Prepared remarks
Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Remitly Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. There will be a Q&A session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press *11 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising that your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press *11 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, David Beckel, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us for Remitly's second quarter 2026 earnings call. Joining me on the call today are Sebastian J. Gunningham, Chief Executive Officer of Remitly, and Vikas Mehta, Chief Financial Officer. Results and additional management commentary are available in the earnings release and presentation slides, which can be found at ir.remitly.com. Please note that this call will be simultaneously webcast on the Investor Relations website. Before we start, I would like to remind you that we will be making forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws including, but not limited to, statements regarding Remitly's future financial results and management's expectations and plans. These statements are neither promises nor guarantees, and involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to vary materially from those presented here. You should not place undue reliance on any forward-looking statement. Please refer to the earnings release and SEC filings for more information regarding the risk factors that may affect results. Any forward-looking statements made in this conference call, including responses to your questions, are based on current expectations as of today. Remitly assumes no obligation to update or revise them whether as a result of new developments or otherwise except as required by law. The following presentation contains non-GAAP financial measures. For a reconciliation of non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP metric, please see the earnings press release and the appendix to the earnings presentation, which are available on the IR section of our website. Now I will turn the call over to Sebastian to begin.
Thank you for joining our second quarter earnings call. My first six months as CEO have been intense, and they have confirmed something I already knew: Remitly matters deeply to its customers. This quarter's results prove it. Record revenue, record adjusted EBITDA, both above the high end of guidance again. We also achieved an important milestone for the company—over 10 million quarterly active users aided by record new customer additions. That is a direct reflection of the trust and confidence customers place in Remitly and our team's ability to execute. This quarter's strong results reflected three enduring attributes of our business. First, a strategy that works: providing affordable, fast, and trusted money movement for a wide range of global customers. Second, a competitive position that is strong and defensible. We continue to gain share and the advantages of lower-cost network breadth and operating scale are compounding. And third, a cost discipline that is structural. The operating leverage in this business is real, and AI is driving genuine productivity gains that can be redeployed to invest in growth, strengthening our confidence in the top line while we continue to expand adjusted EBITDA margins. Today, I will provide an update on my operating philosophy, discuss our progress across our core business and growth accelerators, explain how AI is reshaping the economics of our business model, and share our latest view on capital allocation. When I joined, I was clear about how I wanted this organization to work: smaller teams, clearer ownership, customer-first design, AI embedded everywhere, speed as the default. This quarter, we kept building towards that. The result is a flatter, faster-moving company. Product teams are being consolidated into fewer locations to take advantage of faster speeds to design, build, and launch features. Fewer layers mean clearer ownership and faster decisions. Faster decisions mean more products, and more products mean more revenue. And through this rapid evolution, our culture has held. Our team continues to obsess over building the most affordable, fastest, and most trusted way to move money. They understand every transaction matters to a real family, and I am proud to confirm what I see every day: everybody at Remitly cares deeply about our customer-focused mission. Moving on to an update on our business. Last quarter, I introduced a framework for how we think about our opportunities: call centers, high-value senders, business senders, and receivers against four offerings, which are send, borrow, spend, and save. Everything outside our core send, we call growth accelerators. This quarter, we shipped against all of these boxes. As we broaden our offerings beyond remittances, we build a powerful flywheel—driving better loyalty, higher volumes, and more diversified revenue. This quarter's results are evidence that the flywheel is turning. I will now cover key customer and product updates across CoreSend and our growth accelerators. Our global pay-in and payout network is our strongest competitive advantage. This quarter, we expanded our network on the dimensions customers care about most: reach, speed, and reliability. We added five countries—New Zealand, Niger, Mali, Angola, and Botswana—bringing the total received geographies to 179. Thirty-two of these countries are now send-and-receive enabled. Speed and reliability matter to our customers and are important drivers of retention. This quarter, new real-time pay-in rails, FedNow, and real-time payments in the US improved our pay-in funding speeds. In the second quarter, nearly 70% of Remitly's global funded transfers were delivered in under 20 seconds, an all-time high. Further, payments and customer onboarding improvements drove record pay-in acceptance and