Earnings Labs

SoFi Technologies, Inc. (SOFI)

Q1 2023 Earnings Call· Mon, May 1, 2023

$18.59

-0.92%

Key Takeaways · AI generated
AI summary not yet generated for this transcript. Generation in progress for older transcripts; check back soon, or browse the full transcript below.

Same-Day

-10.33%

1 Week

+0.00%

1 Month

+24.68%

vs S&P

+21.67%

Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good morning, and thank you for attending today's SoFi First Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference call. All lines will be muted during the presentation portion of the call with an opportunity for questions-and-answers at the end. At this time, I would now like to turn the conference over to our host, Maura Cyr SoFi Investor Relations. Maura, please proceed.

Maura Cyr

Management

Thank you, and good morning. Welcome to SoFi's first quarter 2023 earnings conference call. Joining me today to talk about our results and recent events are Anthony Noto, CEO; and Chris Lapointe, CFO. You can find the presentation accompanying our earnings release on the Investor Relations section of our website. Our remarks today will include forward-looking statements that are based on our current expectations and forecasts and involve risks and uncertainties. These statements include, but are not limited to, our competitive advantages and strategy, macroeconomic conditions and outlook, future products and services and future business and financial performance. Our actual results may differ materially from those contemplated by these forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause these results to differ materially are described in today's press release and our most recent Form 10-K as filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as our subsequent filings made with the SEC, including our upcoming Form 10-Q. Any forward looking statements that we make on this call are based on assumptions as of today, and we undertake no obligation to update these statements as a result of new information or future events. And now, I'd like to turn the call over to Anthony.

Anthony Noto

Management

Thank you, Maura, and good morning, everyone. The first quarter at SoFi was an incredible beginning to what is already turning out to be yet another eventful year in the macro environment. Amid all the volatility, we delivered another quarter of record revenue and adjusted EBITDA with strong overall operating results, reinforcing the strength of our strategy and our ability to execute with excellence. A few key achievements from the first quarter include: our eighth consecutive quarter of record adjusted net revenue of $460 million, up 43% year-over-year with record revenue in lending and financial services, as well as continued strength in tech platform; our third consecutive quarter of record adjusted EBITDA at nearly $76 million, representing a 48% incremental margin and a 16% margin overall; and incremental GAAP net income margin of 54%, resulting in a loss of just $34 million. Deposits increased by $2.7 billion sequentially, marking another record quarter and now exceed $10 billion in total deposits. Importantly, more than 90% of our consumer deposits are from sticky direct deposit members and 97% of our deposits are insured. Our cash and cash equivalents on the balance sheet increased by $1.1 billion to $2.5 billion since year-end, reinforcing our strong liquidity position. Once again, we are achieving several financial inflection points. Adjusted EBITDA of $76 million is now greater than stock based compensation at $64 million, which actually declined. And this is another critical step towards GAAP net income profitability. We achieved positive variable profit in the Financial Services segment and remain on track for positive contribution profit by year end. Additionally, lending net interest income revenue or NIM revenue of $201 million exceeded lending non-interest income of $136 million for the second consecutive quarter. And importantly, our NIM revenue is meaningfully greater than our Lending segment directly…

Chris Lapointe

Management

Thanks, Anthony. We started the year with a great quarter, which saw strong growth trends across the entire business. We achieved record revenue and adjusted EBITDA despite operating in a rapidly evolving macro backdrop. I'm going to walk you through some key financial highlights for the quarter, and then share some color on our financial outlook. Unless otherwise stated, I'll be referring to adjusted results for the first quarter of 2023 versus first quarter of 2022. Our GAAP consolidated income statement and all reconciliations can be found in today's earnings release and the subsequent 10-Q filing, which will be made available next week. For the quarter, top line growth remains strong as we delivered record adjusted net revenue of $460 million, up 43% year-over-year and 4% sequential from the fourth quarter's record of $443 million and above our Q1 guidance of $430 million to $440 million. Adjusted EBITDA was $76 million at a 16% margin, also above the high end of our most recent guidance of $40 million to $45 million and ahead of the prior quarter record. This represented 14 points of year-over-year margin improvement, demonstrating the strong operating leverage of the business as it scales. Year-over-year margin improvement has been driven by significant operating leverage across our sales and marketing, G&A and ops functional expense lines. Overall, this resulted in a 48% incremental adjusted EBITDA margin year-over-year. Our GAAP net losses were $34 million this quarter, which is a $76 million improvement year-over-year and a $6 million improvement sequentially. Our incremental GAAP net income margin was 54% for the quarter. In addition to our adjusted EBITDA margin expansion, we saw meaningful leverage against stock based compensation as a percentage of net revenue at 14% in Q1 2023, down from 16% in the fourth quarter and 24% in the…

