SPECIAL NOTE REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS
This Annual Report on Form 10-K contains forward-looking statements that involve substantial risks and uncertainties. All statements other than statements of historical facts contained in this Annual Report on Form 10-K, including statements regarding future events or our future results of operations, financial condition, business, strategies, financial needs, and the plans and objectives of management, are forward-looking statements. In some cases you can identify forward-looking statements because they contain words such as “anticipate,” “believe,” “continue,” “could,” “estimate,” “expect,” “intend,” “may,” “might,” “likely,” “plan,” “potential,” “predict,” “project,” “seek,” “should,” “target,” “will,” “would,” or similar expressions and the negatives of those terms. These forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements concerning the following:
•our expectations regarding our revenue, expenses, and other operating results;
•our ability to acquire new customers and successfully retain existing customers;
•our ability to develop new products and services and bring them to market in a timely manner;
•our ability to achieve or sustain our profitability;
•our ability to maintain and expand our strategic relationships with third parties;
•our business plan and our ability to effectively manage our growth;
•our market opportunity, including our total addressable market;
•anticipated trends, growth rates, and challenges in our business and in the markets in which we operate;
•the COVID-19 pandemic, and its impact on our employees, customers, strategic partners, vendors, results of operations, liquidity, and financial condition;
•uncertainties regarding the impact of general economic and market conditions, including as a result of regional and global conflicts or related government sanctions;
•our ability to attract and retain qualified employees;
•our ability to maintain the security and availability of our solutions;
•our ability to maintain and expand internationally;
•our expectations regarding anticipated technology needs and developments and our ability to address those needs and developments with our solutions:
You should not place undue reliance on our forward-looking statements and you should not rely on forward-looking statements as predictions of future events. The results, events, and circumstances reflected in the forward-looking statements may not be achieved or occur, and actual results, events, or circumstances could differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements. The forward-looking statements made in this Annual Report on Form 10-K speak only as of the date of this report. We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements made in this report to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this report or to reflect new information or the occurrence of unanticipated events, except as required by law. If we update one or more forward-looking statements, no inference should be drawn that we will make additional updates with respect to those or other forward-looking statements.
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Item 1. Business
Unless the context otherwise requires, the terms “Remitly Global,” “Remitly,” “the Company,” “we,” “us,” and “our” in this Annual Report on Form 10-K refer to Remitly Global, Inc. and our consolidated subsidiaries, taken as a whole.
Overview
Remitly was founded in 2011 to transform the lives of immigrants and their families by providing the most trusted financial services on the planet.
The inspiration behind Remitly came when Matt, our co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, was living and working in Kenya. There, Matt realized how challenging it was for families to send and receive money to and from their loved ones while overseas – the process was painful, opaque, and expensive. This first-hand look at cross-border remittances was an eye-opener, and Matt became convinced there was a better way. In 2011, Josh and Shivaas, our two other co-founders, joined Matt to start Remitly and began working on the problem. Their goal was to make a difference for immigrant communities by using technology to disrupt traditional cross-border remittances.
Today, Remitly is a leading digital financial services provider for immigrants and their families in over 150 countries around the world. We remain committed to our vision of transforming the lives of immigrants and their families by providing the most trusted financial services on the planet. The long-term, trusted relationships we foster with our customers have enabled us to expand our core cross-border remittance product to over 2,100 corridors worldwide and we are now working to extend our offering to a broader suite of financial services.
Our customers are at the heart of everything we do. They are primarily immigrants from developing countries who have moved away from their families to seek new opportunities and build a better life for themselves and their loved ones. While our customers may be physically distant, they remain closely connected with and deeply committed to their family and friends back home – often sending money home multiple times per month. Through their individual experiences, they help us define how we design and build best-in-class services. Our relentless focus on our customers underpins our commitment to do everything in our power to ensure their hard-earned money reaches their families back home.
Our Culture
Our culture and values act as a blueprint for how we get things done. As noted above, the one constant, and single most important of these values is customer centricity, which serves as our north star in all that we do. To us, customer centricity means “we are here to listen to, learn from, and serve our customers. Period.”
