Latest news with #Marqeta
Yahoo
29-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Is Marqeta (MQ) Stock Outpacing Its Business Services Peers This Year?
The Business Services group has plenty of great stocks, but investors should always be looking for companies that are outperforming their peers. Is Marqeta (MQ) one of those stocks right now? A quick glance at the company's year-to-date performance in comparison to the rest of the Business Services sector should help us answer this question. Marqeta is a member of the Business Services sector. This group includes 270 individual stocks and currently holds a Zacks Sector Rank of #3. The Zacks Sector Rank considers 16 different sector groups. The average Zacks Rank of the individual stocks within the groups is measured, and the sectors are listed from best to worst. The Zacks Rank is a successful stock-picking model that emphasizes earnings estimates and estimate revisions. The system highlights a number of different stocks that could be poised to outperform the broader market over the next one to three months. Marqeta is currently sporting a Zacks Rank of #2 (Buy). Within the past quarter, the Zacks Consensus Estimate for MQ's full-year earnings has moved 27.5% higher. This means that analyst sentiment is stronger and the stock's earnings outlook is improving. Based on the latest available data, MQ has gained about 39.1% so far this year. In comparison, Business Services companies have returned an average of 3.4%. This means that Marqeta is performing better than its sector in terms of year-to-date returns. Another Business Services stock, which has outperformed the sector so far this year, is AppLovin (APP). The stock has returned 20.5% year-to-date. Over the past three months, AppLovin's consensus EPS estimate for the current year has increased 22.2%. The stock currently has a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy). To break things down more, Marqeta belongs to the Financial Transaction Services industry, a group that includes 35 individual companies and currently sits at #59 in the Zacks Industry Rank. This group has gained an average of 5.3% so far this year, so MQ is performing better in this area. On the other hand, AppLovin belongs to the Technology Services industry. This 129-stock industry is currently ranked #50. The industry has moved +5.8% year to date. Marqeta and AppLovin could continue their solid performance, so investors interested in Business Services stocks should continue to pay close attention to these stocks. Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report Marqeta, Inc. (MQ) : Free Stock Analysis Report AppLovin Corporation (APP) : Free Stock Analysis Report This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research ( Zacks Investment Research Sign in to access your portfolio
Yahoo
28-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Finance and HR Software Stocks Q1 In Review: Marqeta (NASDAQ:MQ) Vs Peers
As the Q1 earnings season wraps, let's dig into this quarter's best and worst performers in the finance and hr software industry, including Marqeta (NASDAQ:MQ) and its peers. Organizations are constantly looking to improve organizational efficiencies, whether it is financial planning, tax management or payroll. Finance and HR software benefit from the SaaS-ification of businesses, large and small, who much prefer the flexibility of cloud-based, web-browser delivered software paid for on a subscription basis than the hassle and expense of purchasing and managing on-premise enterprise software. The 13 finance and hr software stocks we track reported a satisfactory Q1. As a group, revenues beat analysts' consensus estimates by 1.4% while next quarter's revenue guidance was 1.1% below. In light of this news, share prices of the companies have held steady as they are up 4.5% on average since the latest earnings results. Founded by CEO Jason Gardner in 2009, Marqeta (NASDAQ:MQ) is an innovative card issuer that provides companies with the ability to issue and process virtual, physical, and tokenized credit and debit cards. Marqeta reported revenues of $139.1 million, up 17.9% year on year. This print exceeded analysts' expectations by 2.4%. Overall, it was a strong quarter for the company with an impressive beat of analysts' EBITDA estimates and a narrow beat of analysts' total payment volume estimates. Marqeta achieved the fastest revenue growth of the whole group. Unsurprisingly, the stock is up 28% since reporting and currently trades at $5.24. Is now the time to buy Marqeta? Access our full analysis of the earnings results here, it's free. Originally created to process international tuition payments for universities, Flywire (NASDAQ:FLYW) is a cross border payments processor and software platform focusing on complex, high-value transactions like education, healthcare and B2B payments. Flywire reported revenues of $133.5 million, up 17% year on year, outperforming analysts' expectations by 5%. The business had a very strong quarter with a solid beat of analysts' EBITDA estimates and revenue guidance for next quarter meeting analysts' expectations. Flywire pulled off the biggest analyst estimates beat among its peers. The market seems happy with the results as the stock is up 6.1% since reporting. It currently trades at $10.66. Is now the time to buy Flywire? Access our full analysis of the earnings results here, it's free. Holding close ties to American Express, Global Business Travel (NYSE:GBTG) is a comprehensive travel and expense management services provider to corporations worldwide. Global Business Travel reported revenues of $621 million, up 1.8% year on year, falling short of analysts' expectations by 1.9%. It was a softer quarter as it posted full-year EBITDA guidance missing analysts' expectations. Global Business Travel delivered the weakest performance against analyst estimates and slowest revenue growth in the group. As expected, the stock is down 9.1% since the results and currently trades at $6.26. Read our full analysis of Global Business Travel's results here. Created in 1983 when founder Scott Cook watched his wife struggle to reconcile the family's checkbook, Intuit provides tax and accounting software for small and medium-sized businesses. Intuit reported revenues of $7.75 billion, up 15.1% year on year. This number beat analysts' expectations by 2.6%. Overall, it was a very strong quarter as it also produced full-year EPS guidance exceeding analysts' expectations and a solid beat of analysts' EBITDA estimates. Intuit pulled off the highest full-year guidance raise among its peers. The stock is up 12.7% since reporting and currently trades at $750.46. Read our full, actionable report on Intuit here, it's free. Founded by industry veterans Aneel Bushri and Dave Duffield after their former company PeopleSoft was acquired by Oracle in a hostile takeover, Workday (NASDAQ:WDAY) provides cloud-based software for organizations to manage and plan finance and human resources. Workday reported revenues of $2.24 billion, up 12.6% year on year. This result topped analysts' expectations by 1%. Aside from that, it was a satisfactory quarter as it also recorded a solid beat of analysts' EBITDA estimates but a significant miss of analysts' billings estimates. The stock is down 12% since reporting and currently trades at $239.43. Read our full, actionable report on Workday here, it's free. As a result of the Fed's rate hikes in 2022 and 2023, inflation has come down from frothy levels post-pandemic. The general rise in the price of goods and services is trending towards the Fed's 2% goal as of late, which is good news. The higher rates that fought inflation also didn't slow economic activity enough to catalyze a recession. So far, soft landing. This, combined with recent rate cuts (half a percent in September 2024 and a quarter percent in November 2024) have led to strong stock market performance in 2024. The icing on the cake for 2024 returns was Donald Trump's victory in the U.S. Presidential Election in early November, sending major indices to all-time highs in the week following the election. Still, debates around the health of the economy and the impact of potential tariffs and corporate tax cuts remain, leaving much uncertainty around 2025. Want to invest in winners with rock-solid fundamentals? Check out our Top 6 Stocks and add them to your watchlist. These companies are poised for growth regardless of the political or macroeconomic climate. Join Paid Stock Investor Research Help us make StockStory more helpful to investors like yourself. Join our paid user research session and receive a $50 Amazon gift card for your opinions. Sign up here. Sign in to access your portfolio
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Q1 2025 Marqeta Inc Earnings Call