record-low defect rates, reinforcing the basics that drive customer trust in the Remitly platform. Last month, we announced our participation in OpenUSD, a stablecoin consortium, as a founding member. This new stablecoin has the potential to cut pay and settlement times by up to one day, and lets us share in stablecoin wallet economics. Since our last earnings call, we strengthened our regulatory foundation across three important geographies: we received a stored value facilities license from the Central Bank of the UAE, an electronic money institution license in the UK, and an extension of our EU payments institution license. These licenses open the door to new products designed specifically for customers in these regions. Each of our growth accelerators gained important traction this quarter. Our approach to investing in growth is deliberate: we start small and scale only when we see product-market fit and a clear return. Vikas will cover the financials; I will cover the operating highlights. High-value senders are those who send $5,000 or more in a single transaction, often for property investments or larger transfers to family. For them, reliability matters most, and the economics of earning their loyalty are strong. In Q2, we lowered friction across a number of dimensions for these customers and added bank wires as a funding option. In Latin America, a key growth region for this customer category, we raised send limits and eliminated unnecessary customer actions. As a result, high-value send volume more than doubled in the US–Mexico corridor. Remitly Business grew strongly again this quarter with sequential revenue and volume growth both accelerating quarter over quarter. New features like Bulk Send and the addition of 23 new countries in the European Union are helping broaden our customer base. More than 80% of customers added to the business platform this quarter are new to Remitly, and usage is sticky, with the average business customer sending money 10 times a quarter. This quarter, we grew the receiver product from six to 130 countries. It is still early, but we are optimistic about its potential to drive send revenue and eventually spend and save. The bet with receivers is simple: build direct relationships with receivers, and senders will follow. In countries where stable currencies and dependable financial services are scarce, we think we can serve receivers better than anyone. We recently launched a global stablecoin wallet with a debit card, starting our rollout in Latin America. A first-of-its-kind offering lets receivers get paid, hold, and spend in USDC. Longer term, we want to be a big part of our receivers' financial lives, not just where a transaction lands. This is a first step. Last week, we launched the Remitly Global Card—an all-in-one product for our customers to borrow, spend, and save as easily as they can send money home. The Remitly Global Card is the next step in our journey from a remittance company to a broader suite of products our customers need and want. The Remitly Global Card combines one-of-a-kind features including our best remittance prices, faster and lower-fee sends, no-fee everyday spending, a bank account for everyone, the ability to hold and move money in fiat currency or USDC, instant transfers between Remitly Global Cardholders, no foreign transaction fees, direct deposit, global ATM access, and a line of credit through the Remitly Global Card membership plan, among other valuable new features for our global customers. The launch of this card marks an important milestone for our company. For millions of people, banking was not built for them. This card is. With the Remitly Global Card, we are giving communities who live across borders frictionless access to borrowing, spending, saving, and sending. No paperwork. No bank branch. No waiting. All card members get default access to the lowest-cost, fastest remittance options on Remitly. Our customers should not have to shop for the best rate every time they send money home. The Remitly Global Card allows us to more fully address the financial needs of tens of millions of customers who have sent or received money via Remitly, and our intent is to put the Remitly Global Card in the hands of each and every Remitly customer over time. In the coming quarters, we plan to expand the Remitly Global Card to additional countries, enabling seamless direct payouts for global workers and broader multicurrency holding capabilities for consumers and businesses worldwide. Finally, an update on AI. There are three ways AI benefits Remitly: speed, trust, and cost. Speed: we build and ship faster. Trust: we deliver a better, more personal experience. Cost: AI is delivering real efficiency improvements. This quarter, all three moved forward. Speed and trust gains are starting to show up in the top line—faster launches and a better customer experience. Cost remains the clearest AI win so far. AI-driven productivity has allowed us to hold headcount below plan as I reoriented the company toward speed and tested our growth bets. I asked every team the same question: show me the number that proves your function is more self-driving than it was one quarter ago. The answers are getting better. Before I hand the call to Vikas, I want to say a word on capital allocation. This quarter, we generated $130 million in free cash flow. Today, this management team is balancing two things: reinvesting in profitable growth and executing share buybacks within the limits set by our board. We believe this is the right plan, and we will continue to update our shareholders as our thinking evolves. Let me close with this: we delivered an excellent quarter. We are gaining ground with customers in geographies that matter. We are doing it more efficiently than ever. Our products are working for customers. I am optimistic—not because of a forecast, but because of what I see in the business every day. Thank you.
