Cardlytics Inc

NASDAQ:CDLX

Earnings Call Analysis

Cardlytics Earnings: Recovery and Tech Progress

Overcoming a challenging financial start in 2023, Cardlytics resolved a major dispute and achieved a positive adjusted EBITDA of $3.8 million for the first time since 2019. Heading into Q1 of 2024, the company anticipates 12% to 16% billing growth, excluding divestments from Q4. Improvements in their technology infrastructure have led to increased network performance, with 80% of network traffic now on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and a corresponding bump in redemption rates by 23% for partners on the Ads Decision Engine (ADE). Cardlytics is expanding their tech capabilities, building a comprehensive and flexible platform, and leveraging first-party data to guide their clients, like grocers and fast food chains, towards targeted marketing strategies, fueling growth and loyalty.

Cardlytics on a Path to Revitalization After a Transformational Year

The year 2023 marked a turning point for Cardlytics with a modest increase in billings and revenue, at 2% and 4% growth respectively. Looking at the more granular financials, the adjusted contribution saw an 11% rise overall, with a significant surge in the latter half at 20%. Notably, for the first time since 2019, adjusted EBITDA turned positive at $3.8 million, a stark contrast to the previous year's figures. These results indicate that the strategic changes in cost structure by Cardlytics have begun to pay dividends, putting the company in a strong position for future growth and investment.

Fourth Quarter Shows Promising Results and Platform Expansion

For the fourth quarter of 2023, Cardlytics reported billings of $131.9 million, an increase of 5%, spurred by the everyday spend and travel categories. The uplift in revenue was even more pronounced at 8%, hitting $89.2 million. They have secured renewals, such as a three-year deal with Lloyds, and are onboarding new clients, which suggests an expanding customer base. The U.K. market, which had been stagnant, exhibited growth and with new leadership, is expected to see robust double-digit gains. The company's loyalty platform, Bridg, also achieved revenue growth of 12%, while the adjusted contribution jumped by 18% to $47.3 million, pointing to a stronger monetization of their services.

Robust Cost Management Leading to Sustained Profitability

Cardlytics' discipline in managing expenses contributed to its largest recorded adjusted EBITDA at $10 million. The business was able to curtail operating expenses to $37.3 million, with Bridg, its loyalty platform, marking its third profitable quarter. Two successive quarters of positive adjusted EBITDA and operating cash flow indicate a stable financial operation, which is underpinned by a solid balance sheet reflected by $91.8 million in cash and cash equivalents and enhanced credit facilities.

Looking Ahead: Q1 Expectations and Long-term Financial Strategy

Despite Q1 2024 traditionally being weaker due to seasonal spending patterns, Cardlytics is forecasting an encouraging double-digit top-line growth. The guidance ranges suggest billings between $105 million and $109 million and revenue anticipated to be in the realm of $70 million to $73 million with a breakeven adjusted EBITDA. The projected growth in billings of 12% to 16%, from the previous quarter indicates an accelerating business trajectory. The introduction of a non-GAAP metric, free cash flow, is poised to offer investors a clearer picture of the company's available funds for investment, marking their efforts towards transparency and prudent financial management.

Earnings Call Transcript 2023-Q4

[Operator]

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Cardlytics Fourth Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note that today's conference is being recorded.I will now hand the conference over to your speaker host Nick Lynton, Chief Legal and Privacy Officer. Please go ahead.

[Nick Lynton, executive]

Good evening and welcome to the Cardlytics fourth quarter and full year 2023 financial results call. Before we begin, let me remind everyone that today's discussion will contain forward-looking statements based on our current assumptions, expectations and beliefs, including expectations regarding our future financial performance and results, including for the first quarter of 2024 and various product initiatives and improvements. For a discussion of the specific risk factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from today's discussion, please refer to the Risk Factor section of the company's 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2023, which has been filed with the SEC. Also during this call, we will discuss non-GAAP measures of our performance.GAAP financial reconciliations and supplemental financial information are provided in the press release issued today and the 8-K that has been filed with the SEC. Today's call is available via webcast and a replay will be available for 1 week. You can find the information I have just described in the Investor Relations section of the Cardlytics website. Please note that a supplemental presentation to our fourth quarter and full year results has also been posted on our Investor relations website. Joining us on the call today is Cardlytics CEO, Karim Temsamani and CFO, Alexis DeSieno. Following their prepared remarks, we'll open the call to your questions.With that said, let me turn the call over to Karim.