Stacey Finerman; Vice President, Investor Relations; Marqeta Inc Michael Milotich; Chief Executive Officer, Chief Financial Officer; Marqeta Inc Timothy Chiodo; Analyst; UBS Tien-Tsin Huang; Analyst; JPMorgan Ramsey El-Assal; Analyst; Barclays Darren Peller; Analyst; Wolfe Research James Faucette; Analyst; Morgan Stanley Craig Maurer; Analyst; FT Partners Cassie Chan; Analyst; Bank of America Sanjay Sakhrani; Analyst; KBW Andrew Bauch; Analyst; Wells Fargo Operator Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Marqeta Inc's first-quarter 2025 earnings conference call. (Operator Instructions) As a reminder, this conference is being is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Stacy Finerman, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead. Stacey Finerman Thanks, operator. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that today's call may contain forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties, including those set forth in our filings with the SEC, which are available on our Investor Relations website, including our annual report on Form 10-K for the period ended December 31, 2024, and our subsequent periodic filings with the results may differ materially from any forward-looking statements we make here today. These forward-looking statements speak only as of the time of this call, and the company does not assume any obligation or intend to update them except as required by addition, today's call includes non-GAAP financial measures. These measures should be considered as a supplement to and not a substitute for GAAP financial measures. Reconciliation to the most directly comparable GAAP measures can be found in today's earnings press release or earnings release supplemental material, which are available on our Investor Relations today's call is Mike Milotich, Marqeta's Interim CEO and CFO. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Mike to begin. Michael Milotich Thank you, Stacey, and thank you for joining us for Marqeta's first-quarter 2025 earnings start, I'll briefly highlight our Q1 results followed by an update on the progress we are making on deepening our platform breadth and expanding the solutions we offer. I'll conclude with more details about our Q1 financial results and our expectations for Q2 and full year first-quarter results demonstrate our ability to execute on our growth plans while simultaneously increasing our level of profitability. Total processing volume or TPV was $84 billion in the first quarter. This is a 27% increase compared to the same quarter of 2024, with the lapping of leap year reducing growth by 1 point.Q1 net revenue of $139 million grew 18% year over year, driven by the wide variety of use cases we enable for our customers. Gross profit was $99 million, a 17% increase versus Q1 2024, resulting in a gross margin of 71%. Adjusted EBITDA was $20 million in the quarter, translating into a 14% margin fueled by both gross profit growth and operating expense discipline, efficiency, and has been at the forefront of modern issue of processing, which started many years ago with de novo programs predominantly for fintechs with innovative and disruptive initiatives that leveraged cards in new ways. Over the past couple of years, we have heard from many prospects with existing card programs that they're interested in the capabilities, flexibility, and control that modern issue of processing enables, yet are reluctant to undergo what they perceive to be a complex and risky response, in 2024, we deepened our platform depth by building a product to facilitate migrations to reduce the burden and the risk of moving existing programs to Marqeta. We completed the migration of millions of cards for Klarna last year, and this quarter, we began migrating a US consumer credit program and an innovative debit program in migrations and flips are still relatively rare given their complexities, we are building expertise and our track record with regard to this capability. The combination of our advanced capabilities, scale, expertise, and experience smoothly executing migration makes Marqeta's platform a strong candidate for more established brands and programs that are looking for a modern Q1, we started migrating our first consumer credit program with Perpay, showcasing our ability to convert credit in addition to debit. Perpay has an excellent vetted finance offering as a unique credit builder card enables customers to earn rewards based on repayment via their paychecks. Perpay had already found product market fit in a significant client base. However, they were looking to switch from their processing provider to one that had more sophisticated, scalable, and responsive program chose -- or the company chose Marqeta as due to our flexibility and ability to support their unique underwriting and repayment structure. As of February, Marqeta has been supporting all new issuances for Perpay and has started to migrate its active credit card Bread also means having product and solution parity when our customers operate in multiple geographies. We continue to see significant growth in Europe with TPV growth remaining over 100% in Q1. Adding program management is a key lever for enhancing our offering to provide a more holistic solution for customers operating in started by partnering with TransactPay before moving to acquire the company late last year. The acquisition of TransactPay is currently on track to close by the end of Q3 and we expect it to be a significant step in delivering our program management offering that is comparable to other geographies like the US and Canada. The transaction is driving significant customer interest, and it means more control of the entire card offering and seamless geographic second migration this quarter was Bitpanda, a European crypto platform. Of the three recently signed European customers that we will support with program management, this program is the first to launch. We have been powering cards that allow consumers to spend their cryptocurrency via card for several years. Our early innovations with just in time funding allow fiat currency to be spent at the point of sale using a crypto flip had a tight turnaround due to the previous partner wanting an accelerated timeline to fully migrate the program. Our commitment and willingness to work quickly was also a key reason for Bitpanda to choose Marqeta. Not only did we sign and launch the full program in the same quarter, but the launch was executed simultaneously in 26 countries and 10 Q1, we also continued expanding our solutions to accelerate card program launches while minimizing customer development needs. A few quarters ago, we introduced our UX toolkit, a comprehensive library of pre-built UI components fully optimized for Marqeta's APIs and vetted for regulatory compliance. These SDKs make it easier for customers to embed payments into their existing mobile app or web experiences by offering product ready flows for onboarding, card management, transaction history, and the UX toolkit serves customers ready to deeply embed financial products, some customers want to launch a card program quickly without relying on internal app engineering resources or taking on the day-to-day management of the cardholder experience. For these customers, we expect to have a standalone white label app available later this year, giving customers a fully branded out of the box solution managed by mobile app will incorporate the same SDK components from our UX toolkit, enhanced with expanded banking and rewards functionality along with preconfigured flows for onboarding, account set up, transaction monitoring, and support. Customers will be able to tailor the app to reflect their brand identity and launch it alongside their primary application with the option to embed it later using the same intended benefit for our customers will be the ability to establish a market presence quickly with our Marqeta managed app experience, then transition to a fully embedded solution over time without redoing compliance work or re-engineering core user flows. This dual path approach should not only accelerate speed to market, but also maintain continuity and consistency across the user wrap up before moving to the details of our financial results, the business had nice momentum ex in Q1 and puts us in a good trajectory for the remainder of 2025 and beyond. Specifically, both Perpay and Bitpanda showcase our ability to migrate programs in a timely and efficient manner, the core capability we added in late 2024. These program wins also demonstrate that our customer base and prospects in the market are looking for a technology partner that is flexible, responsive, and has experience with innovative the wave of card issuing modernization accelerates in the coming years, the experience of migrating platforms and programs while solving specific pain points with flexible solutions will serve us well in the future. These capabilities give us confidence that as more