Thank you, Sebastian, and good afternoon, everyone. We delivered another excellent quarter of profitable growth and strong free cash flow, reflecting solid execution and rigorous attention to cost discipline. Second quarter revenue was $495 million, $11 million above the midpoint of our guidance, and up 20% year-over-year. Adjusted EBITDA was $115 million, $28 million above the midpoint of our guidance at a 23% margin. Let me share an overview of our second quarter results and then provide our outlook for the third quarter of 2026 and our updated guidance for the full year. Strong top-line results this quarter reflected momentum in CoreSend and the continued scaling of our growth accelerators. Revenue outperformance this quarter was driven by a number of factors. Regulatory changes in the United States continued to support a shift towards digital remittances, driving another quarter of record new customers acquired. Mother's Day weekend volumes strongly exceeded expectations. As noted last quarter, the pacing of Q2 growth relative to Q1 was due to a shift in the timing of Ramadan and Easter to earlier in the year. Unpacking revenue growth drivers for Q2: send volume grew 27% to $23.5 billion. Send volume per active customer reached a record $2.3 thousand, up 6% year-over-year, driven by growth in high-value senders and business customers, as well as higher average transaction sizes among core senders. Quarterly active customers grew 20% year-over-year to 10.2 million. This was our first quarter above 10 million QAUs, an important milestone which validates the strength and durability of our business model. Quarterly active customer growth remains strong due to the effectiveness of our Skip the Line campaign which targets customers seeking alternatives to cash-based remittance methods. Our take rate this quarter was 2.11%. Now let me dive deeper into our revenue performance from a geographic and new product perspective. From a spend perspective, U.S. revenue grew 24% reflecting continued share gains in key geographies. Rest of world revenue grew 18% year-over-year. On the receive side, revenue from transactions to regions outside of India, the Philippines, and Mexico once again grew faster than overall revenue growth and comprised over half of our revenue mix. I will now discuss the performance of our growth accelerators. As a reminder, growth accelerators include all customer categories and offerings outside of CoreSend. Our growth accelerators continue to gain traction and scale and are well on track to comprise around 5% of total revenue in 2026 and exceed 10% of total revenue by 2028. Let me take a few minutes to provide more detail on the performance of each of our primary growth accelerators. Let me start with high-value senders. High-value sender volume grew 37% year-over-year, a 70-basis-point increase in mix year-over-year. We achieved a number of milestones with high-value senders this quarter, including our first transaction of $300 thousand and our first customer to send more than $1 million in a single quarter. This quarter, we also expanded how customers can fund transfers by adding bank wires. Customers can now wire funds directly to Remitly, which we then deliver instantly through our global network, avoiding the cost and delays of traditional international wire. This gives more customers, particularly high-value senders, a flexible way to fund transactions and is already resonating—customers using wires send nearly three times more per transaction. This quarter, high-value sender volume growth was softer in June due to fluctuations in the Indian rupee relative to primary send currencies as well as short-term foreign currency mobilization measures announced by the Reserve Bank of India. We expect trends affecting Indian corridors to normalize over the course of the year. Further, we have a robust pipeline of high-value sender product enhancements, and in the second half of the year we are expanding our marketing and targeting efforts for this important customer category. Now moving on to Remitly Business. Remitly Business performance continues to exceed our expectations. We ended Q2 with over 25 thousand Remitly for Business users and saw sequential acceleration quarter-over-quarter growth for both volume and revenue. Growth was supported by the continued reduction in friction associated with onboarding and transaction flows. Shifting to receivers: our receiver offering generated revenue for the first time this quarter—an important inflection point for this business. The receiver product allows us to unlock a direct relationship with more than 30 million receivers on our platform, creating a new flywheel at little to no marketing cost. Finally, our fourth growth accelerator—Spend, Save, and Borrow. We are excited to share an important milestone: the launch of the Remitly Global Card. With this