Motley Fool Money - PayPal Turns Around (Slowly)
Episode Date: April 30, 2024Alex Chriss is still early in his tenure as the CEO of PayPal, but the company’s turnaround is already showing green shoots. (00:21) PayPal’s earnings and why a drop at a specialty insurance comp...any could be a buying opportunity for investors. (16:57) What to do before you meet a financial advisor, and some questions to ask in an initial meeting. Companies discussed: PYPL, INTU, ZM, KNSL Host: Ricky Muvley Guests: Matt Frankel, Alison Southwick, Robert Brokamp Producer: Mary Long Engineer: Dan Boyd Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Everybody loves a comeback story, except when it slows down.
You're listening to Motley Full Money.
I'm Ricky Mulvey, joined today by Matt Frankel.
Matt, thanks for being here.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
I'm excited to, we're in like my favorite part of earning seasons right now.
Why is that?
It's all the companies that I follow, like the two we're about to discuss today.
But like this week, it's, I'm just, you know, it's crazy.
I'm going to be working until 10 p.m. every day this week.
There, there you go.
Yeah.
The reason, the reason why we've called you here, we got paid.
PayPal and Kin Sale, which are two companies you follow closely, and maybe for a listener,
one of them is a lot more known than the other.
So let's start with PayPal, which reported this morning, this was the third call for the new CEO, Alex Chris.
He's still kind of early in his tenure, but do you think he's starting to deliver on that promise he made in the first call
to make PayPal a much more focused and profitable company?
The short answer is yes, but it's also important to know that Alex Chris isn't just the only new part of the team. Paypal literally got rid of its entire C-suite.
Alex Chris started his tenure in September, and everyone else on the key leadership team is newer than him.
So, I mean, some started in January of this year. Some are just being appointed now. I think they just added someone, another key board member this past week.
it's a really kind of interesting time.
It's really rare that a company of this size and this dominance of what it does
just kind of like wipes the slate clean and brings it a totally new management team.
But on the efficiency question, absolutely, this is what was the big surprise to me in the
quarter.
There were two big surprises.
This was one of them is that PayPal's revenue grew by 9% year every year.
It's earnings per share grew by 27% year every year.
Anytime you see earnings from an already profitable company,
growing that much quicker than the top line, they're doing something right when it comes to efficiency.
Yeah, they're also doing hundreds of billions of dollars in payment volume. So those percentages
become a little bit harder to come by. Yeah, Chris is an outspoken CEO. In this call, he sort of took
some pot shots at the previous administration of PayPal for essentially their relationships with small
to medium-sized businesses. He called out Zoom for being a company in stagnation. And usually you hear
leaders say, like, this is a company we want to be like. We want to be like the Taiwan
semiconductor of artificial intelligence. And in this case, you have Chris saying, look at Zoom.
They stagnated. And that's exactly what we don't want to be like. So he's got this more, I would
say, deliberate, straightforward approach than you see in a lot of CEOs.
Yeah. And I mean, he came from the small and medium-sized business world. He was CEO of
Intuit, if you're not familiar, which is, you know, the company behind QuickBooks, which is the
small business accounting software package.
It's not surprising that that's a key focus area of his.
And he's absolutely right that PayPal just completely stagnated.
The previous management strategy was generally that we're going to keep growing our
user base forever and ever until every person in the world uses PayPal.
That clearly didn't pan out.
And then they were kind of kind of disjointed strategy.
I don't know if you remember when they were going to acquire Pinterest.
I've heard the stories.
And then just scrapped it because everybody who heard it
just like why. So it was just really a disjointed strategy. They abandoned their core growth
strategy, which like you said, small and medium-sized businesses. And just kind of were just
figuring, like throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. Yeah, it has a couple of powerful
tools over at PayPal. They didn't need Pinterest. I'm going to give you, let's do a menu of topics
of what was talked about in the quarter. And then you can, you can pick from the menu, what stood out
to you. So here's a few of them. Number one is Chris is trying to grow the fraud,
prevention services, which Chris called best in class. It's a key differentiator. They inked a deal
with draft kings for fraud prevention. There's a 21% increase in users on the Venmo debit card.