established brands with both de novo and existing card programs look to offer their customers new modern experiences, Marqeta will be the partner of let me transition to discussing our Q1 financial results which reflect a strong start to the year, outperforming our expectations across all metrics. Q1 TPV growth of 27% remains strong and steady, coupled with outperformance across net revenue, gross profit, and operating expense, delivering higher adjusted EBITDA of $20 million in a revenue and gross profit growth outperform the midline of our guidance by 3 and 5 points respectively, primarily due to favorable business mix. This business outperformance, combined with moderating expense, delivered an improved adjusted EBITDA margin of 14%.G1 TPV was $84 billion, an increase of 27% year over year, despite a 1 point growth headwind due to the lapping of leap year. This growth on an ever-expanding base continues to show our ability to grow the business at scale. Non-Block TPV grew more than 2 times faster than Block TPV fueled by a wide range of customers across several use with the last several quarters, financial services, lending including buy now pay later, and expense management drove the bulk of our TPV growth. Growth within financial service use cases was in line with the overall company and continues to be fueled by the rapid expansion of our non-Block neobanking customers where our TPV almost doubled year over year. Both lending and expense management TPV continued to grow over 30%, and both accelerated a bit from last including buy now pay later, growth is driven by the combination of Klarna's migration to our platform in Europe, our BMPL customers benefiting from the increased adoption of pay anywhere card solutions and distribution through wallets, both are supported in part by newly available flexible network credentials and strong user growth among SMB lending management growth remains driven by our customers sustaining strong end user acquisition as AP automation and modern corporate card platforms continue to gain share. On-demand delivery growth remained in the single digits due to the maturity of the use case. Despite the changing macro environment, we did not see a shift in the mix of spend on our platform in Q1. Breaking down the spend by low, medium, and high discretionary TPV based on merchant category reveals no meaningful shift in the mix of spending in Q1 versus the past several quarters.G1 net revenue was $139 million, growing 18% year over year. Although this growth was approximately 3 points higher than we expected, the outperformance would have been 6 points, which is more in line with the gross profit beat, had it not been for one unplanned change in terms with a similar last year, we recently renegotiated a platform partner agreement with reduced pricing, improving our economics. Based on the terms of the Cash App contract and the associated revenue presentation, we pass through the proportional savings to Cash App, which reduces our revenue but has no impact on gross profit. As a result, our net revenue growth was reduced by 3 points in Q1 versus our this is a very similar situation to last year and another reminder why we focus more on our gross profit when discussing our business performance. Block net revenue concentration was 45% in Q1, decreasing 1 point from Q4 2024, and down 4 points from Q1 2024. Non-Block net revenue growth was on par with last quarter and remains over 10 points higher than block net revenue growth, driven mostly by strong performance among our larger non-Block customers and the ramping of new programs launched since the start of net revenue take rate of 16 basis points was 1 bp lower than last quarter, which is the typical seasonality following the holidays. Q1 gross profit was $99 million, resulting in a year over year growth of 17% and a gross margin of 71%. This growth was approximately 5 points higher than we expected at the end of the last quarter, primarily driven by two more than half of the outperformance was due to favorable business mix. Our Q1 TPV growth was slightly above our expectations, despite the fact that a few of our largest customers underperformed. As a result, our gross profit take rate was higher than expected since our pricing is generally commensurate with the amount of volume on our as I mentioned earlier, we are pleased with our ability to migrate significant programs on our platform efficiently and expediently, enabling these new customers to benefit from the capabilities, flexibility, and scale of our modern platform. Unfortunately, one of our planned migrations later this year will no longer take place as we reach an agreement with Varo to terminate the deal we announced in Varo has chosen to focus on its existing products. The early termination lifted Q1 gross profit growth by approximately 1 gross profit growth continues to grow many points faster than the overall company and is in line with non-Block revenue growth. Our gross profit take rate was 12 basis points consistent with last quarter. Q1 adjusted operating expenses were $79 million growing 5% year over year, a little better than expected. We continue to be focused in our hiring and utilizing multiple geographic locations to find the best addition, the combination of our size and growth continues to afford us better economies of scale. Q1 adjusted EBITDA was $20 million a margin of over 14%, a new all-time high for both metrics as we progress on our path to profitability. We feel the adjusted EBITDA margin on the basis of gross profit, which was 20%, better reflects the nature of our business and Q1 GAAP net loss was $8 million including $10 million of interest income. We ended the quarter with approximately $1 billion of cash and short-term to reporting our Q4 2024 results, we restarted our share repurchase activity as we continue to believe the current valuation does not fairly represent the company's value or the market opportunity ahead of us. In Q1, we repurchased 26.2 million shares at an average price of $4.22. As of the quarter end, we had $270 million remaining on our buyback let's transition to our expectations for Q2 2025. We expect Q2 net revenue growth to be between 11% and 13%. This is approximately 4 points lower than we anticipated at the time of our last call due to the impact of the renegotiated platform partner agreement I referenced earlier that has no impact on gross with what we shared last quarter, Q2 gross profit growth is expected to be in the range of 23% to 25%, with an 8 point lift from the incentive accounting change we discussed last quarter. As expected, even if you put the incentive accounting changes aside, we expect Q2 will be our highest gross profit growth quarter as new programs ramp and new services are adopted, but we don't yet have headwinds from renewals, and we have the easiest year-over-year a reminder, starting in Q2 2025, we will accrue incentives each quarter based on the forecasted annual contract tier we expect to achieve. As a result, we expect that there will be much less variation in the quarterly incentives recorded in the P&L even though this does not impact what we earn in any given incentive contract year. This change will create noise in our gross profit growth rates as we grow over the previous incentive continue to be focused with our investments which are primarily directed toward platform capabilities and innovation. We are also focused on hiring additional resources in key areas like go to market to meet growing demand and compliance to further enhance our expertise and service levels.Q2 adjusted operating expenses are expected to grow in the low- to mid-single digits due to an easier year-over-year comparison. Q2 adjusted EBITDA margin is expected to be 10% to 11%, 1 point higher than we had shared last quarter due to lower adjusted operating expenses. We continue to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of our resources and technology the full year, while we recognize the increasing levels of macroeconomic uncertainty, we are not currently seeing any notable shift in spend behavior. As such, we are seeing consistent macroeconomic conditions for the remainder of the year, but noting the risk. We expect 2025 net revenue growth to be between 13% and 15%, 3 points lower than what we shared last quarter, due to the renegotiated platform partner agreement. I want to reiterate that this impact is accounting related based on our Cash App agreement and does not lower gross impact of this new agreement should be relatively consistent each quarter. Therefore, we expect net revenue growth to be 13% to 15% in Q3 and 14% to 16% in Q4. Since the impact of this new platform partner agreement is due to our revenue presentation with no impact on gross profit, our expectations for the underlying business trajectory for 2025 remains unchanged from last quarter. We still expect 