Operator

Operator

We will now open the lines for Q&A. [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Mihir Bhatia with Bank of America. Your line is now open.

Mihir Bhatia

Analyst

Good morning.

Anthony Noto

Management

Good morning.

Mihir Bhatia

Analyst

Thank you for taking my question. Maybe to start, Chris, if you could just provide the loan sales and gain on sale margins this quarter, with and without hedging if possible, please? And just talk also about the larger strategy. Is there any change as you've grown deposits to hold loans for longer or is it still very much a buy and distribute model? Thank you.

Chris Lapointe

Management

Yes. No problem. So I'll hit on each of the products starting with our home loans business. So in home loans, we ended up selling $78 million of principal at a 104.7% execution level, inclusive of hedges, it was about 100 basis points less than that. In our personal loans business, we did not do any whole loan sales in period, our last one was in Q4 at 104.4% execution. But we did execute a $440 million consumer loan ABS transaction with spreads that outperformed our expectations and we're able to price at 90 basis points over SOFR. The deal was 8 times oversubscribed with over 28 orders, which allowed us to tighten spreads meaningfully by 80 basis points relative to the deal that we did back in Q4 that had comparable collateral. The market obviously continues to search for shorter duration securities backed by higher credit collateral. And then in student loan refinancing, we did not do any whole loan sales in period. Our last one was in Q3 at a 104.4% execution. What I would say in terms of your second question, Mihir, as we've discussed in the past, we are extremely well capitalized at this point having raised $3.6 billion in 2021. We have access to $8.6 billion in warehouse lines, $3.5 billion of which is drawn currently. And our bank deposit base of $10 billion is growing really quickly with the vast majority of our deposits, more than 90% of them coming from direct deposit members. In addition to that, we've been able to successfully access the ABS markets each of the last two quarters, which have brought attractive fixed financing options for all of our loans. Given this flexibility, we're always going to maximize returns on the loans that we originate as well as the overall firm ROE. And that's going to take different forms given the environment that we're operating in at any given point in time. This quarter similar to last quarter, we had the flexibility to hold loans for a longer period of time, particularly given the growth that we saw in deposits of $2.7 billion, which resulted in really strong net interest income. But that could certainly change in future quarters, but we have a lot of options and flexibility to that.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Jeff Adelson with Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open.

Jeff Adelson

Analyst · Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open.

Yes. Hi. Thanks for taking my question. I was just wondering if you could dig in a little bit more on the loan growth -- the loan growth expectation from here. You've been doubling the loans every quarter year-on-year. And I understand you have a lot of capital at this point, but is there a point at which you feel like you need to start selling your loans again? And then, I guess, on the actual loan sale side, what are your -- what gives you confidence that the loans you're marking on your balance sheet today, if you were to start going back to the market again, what gives you confidence that you can kind of hold on to those marks you have on the balance sheet? Thanks.

Anthony Noto

Management

Thanks, Jeff. First, what I'd say is that, our overall strategy as it relates to loans and when we sell them versus hold them is really driven by liquidity and our ability to optimize return on equity. It's the same strategy we've had since 2018. Our ability to execute it has only become more and more strong and robust so that we have maximum optionality. I would love to remind everyone that if you think about our liquidity stack and our funding stack, we have $3 billion of equity or own equity capital that we can fund with $8 billion of warehouse facility. And then as we reported today $10 billion of deposits. That source of funding allows us to be very nimble in what we decide to hold versus what we decide to sell. And also allows us to be very nimble as it relates to loan purchases of SoFi loans and other opportunities that we have as optionality on deals over time. So in essence, there's no one answer to your question. It's about maximizing ROE and making sure we have the right liquidity and making sure we have the right capital ratios as a bank. I'll let Chris talk about the way we think about the value of the loans in the marketplace.

