What does SoFi’s latest quarterly earnings tell us about Galileo?
- With a 119% year-over-year increase in accounts, Galileo users reached 79 million, up from 36 million.
- For the first time, Galileo crossed $100 billion of annualized payment volume in July 2021.
SoFi’s recent earnings report has provided a first ever peek into Galileo’s performance under SoFi since the acquisition last year. Galileo, SoFi’s banking as a service offering, clocked in a 119% year over year increase in accounts, up from 36 million to 79 million; and a 138% YoY increase in revenue, up from $19.0 million to $45.3 million.
SoFi’s Galileo platform reported net revenue of $45 million in Q2 2021 with $13 million of profit — a 29% margin. The platform has already established itself a leader in the neobanks space, holding a substantial market share — reported by Apptopia to be 95% among the largest challenger banks in the US — and is increasingly expanding into non-financial sectors. An example of this expansion is Galileo’s partnership with Verizon, which was announced in June, for a new service developed for parents to help foster their kids' financial literacy skills.
Galileo added 42.9 million new end users, rising from 36 million in Q2 2020 to 79 million in Q2 2021, representing 119% growth. Galileo’s net revenue was up by 138% YoY to $45.3 million from $19 million in last year’s corresponding quarter. Growth was attributed to new client acquisition and growth at its existing clients.
Galileo is growing by adding new clients — it provides debit cards for many of the top fintech brands in the U.S., like Chime, Robinhood, and Wise. “We've also continued to grow the partnership base. We added 22 new partners on Galileo in the first half of 2021. We added 10 in Q1 and we're adding 12 in Q2,” said SoFi CEO Anthony Noto in the company’s earnings conference call. That compares to the 41 partners acquired in all of 2020, 7 of which came in the last quarter.
Of the new partners onboarded so far in 2021, Noto revealed the vast majority were business-to-consumer customers, like Lower, a millennial and Gen-Z focused home financing platform. In addition, the company has signed business-to-business relationships, where the firm provides payment capabilities to non-consumer facing businesses, like Hatch, a fintech focused on offering financial services to small businesses. He also informed that a growing number of companies in the US and Mexico have been in contact with Galileo for digital payment capabilities.
For the first time, the platform crossed $100 billion of annualized payment volume in July 2021.
The company has been moving to a cloud computing environment, replacing on-premise, a 15-month -project that's now completed. The company has been onboarding new clients straight to the cloud, and in Q3, intends to focus on migrating existing clientele to the cloud.
In the last year of operations, Galileo has almost doubled its headcount, while moving to the cloud and expanding to foreign markets, gearing itself towards further growth.
Galileo’s work with neobanks positions SoFi as a potential competitor to Galileo’s customers, a situation SoFi says it hashas a growth plan to address. `The firm believes that there's an opportunity to expand Galileo products beyond just debit and direct payments, their original forte, but was reluctant to share its product pipeline publicly. “There's a fair amount of additional products we can add to our existing partnerships, in addition to bringing on new partners. So as a competitive environment, we haven't lost any of our major partners,” said Noto.
SoFi’s expansion to new and emerging global markets will focus on Mexico and the LatAm market as a whole, where its already onboarded clients like neobanks Ualá and Klar. The competitive environment in these markets is creating opportunities for Galileo, which the company claims to be picking up the “lion’s share” of new business.
“We've really had great success in Mexico. We'll expand into other LatAm countries. There is an opportunity, not just in B2C, but it's pretty wide open as it relates to enterprise and different areas like buy now, pay later and supplier payments, etcetera,” said Noto.