2025 gross profit growth to be between 14% and 16%.While Q1 did come in higher than expectations, the bp was not large enough for us to revise our gross profit out upwards for the entire year, given the new levels of macroeconomic uncertainty. We want to be clear that our gross profit projections for the remaining nine months of the year are essentially consistent with what we guided to at the time of our fourth-quarter call. Therefore, we expect to be on the higher end of the original 2025 gross profit growth range based on our Q1 do, however, expect 2025 adjusted EBITDA margin to be approximately 1 point higher than what we shared last quarter at 10% to 11%. This upward revision of our expectations is due to lower expenses as we grow more efficiently as well as the smaller revenue denominator due to the accounting for the renegotiated platform partner agreement. The Q3 and Q4 adjusted EBITDA margin is expected to be in line with the full conclusion, we are starting 2025 on solid foundation as our Q1 results outperform across all our primary metrics. Even as our TPV continues to rise, we are sustaining a relatively stable TPV growth rate with increasing levels of profitability, which keeps us on our desired path to confidence to continue this trajectory is primarily driven by four factors. First, our portfolio migration abilities and growing track record executing flips makes us a strong candidate for established programs and brands that are looking for the increased control and advanced capabilities of a modern provider with proven scale. The combination of de novo program wins and a shift toward modernization among existing programs should result in Marqeta capturing an increasing share of the our customer base and large prospects in the market are looking for a true technology partner that is flexible, responsive, and innovative to solve the card issuing and money movement pain points, as well as driving increasing levels of engagement with their users. We believe Marqeta is relatively unique in our ability to meet those our European business continues to expand rapidly, and our recent launch of program management in Europe is a promising and valuable expansion of Marqeta's platform breadth and our platform continues to reach new levels of economies of scale. The rapid adjusted EBITDA margin expansion is evidence of our ability to reach our profitability potential and fuel long-term value creation as the business grows.I will now turn it back over to the operator for questions. Operator (Operator Instructions) Timothy Chiodo, UBS. Timothy Chiodo Great, thank you for taking the question. I want to touch on something that was announced by both the card networks recently around their efforts in agentic commerce, and this is more of an industry question, Mike, if you could talk about it specific to Marqeta or broadly speaking within issuer processing. It would just seem that someone like Marqeta would be able to play a big role there given the importance of controls and potentially single use virtual cards and how that could all play a role in a future world where agentic commerce is a larger portion of purchases being made? Thank you. Michael Milotich Yeah, thank you for your question, and we agree with your quick assessment. Yeah, this is exactly the kind of innovation that -- we have a track record of enabling and giving people's dynamic capabilities where they can make decisions in real time in taking data and making very quick responses from a platform perspective. So this is exactly the kind of innovations that we think we're well positioned to enable for even just, I would say stepping back, if you look at where we're focused in AI as a business in general, there really are three areas that we're focused on from a strategy perspective. One is product innovation, agentic commerce obviously being one of them, where we're looking to add AI capabilities to new or existing products that create more value for our that includes areas like you're mentioning, but also areas like risk products that we have, program management offerings around disputes and fraud, as well as this ability to do dynamic rewards and very personalized offers and personalized experience for each individual other areas that we're focused from an AI perspective are internal productivity, so making our employees improve efficiency and reducing manual work, and then also operational efficiencies in terms of the support we offer cardholders by leveraging AI automation. So those are things we're focused on, but we are excited about the potential for agentic commerce. Operator Tien-Tsin Huang, JPMorgan. Tien-Tsin Huang Thank you so much. Mike, nice job. 20 straight minutes of talking, so I'll give you guys a little bit of a breath here. I want to ask -- Tim asked about agentic commerce. I want to ask just about conversions and you're talking about this shift towards modernization of you have the staff and the tools to do these conversions quickly, especially if these things start to level up or size up? Because it could be quite a bit of labor I think to drive that decision. And I'm curious, was that part of the Varo decision to terminate? I know you said they're going to focus more on products, but I didn't know if resourcing was also an issue in this uncertain time. Michael Milotich Yeah, so resourcing is not a concern for us, Tien-Tsin, so yes, these conversions can be a lot of work and require a lot of support which we're very prepared to provide as the opportunities come our way. So what we're really focused on is that migrations tended to be fairly rare in the past because a lot of times people weren't moving necessarily for a big difference in capability. It more had to do with relationship souring, or maybe a better what we're really focused on is with our modern platform and all the capabilities we have across multiple use cases, both credit and debit, across many geographies, but there's a significant enough capability difference that we can make people interested. And if we show that we have the capability and the track record of executing well and providing them the kind of support that they need, as you mentioned, we can get them kind of past that hurdle and get them thinking about migrating to a modern platform like is something that we think is possible, but the resourcing required is not a barrier from our perspective. Tien-Tsin Huang Got it. That's good to know. Mike, if you don't mind, just a quick follow-up. I'm glad to hear the consumers is not surprising you here. How about on the backlog and the pipeline, is there changes in conversation there? Is there any lengthening of cycles in the Varo side? Michael Milotich So no changes to cycles or level of investment right now. I mean, I think so far, and I think you've heard from many other payment companies, everything looks pretty good, stable right now and even if you look at our numbers in April, our TPV growth was a few points higher than what we saw in Q1. And so things look stable from that perspective. I think if there were risks that come about, they could take place in sort of two that you mentioned, which is programs that have either signed and not launched, or even people who are in our pipeline holding back or taking a pause to see how the macroenvironment shakes out. We haven't seen that yet, but that is something we're certainly watching out the second area where it could impact us would be just if there -- we get to more of a recession situation, obviously spending can be impacted, which would impact any of our existing programs, but today we're not seeing that. And if anything, we have several people in our pipeline now who are actually looking to move more I think as we talked to larger brands who maybe have spent a lot of time sort of planning and thinking about how to execute, we're having many conversations with people who are -- we're still talking to them now, but they are very motivated to launch within the year. So that's a little bit of a change. Well, we'll see what happens, but that's the kind of inputs we're getting from the market. Operator Ramsey El-Assal, Barclays. Ramsey El-Assal Hi, good results here and thanks for taking my I wanted to follow up on Tien-Tsin's question, but with a little bit of a different overlay which is regulation or rather deregulation, have you seen any impact in terms of the behavior of your bank partners in the context of a lot of the deregulation that we're seeing on the financial services side? Are you sensing they can move a bit faster with things like due diligence or onboarding, or are we still sort of back in the environment that you guys called out a couple quarters ago? Michael Milotich Thanks for your question, Ramsey. Yeah, some of the changes that have been announced or there have been others that have been signaled, but right now I'd say the execution, still sort of getting