offering, card members can send, spend, and save money from the same account. The Remitly Global Card is an important strategic offering and enabler of revenue diversification as we extend the value of the Remitly platform further into our customers' financial lives. The Remitly Global Card comes with no monthly fees or minimums. Customers can further upgrade to our membership plan which, for $9.99 per month, contains valuable benefits, including access to an open-end line of credit that customers can use to remit money home before payday and pay back over time. We plan to evolve our liquidity offerings, which more than doubled year-over-year, to a card-focused format over time. The new card plan format is showing strong early customer uptake with response and conversion rates exceeding prior benchmarks. Lines of credit associated with the Remitly Global Card are funded by a third-party bank partner. As a result, we expect receivables associated with our liquidity products to reduce over time. Turning to our focus on driving profitable growth. On Slide 13, this quarter we are replacing the term revenue less transaction expense (RLTE) with transaction margin, which we believe is a more intuitive description of this metric. Transaction margin is calculated in the same manner as the measure we previously referred to as revenue less transaction expense in prior periods. Transaction margin dollars grew 25% to $334 million, outpacing revenue growth. Transaction margin dollar growth reflects strong customer activity as well as improved partner economics, routing optimization, and economies of scale. Transaction margins were 67%, improving 35 basis points year-over-year. Transaction expenses this quarter were $161 million and as a percentage of revenue were 33%. Excluding provisions for transaction losses, other transaction expenses were $137 million, improving 51 basis points year-over-year as a percentage of revenue. This reflects improved network economics as well as continued shift in mix toward digital receive volume. We continue to see early benefits from the use of stablecoins in our treasury settlement operations, but the impact remains modest in absolute terms. Provision for transaction losses was $24.5 million, or 10.4 basis points as a percentage of send volume. This was better than expected as we continue to benefit from efficiencies afforded by the AI-driven fraud prevention and detection model deployed late last year. With that, let me walk you through the specific non-GAAP expense categories. Marketing investments remain disciplined and growth-focused. We spent $96.5 million on marketing in Q2, up 20.9% year-over-year. As a percentage of revenue, marketing expense was 19.5%, roughly in line with prior year levels. Marketing spend per active customer was $9.46, up 0.9% year-over-year and in line with our expectations. Marketing consists primarily of advertising and promotions. This quarter's notable brand campaigns included the expansion of our Skip The Line campaign to new US cities, a World Cup promotion featuring Cristo Fernández of Ted Lasso fame, and additional marketing investment in the UAE. Promotions, including those in contra revenues, grew 35% year-over-year reflecting a deliberate focus on driving higher retention and win-back among our back book of customers. Our LTV-to-CAC ratio was about 6x while our payback period remained under 12 months. Continued efficiencies reflect growth in customer acquisition through unpaid channels and word-of-mouth. As a reminder, our marketing investments drive returns for many years beyond initial investment due to our growing base of repeat users. Customer support and operations expense was $26.2 million, and as a percentage of revenue was 5.3%, improving 68 basis points year-over-year and continuing a multiyear trend of steady operating leverage. Technology and development expense were $55.5 million, and as a percentage of revenue was 11.2%, improving 175 basis points year-over-year and reflecting the benefits of embedding agentic AI into our engineering and product teams. Despite a modest increase in AI-related spend, the benefits of AI-related labor productivity have outweighed the direct AI spend—a trend we expect will continue. G&A expense was $41 million, declining 11% year-over-year—our first year-over-year decline in G&A ever as a public company. We delivered significant leverage this quarter, 295 basis points as a percentage of revenue year-over-year, reflecting lower-than-expected hiring as we evaluate business priorities along with the continued rigorous focus on operating discipline. Strong revenue growth combined with operating leverage and cost discipline led to a record level of adjusted EBITDA of $115 million. Adjusted EBITDA outperformance was driven by higher-than-expected revenue, lower-than-expected transaction losses, and lower-than-expected expenses