It's working on linking that to Google Pay and Apple Pay. I would say a reporting thing that
stands out to me is that PayPal is now reporting stock-based compensation as a part of non-gap
metrics, which is going to change a lot of those comparisons, but gives a lot more clarity.
to those investing in the company.
Hey, we got a stable coin.
How about that?
PYUSA, they're hoping to eliminate fees on those cross-border transactions for users on Venmo.
And then active accounts grew sequentially, which is a little bit of a reversal from recent trends.
There's your menu board, Matt Frankel.
Which would you like to order from?
Well, let's start with the two different Venmo topics.
That was the Venmo debit card and the stable coin.
Yeah. Venmo has been an area that PayPal has struggled to monetize for a long time. It's a big part of its payment volume. I want to say it's roughly one-fourth of the company's entire payment volume, which one-fourth of $1.6 trillion of annualized volume is not, that's not nothing. They've really had a hard time figuring out the best ways to monetize that. The Venmo debit card is huge because they will get some kind of take rate from each transaction there. It's not just like if I Venmo use some money, they really don't make any money off that transaction.
So it's a really good way to monetize.
And the stablecoin, we could talk about all day about my thoughts on cryptocurrencies and
stablecoins and things like that.
But anyway, cross-border transactions are expensive.
This is why credit cards with no foreign transaction fees do so well in the marketplace.
So anything you could do to eliminate that charge and maybe even increase your own margins
by being able to offer that.
And kind of as like a back end on their infrastructure is being able to move money.
around for free. It's something that I'm excited to see develop, and it sounds like another
kind of piece of the efficiency puzzle. Yeah, I think it's easy to dunk on the stable coin,
but if they can solve a lot of those cross-border transactions, that's huge. And also,
I mean, among its competition, I'm more willing to trust that PayPal has a dollar to back up
every single one of their PYUSAs, or at least they can make good on it. I know you want to talk
about the active accounts, though, because that's a part of the story that's not getting covered
a ton, but I know stands out to you. Yeah, so the active account, the headline number
is that the number of active accounts on PayPal declined by 1% year-over-a-year, which is about
4 million people. But that doesn't really tell the full story. PayPal had four consecutive
quarters, quarter-over-quarter declines in their user base. This is the first time in the past
five quarters where they reported a sequential growth of about a million-year-old.
active users quarter over quarter. And that's especially big in the first quarter because it's
bad seasonality trends. A lot of people are active in the fourth quarter for holiday purposes,
you know, in simple terms and kind of drop off the platform in the first quarter. So even
including that, they net added active users this quarter, which is a nice reversal.
I'm a PayPal shareholder. So I'm bringing in some bias to this next question I'm about to ask you.
you know, PayPal, they raised revenue guidance, which they got hit for in the past for essentially
lowering it. They expanded the operating margin. They're adding, you know, they're adding users.
What's going on with the market? Why are we getting, it's just a completely lukewarm reaction to
these results? So the biggest raise that they made was actually earnings guidance because they were,
they had originally, in their fourth quarter report, expected earnings to be roughly flat this year.
and now they're saying a mid-to-high single-digit percentage growth, that's a pretty big adjustment.
But the question is, is this just kind of one-time efficiency adjustments that the new CEO is making?
Obviously, more earnings is better than less earnings.
And now, I mean, if the guidance, if their full-year guidance comes true, PayPal trades for something like 11 times earnings right now.
it's a really cheap stock.
You would expect a bigger reaction, especially when you're considering not only the earnings
growth, but the top and bottom line beats this quarter.
You have the accounting change, which I love the accounting change.
We've got to hit that in a minute.
And the return to growth in the active user base, you would expect a better reaction.
And I'm a PayPal shareholder, too, and I expect a better reaction.
Let's hit the accounting change because, you know, I can't title.
the episode, PayPal makes an accounting change, but why is this something that the investors
should care about? Well, they changed the way that they report adjusted earnings. A lot of
commentators, including Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, have always looked down upon adjusted
metrics because they don't really take everything into account that actually is a cost. PayPal
specifically, and this is the only time I've heard of it, maybe you've heard of other companies
doing this. They're now reporting stock-based compensation as part of their adjusted
earnings. Normally, that's the adjustment that you see these tech companies make
their earnings look better than they are. But now PayPal is, you know, they're owning it.