Chris Lapointe

Management

Yes. Absolutely. And in terms of why we get confident in the sense that we would be able to sell the loans at where they're currently marked, every single quarter we work with a third party valuation firm that marks to market each and every one of our loans on an individual basis to account for changes in every single factor that impacts loans. So that's things like the weighted average coupon, default rates, prepayment speeds, benchmark rates, spreads as well as where secondary bonds and residuals are trading. So you see that mark to market take place every single quarter and that flows through the revenue line of our P&L.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Kevin Barker with Piper Sandler. Your line is now open.

Kevin Barker

Analyst · Piper Sandler. Your line is now open.

Great. Thanks for taking my questions. I wanted to follow-up on the acquisition you announced a couple of months ago on Wyndham Capital. You mentioned that it's going to be accretive within the next six months. And I believe they did about $2 billion of originations last year according to some press reports. Could you just give us an idea of like how big do you expect the mortgage platform to be? And then what does the accretive within 6 months guidance imply? Did you have to do a significant amount of further integration within the SoFi platform or is a lot of that already existing within Wyndham? Thank you.

Anthony Noto

Management

Thank you. First, let me approach the question about home loans from a strategic standpoint. As many of you know, we want to be a one stop digital provider for all of your financial needs during all the major decision of your financial life and all the days in between. In order to do that, we have to be there when you make large decisions like how you pay for college, like how you may pay for grad school, medical school, or buying a home. We've taken approach over the last five years where we prefer to vertically integrate with our technology. It gives us lower cost, we can innovate at a much faster rate. We can make better real time decisions, more personalization. The mortgage industry, as you know, is very cyclical and it can really be challenging if you take actions at the height of the market from an acquisition standpoint or other investment standpoint. We worked hard over the last three years to find a technology and a platform that we could buy at a great price. A small dollar amount that could be integrated pretty quickly and allow us to accomplish the objectives that I mentioned from vertical integration. We couldn't have been happier to find Wyndham. We think it's a phenomenal team. It's longer and durable company, just the way that Galileo and Technisys was around for decades and it was founder led and Jeff will continue to stay with us at SoFi. The integration will be done throughout the year. It's not significant in size in terms of the bandwidth that we have to allocate for that integration. So we feel like we can make it accretive by the end of the year. In terms of the volume they were doing, as you can imagine, the environment has been very challenging for home sales and refinancing. And so the volume was quite low relative to historical levels. And you should really think about it as a technology integration and significantly increased capacity for us to step on the gas pedal to increase our market share gains. And we intend to do that on the back of the full integration. So expect it to have a much more meaningful impact in 2024 once we feel great about the ability to scale, not just the technology, but our processes and our people to ensure our members have a great experience. Time to fund is critically important in purchase mortgages, and we want to have the best time to fund possible for our members with high satisfaction. I will let Chris talk about the accretion.

Chris Lapointe

Management

Yes. So overall what we assumed in the back half of the year is that, this was not going to have a material impact on the overall business either from a top line or bottom line perspective, but from an accretion perspective, we expect to deliver positive contribution.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of John Hecht with Jefferies. Your line is now open.

John Hecht

Analyst · Jefferies. Your line is now open.

Thanks very much. Good morning, guys and congratulations on a great quarter. I wonder if you guys can just talk about, over the course of the year we've got certain things happening, like the potential moratorium ending for student loans and, obviously, the changes that are expected in the interest rate markets. Maybe just considering all that, can you give us your kind of expectations for the mix of originations over the course of the next few quarters?

Chris Lapointe

Management

Yeah. Sure. John, I can take that one. So, what I would say is, we aren’t providing specific guidance at the product level, but we are expecting to continue to see modest growth in our personal loans business. This past quarter, we reached 8.2% market share, that was up from 5.8% last quarter and [5.5%] (ph) a year ago. So there is significant headroom to continue to grow that business. But as we've said in the past, we are going to continue to be prudent and thoughtful about how we approach that business and won't overextend ourselves. So expect to see continued modest growth in that business similar to what you seen over the course of the last several quarters. On student loan refinancing, our guide and outlook has not changed from our Q1 earnings call or our Q4 earnings call. What was contemplated in our full year guide is that, the moratorium would end on June 30. And then people would go back into repayment 60 days thereafter, which means that we would see elevated demand for student loan originations in Q4, albeit at a lower monetization level given where interest rates are. We do think that there is still a large TAM that we can go after, given where we can price the loans today. So we do expect to see an uptick in demand, but probably not to the levels that we saw back in Q4 of 2019. Then in home loan origination, Anthony just touched on it. We do expect to see an acceleration in originations given the acquisition of Wyndham Capital. Right now we have a very, very low market share. So there's a ton of headroom to continue.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Eugene Simuni with MoffettNathanson. Your line is now open.