due to the ongoing assessment of business initiatives following Sebastian's arrival. Net income was $206 million, which included a $140.6 million release of tax valuation allowance. Our North Star is growth in free cash flow while managing dilution, and Q2 demonstrated continued progress on both counts. Free cash flow nearly tripled year-over-year to over $130 million. This was aided by strong operating leverage, favorable working capital, as well as lower property and equipment spending as we lap the build-out of our new headquarters from last year. Outstanding shares were 212 million, up 3% year-over-year, reflecting our disciplined approach to dilution management and share repurchase activity. Stock-based compensation was lower year-over-year for a second consecutive quarter, and it declined 9% year-over-year, coming in at 7% of revenue, which is 28 basis points lower than the second quarter of 2025, due in part to lower-than-planned hiring. For all of 2026, we continue to expect stock-based compensation to increase modestly in absolute terms year-over-year but decrease as a percentage of revenue. We continued repurchasing shares in Q2, buying back $21 million worth of stock, or over 1.1 million shares. Year-to-date, we have repurchased almost 4 million shares. This reflects conviction in our long-term growth opportunities and a view that share repurchases are an attractive use of capital. We will continue to be disciplined and opportunistic in how we deploy capital toward buybacks. With that, I will move to our outlook. For the third quarter of 2026, we expect revenue of $505 million to $507 million, or 20% to 21% growth. We continue to see strong momentum in our core, and we expect the continued shift toward digital remittances, growth in new geographies, and the scaling of our growth accelerators to contribute to total company revenue growth of over 20% in the second half of the year—an increase relative to prior expectations. Breaking down our revenue growth, in Q3 we anticipate send volume growth to exceed revenue growth, and revenue growth to modestly exceed quarterly active customer growth. Send volume per active customer is expected to grow in the mid-to-high single digits range supported by the continued shift in mix towards high-value senders and businesses. For the full year, we expect revenue between $1.978 billion and $1.988 billion, a growth rate of 21% to 22% reflecting strong demand in our core and growing levels of contributions from our growth accelerators. As a reminder, we are lapping a particularly strong holiday season in Q4 which drove outsized volume growth in the prior year. Now let us pivot to profitability and expense guidance. Starting with transaction margins, we expect Q3 transaction margins to be slightly higher than the prior year. Note transaction loss rate may fluctuate quarter-to-quarter. We remain disciplined about optimizing customer value while rigorously managing risk across our platform. For the full year, we continue to expect transaction margins to be broadly in line with 2025 levels on a normalized basis. Shifting to marketing, we expect continued marketing efficiencies in the back half of 2026 as we prioritize high-ROI marketing opportunities. For Q3, we expect marketing spend per QAU to be slightly higher year-over-year as we extend our Skip the Line campaign and increase brand marketing in the UAE. Please note marketing expense per QAU faces a tough comparison in Q4, as last year benefited from a focused and intentional approach to holiday-period spend. Putting this all together, we expect Q3 adjusted EBITDA to be between $92 million and $94 million, translating to an adjusted EBITDA margin of around 18% to 19%, an expansion of over 350 basis points year-over-year. For the full year, we expect adjusted EBITDA to be between $410 million and $415 million, representing an adjusted EBITDA margin of around 21%, an expansion of over 400 basis points year-over-year. This improved adjusted EBITDA outlook reflects a more favorable outlook for revenue, Sebastian's deliberate assessment of the business in the first half of the year, and our commitment to continued cost discipline leveraging AI as we invest in growth. As always, we remain rigorously focused on balancing growth and profitability and will continue to look to further leverage the benefits of AI as we invest in top-line growth. Our outlook also assumes normal levels of transaction losses for the remainder of the year. To summarize, in Q2 we delivered another excellent quarter with results that were strong across our key financial metrics. We achieved over 20% revenue growth and over 23% adjusted EBITDA margins. We delivered record GAAP profitability and record free cash flow underscoring the power and scalability of our business model. With that, Sebastian and I will open up the call for your questions. Operator?