They're saying, here's what we're paying our people. And it's not just that they made the
accounting change. They're actually adjusting their incentive plan to better align with
shareholder interest, not just, you know, here's your pay in stock. Like, we're going to give you
more stock if you deliver returns for shareholders. And I love these changes. I wish,
I hope other companies follow this lead because we're not the,
only ones who kind of think it's, it should be included in earnings. It is an expense. So I'm happy
to see it. It's something that might hurt the models, but Chris was talking about on the earnings
call, they're saying, we're not going to hide this. We're a pay for performance culture.
And so we're going to highlight it. I want to move to Consale, because this is another,
what I would describe is a befuddling market reaction. I know Consell is familiar to us,
but for those listening who haven't heard of it,
this is a company that focuses on excess and surplus insurance
for your hard-to-reach places.
So if you're a business or an event
and you have a tough time finding insurance,
Can Sale will help you.
Think about, like, if you want to host an equestrian event
inside of a weed dispensary,
can sale will help you with the insurance for that.
Why should you care from what we're about to talk about?
Well, Matt on Twitter was saying this is a massive buying
opportunity, so we're going to find out why. But let's focus on the business first. The company
is getting beaten up essentially because of the slowdown in growth of its premiums, but it's
also getting a lot more in terms of investment income. So that's the table. What's kind of going on
with this business right now, Matt? Yeah, so the investment income, that's not really they're doing.
You really can't give the company credit for that. That's like saying my savings account is making
five times what it was two years ago. I didn't do anything smart. The interest rates went up.
So, Kinsale, like you mentioned, they're in specialty insurance. And the kind of key thing to
know about that business, one, it's really hard to do, which is why they have companies like Kinsale
and you can't just go to progressive if you have a demolition business or something else
that's really hard to insure. So these companies exist because they're really good at what they do.
and if you're good at it, it's very profitable. Most insurers are happy with an underwriting
margin of 3 to 5%, and then they make the rest of their money on investments. Can sales
underwriting margin averages more than 20%. So, you know, I think it's something like seven times
the industry average, just their underwriting margin before we even get into investments.
So it was a slowdown in growth, if you want to call it that, but it was.
The gross written premium growth growth was 26% versus 34% year-over-year in the previous quarter.
Net investment income, you mentioned, it was up 59% year-over-year.
It was up 71% in the previous quarter.
And in my opinion, this is the big reason we saw the reaction that we did.
The combined ratio, which is an indicator of underwriting profit, went from 72.1%, which is,
subtract that from 100, you get your underwriting profit. So lower is better to 79.5%. So about,
you know, it's 7.4% jump in the wrong direction in the combined ratio. And that's why I think
the market reacted the way it did. So quickly, underwriting profit, essentially, what's that mean?
Sure. So if I'm an insurance company, I collect $1,000 in premium. Some of that's going to get
paid out as claims. That's what you call your loss ratio. And some of it's going to be used to just run
the business. I have to pay my office rent, things like that. Add the two of those together,
you get your combined ratio. So whatever is left after your combined ratio is your underwriting
profit. So 100% of your money, if your combined ratio is 90%, the other 10% will be your
underwriting profit. So can sales underwriting profit, put in more simple terms, went from about
28% to about 20%. Okay. The other trend that's going on here is, and I haven't seen a lot of discussion
about this is the rise of seeded written premiums, which essentially means that CanSail is transferring
their policies to a reinsurer, to someone else. What's going on with this? Why are they spending
so much more money on reinsurance right now? I mean, that's not necessarily a terrible thing.
It's kind of like a sports book laying off some of the action it receives. You know, insurance is an
inherently risky business. Specialty insurance is riskier than most, and reinsurance policies are
used to kind of cap an insurer's losses. A lot of it could be because we're entering peak
hurricane season. A lot of insurers kind of get scared when you get to the second and third quarter
because that's when all the natural disasters tend to happen. So I don't know if that's what
the management's thinking there, but they're definitely shifting some money into reinsurance.
And it's a common part of the insurance business. You don't want a natural disaster to wipe out your
business. You want to make your losses manageable. And if that means spending a little more on
reinsurance, then so be it.
And by the way, that combined ratio under 80% is still pretty great.