Eugene Simuni

Analyst · MoffettNathanson. Your line is now open.

Thank you. Good morning, guys. Congratulations on great results. I wanted to go back to the trends in your deposits. Great to see very strong growth in Q1, but can you elaborate a little bit on the trend in March since the beginning of the bank crisis? And maybe if you can share anything on what are the trends in April? And just maybe as a broader question here, how is the behavior of your bank customers changed at all since the bank crisis? And how you're adjusting to that? I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. Thank you.

Anthony Noto

Management

It's another quarter since opening the bank about a year ago in February of continued strong performance of our SoFi Money account, which is checking and savings as you know. The strategy has really played out in space throughout the year offering high interest rate on checking and very high interest rate on savings up to 4.2% now. If you do direct deposit with us, getting all the other member benefits that we provide for you beyond that free certified financial planner discounts on loans, our broad based rewards program, all of which now bundle into SoFi Plus has really helped us drive not just strong adoption of SoFi Money, but a lot of engagement as it relates to both deposits and spending. We couldn't be more happy with the trends we're seeing in both of those. We expect them to continue into the second quarter that we've seen so far in April and throughout the managing time period. What I'd say about Q1 is that, it's really hard to sort of separate out what may have happened because of all the uncertainty and maybe a flock to safety as people trust SoFi and came to our product and used it more frequently. I would say the trends in April are off to a start that would indicate we should be at the similar level of $2 billion plus in deposits at the end of the quarter. In terms of spending, we continue to see really strong growth in spending as our direct deposit members increase, given that they're using as their primary account. And so that's also a contributing factor to our financial results that sort of gets overlooked because of just a strong performance on NIM that we continue to see and how much more scale that is. But the spending trend on [debit] (ph) and so forth has really mirrored the trend in deposits as well as NIM to reinforce our overall strategy, giving us an opportunity to have more touch points in helping people get their mind rate based on their spending and what's happening in their accounts.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Reggie Smith with JP Morgan. Your line is now open.

Reggie Smith

Analyst · JP Morgan. Your line is now open.

Hey. Good morning and congrats on the quarter. I only have one question, so it's going to be kind of long, I guess. I was curious, what are your loss expectations, life of loss expectations for your most recent cohort of personal loans? How does that compare to maybe your 2022 cohorts? And then follow-up to that is, how are the 2022 tracking relative to your initial expectations?

Anthony Noto

Management

Thank you for the question. I'll let Chris get into the particulars. But at a high level, since 2018, we've architected our personal loans in a way that will drive to at least a 40% to 50% variable profit margin. And that includes all the variable cost, including life of loan losses and funding costs. The reason why we target that level of profitability is so that our loans are durable through the cycle. If we're seeing trends that lead us to believe that we can't get to that level, we will make changes. Sometimes that's increasing our WAC. Sometimes that's being more efficient in our marketing costs. Sometimes that involves driving down lower cost of funding. As it relates to the macroeconomic conditions impacting life of loan losses, we will tighten credit. We've tightened credit in the past. We have very sophisticated real time ability to test pricing and credit and a number of early warning economic indicators that have caused us to be more conservative on what we under write and tighten credit throughout the year and we'll continue to do that. But we've been below our targets life of loan losses of 7% to 8%, which is part of that equation of 40% to 50% variable profit margin. I just don't want people to think it's just about that metric, it's about the overall unit economics of getting to 40% to 50% variable profit margin and that assumes 7% to 8% life of loan losses, which we've been below and our cohorts have really continued to trend relative to that metric in a positive way.