Questions and answers
Thank you. At this time, we will conduct a Q&A session. As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press *11 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. We kindly ask that you limit yourself to one question. Our first question comes from Tien-Tsin Huang with JPMorgan. Please go ahead.
Thanks so much. Nice results here. Sebastian, given your prepared remarks, I was thinking about asking what you are most excited about among some of the things you talked about where you are leaning in more. We heard about the Global Card, USDC, AI. It sounds like business also outperformed. What has changed in the last 90 days in terms of your excitement and where you are leaning in more? Thanks.
Good question. I would say the sum of the parts—we are hitting on many cylinders right now. The company is diversified globally and the different corridors have puts and takes, but I really like the rhythm that we are gaining on upgrading products and launching new features. It is hard for me to pick one specific piece. Standing here today, I am very pleased with the momentum across many parts of the business. Under the hood there are many elements that make up the delivery of money movement—network, risk, compliance—and there is a lot of good momentum across the company. If you force me to pick one piece, I will avoid that and say it is the sum of everything right now. Thank you.
Our next question comes from Ramsey El-Assal with Cantor Fitzgerald. Please go ahead.
Hi, thank you so much for taking my question this evening. Vikas, you mentioned that you will be expanding your marketing efforts for high-value senders in the second half. Can you help us think through the cadence and magnitude of that investment? Is it a gradual ramp through the balance of the year, or a more meaningful step up in marketing spend later in the year? How should we think about that from a modeling perspective?
Overall, I would say that we remain very confident in our high-value sender business and the long-term growth potential of that business. As we have shared in prior quarters, we are just getting started there—raising send limits and making product enhancements. This quarter you saw some very interesting highlights: our first set of $300 thousand-plus transfers is a significant milestone compared to where we were 12 months ago. Within the same construct, one of our customers sent more than $1 million in the recent quarter. That shows demand is there, our network is set up for that, and it is a matter of focus and marketing for us. We have not invested a lot in marketing specifically for the high-value sender market. We will be very deliberate: gradual and thoughtful in how we increase the marketing. We will learn from early campaigns before we expand more in fiscal 2027. So disciplined but focused and thoughtful marketing in the high-value sender segment.
Our next question comes from Chris Kennedy with William Blair. Please go ahead.
Good afternoon. Thanks for taking the question. I think productivity gains from AI are a key theme from the call and incremental EBITDA margins were over 60% in the quarter, which is nearly double what you've historically talked about. Can you discuss the levers there, what that means going forward, and the opportunities to reinvest back in the business?
Yeah. We are all on this AI journey, and a day does not go by that we do not see a 'wow' moment about what AI can do inside the company. The most obvious effect is that it allows us to constrain people growth while increasing speed—speed is money, productivity is money. Simplifying the organization is money; these effects compound. We track almost every piece of our AI usage down to individuals and to production code, and we are launching different agents that do various tasks across the company. What you are seeing is a snapshot in time of benefits. Will it accelerate? Hard to say, but I do not see it decelerating. Over the next few years we will keep learning and evolving how AI changes our company and management. It is a daily theme and I am optimistic about the future trajectory of efficiencies we can get with AI.
If I were to add on the expense categories, we have seen benefits across the board. Transaction loss improvements are a result of the AI/ML capabilities we've built—definitely noticeable over the last couple of quarters. Customer support is another key area of benefit we've been harvesting. This quarter, the two standouts were technology and development spend, which grew in mid-single digits thanks to net AI benefits despite a modest increase in AI spend, and G&A, which had the biggest improvement with the first year-over-year decline as a public company as we harness AI benefits across support functions—legal, HR, finance, and platform. The net benefit from AI for us has been positive. Clearly early days, and we'll be mindful and thoughtful as we proceed.
Our next question comes from Alexander Markgraff with KBCM. Please go ahead.
Hi, everyone. Thanks for taking my question. I wanted to ask about the receiver-side monetization. It's a compelling opportunity. Could you discuss what right to earn wallet share with receivers looks like? What wedge or value proposition is distinct from local or other global peers that you'd point to with the Remitly card and other offerings?