So just so investors know.
And then finally, you went out on the X platform, the platform formerly known as Twitter,
calling this dip on these results a massive buying opportunity.
Lay out the thesis.
Why is this a massive buying opportunity for conceal capital?
Well, even if it slows down, 26% growth is still growth.
even if your underwriting margin dropped to 80 to 20%, that's still seven times what the average insurer is making.
Now, the biggest reason for this reaction is because Kinsale is generally priced for perfection.
They have a great history of underpromising and over-delivering.
Just for example, Kinsale trades for about 25 times forward earnings and about seven times sales.
I own another insurer called MetLife.
I'm sure you've heard of them.
They trade for less than one-time sales and have an eight-time sales.
forward earnings multiple. So they're a very expensive insurer relative to their peers, priced for a
lot of growth. And I think that slowdown in growth is really scaring people, but it shouldn't.
There's a lot of investment income that's kind of embedded in the portfolio that we haven't seen
yet. These are mostly fixed income security, so as they roll over to today's interest rates,
you're going to see that investment income climb even further. I think there's a lot of,
you know, unlocked potential on that side of the business. I like what they're doing in their
investment portfolio. They're putting more money in investments like common stocks, kind of like
a Berkshire Hathaway would. Not a giant portion of their portfolio, but a lot. And I love the
management team. They're the only pure play in specialty insurance in the space. And they have about
a 1.1% share of the market right now. So if you think that they can't keep up that 26% growth
rate, they can. It's a good place to end it. Matt Frankel. Appreciate your time and your insight on
This one. Always glad to be here.
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How do you find a financial advisor?
And what should you ask them?
Allison Southwick and Robert Brokamp offer up some questions to ask in that very first meeting.
There comes a time in everyone's life when they need a little help and your finances are no different.
Maybe you've heard, bro, over the years, say stuff like, I'm Robert Brogan.
If you've had a major life event, it might make sense for you to talk to a professional fee-only advisor.
Is that really what I sound like?
No, but that is kind of what strong that sounds like.
Anyway, this sounds easy enough, but we've heard from plenty of people over the years who struggled to find a good financial advisor they could trust.
So today we're going to tackle this topic.
Bro, when should you enlist the help of a financial advisor?
I would put it in two broad categories.
So one is you're mostly a do-it-yourselfer, but you just want to do it.
a second opinion or you're about to experience a big life event, right? Maybe every five or
10 years, you just make sure that your retirement plan is on track, or you're getting close to
retirement and you want to make sure you have all your bases covered. Or you may have just one big
question you'd like help answering. One of my favorite personal finance columnists is Christine
Ben's at Morningstar. She knows about as much as anyone about financial planning. But when she and
her husband were trying to determine whether they should get long-term care insurance,
and how to take care of long-term care, they hired a fee on the financial planner to help with that decision.
So basically, you just want occasional help.
But the other situation is you don't want to be mostly a do-it-yourself.
You want an expert to be helping you along the way every day, though maybe not your entire portfolio.
It could be because you're just very busy with your career and your family,
and you don't have the time to become a financial planning and an investing expert in your spare time.
Or it might be because you're getting up there in years and you want to begin a relationship with a financial advisor now
in case something happens to you, especially if you're the person who primarily handles the finances
for the family.
All right. So not all financial professionals are alike in their credentials, qualifications, or
expertise. So how about you break it down for us? What are our options here?
Yeah, it's very confusing because you'll hear a lot of terms, and they're almost meaningless.
Financial advisor, financial planner, financial consultant, wealth advisor, wealth coach.
Because there aren't many regulations. Just about anyone can call themselves a financial.
advisor. So the main differentiation I think to look for is whether someone is a broker, which means
they sell products or a registered investment advisor who is required to act as a fiduciary. We'll
talk about this a little bit more later on, but basically a fiduciary is someone who is legally
obligated to put your interests first. You would think that all financial professionals should
be held to that standard, but that's not the case. And the other thing to look for is designations.
And there are a bunch. So I'm just going to highlight the biggest. So for financial planning,
the granddaddy of them all is the certified financial planner designation, requires you to take
six classes, pass a pretty hard exam, and have three years of experience. One that is gaining more
popularity is the chartered financial consultant. You'll see it as CHFC behind someone's name.