Chris Lapointe

Management

Yes. And I would just add on. If you look at all of our cohorts on a month-to-month, quarter-to-quarter basis, they've all been relatively consistent with the framework that Anthony just laid out. At the overall portfolio level right now, our annualized charge off rate on the personal loans business is 2.97%. If you take the weighted average life into consideration for that portfolio, it gets you to an estimated life of loan losses of about 4.5%, which again is meaningfully below the 7% to 8% risk tolerance level that we have today.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Moshe Orenbuch with Credit Suisse. Your line is now open.

Moshe Orenbuch

Analyst · Credit Suisse. Your line is now open.

Great. Thanks. And most of my questions have been asked and answered. But I thought -- and you talked about this a little bit in the prepared remarks, but I think it's actually quite interesting in terms of the ability to increase whether it's cross buy or reduce marketing spend because of the increase in the number of members across financial services and SoFi money. Could you talk a little bit -- in a little more tell like how you would expect to see that playing out over the course of the next year or two in kind of more specifically? Is it a function of less marketing for consumer loans? Is it lantern products? Like what are the biggest benefits to SoFi?

Anthony Noto

Management

Yes. So we talk about a concept called the FSPL, financial services productivity loop. And the concept is very simply, we want to leverage the broadest reach, most appealing high engagement products like Relay, like SoFi Money, like SoFi Invest and SoFi Credit Card to really build a significant amount of products in those categories. As we build that scale, we have information about our members that allows us to give them personalized offers that best meet their needs. So for example, if we bring in a SoFi Money customer member and that member does direct deposit with us and we see the mortgage that they're paying or we see the student loan that they're paying, we see them sitting on a ton of cash. We see them overrunning and having the significant amount of credit card debt. We can make it very specific recommendation to them on how to get their money right in that particular area. We play that strategy out every day. Sometimes it's driven by technology and data. And sometimes it's driven by the mechanical processes of our teams, as well as our certified financial planners. That cross buy allows us to bring in that second product with no customer acquisition cost and has a huge impact on unit economics. So let's take a personal loan, for example, and this is just illustrative. Let's just say over the course of time, our average variable profit on a personal loan, and so that would be the revenue of that personal loan less the life of loan losses, the funding cost, variable operating cost and the customer acquisition cost resulted in $800 of variable profit. That could have a customer acquisition cost of anywhere between $600 to $1000. If someone comes in through Relay and they do credit…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Dominick Gabriele with Oppenheimer. Your line is now open.

Dominick Gabriele

Analyst · Oppenheimer. Your line is now open.

Great. Good morning and great results. So, we saw significantly better revenue and adjusted EBITDA in the quarter. And I've been getting to even wonder how much we need the student loan business to return if you guys have a really strong franchise prevail. But the incremental adjusted EBITDA margin was higher than expected in the quarter. And if you take this quarter and the next quarters guidance, you get -- still your roughly 30% expectation for incremental EBITDA margins. And so, could you just talk about any shift that may have happened between this quarter and next quarter or if there's any seasonality as far as kind of that 30% expectation that we should be thinking about? Thanks so much.

Anthony Noto

Management

Thank you for the question. As it relates to student loans, I want to bring into two categories. You have our private student loans, i.e. the loans that people are taking out to actually go to school. So we're in the school student loan business. We're also in the student loan refinancing business. That business is one that takes our members who have either private student loans or federal student loans and refinances them at a lower rate or longer term to lower their monthly payment, much like the home loan refinancing industry. As long as the college education in the United States is not free, there will be a student loan market. Simply said, as long as the college education in the United States is not free, there will be a need for student loans. Sometimes those student loans could be provided by the government and sometimes they could be provided by private institutions. Because of that dynamic, we will always be in the student loan business. The question is, are we just in the private student loan business or the private student loan business and the refinancing student loan business? I believe we will always be in both businesses regardless of what's decided by the Supreme Court on forgiveness and regardless of what happens with the moratorium. Why? The cost of education is significantly greater than the ability of people to pay. Therefore, they have to borrow money to do that. As long as they're borrowing money, we can find a way for them to not just get access to that loan, but to do it at a lower cost as they continue improving their financial lives. So it's never a question in our mind whether we're going to be in the business. It's just a question of what are the actual products and how we best meet the member’s needs. Because I'll just reiterate again, we want to be there for every one of the major financial decision of someone's life and all the days in between, which means we have to be in the student loan business to execute our strategy. In terms of the particulars as it relates to EBITDA margin, I'll let Chris answer that.