Thank you for the question. It is very early days. What earns us the right to offer services to receivers is the unique transaction when someone receives money from a sender on Remitly. At that point we know the money and we know the receiver. There are many things we can do to encourage that receiver to spend or hold funds with us: put the money in USDC, load it to cards, keep it in accounts, or offer savings products. The theory is compelling: we have somewhere in the order of 30 to 40 million receivers around the world. We have not fully proven the monetization yet, but we have a team rapidly iterating and we see good signals from product launches. Also, many transactions are peer-to-peer in repeat pairs—sender A to receiver B monthly—so you can imagine many products for that pair. Early days, we feel it is an investment area and an opportunity, and we will keep you updated on progress.
Our next question comes from David Scharf with Citizens Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
Hi, good afternoon. Thanks, the results were strong. I'll ask a devil's advocate question on the growth accelerators. From Investor Day, I think the expectation was more than 10% of revenue by 2028 from growth accelerators—is that correct? If so, why isn't that number larger? These seem like tremendous opportunities, especially business. Is the 10% a reflection of conservatism, or is the core consumer business so strong it will weigh down the mix? I'm trying to understand whether the 10% number might end up being higher in two years.
David, thank you for the optimism—we share it. We want to be thoughtful with new products to get product-market fit right. We test in ways that are battle-tested and, once validated, we scale marketing. Rather than a tight timeframe, we look at the bigger prize and total addressable markets. Our bets are huge: Remitly for Business could be larger than our core consumer business; high-value senders have massive upside; Remitly Global Card and receivers present many use cases. These are five- to ten-year bets that could diversify our business and create multiple revenue streams. Our objective is to invest to make them long-term successful rather than pushing for short-term wins, but we feel confident about getting to the 10%-plus threshold and we'll keep updating you.
Well said. If you expand the timeframe, we would probably be disappointed if these businesses were not much larger. All the bets we are making are in very large markets. The fact that we're still investing and excited about them means we're not settling for 10%. Ten percent of a roughly $2 billion company is significant, but our ambitions are much larger. We'll kill anything that is not on a trajectory to get really large and we'll keep you posted. We're working hard to make these opportunities a lot bigger.
Our next question comes from Gustavo Gala with Monness, Crespi, Hardt. Please go ahead.
Hi, Sebastian, hi Vikas. Thanks for taking my question. You're seeing some pricing actions and perhaps distress from larger legacy peers in North America, which is the core business. Can you talk about the opportunity there in terms of cheaper customer acquisition because pricing competition might be coming back? Also, for the second half of 2026 on margins: you're guiding to roughly 19% in Q3 versus 23% this quarter. A 23% first-half versus 19% third quarter implies lower incremental margin in the back half. I get the HVS investment, but beyond that, should we expect consistent transaction loss rates or other OPEX investments that would explain the gap?
Thank you for the question. I'll address the margin and outlook portion first and then speak to the opportunity. On EBITDA margin guidance, we put a lot of thought into it. You see a 350-basis-point expansion in Q3 year-over-year and roughly a four-percentage-point increase for full-year 2026. The first half included some specifics: Sebastian joined and conducted a rigorous evaluation, which created a pause as we decided where to invest. We also had revenue outperformance and lower transaction loss rates which we are normalizing—our assumption for the remainder of the year is around 11 basis points, so that creates some first-half benefit that we are normalizing in the second half. Regarding marketing and other investments, we see opportunities for market share gains; we saw that in the first half with regulatory shifts and Skip the Line campaigns. We'll be front-footed in pursuing share in the second half and will evaluate marketing investments on a specific basis. Sebastian can add more on the competitive environment.
We intend to be very aggressive in pursuing market share where it's available. From a customer perspective, there is no magic: customers want better pricing, faster transfers, and better service. We're focused on all three—sharper pricing, faster movement of money, and improved service—and that will drive continued market share gains. This is true across the world: we have corridors where we have strong market share and many where we see meaningful opportunity. This is a good moment to be aggressive in pursuing that share.
I am showing no further questions at this time. Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This concludes the program. You may now disconnect.