Also, you have to take classes, one more class than the CFP designation, have to have experience,
you don't have to pass an exam. If you're looking for someone who's like a real investment expert,
the thing to look for there is the chartered financial analyst or CFA. My opinion, that is by far the
hardest one to get. You have to pass three very difficult exams. I know many, very smart people
who failed one or more of those exams until they eventually passed it and got it. Taxes, of course,
you're looking for a certified public accountant, CPA, but some of them also have another designation
called the personal financial specialist or PFS, which basically means they're a tax expert,
but they also know financial planning. So they're very knowledgeable about many aspects of your finances.
If you're looking for someone to help you with insurance decisions, you're looking for the
chartered life underwriter or CLU, which is a designation that shows you know something about
life insurance, estate planning, maybe business planning. So those are the biggies. You'll find
plenty of other ones. Some are meaningful, some are not. The key is to look at the requirements in terms
of classes in terms of experience and whether they had to pass any exams.
All right. So where do you find them?
Well, I'll start with the one everyone starts with, and that is referrals, right?
You talk to people you know, you talk to professionals your work with, your attorney, your
accountant, see who they recommend. The only thing I would say about referrals, though, is that
in my experience, a lot of people are very happy with their financial advisor.
But then when I ask them questions about what the financial advisor does, the financial
advisor actually is very good. They just like the person, and they're not knowledgeable enough
to know that they're not getting good service. But still, referrals are a good place to start.
But really, since the early days of the Motley Fool, we have recommended that you look for a
fee-only financial planner. Most of these fee-only financial planners, first of all, they are
paid for their service. They don't sell you products. And they are fiduciaries. And there are
a few places to find these people. The first I'm going to mention is the one I know the best,
Garrett Planning Network, started by Cheryl Garrett. I've known Cheryl for many years. She was very
kind enough to let me attend her conferences here and there. So I've gotten to know a lot of their
members. In fact, I spoke with their current managing director, Eileen Freiburger, and got some input
from one of their financial planners, Christopher Lazaro, just to get the insider view with input on this
episode. So that's a place to start. There's also the National Association of Personal Financial
Advisors, or NAFSA, and the XY Planning Network. And you'll find that there are planners who belong,
to two or all of these networks because they're all fee-only financial planners. Most of them
will manage money for you, but many of them will also just do projects and charge by the hour
or the project. And then finally, I'll just add, you know, if you work with a financial services
firm that you're happy with, like Vanguard, Fidelity Schwab, T-Roe Price, all of them provide
wealth management and financial planning services. So you could look to them, but just expect that many
of their solutions will be their own products, right? If you're going to have your money managed to
Y Vanguard, chances are they're going to put all your money in Vanguard funds. So there is a little
bit of a conflict of interest there. So not only do financial professionals have different
scopes of work. Some might be absolute crooks. Sorry to say it. Some might be incentivized
to line their own pockets. Some might be incompetent. Some might be right for someone else,
but not so right for you. So how do you evaluate these people?
Well, first of all, you want to make sure they're not crooks. And there are a couple of ways to do that.
You could check what is called brokercheck offered by FINRA. So it's brokercheck.finra.org.
Finra is sort of the self-regulatory organization for brokers.
And then there's the Investment Advisor Public Disclosure website offered by the SEC.
That is at advisorinfo.sec.gov.
So you check them.
You first of all, will find out whether that person is registered, in what states they're registered.
and if there have been any complaints.
If someone has been in the business long enough, they might have one or two complaints,
but you just want to see what those complaints are and make sure that they were resolved.
If someone says that they have a certain designation, go to the website of the governing board
of that designation to make sure they actually have it.
And if they don't have a designation, you might still go to that website because in some
situation someone had the designation, but they lost it due to some sort of ethics violation.
and you'll find that on the website.
So, you know, go to the website of the board
or the certified financial planners and CFAAs.
If you're going to work with an attorney,
go to the website of the State Bar Association
to make sure that everything is fine there.
Do those kind of checks.
But then, once you have gone through these various processes,
you should identify and interview multiple planners,
and they will likely allow you to do
what's something called a get-acquainted meeting
where you talk for maybe at half hour or so, and just make sure that they can provide what you're
looking for and that you're comfortable with working with them.