[Karim Temsamani, executive]

Thank you, Nick. Good evening and thank you for joining our Q4 2023 earnings call. I would first like to reflect on 2023 as a whole. We started the year in a difficult position financially, with the SRS dispute presenting a significant challenge for the company. I'm glad we not only resolved the SRS dispute, but also finished the year with positive annual adjusted EBITDA of $3.8 million. This is the first time since 2019 that we ended a year with positive adjusted EBITDA. In 2023, we also made fundamental changes to our cost structure, including renegotiating partner contracts and right sizing our expenses and we made key hires for tech, product, sales and leadership teams. All these efforts and results are a great foundation for us to continue to improve our business.With the SRS dispute resolved and our cost structure rebalanced, we can now fully focus on execution and growth, as well as addressing our capital needs. I am delighted to add that we have just signed a large new banking partner as per the 8-K we filed within the last hour. Q1 is off to a good start and we're expecting 12% to 16% billings growth when we exclude entertainment, which we sold in Q4. Alexis will provide further details on our financial performance later in the call.Aside from our finances, we are making progress across our operational teams. Our sales teams in the U.S. and U.K. are driving stronger growth and bringing advertisers back to the platform. As I mentioned, our bank partner team has just signed a large new bank partner in the US and we continue to have promising discussions with additional banks in the U.S. and the U.K. Our product and engineering teams are continuing to launch new products that improve the experience of our bank partners and their customers, as well as provide more options for advertisers.Let me provide more specifics on our progress. We continue to obsess about the outcomes we create for our banking partners, customers and tech adoption is a foundational part of creating these outcomes. Our new technology provides us the ability to run the network better, surface more relevant offers to bank customers and roll out new products more quickly. All these are great drivers for engagement, new content and growth. We continue to make progress on tech adoption, with almost 80% of our network traffic now on AWS. Bank partners that are on AWS have the ability to adopt our ads decision engine or ADE and we are in discussions with the remaining banks who have not yet migrated to AWS.We've mentioned that ADE will be a powerful driver for improvements over time by allowing us to interface with banks in real time, enhance audience segmentation and offer relevance and improve dynamic targeting. So far, we are already on our third version of ADE. 80% of our network is now on ADE, with 40% of our network on the latest version. For those banks on ADE, we have seen a 23% increase in redemptions, compared to a 9% increase across the whole network. We saw this trend continue in January and we are confident that subsequent versions of ADE will continue to improve redemption numbers.A focus on the impact of ADE on redemptions because we view driving redemptions as our NorthStar, as they provide the best outcome for our banks, their customers and our advertisers and because the best way to increase redemptions is to increase engagement, we have focused on 4 key pillars to drive more engagement with our platform. The first key pillar is content and insights. We are continuously aiming to improve the quality and variety of content on the network. We pride ourselves on being a high quality, in-demand advertising solution for well-known large brands. We are seeing growth from our existing advertisers and are additionally seeing advertisers return that had previously left our network.The strengths of our business resides in our insights. Most competitive analysis focus on scanned data from a limited number of retailers or a subset of card types. Our data provides the most comprehensive scope across channels, cards and geographies, making our insights highly differentiated. However, historically, it's been a manual process for our teams to pull this data.We're fixing this. We plan to deliver an automated dashboard by the end of 2024 that will provide advertisers with a snapshot of their performance against industry benchmarks. This dashboard will give advertisers a self served view of the market summary for their category. We'll let them visualize competitor activity, showcasing revenue, transactions and customer growth across different brands.Lastly, we will offer a customer centric data set showing brand affinity, new customer and churn benchmarks. This is just the beginning of a growing list of insights, use cases that we will be exposing