Our other core values fall broadly into three categories:
•Our purpose: Aim for the stars, be an owner, hire and develop exceptional people, don’t be afraid to fail and be joyful;
•Building relationships: Lead authentically, act with integrity, be constructively direct, and be an empathetic partner; and
•Taking action: Have a bias for action, be data-driven, sweat the details, deliver on promises, and continuously improve.
These values influence our actions every day. Living up to our values builds customer trust, inspires employee engagement, and makes “Promises Delivered” our fundamental ethos.
2021 Key Performance Metrics
The vast majority of our revenue today is generated through our remittance business, where we earn revenue from transaction fees charged to customers and foreign exchange spreads applied to the customer’s principal. In addition to our financial results, we regularly review key business metrics to evaluate our performance. These key business metrics include active customers, send volume, and average revenue per active customer.
Our 2021 key performance metrics included the following results:
•Active customers for the fourth quarter of 2021 increased to 2.8 million, from 1.9 million, up 50% year over year.
•Send volume for the year ended December 31, 2021 increased to over $20.4 billion, from $12.1 billion, up 70% year over year.
•Average revenue per active customer for the fourth quarter of 2021 increased 13% year over year to $47.69.
We regularly review these key business metrics to evaluate our performance, identify trends affecting our business, prepare financial projections, and make strategic decisions. We believe that these key business metrics provide meaningful supplemental information for management and investors in
assessing our historical and future operating performance. The calculation of these key business metrics discussed below may differ from other similarly titled metrics used by other companies, analysts, or investors.
The key business metrics that we use to measure the performance of our business are defined as follows:
•“Active customers” is defined as the number of distinct customers that have successfully completed at least one transaction using Remitly during a given calendar quarter. We identify customers through unique account numbers.
•“Send volume” is defined as the sum of all customer’s principal, measured in U.S. dollars, related to transactions completed during a given period. The customer’s principal is net of cancellations, does not include transaction fees from customers, and does not include any credits, offers, or bonuses applied to the transaction by us.
•“Average revenue per active customer” is calculated by taking revenue for the quarter, divided by quarterly active customers.
As active customers are measured on a quarterly basis, the data for the full-year periods for active customers and average revenue per active customer is not meaningful, and therefore both metrics are only presented on a quarterly basis herein.
Our Services
Our journey began in digital cross-border remittances, and we continue to evolve and develop a portfolio of broader financial services. We designed and built a mobile-centric suite of products to address our customers’ discrete financial services needs, many of which are not met by legacy institutions.
Digital Cross-Border Remittances
We provide a digital cross-border remittance product that is accessible via our mobile app or the web. Our customers are able to set up an account and start sending money to international recipients on our platform without visiting physical agents, generally within minutes. Recipients can receive funds in multiple ways using our diversified and global disbursement network. Our customers and their families can also track the status of their transactions in real time. Today, over 90% of our customers engage with us via our mobile app, shifting what traditionally required waiting in line to speak with an agent to the palm of their hands. Providing our customers with a convenient, easy, and safe mobile experience underpins our approach to product development, marketing, and customer success.
Historically and at the present time, substantially all of our revenue is generated from digital cross-border remittances.
Remitly for Developers
We serve business customers through Remitly for Developers, our remittance-as-a-service offering that strategically leverages our custom-built global network and compliance and regulatory infrastructure. With Remitly for Developers, businesses and their developers can integrate this network and infrastructure into their existing applications and websites through our APIs, in exchange for fees and foreign exchange markups paid to us by our business customers to utilize our network. This enables them to offer digital cross-border payments to their customers in emerging markets.
Digital Banking Services
In partnership with Sunrise Banks N.A (“Sunrise”), we launched Passbook, a digital banking service available through a mobile app and uniquely designed for immigrants. Passbook promotes financial access by giving our customers a new way to store, spend and send money in a manner that is secure and compliant. With Passbook, our customers have access to banking services that don’t require them to pay account or international transaction fees, and they can personalize their Visa debit cards. With tailored Know Your Customer (“KYC”) and identity verification processes using our existing technology platform, they can sign up for a Passbook account in under ten minutes. We generate revenue through interchange fees from the bank partners to whom we market these financial services.