Chris Lapointe

Management

Yes. So in terms of the outperformance that we saw in Q1, Dominick, we saw revenue outperformance across both our lending and our financial services businesses, primarily attributable to net interest income as I alluded to in my prepared remarks. From an expense perspective, we did see really good CAC efficiencies, given the strong member and product growth, particularly in lending where our customer acquisition costs on a per loan basis was down 20% sequentially. And then in addition to that, we were able to manage expenses effectively, again, throughout the quarter creating leverage across our entire fixed cost area. Collectively, the revenue outperformance along with the efficiency gains drove the excess earnings that we decided to drop to the bottom line and take more of a conservative approach given the uncertainty in the market. Overall, as we've discussed in the past, we strive to spend about 70% of our incremental revenue as we've said. Depending on a number of factors we may choose to drop more to the bottom line, period-to-period. And that's what happened certainly this quarter. And you'll see periods of over earning followed by deployment of those resources back into the drivers of the business.

Anthony Noto

Management

And the only other thing I'd add is, there's a lot of operating leverage in the business and you're seeing that come through in Q4 and again in Q1. We are trying to balance investing to drive growth with prudent responsibility of driving towards profitability to give investors clear transparency on where our long term margins and ROE can be. We couldn't be more confident about the long term margins of the company and return on equity, but we need to move judiciously through the process of balancing both. One of the things I would tell you is that, we've been driving the growth that we have and the improvement in profitability with their financial services segment being unprofitable. So the lending segment has a positive contribution margin, the tech platform has a positive contribution margin and then we have large losses in financial services. The reason why that's the case is because there's a 12 month to 24 month payback on customer acquisition cost. So we absorb that cost upfront and then we recoup it over time. We're finally to the point that we're actually a positive variable profit margin for the financial services segment. That means, we're actually covering all that customer acquisition cost. And the next step for us now that we're positive on a variable profit basis is getting the total variable profit dollars to be greater than the fixed directed -- fixed direct cost of financial services. And once we do that, all three segments will have positive contribution margin. So we're just getting started with the type of leverage we can drive over time. We will dampen your expectations on where the margins will be in the intermediate term, because we also want to keep investing. But we will hit the milestone that we've laid out as it relates to GAAP profitability and financial services, positive contribution margin unless there's a huge dislocation that we can't anticipate today.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Robert Wildhack with Autonomous. Your line is now open.

Robert Wildhack

Analyst · Autonomous. Your line is now open.

Good morning, guys. I wanted to ask one more about deposits. Anthony, it sounds like you're talking about at least another quarter of really solid growth. So zooming out beyond that, what's the current strategy in line of thought with respect to keeping the pedal down on deposit growth versus maybe giving up some of that growth rate, but possibly taking a lot of pressure off your deposit costs and deposit betas?

Anthony Noto

Management

Well, the great thing about our company and our vertical integration is that, the cost that we're currently have on our checking and savings account are lower than the cost that we've ever had in the business historically from a spread standpoint. So, it's actually cheaper for us to fund via deposits than the way we've historically funded the warehouse lines. And so, that's a huge competitive advantage. The reason we can offer the interest rate that we offer is because we actually make more money than we would with warehouse lines and without being a bank. And so the cost is completely acceptable [indiscernible] and we continue to be aggressive with the interest rate. I think the bigger question is, what happens when rates start to get cut and go down. I think we'll be able to hold rate much longer and higher than our competitors and really gain even more market share. Our goal is to have as many direct deposit customers as we can. That's a leading indicator of primary account and we -- that's our strategy. Direct deposit is one indicator of that, there are others that we're using now and that will give people benefits from if they take those other actions outside of direct deposit. But the rate that we're providing is very competitive, but it's very attractive to us form a financial rewards -- return standpoint.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Arren Cyganovich with Citigroup. Your line is now open.

Arren Cyganovich

Analyst · Citigroup. Your line is now open.

Thanks. Just a quick question on the technology segment. It looks like the revenue is down a little bit sequentially if you remove the client you lost kind of flattish. Do you expect any pull forwards of contract renewals there? And what do you expect in terms of revenue growth for that segment going forward?

