief Financial Officer

Thanks again, Kelvin. Yeah, I'll be happy to answer the questions. What you are witnessing is the strict execution of our mandate to achieve sustainable adjusted EBITDA profitability. You have already pointed out that Hong Kong and Singapore possess our strongest unit economics, the highest lifetime value per customer, and the most mature digital financial ecosystems. So we have intentionally reallocated our capital, technology, and marketing resources toward these two markets because, quite simply, they yield immediate and highly profitable returns.

On the other hand, in Taiwan and the Philippines, we have experienced contractions in organic traffic visits year over year as the broader digital search landscape evolves and as we see changes in how search engines and AI impact traffic. Organic discovery is facing pressure across all of our platforms. This is particularly true in both Taiwan and the Philippines, where our brand moat is still developing compared to our dominance in Hong Kong and Singapore.

However, the narrative of a collapse or a soft exit completely misses how we actively manage the P&L. In response to these organic headwinds, we did not just blindly buy expensive traffic to plug the organic gap. Instead, we actually optimized for unit economics. In the case of the Philippines, we slashed our performance marketing spend by 57% year over year, bringing it down from around 1.1 million to roughly 400k specifically to protect our margins.

So as a result, yes, top-line revenue contracted by 17%. But because we monetized the remaining traffic so efficiently and cut our acquisition cost, our GP in the Philippines actually grew. The story in Taiwan is very similar. Despite significant organic traffic headwinds, we managed the downstream funnel conversion so effectively that revenue actually only fell 12%. At the same time, we optimized our reward cost and paid marketing, which improved Taiwan's GP also.

So to answer your questions, we are not soft exiting nor are we bleeding out to local competitors. We are proving the absolute resilience of our model. Ultimately, we successfully extracted over 40% more GP from both of these markets, even while navigating one of the toughest organic top-of-the-funnel environments we have ever seen.

Kelvin Wong, Spica Capital

Okay, very clear. Thanks.

Danny Leung, Chief Financial Officer

Thank you, Kelvin.

OPERATOR

Thank you. And the next question will come from William Gregozewski with Green Ridge Global. Your line's open.

William Gregozewski, Green Ridge Global

Hey Danny. There's obviously been quite a few changes to the board since the last conference call. Given everything that was speculated on in the media, and I realize it's just speculation ahead of that call, what are the takeaways we should have from viewing the changes?

Danny Leung, Chief Financial Officer

Thank you, William, for your questions. Yeah. So, to begin, all our recent board adjustments, strategic refreshments directly align with our current business inflection point. We have now fully exited the restructuring and cost reduction phase that defined the past two years. What I can say is today we are firmly in a profitable scaling stage that focuses on AI-driven margin expansion and delivering sustainable long-term shareholders returns. This board refresh is intentionally tailored to bring in the exact expertise required for this new growth era.

Specifically, our board brings deep experience across fintech, scaling, digital consumer platforms, capital allocations, and M&A governance. These are the core capabilities critical to overseeing our next chapter. And also crucially, there is full alignment between the refreshed board and the interim management team regarding the company's strategic priorities. So, moving forward, we are completely united on four key pillars: scaling AI across all functions, growing our high-margin wealth and insurance revenue, maintaining strict cost discipline, and advancing steadily toward consistent and positive adjusted EBITDA.

William Gregozewski, Green Ridge Global

Okay, great. And then since there's not the permanent CEO yet, you said that's still underway. Can you talk about the Board's view on M&A or any possible uses of cash we should look for now that you're running around breakeven?

Danny Leung, Chief Financial Officer

Yep, sure can. Yeah. Thanks for the question, William. Regarding the search for a permanent CEO, the Board's formal process remains active and ongoing. As you can appreciate, we want to ensure we find the right leader for our next chapter. So we will provide updates to the market only when we have a concrete milestone to share. Turning to your other questions about capital allocation and M&A, now that we are operating towards breakeven or better, our balance sheet remains completely debt-free with very healthy cash reserves.

Our capital priority continues to be organic reinvestment into our high-return internal growth levers. Specifically, we are funding our group-wide AI rollout and accelerating the scale of higher-margin verticals in wealth and insurance. As for M&A, the Board remains open to evaluating selective market consolidation opportunities. However, we are maintaining a highly disciplined approach. With that, we will only pursue transactions that meet our strict predefined capital return criteria and clearly enhance long-term shareholders' value.

Thanks, William.

William Gregozewski, Green Ridge Global

Great. Thanks, Danny.

OPERATOR

Thank you. And this does conclude today's question and answer session. And I will now turn the call back over to Danny for closing remarks.

Danny Leung, Chief Financial Officer

Thank you, Michelle. Again, thank you all for being here today. Our first quarter results reflect the next phase of MoneyHero's journey. Having completed our strategic turnaround in 2025, delivering our first-ever adjusted EBITDA gain and a net profit in the fourth quarter, we are now executing on the next mandate, scaling profitable growth and leadership structure built for this chapter. I want to take this opportunity to thank our team for the continued execution, our partners for the trust, and our shareholders for their patience and support.

As we move into the remainder of 2026, we look forward to sharing our next set of results with you. Thank you, everyone, and have a good day.

OPERATOR

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating and you may now disconnect.

Disclaimer: This transcript is provided for informational purposes only. While we strive for accuracy, there may be errors or omissions in this automated transcription. For official company statements and financial information, please refer to the company's SEC filings and official press releases. Corporate participants' and analysts' statements reflect their views as of the date of this call and are subject to change without notice.