pushed down through the ecosystem, I'd say it's still relatively slow and moves at a slow pace. So at this point, we're not seeing any change in how our banks are I would say together, both of us are continuing to just be focused on optimizing the onboarding to be sort of the raised bar that happened over in the last year or two. So that's what we are seeing. We continue to believe that the possible lighter touch from regulators, if you will, would be beneficial to us, but more in the form of innovation. People looking to do more innovative programs because they feel like they have a little bit more freedom to operate. And just given our track record and the type of platform we have that really caters to disruptive innovative companies, that would be a benefit to us. Ramsey El-Assal Okay, a quick follow-up from me, good to hear about the Bitpanda card. I was wondering if you could comment a little bit further on the pipeline in Europe ? Is that the type of thing where you've got a lot of pressure building up in the sort of sales pipe, such that you get one of these implementations under your belt and we could see quite a few on the heels of it? Maybe a little more color there would be helpful, thanks. Michael Milotich Sure, yeah, our European pipeline is strong. We definitely are getting -- we have a lot of good traction that we can demonstrate and a lot of customers who are quite well respected, who are performing well on our platform and utilizing the capabilities to the fullest. So I think that's creating momentum and then our announcement last quarter of the pending acquisition of TransactPay also helps because it makes our solution even more complete, a little more holistic offering we can offer do have a strong pipeline. I think the thing that's encouraging about Bitpanda is that we are obviously building capabilities and talking a lot about our ability to migrate platforms. We want that availability to be there for potential customers, but it's still relatively rare. I think what's very promising though about Bitpanda is that it does demonstrate that it if everyone is very aligned and focused and doesn't make changes, you can actually move very this was sort of a deal done in record time where we literally signed and launched the program in Q1, which is probably the first for Marqeta. I can't remember that ever happening, so it moved very quickly and part of that was out of need, but it also shows that when everyone is very motivated and focused, it can happen quickly. That's probably the exception rather than the rule at this point, but it is encouraging to see that it can be their launch was not easy, as I mentioned, many geographies, many currencies at the same time. So we felt great about executing that well and it's good for Bitpanda. I think their business is doing great. Operator Darren Peller, Wolfe Research. Darren Peller Hey, thanks, guys. Nice results. Mike, I think I heard you say that you're looking at the -- obviously the EBITDA guidance is raised for the year, and you're looking towards the high end of the range for gross profit outlook just given the beat in the quarter if I heard that correctly. And then just thinking about what's incorporated into that now, I mean, you're correct me if I'm wrong, but you're taking the current trends, flowing it through for the rest of the year more or less with what you could we just revisit, in terms of the opportunities and the range of outcomes and that range of guidance based on different macro scenarios and remind us again of what you perceive as the opportunities that are idiosyncratic versus the macro categories of your business that could potentially be the most notable swing factors to the downside as well and a tougher macro? Michael Milotich Sure. So first you didn't hear correctly, so we have raised our EBITDA projections for the year, we just continued to really execute well in terms of being very much more just efficient and effective, it's an area we've been improving a lot in the last couple of years and we continue to do so. And on a gross profit basis, we essentially kept Q2 to Q4 the same as what we told you last quarter. And so with the Q1 beat, we essentially are at the high end -- higher end of the range of what we said for a full year, but although we did keep the range the terms of where we could see things going well or the risk, I think the things that are promising about the business from my perspective is a few of the things we highlighted. So first, this migration expertise, this is now a migration we completed last quarter. We had two in Q1, so we're definitely showing that we have that capability and customers are taking advantage of Europe, the fact that our TPV continues to grow over 100% and we have sort of more capabilities on the way, as we still assume the TransactPay acquisition will close by the end of Q3, and we are -- we've signed three programs already in program management, one of them being Bigpanda is the first to also, just all this efficiency and EBITDA, we feel like positions us well to grow and probably have some upside. The macro risk that you mentioned, it's something -- again, we haven't seen anything yet, and even in the month of April, the mix of spending between how we bucket things between sort of high, medium, low discretionary, we're not seeing big anything, in April, the higher discretionary actually increased a little bit, which just could be the timing from Easter or any of the other changes, but that's really what drove the acceleration and growth. So we're not really seeing anything. I think from our perspective, what could be idiosyncratic to us is that when we look at our business, because of the base of business that we have, we're less exposed to direct discretionary spending than most.A lot of our use cases sort of target a little bit of the underserved who spend just generally it's less discretionary in nature. And so when we look at our spending, less than a quarter of the spending on our platform, we view to be in high discretionary categories. So I think that everyday spending tends to hold up well even in economic slowdowns. So I think that could be a benefit to us relative to other people in the still a spend-based economic model. So we would feel some pain, but we might have a little less than others whose exposure might be more to the higher end consumer where there's more discretionary spending. Darren Peller And just my quick follow-up on the banks, just where are you on adding incremental partners? I know that was something you guys were hoping to get down to the next couple of quarters going back from fourth quarter, third quarter, I think it was -- Michael Milotich That's right. So we plan to add two new banks before the end of the year. I'll say both of them are progressing well. With one of them, the technology work is essentially done. So a lot of the connectivity is placed and now we're kind of moving on to more of the testing and sort of the finer points, so we're very far other one is there's just been some kickoff meetings just in the last few weeks, so both of those are on track and we feel good about not only the capacity that that adds to our business, but also some of the capabilities that some of those banks bring that we can pass on to our customers and offer an even more compelling value proposition for them. Operator James Faucette, Morgan Stanley. James Faucette Great. Thank you so much. I just wanted to follow up on your comments around kind of increasing your -- or essentially decreasing your reliance on Block and that kind of thing. Can you give us a little more color on what types of customers are -- or implementations are showing faster growth? And I guess I'm wondering how much of a contributor things like earn wage access are and how we should think about that and other programs out of traditional debit or even credit as long-term drivers? Michael Milotich Yeah, I think -- thanks for your question, James. What we kind of always shared with you is we still think there's a lot of growth still to come from Block and we think we can actually help with -- help them with that and enable that, but so to really judge our non-Block growth in terms of how we lower our concentration, because of course we still want to support Block and help them our non-Block business, we want to be growing at a good clip, which is what we've been doing up to this point. I would say the growth is really coming across all the different use cases. So even within financial services, which is a lot of neobanking and wage access use cases like you mentioned, that is growing. The volume almost doubled in Q1 versus Q1 a year ago, so that continues to grow really now, pay later, and expense management, both those businesses, the TPV is growing over 30%. And just to give you a sense for -- I talked about the outperformance and our gross profit really