over time. As we productize more of these insights, we will also free up time from our analytics team to provide custom, highly nuanced and actionable insights for our largest advertisers and bank partners. We believe this is a highly differentiated offering that will enable us to reduce churn and increase budgets over time.The second key pillar is giving merchants customizable tools to optimize campaigns and offers. I wanted to highlight the success we had recently with a receipt level offer test we did with a major U.S. airline. As a reminder, receipt level offers are offers tailored to a specific product category or item. In this case, the airline wanted to promote a higher cash back reward for flights that departed within the months, as they were experiencing softer than expected booking demand in the low season.To the airline's delight, 45% of ticket purchases in the campaign were for the targeted time period and allow us to close a renewal with the client just days later for a campaign that run the following months. This is one example of how product initiatives are driving more targeted growth for advertisers and delighting their customers.The third key pillar is making offers easier to discover and use. With several of our banks, we are testing different placements for the core widget, call out buttons, new entry points and alerts. All of these are at low volumes where we have already shown a strong ability to increase engagement with the program. As an example, when 1 of our bank partners started placing offers on the line item transaction in customers bank statements, we saw an activation rate for those offers that was 5x higher than the typical activation rate.The fourth key pillar is our differentiated offering for each bank. At tech and size of network enables us to create differentiated offering such as featured offers, increased creations and proximity offers. We are also relying on enrichment and customization of the offer experience. For example, we launched a unique event the week leading up to the Super Bowl called the Big Game with 1 of our bank partners. The big game targeted cardholders of that bank with featured cash back deals for all of their party supply needs across multiple advertisers. This is the first of many 2024 initiatives where we will leverage existing advertisers to target customers with unique tent pole events to increase engagement with the bank's rewards platforms.With these four pillars in mind, we are building a best-in-class platform with flexible platform APIs, a deep understanding of merchant data, a top tier targeting and decisioning engine, and a rich, highly differentiated user experience, with a fantastic source of content and insights. All of this is hosted in the cloud and fully flexible.Moving to Bridg. First party data is the foundation for the cookie free world of marketing and Bridg continues to serve the leading retailers, QSRs and entertainment businesses, helping them to better understand their customers by expanding and un-reaching their first party data. For instance, we are helping one of the fastest growing grocers enhance their inventory management strategies by analyzing purchasing data. A partnership with a large fast food restaurant allows them to grow their loyal customers by delivering hyper targeted promotions.Rippl, our retail, media and data network that we recently launched, provides CPGs and other brands flexibility in building sophisticated audiences, seamless access to a national footprint and user friendly tools that empower them to gain valuable insights, drive substantial incremental sales and accurately measure the impact of the campaigns. Over the last few months, several leading retailers, including Wegmans and Giant Eagle have joined the Rippl platform, which translates to a national footprint of around 70 million profiles actively being loaded onto the platform.This has sparked interest from leading CPGs who have started running test campaigns and this gives us great confidence that our strategy will pay-off. With our cost structure rebalanced, we can now dedicate our time to returning to the higher growth rates we should expect from this business. Our Q4 results and projected Q1 progress give us confidence that we can do this and just as I said last quarter, we are in the midst of a transformation that will spur growth.In addition to adding a new large banking partner, we're working towards a broader and deeper data set, more sophisticated audience targeting, better analytics and reporting and a variety of ad formats that will drive increased engagement. As we move past the core transformation that needed to happen in the business, our belief in our long-term growth prospects continues to strengthen.Now, I'll hand it over to Alexis to discuss our financial results.