Anthony Noto

Management

Yes. One of the things we want to point out is that, the technology platform is in a transition from a lot of small accounts and earlier stage start up to fewer larger durable customers. We made the decision throughout 2022 to stop chasing a lot of smaller deals. So what you see in the quarter is less new customers coming on and contributing to revenue that would have been signed in 2022, in the earlier part of the year and that transition is ongoing. We expect the revenue to continue to stay at about this level throughout the year and we'll start to see more meaningful contribution from some of the larger more durable customers that we've signed up. A couple of which were actually on the platform now and contributing, but that will become more -- that will become bigger and more significant by the end of the year. We really like the strategy. It's longer lead times. It's longer sales cycles. But the economic opportunity from each one of these partners goes well, well beyond just using the processing platform or APIs at Galileo to a number of other products. One of the things that may not be obvious to everyone is that, we're starting to see really strong traction in some of the products that are on top of the platform. So for example, [Connecta] (ph) is a natural language AI chatbot that helps with customer service. SoFi actually just integrated itself in our business, but it's gotten great uptick from adoption from our partners. We also rolled out something called PRP, which is Pain Risk platform, we're leveraging all the data on the Galileo platform. We process about 6 billion transactions a year. That gives us great intelligence to be able to detect transactional fraud.…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our last question goes to the line of Matthew O'Neil with ST Partners. Your line is now open.

Matthew O'Neil

Analyst

Yes. Hi, gentlemen. Thanks for squeezing me in at the end here. Just want to clarify and make sure that the prior question on technology segment and the commentary around fewer smaller accounts and more larger ones going forward. Is that directly connected to the small dip we saw this quarter in the Galileo accounts, just some smaller ones coming off before some bigger ones are being folded in. And then just as a separate follow-up, just curious on the macro front with what's going on in the rate environment. Is there a unemployment rate that you guys think about where things would start to become more concerning or there'd be some nonlinear impact on the credit quality side and are we anywhere kind of close to that? The assumption is not, but just kind of curious what you guys are thinking about on the potential horizon.

Anthony Noto

Management

Yes. On the technology platform side, I think you're asking a question about accounts and the growth of that being slower year-over-year and down sequentially. That just reflects a partner that moves off the platform and those accounts moving off. So it's both new account growth offset by that partner that moved off in 2022 off the platform. In terms of the unemployment rate, I'll give -- I'll hand over to Chris to talk about how we think about underwriting credit and the macroeconomic factors that we're looking at.

Chris Lapointe

Management

Yes. So our overall outlook on the macro hasn't changed from our Q4 earnings call. What we have talked about during that is that, the rate was going to be consistent with where the forward curve was at the time and peaking around 5% to 5.25% and exiting the year at 4.5%. So that's still contemplated in our current outlook. We assume that the unemployment rate would be 5%. So we're holding with that as well. And we finally we assumed that there would be a 2.5% GDP contraction. And then finally, we did assume that credit spreads would remain elevated, but we have seen that over the course of the last several quarters and we expect that to persist heading into Q2, Q3 and Q4, but that's all contemplated in our guide.

Anthony Noto

Management

And let me finish here by saying that we've been in an all-out sprint over the last five years to build out our digital product suite to meet our member’s needs. For every major financial decision in their lives and all the days in between, thanks to the incredible grit and hard work of our team at SoFi. We've been able to do that consistently. That said, we've seen tectonic plate shift for the industry in each of the last five years and some years multiple times. But through that volatility and uncertainty, we continue to prevail and thrive hitting eight record quarters of revenue in a row and hitting strategic and financial inflection points all along the way. 2023 has proven to be as formidable in just three short months as any year and it's just getting started. We're likely to see another multi tectonic plate shifting year. That said, SoFi will be ready. We'll be ready because the benefits of our strategy to build a uniquely diversified business combined with the national banking license not only positions SoFi to be the winner takes most in the separate transition of financial services to digital, but also provide greater durability through a market cycle and the many other viable events that may occur. I'm excited about where we are today and even more excited about where we can go from here. With that, thank you for your interest in SoFi and we'll talk to you in three short months.

Operator

Operator

Goodbye. This concludes SoFi's Q1 2023 earnings call. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day.