coming from favorable business mix. When we look at the TPV for customers who are outside of our top five customers, that TPV grew at more than twice the rate of the company as a it really is a fairly broad based in -- and it's a combination of both existing customers who have been our customers for a while who are expanding with us and either their business is just thriving or they're also launching new products or new geographies with us, as well as getting a little bit more contribution from new programs as those begin to ramp up. So it really is broad-based, which is what's the most encouraging. James Faucette Yeah, no, I'm sure it is. And then separately, you mentioned in terms of some of the changes in renegotiation with customers, et cetera, that you've improved your economics. So you can see that in the way that your guidance and outlook for the rest of the year has come you talk a little bit about like how we should think about what the moving parts are that allow you to improve the economics and what you're doing either from a cost perspective or something like that? Just trying to make sure that we're sensitive to make focusing on the profitability and the bottom line, if you will. Michael Milotich Sure. So just to be clear, I guess the renegotiation that we talked about is for a platform partner of ours, so not a customer, and so the improving economics are good for us in terms of improving our gross profit. And because of the way we've structured our relationship with Cash App post renewal, we also pass on the proportional benefit to them where their volume is also a driving force of those savings. So that's what's causing the impact to our revenue that does not impact gross profit because there's a corresponding offset within our cost of revenue.I would say generally when it comes to the customer renegotiations, we mentioned last quarter, we have a couple of big ones this year. But generally, what we tend to focus on is the value we're adding and the benchmarks in the market and looking to in some cases, our sort of core price where the bps on volume that they have, we might come down, we might add a tier or two if they've grown a lot that they can move we're working pretty effectively to offset some of that with additional services that we're selling. So as we add a lot more capabilities, either more program management services that can be purchased on an a la carte basis or value added services like our risk services tokenization, even some of the things I mentioned with this white label app that we're building to help are all things that add additional value that we can charge for that also is an effort to offset some of the just reduced core economics that just generally happen as the volume grows more and more typically people are going to continue to get a little bit of a favorable price change from you. Operator Craig Maurer, FT Partners. Craig Maurer Yes, hi, thanks for taking the question. I wanted to ask about the US neobanking environment. We've seen some significant underperformance from several players. You talked about Varo choosing not to move forward with the program with you. I was wondering if US neobanking has the potential to become a drag on growth, if things don't accelerate? Thanks. Michael Milotich Thank you for your question, Craig. I think that there's -- I think, I guess from our perspective, what we're seeing is that just a lot more people looking to launch a neobanking like offering, right? It might not be a standalone neobank, but it might be a a large brand that has another business where they are looking to offer banking services to their customers and or their employees. So I would say it is becoming more competitive for the -- to drive the growth because consumers do have more options than they had a few years I think from our perspective, as long as we can capture our fair share of that and enable a lot of these newer people who may be launching, then I think we don't see that as something that could be a drag on our growth, and again, like our neobanking use cases outside of Block, are continuing to grow very I think it is getting more competitive, but we are trying to demonstrate our leadership and our capabilities in this area so that we can power as many of those as possible and therefore that increased competition, that should minimize the impact on us if we're successful doing that. Operator Cassie Chan, Bank of America. Cassie Chan I just wanted to follow up just again to make sure I'm understanding the gross profit outlook for 2025. So you guys kind of said that it was -- you kept it at 14% and 16%, but obviously, if there's macro deterioration from here, it seems like it can accommodate that so fair to say at the midpoint it can accommodate some of the further macro how much is the borrowed termination having an impact on 2025? And can you also just talk a little bit about if there were any updated expectations for Block's performance within your guidance expectations just given, obviously, they've revised their forecast and well and there's still a significant portion of your revenue. Thank you. Michael Milotich Sure, so just to clarify the gross profit, so yes, we maintained our full year gross profit growth guidance of 14% to 16%. What we said is we now believe we'll be on the high end of that range just based on our Q1 outperformance and essentially holding Q2 to Q4 consistent with where we were last quarter. So that's kind of where we are, so at the higher end of that we are assuming macroeconomic stability in that assumption is we're not seeing any changes in spend trajectory or even the spend mix in our business at this point. So we feel like that's the best assumption to be making at this time, but obviously, there's a lot of uncertainty out there and we're going to watch borrow termination impact, the early termination we reached did raise our gross profit growth in Q1 by approximately 1 point. And there will be some, I guess, lower growth in Q3, Q4. We had expected that to launch in the second half of the year, and so we will be losing some revenue and gross profit associated with that, but we did not change the trajectory of our projections in total because we're seeing a better part -- other parts of our business perform better than we had we are essentially absorbing that impact in the second half and we still believe that we can deliver the growth expectations that we discussed last quarter. There are a lot of -- in addition to, I guess, what we feel good about, there's even -- as I referenced to earlier, new opportunities that have surfaced recently where there are prospects who are looking to move quickly and therefore could contribute in 2025. So we feel like based on the visibility we have that we feel good about the range we've set being on the high end of our 14% to 16%, and we'll continue to monitor it and absorbing the viral last piece, the last question you asked was about Block expectations. Obviously, we're very close partners and so we're in very regular contact, and so anything that they have shared publicly, absolutely it has been factored into our projections of (inaudible). We're in contact with them on a, if not daily, then certainly weekly basis and so we're in pretty close sync in terms of how we think about the trajectory of their business and how that impacts our performance. Cassie Chan Okay, that's helpful. And just to follow up on credit, obviously, Perpay was a really nice win. It's nice to see that go live. Can you just talk a little bit about what you're expecting credit to contribute to 2025 now with this? And in general, how do those volumes transactions look like relative to obviously your traditional debit business in terms of what that looks like on the impact of the P&L and what we -- maybe it changed the shape of that a little bit going forward as it becomes a more meaningful part of the business?Thank you. Michael Milotich Yeah, so we're excited about Perpay coming onto the platform and again, we've been doing the new issuance for them since late February and we're starting to migrate their existing cardholders. Just kind of stepping back where we are from a credit standpoint is with Perpay doing new issuance, and we already had a commercial customer live, so we now have a commercial and a consumer program live on the platform and then we already have signed another consumer co-brand that we talked about last quarter as well as there's another commercial program as well that has been signed and is in we know there are at least two additional programs that we expect to launch later in 2025. So we're getting some traction. We're getting the experience driving some volume so we can show what our capabilities can deliver and have more proof points for prospective customers. Its impact in 2025 is still small, and I would say even in 2026, it would be relatively small.I