[Alexis DeSieno, executive]

Thank you, Karim. Before moving on to Q4, I want to echo Karim's sentiments about 2023 as a turnaround year for Cardlytics, with most of the acceleration occurring in the second half of the year. In 2023, we generated $453.4 million in billings, representing 2% growth and we generated $309.2 million in revenue, representing 4% growth both versus the prior year. Adjusted contribution was $158.6 million at a 11% growth versus the prior year, with the second half of the year at 20% growth alone. Adjusted EBITDA was positive for the first time since 2019 at $3.8 million and nearly $50 million better than in 2022. As Karim mentioned, we've made fundamental changes to our cost structure that will enable us to drive positive adjusted EBITDA and invest strategically in the future.Let's move on to our Q4 results. We performed in line or better than expected with billings revenue and adjusted contribution consistent with our Q4 guidance and adjusted EBITDA exceeding expectations. We had our third consecutive quarter of positive operating cash flow and our second consecutive quarter of positive adjusted EBITDA. We continue to show momentum in driving top line after right sizing our business.My comments will be year-over-year comparisons for the fourth quarter unless stated otherwise. In Q4, billings reached $131.9 million, a 5% increase due to continued success in everyday spend, as well as in travel. Our restaurant category turned slightly positive in Q4 as the efforts of rebuilding our sales team are beginning to pay off. Revenue was $89.2 million, up 8%, partially driven by a one-time revenue related benefit of $2.2 million. Our top five customers accounted for 16% of revenue this quarter compared to 12% last year and we continue to land new customers and expand existing customers.Geographically, U.S. revenue increased 8%. The U.K. showed growth for the first time in several quarters at 4%. We resigned Lloyds to a 3-year contract and started the implementation of our auto enrollment program. This means customers no longer have to opt into our offers, which has allowed our sales team to sell and deliver larger budgets.We expect to see continued sequential improvement and very strong double-digit growth in the U.K. in Q1 as a result of these initiatives and of new leadership. Bridg revenue grew 12% due to an existing customer expanding its contract, as well as a new large restaurant joining the platform. We will soon have over 70 million profiles in the database and we believe we now have the scale to be relevant to CPG customers.Adjusted contribution increased 18% to $47.3 million with the margin calculated off of revenue of 53% compared to 48% 1 year ago. Adjusted contribution growth is partially due to the benefit of our partner share renegotiation. Adjusted EBITDA exceeded the high end of guidance at positive $10 million, the largest in Cardlytics history. Business operating expenses came in lower than expected at $37.3 million and Bridg was profitable for the third quarter in a row.Operating cash flow was $2.9 million and as previously mentioned, positive for the third consecutive quarter. On the balance sheet, we ended Q4 with $91.8 million in cash and cash equivalents and we had $16.7 million of unused available borrowings under our line of credit. This does not reflect the amendment to our line of credit, which we completed in February, which now allows us to borrow up to 75% of our eligible accounts receivable, up from 50% previously.We also confirmed the extension of the maturity on our line of credit by 1 year to April 2025. As a reminder, we paid $20 million at the end of January as part of our settlement with SRS and we issued 3.6 million shares in February. We believe that our available liquidity is sufficient to support our long-term plans. However, our amendment to the line of credit is one of many steps we are taking to improve our balance sheet. Lastly, MAUs were $168 million and ARPU was $0.53 for the fourth quarter, an increase of 3% and 8% respectively.Before I turn to guidance, I want to note that we added a new non-GAAP metric to our 10-K, which is free cash flow. We believe free cash flow is useful to measure the funds generated in a given period that are available to invest in the business. In Q4, free cash flow was negative $0.8 million and for the year, we were nearly $55 million better than in 2022. To remind you, Q1 is seasonally weak due to consumer spending habits, which lead to decreased marketing budgets for most of our clients. Despite that, we are expecting double-digit top line growth in Q1.For Q1, we expect billings between $105 million and $109 million, revenue between $70 million and $73 million, adjusted contribution between $37 million and $39 million, adjusted EBITDA between negative $1 million and positive $1 million. At the midpoint of our range for adjusted EBITDA, this would be the first time we would be breakeven in Q1. Excluding the sale of entertainment, our billings guidance represents 12% to 16% growth and a meaningful acceleration from Q4.I'd like to provide some additional color on what we are seeing in the top line. Billings are being driven by continued success in the everyday fund and travel categories. We continue to see our largest clients spending more with us. The majority of our growth is from existing accounts increasing their spend with us and we are continuing to focus on getting new brands on to the platform and winning back lux brands. In fact, we are seeing good momentum in restaurants with the return of 2 major clients back on the platform over the next few quarters.2023 was an instrumental year as we built the foundation for future growth and positive adjusted EBITDA. Our Q1 guidance implies further acceleration and shows we are making progress towards our long-term goals. As we look forward to 2024, we expect the momentum to continue and we expect to make progress on our capital structure. We are excited about the addition of a large new bank partner and will provide more details about the launch when we are able to do so.For fiscal year 2024, we expect continued operating leverage and our expectation moving forward is to have double-digit billings growth for 2024 and to be operating cash flow positive on an annual basis. We are focused on our NorthStar redemptions and continue to drive consumer engagement, top line growth and adjusted EBITDA.Now I'll turn it back to Karim for closing remarks.