All right, let's go through some questions you'll want to ask in this meeting, as well as
the answers that you're going to want to hear.
So the first question to ask is, what are your qualifications slash credentials?
Maybe don't say the slash.
Yeah.
So obviously, they'll probably highlight some of the designations they have.
They'll highlight their experience, maybe talk about how they became a financial professional.
That's always an interesting question too. What brought you to becoming a financial professional?
There are some things that they may have that are not listed on their website.
For example, for me personally, I got my master's in personal financial planning.
That would be something you would look for. What was their education?
But really, what you're looking for are the comfortability that you find with them talking about
their qualifications?
Do you feel comfortable that they know enough to perform?
provide what you're looking for.
All right. Next question. Are you a fiduciary?
We touched on this a little bit. The tricky part about fiduciary is you can be a fiduciary
in many ways. You might be a fiduciary because you work for a firm that is a fiduciary,
like a registered investment advisory firm. You could be a fiduciary because of the designation
you have, right? Your firm may not require you to be a fiduciary, but, for example, if you
have the certified financial planner designation, you are expected to act as a fiduciary.
And then there are circumstances in which you have to act as a fiduciary.
So the Department of Labor just passed a rule that said, if you are advising someone on their
rollover from a 401k to an IRA, starting this September, you have to act as a fiduciary.
Part of it is going to happen this September.
Another part next September, expect that the industry is going to protest this, especially
the insurance industry.
So we'll see if it happens.
But what you're looking for is for them to explain whether they are a fiduciary, whether they
understand what a fiduciary is.
There are circumstances in which you might find a very good financial advisor who's not technically
a fiduciary.
So what you're looking for there is that she or he is explaining to you and so that they are
looking out for your best interests.
All right.
Next question is to ask, how are you compensated and what are the all-in costs?
I'll be paying. Yeah, this is where the difference between like a fee-only planner and a broker really comes in,
right? Sometimes the solutions someone provides will generate a commission for them. And you just want to
be very clear that the advice you're getting is the best thing for you and not the thing that is going
to generate the biggest commission. So you want to understand how they are getting paid so you can
understand any potential conflicts of interest. These days, board more people are charging an assets
under management fee. The average is about 1%. It's usually a little bit higher if you have a smaller
account, smaller being like 250,000. It's usually lower if you have over a million dollars. But even in
that situation, you want to find out, is that the only fee? Because if you're paying the advisor 1% a
year to manage the money. But then they put you in mutual funds or separately managed accounts that
charge another 1%. In that case, the all-in cost is 2%. So you want to be very clear about that.
Now, if you are looking for just a one-time analysis or a one-time financial plan, you're going to have
to pay by the hour or by the project. The fees on that are going to vary based on the experience of
the planner as well as the city they live in, but expect to pay anywhere between $100,500 an hour
or on a project basis, $1,000 to $10,000, again, based on the person's experience, but also the
complexity of your plan.
All right.
Next question to ask is, what's your investment philosophy?
Yeah, if you're going to have someone to manage your money, you want to make sure that you
are at least mostly on the same page.
And you'll find that many fee-only financial planners are pretty committed indexers, not
exclusively, but a lot of them are.
So if you are an active stock picker, you don't want to choose a financial advisor who's just
going to put you in index funds unless you are looking for something besides wealth management.
And I'll just point out when I was talking to Eileen Freiburger about trying to find a financial
advisor. She has said that often many people from many readers and members of the Molly Fool reach
out to them and they're looking for advice about stocks, their portfolio, and stuff like that.
And many of the folks at the Garrett Network don't look at individual stocks so much. So it's
important that you are finding someone who could provide what you're looking for?
These are all great questions. I know one red flag that I saw when we were researching this
is that your advisor should actually do more listening than talking. I know we just did like a
bunch of questions to ask them, which would require them to do a lot of talking. But one of the good
pieces of advice I saw was that your advisor should be very, very interested in you, your interest,
what you want, your goals, and you should be doing more talking than they should.
As always, people on the program may have interests in the stocks they talk about, and the Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against.
So, don't buy yourself stocks based solely on what you hear.
I'm Ricky Mulvey. Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.