mean, Perpay is a migration, so that's nice. You get the volume immediately, but the other three programs are all new programs that will take some time to ramp. So I would expect that contribution from credit to our revenue and gross profit won't really be meaningful until probably late '26 or even into 2027 when these programs have ramped up more fully and maybe we've onboarded a few additional ones in addition to just those terms of human economics, typically, in credit, it's going to be a little bit better than debit, as you just said, there's a lot more complexity and a lot more opportunity to add value. In terms of what you're doing from a ledgering perspective, the (inaudible) the reward support, these are all areas that are just a little more complicated and involved than they are in debit and typically the unit economics reflect that. Operator Sanjay Sakhrani, KBW. Sanjay Sakhrani Hey, thank you. Hey, Mike, could you just talk about where you are with the CEO search? Michael Milotich Happy to, Sanjay. Thank you for the question. So the Board is committed to taking the time it needs to find the right CEO for Marqeta, so the search process is ongoing, and we'll update you when there's news. But I think what the Board feels comfortable with is with me in the interim and the rest of the executive team here in place that the business can continue to perform well and not miss a beat in this interim period. And so they're going to take the time that they feel they need to hire the right candidate. Sanjay Sakhrani Okay, great. You're doing a great job, by the way. But specific to the question, the line of questioning on Block and sort of how it ties into your performance, could you maybe just talk a little bit about just the difference in spending behavior they're seeing versus you're seeing? Because it seemed like that consumer that they're exposed to kind of looks a lot like your consumer but the spending behaviors are different. Any analysis there that you guys have done? Michael Milotich Yeah, I mean, obviously, I can't speak to their business specifically. I'll leave that to them, but I would say what we see on a broad basis is that we're seeing the whole neobanking market based on many customers who use our platform, for example, so it's a bigger population. There's also, for us like for an example, for some detail is like when we look at all the buy now pay later use cases as an example, and we look at the breakdown in spending between high discretionary and medium discretionary and low discretionary, one of the areas we see growing a little faster and taking share within buy now pay later is actually the low use case is being applied in -- the footprint of it is expanding. And particularly as we enable these customers with these pay anywhere cards where essentially the buy now pay later functionality is embedded in a card rather than the merchant accepting that buy now pay later, that gives consumers a little more flexibility in terms of where they apply that's just an example where just based on our much broader view, the behaviors may be a little different for us. So I mean, there's still obviously a whole very large customer for us and drive 45% of our revenue, but that means that's more than half of our business that is coming from other customers that might have a slightly different mix or target audience. Operator Andrew Bauch, Wells Fargo. Andrew Bauch Hey, guys, I'll just bookend it here with a thematic question. Good to hear about your facilitation of cryptocurrency spend through your does this all kind of dovetail around stablecoins? And are you hearing more demand for stablecoin functionality from your client base? How do you see Marqeta fitting into the stablecoin trend? It seems to be a lot more topical today than it has been in years past and wonder how Marqeta would fit in that type of environment. Michael Milotich Yeah, no, thanks for your question, Andrew. And yeah, so obviously, things have really heated up again in the last few months from a crypto and stablecoin perspective. I think that the way we look at it is because of the way our platform works and the flexibility we provide as well as the way we use our just-in-time funding, we've always been a pioneer in crypto that allows cards to be spending in the fiat currency, but have the stored balance essentially be in something else, a crypto or it could be a I think where we could see a opportunity for us is assuming -- if you assume that acceptance is going to be like how people transact with stablecoins, if they're going to use it for kind of everyday spending, either consumers or small, medium sized businesses where it might be a card like use case. If the acceptance isn't there and how it works for both the merchant and the issuer, then transacting in fiat is obviously a much easier way to do it and just have the balance come from a stablecoin, and that's something given our track record in crypto and the types of customers that we have and who we support for that offering, we think that's very applicable, we certainly demonstrated leadership, and that was a part of why Bitpanda in Europe selected us. It's still early, but obviously there's a lot of activity and assuming people want to go down that path, even if it's in the more short to medium term until maybe there is broader adoption of acceptance or issuance of products that would use stablecoin directly, we could be a bridge to that later state. Andrew Bauch Great. Congrats on the quarter. Michael Milotich Thank you. Operator Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, with that, the conference of Marqeta Inc. has now concluded. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your lines.
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Marqeta chief focuses on revenue diversity, execution
This story was originally published on Payments Dive. To receive daily news and insights, subscribe to our free daily Payments Dive newsletter. In late February, Marqeta replaced its former chief executive, naming Mike Milotich, the chief financial officer, to the additional role of interim CEO. It's a title he might hold for a while as Milotich says Marqeta's board is comfortable with the current executive team, allowing directors to conduct a thorough, deliberative search. The company focuses on card issuing and embedded finance, to allow its customers – including large fintechs and online retail marketplaces– to profit from interchange fees on transactions. Oakland, California-based Marqeta faces stiff competition from rivals such as Fidelity National Information Services and Global Payments, as well as upstarts such as Adyen and Stripe. Marqeta, which went public in June 2021, has gradually diversified its revenue away from Block, which accounted for nearly three-quarters (73%) of the business in early 2021. Block represented 45% of revenue in the most recent quarter, Marqeta reported Thursday. It's also planning a 'white label app,' rolling out later this year, to allow companies to establish a card program quickly, without spending internal resources or managing cardholders, Milotich said last week on a quarterly earnings call. As the dual CEO-CFO, Milotich is also targeting costs, with a goal of keeping expense growth 10 points below gross profit growth. Milotich joined Marqeta as CFO in February 2022 after prior roles at Visa, PayPal Holdings and American Express. He spoke with Payments Dive on May 9. Editor's note: This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity. MIKE MILOTICH: Not really. Although we've accomplished a lot at Marqeta, we need to improve our execution a little bit. So I think what I'm really focused on is doing the fundamentals, the little things a little better. We have several innovative things that we're doing, and we are constantly growing the capabilities we offer. The key is to do everything, finish everything we start and kind of do it really well, is what I'm a little more focused on than you know, maybe we've been in the past. I think because we have enough great ideas, that's not our problem. Our problem is actually focusing, prioritizing and delivering. You can't really plan for that. It's more that you make sure you have contingency plans. It's more about making sure you have the ability to shift if things change. And sometimes that means the way you execute is slightly different, so that you kind of have some exits and some off ramps if you need to make a change. I think we're trying to make sure every decision we make, there is some flexibility if things change. Otherwise, what we see in our business is that, at least so far, there isn't a shift in the way consumers are spending. For us it's two things. We have one very large customer, Block. This past quarter, they were 45% of our revenue. We're making progress growing our non-Block business, and so I would say that's an area of focus: How