[Karim Temsamani, executive]

Thank you, Alexis. With each passing quarter, we have delivered additional progress in the business. The trajectory of our financials continues upward. We have signed a new large bank partner and the transformation of our platform is well underway. I'd like to thank our teams for their dedication to the business and I'd like to thank our investors for their patience over the last several years. I am excited about 2024 and Cardlytics long-term prospects. Thank you for your support.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] And our first question coming from the line of Kyle Peterson with Needham.

[Kyle Peterson, analyst]

I want to start off with the news on the new FI partner in the [indiscernible], just want to see if you guys could give us any color on the timing of the ramp both in terms of billings and revenue contribution, but also will that require any sizable upfront expenses or CapEx for us to keep in mind as we think about our models this year?

[Karim Temsamani, executive]

Happy to start and Alexis can chime in as well, Kyle. We can't tell you anything more outside of what we have referenced in the 8-K with regards to timing. With regards to expenses, there's no major expenses up front that you need to take into account. And obviously, as soon as we can talk more about the timing for the launch, we will talk to the market.

[Alexis DeSieno, executive]

Yes, I'll just add to that. The full year comments I made does not include any material impact from the signing of this agreement. Like many of our other bank partners, implementation will take time. So we'll keep you posted on launch dates and other information.

[Kyle Peterson, analyst]

And then just a follow-up on liquidity and cash. Obviously, you guys have done a really good job, but expense structure, the credibility is extended, but I guess in order some of the other kind of near-term priorities you guys are thinking about with regards to whether it's just liquidity or the longer-term cash structure for the business?

[Alexis DeSieno, executive]

So obviously, we're focused on rightsizing our capital structure. It's a priority for us and we needed to address it in stages. First, we needed to improve the business. So, we've reaccelerated revenue and we right sized our cost structure. And the next we needed to resolve SRS. Nothing would happen in a way that protected shareholders without these being addressed. So this is done. And both of these have allowed us to extend the revolver and increase the amount that we can borrow giving us further flexibility. So in terms of next steps, we're working hard on this and we have a clear strategy in place. And although I can't talk about specific debt, I'm confident in our path forward. And again, we'll keep you updated as we can.Does that answer your question?

[Kyle Peterson, analyst]

Yes, that's very good color.

[Operator]

Thank you. And our next question coming from the line of Jacob Stephan with Lake Street Capital Markets.

[Jacob Stephan, analyst]

Congrats on the quarter, the guidance on the new partner win there. Just touching on the guidance here. I'd like to get your thoughts on how you're thinking about the upside of the billings growth, you're guiding to kind of mid-teens growth from -- is that being driven by increased customer spend? Or is that -- how much of that's coming from the increased engagement as well?

[Alexis DeSieno, executive]

Sure and I'll let Karim chime in at the end. We're confident that the steps we're taking to reaccelerate revenue at the mid-point and top of the range. I want to reiterate that we're going to be breakeven or positive adjusted EBITDA for the first time in Q1, which is really exciting. So our initiatives are really paying off and we're executing against our plan. And so we're focused on increasing inventory with new banks, improving our tech-in product, investing in our teams to get great content and reduce churn. And our international business is growing double digit. So some of these initiatives are taking time, but very confident in the guide and excited for the quarter.

[Jacob Stephan, analyst]

Maybe just kind of touching on the multi-tier offers programs. Maybe it sounds like you've had good success with your airline partner. But maybe you could talk about where you are in the process of rolling this out to kind of the broader client base.

[Karim Temsamani, executive]

Yes, I'm happy to take that, Jacob. So obviously, these are sort of still tests that we're doing with a number of clients and we're continuing to ramp that up with any time that's interested and it has a relevant use case. We will update the market when we have a view of the sizing of this across the whole of the network. But importantly, those new product initiatives are not only positive benefit for the bank's customers, the advertisers and the clients, but they also allow our sales teams to have normal discussions about the range of offerings that we have across the network. So even if some clients are not adopting them, it allows us to have a discussion about bringing more budgets to the platform. So there are several benefits to these initiatives there.

[Operator]

Thank you. And our next question coming from the line of Jason Kreyer with Craig-Hallum.

[Jason Kreyer, analyst]

We've seen a pretty nice uptick recently just in terms of new logos and the offer, kind of bigger names coming into offers. And I'm just curious, can you talk about like -- and then some of those include vendors that are coming back to the platform that have left in the past. And so just curious what do you think is different right now, what's driving them or what's changed where you're getting audience with what appears to be larger marketers?

[Karim Temsamani, executive]

Yes, I mean I want to stress that larger marketers have always been our focus. So we're continuing to make strides with some of these clients and now going back to what happened in the last couple of years, some of those customers that we had lost were not because of the performance of the platform, but because we see of those changes -- of strategy at these customers. And some of the customers we also lost because we did not have the right activity at the sales teams level. And we fixed that now, I talked about it in the last call that we're investing in our sales teams and we have made a couple of changes and we've seen those changes essentially allow us to have stronger relationship with many of our customers. Now there's plenty more that we want to do. And obviously, having new product initiatives that we can talk to customers about, now improving the risk level offers that we mentioned before also enable us to open doors and showcase great benefits to customers. So I'm very confident that our strategy is really starting to pay off. And I'm very keen to continue to see this growth moving forward and accelerating.

[Jason Kreyer, analyst]

And then on ADE, it seems like -- I mean, you've been talking the last couple of quarters about getting all the right validation points that this is certainly working and providing better offers. What do you think is causing some FI partners not to migrate to that in a quicker way?

[Karim Temsamani, executive]

So again, the vast majority of our network is now on a GE. So we're very pleased with that and then subsequent improvements that we made to just require a little bit amount of work at each of the partners, but it's very minimal. What we have is 20% of our network that's not yet on GE, mostly because there's larger tech changes are required for these partners to move from on-premise, which was essentially a old stack to a non-cloud solution and we haven't paid promising discussions with these partners, but it just takes time for the larger lift to look. So again, positive discussions, we will hopefully update the market as soon as we can with regards to the timing for those banks to move.

[Jason Kreyer, analyst]

And then just 1 last one for me, please on Discovery. I think we've talked in the past about how some FIs has moved offers around in different areas of their application. And it seems like they're at least historically hasn't been as much volatility in consumer uptake or consumer activation. So I'm just curious if you can maybe talk about what things you can influence in terms of discovery or accessibility inside of an application that you think can change consumer behavior and increase those activation rates?

[Karim Temsamani, executive]

Yes, that's a great question. I mean what we really haven't had in the past is a proper playbook and the right discussions with our bank partners to really discuss different placements for the rigids and different types of offers and different places where we can surface the offers. Not only we're having the discussions now, we're creating those playbooks, but we also have an ability to provide some level of data on how these are working for the bank customers that are using them. And again, as I mentioned earlier in the call, we're basically seeing, for instance, with regard to line item transactions in a customer bank statement, we're seeing a 5x higher activation than the normal activation that you see in the network. So we can go back to more bank partners and tell them this is what we see and then work with them with regards to implementing it also on their platform. So we feel much more confident that we have the right structure now that we're really basing those discussions on data rather than on sort of our view of what banks should be doing and that's allowing us to have much, much better discussions.

[Operator]

Thank you. And I'm showing no further questions on the Q&A queue at this time. I will now turn the call back over to Mr. Karim Temsamani for any closing remarks.

[Karim Temsamani, executive]

Thank you very much. This concludes our call. As I mentioned, we remain committed to positioning the business for future success. Thank you for your continued support and I look forward to our next discussion.

[Operator]

Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.