quickly is our non-Block business growing? Our non-Block revenue is growing more than 10 points faster than our Block revenue. That's something investors are watching. We still think there's a lot of growth opportunity with Block and so it's more, how quickly can we diversify the business outside of that? Another thing investors want to see is how successfully we move into embedded finance. How successfully were we able to attract these different kinds of companies and get them on our platform and show the difference that we can make, versus maybe what has been done in the past. We still think there's a lot of opportunity at Block and a lot of ways we can help them. We don't necessarily target that percentage. We more target non-Block growth. We want to drive non-Block growth, but if Block grows really fast, that's not a bad thing on our platform. We support Square, we support Afterpay, we support Cash App. They've talked a lot about getting Afterpay inserted more into Cash App directly. So there's things that we can help them with. They haven't done a true credit card yet, and these are all things that they could do seamlessly with us. In addition to that, we obviously are trying to grow our business as much as we can with other partners. We're happy integrating with multiple players, as we sort of speak to larger and larger companies whose core business is not this. They're looking for a more holistic offering. We're providing a lot more value-added services, risk services that they can adopt. We announced we're building a white label app, so that the decision maker for this card program, one day they might want to embed it into their existing company app, but that takes a lot of selling internally to get people to commit resources that way. So a lot of them are saying, I'm going to build a standalone app that looks and feels and easily syncs with our main app. But it can allow me to get traction in the market, and then maybe one day later, embed it directly. Almost everyone now issues a digital, tokenized version of your card along with the physical card. So a lot of people are putting their card into one of the big wallets. I think the big change that we see coming, that a lot of people are interested in, is where you would do more from their experience. You're inside their app, and there are things you can do. If you were an airline, why wouldn't you be able to do some things directly from their application, as opposed to leaving it, and so I think that's personalized rewards. One of the things we're working on in credit is credit platforms. Today, the reward is the same for you as it is for me, but there's no reason why. Just like if you and I pulled up a website, we were sitting right next to each other. What would be on (each) website would be very different, and we believe there's no reason why card benefits and rewards couldn't be similar, where they are somewhat tailored to your preferences and your needs. The board, they feel like with me in the interim role, and the rest of the executive team in place, that the business can thrive in the short-to-medium term, which gives them the luxury of taking the time they need to do a thorough search. So I don't expect it to be fast. That's up for the board to determine. Recommended Reading How embedded payments are changing the way we pay
Yahoo
10-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Is Marqeta, Inc. (MQ) the Best Low Priced Stock to Invest in For the Long Term?
We recently published a list of . In this article, we are going to take a look at where Marqeta, Inc. (NASDAQ:MQ) stands against other best low priced stocks to invest in for the long term. As per AllianceBernstein, tariffs and trade wars have impacted investors of late. While some asset classes were spared, the US small-cap stocks have been hard hit. Over the past 6 months, the Russell 2000 Index has witnessed a decline of over ~10%. That being said, the investment firm opines that equity markets continue to show signs of broadening, which can work in favor of small-caps over time. The small-caps have underperformed in part since they are perceived as being more economically sensitive as compared to their larger-company counterparts. The current circumstances are unique, says AllianceBernstein. Trade tensions can have a more significant impact on the broader US economy, but robust companies can still see earnings growth. The small-cap investors can also take a sigh of relief from the broadening market. The investment firm highlighted that, over the previous 30 years, small-cap performance remained particularly robust over the last 2 cycles of unwinding large-cap growth concentration, i.e., when markets start to broaden. The 10 largest stocks accounted for over half the market capitalization of the Russell 1000 Growth Index by 2024 end, exhibiting a record high in the market concentration. Despite the trend reflecting the signs of unwinding, the concentration remains much higher as compared to the previous peaks. As per AllianceBernstein, small-caps are well-placed to benefit from the declining market concentration. READ ALSO: and . AllianceBernstein opines that, while broadening markets have resulted in improved small-cap returns, timing the turn can be a difficult task. Typically, economic recoveries have fueled such transitions. In a bid to capitalize on the broadening market with an uncertain beginning, the firm believes that the best approach is to emphasize higher-quality companies. High-quality stocks tend to see reduced drawdowns when there is a contraction in the economy, and more upside when it sees expansion. The firm also opines that small-cap stocks trade at extremely depressed valuations as compared to the larger companies, based on P/E ratios. Notably, the geopolitical tensions and macroeconomic worries have impacted the small companies. Without considering the company fundamentals, the investors have discounted potential hazards for such companies. Investing in firms exhibiting resilient business models can benefit along the road to recovery. To list the 10 Best Low Priced Stocks to Invest in For the Long Term, we sifted through financial media reports to make a list of 40 potential long term stocks. We focused on companies with a market cap of at least $2 billion with a share price below $10. We further refined our list to include stocks that had bullish analyst sentiment. We also mentioned the hedge fund sentiment around each stock, as of Q4 2024. Finally, the stocks were arranged in ascending order of their hedge fund sentiment. Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter's strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 373.4% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 218 percentage points (see more details here). A financial services team at work reviewing customer data on their digital Inc. (NASDAQ:MQ) is engaged in developing and publishing a commerce payments platform. It saw total processing volume (TPV) of $84 billion, demonstrating a YoY growth of 27%. The company continues to expand its customer portfolio throughout a diverse set of use cases and geographies, demonstrating payments industry leadership. In Q1 2025, Marqeta, Inc. (NASDAQ:MQ)'s gross profit improved by 17% YoY primarily because of its TPV growth. The company continues to see strong growth in Europe, with TPV growth remaining more than 100% in Q1 2025. Adding program management remains a critical lever for enhancing its offerings to offer a more holistic solution for customers operating in Europe. Furthermore, the acquisition of TransactPay remains on track to close by the end of Q3 2025, and Marqeta, Inc. (NASDAQ:MQ) expects it to be a significant step in delivering its program management offering, which remains comparable to other geographies such as the US and Canada. The transaction continues to drive strong customer interest since it exhibits more control of the entire card offering and seamless geographic expansion. Furthermore, the second migration was Bitpanda, a European crypto platform. Marqeta, Inc. (NASDAQ:MQ) has been powering cards that enable consumers to spend cryptocurrency through a card for several years. Overall, MQ ranks 5th on our list of best low priced stocks to invest in for the long term. While we acknowledge the potential of MQ as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that some deeply undervalued AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns, and doing so within a shorter time frame. There is an AI stock that went up since the beginning of 2025, while popular AI stocks lost around 25%. If you are looking for a deeply undervalued AI stock that is more promising than MQ but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about this cheapest AI stock. READ NEXT: and . Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at . Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
