Wealthfront Corporation Q3 FY2026 earnings call

• Wealthfront went public last month, a significant milestone since founding in 2008. - Drives forward by serving clients, prioritizing technology for intelligent investing. - Cash Management account offers features like industry-leading APY, free withdrawals, etc. - Investment Advisory has products like Automated Investing with low fees and tax loss harvesting. - Launched Home Mortgage in Q3 and Nasdaq-100 Direct in the quarter. - Total platform assets at record, driven by Cash Management and Investment Advisory asset growth. - Anticipated migration of assets from cash to invest due to Fed rate cuts, and focused on asset retention and cross-product adoption.

Total platform assets were $92.8 billion at quarter-end, a record and up 21% year-over-year. Cash Management revenue was $68.8 million, up 14% year-over-year, with average Cash Management balance in the third quarter of $46.8 billion, up 18% year-over-year and annualized fee rate of 58 basis points, down 2 basis points year-over-year. Investment Advisory revenue was $24.2 million, up 26% year-over-year, with average Investment Advisory balance of $43.7 billion, up 28% year-over-year and annualized fee rate of 22 basis points, flat year-over-year. Cash Management assets were $47 billion, up 14% year-over-year; Investment Advisory assets were $45.8 billion, up 31% year-over-year. Funded Clients ended the quarter at roughly 1.38 million, up 20% year-over-year, and Funded Accounts were roughly 1.78 million, up 20% year-over-year.

Will not provide quarterly guidance, but will provide monthly metrics as the quarter progresses, with metrics for the first 2 months reported intra-quarter and the final month alongside earnings for that quarter.

• Interest rate changes could impact Cash Management asset growth. - Product rollouts like Home Lending face market acceptance risks. - Transition periods in interest rates may have uncertain impacts on asset allocations.

Q: Good to talk David, congrats on the first earnings call here. I guess we want to start on the mortgage offering. And just love to get a sense of any of the early learnings as you guys are just starting to roll this out, kind of what you're hearing from customers? Is it as you expected kind of prior to rolling it out? And then if you can just remind everybody here kind of where you feel like on the product differentiation itself, like what the experience benefits are of Wealthfront versus whatever else is in the market right now?

A: Yes. So thanks, Devin. The fundamental offering really is a great digital experience and a great rate that will be better than they'd find elsewhere. We've made good progress. We originated our first home mortgage in the third quarter and started letting clients off the wait list in November. We initially started in Colorado. We've expanded and are letting clients off the wait list now in Texas and California. It's still early days, and there's still a lot left to learn. We've continued to work to expand our license coverage and now support a majority of our clients. We still have a long way to go. The opportunity size is relatively large. We've sent just from Wealthfront Cash Management accounts, $2.5 billion in wires to title and escrow companies in calendar year '25. You can make some assumptions on the typical down payment to get to an opportunity size, which we believe is both large, and we have the ability to take advantage of. As we exit the holiday period, we're still in a relatively low seasonal period for Home Lending, but early results are promising, and we're continuing to stay focused on building for the long term. This is not a journey that's going to take us a few months to be at sort of our peak. We think it's going to be the course of multiple years, give us the opportunity to build an amazing experience for our clients and for prospective clients in the future.

Q: I wanted to drill down into the customer acquisition strategy in mortgage, specifically, how you think Wealthfront is positioned to meet customers before they engage with agents? Who, as I'm sure you know, like tend to control a lot of that referral process on the mortgage side. And if you could also just remind us the structure of the mortgage business, including the partnership with United Wholesale and just the ownership structure? That would be helpful.

A: Yes. Thanks, Ryan. The first thing I would say is folks join Wealthfront really to save and invest, and they often have goals in mind. Our financial planning interface gives clients the ability to plan for retirement, plan for sending kids to college. It also helps them plan for buying a home. And that's one of the goals that clients engage with most frequently. So we have reasonable visibility into what clients are looking to do with their savings on the platform, and that gives us pretty early visibility that they might be focused on buying a home and engagement with that goal, changing the number of bedrooms they're looking for or in what markets they're looking to buy a home is a great early indicator that they are more actively engaging in the home buying process. That gives us the opportunity to really present the ease of the experience that we offer, if we can support those clients in their home states, get them prequalification letters, which generally clients will pull even before they significantly engage with a realtor. So they start to understand what they can afford and the realtor will often ask for that prequalification letter early in the process. We think that gives us a great opportunity to be able to engage with clients very early in their home buying process, even kind of before the home buying process would normally be considered to have started. And as we're able to build that, we also have the ability to add incentives for the home lending process. We have nothing that we've rolled out yet, but it is something that we're actively looking at to provide incentives to help clients save for a down payment on the platform and then actively engage with our home buying experiences as well. Ultimately, we think if we deliver a great experience to clients, that will lead to word-of-mouth growth for the home lending product like it does for our Cash Management and our Investing product as well. And then on the ownership structure, we are working to revisit the -- or revise the ownership structure to have Home Lending -- the Home Lending subsidiary fall under the Wealthfront Corporation umbrella. The ownership structure that we have was formed intentionally to limit exposure of personal financial information of the LPs and GPs of the equity owners of Wealthfront as a private company. That disclosure was required by various state laws. The primary issuance via the IPO helped ameliorate these ownership thresholds. And once fully remediated, we do plan to restructure ownership of the Home Lending subsidiary. All that said and discussed in the S-1, it's important to note that the relevant management and financing agreements that Wealthfront Corporation has today gives Wealthfront Corporation the ability to direct the activities of Wealthfront Home Lending and absorb and fund all benefits and losses of Wealthfront Home Lending.

Q: I wanted to drill down into the customer acquisition strategy in mortgage, specifically, how you think Wealthfront is positioned to meet customers before they engage with agents? Who, as I'm sure you know, like tend to control a lot of that referral process on the mortgage side. And if you could also just remind us the structure of the mortgage business, including the partnership with United Wholesale and just the ownership structure? That would be helpful.

A: Yes. Thanks, Ryan. The first thing I would say is folks join Wealthfront really to save and invest, and they often have goals in mind. Our financial planning interface gives clients the ability to plan for retirement, plan for sending kids to college. It also helps them plan for buying a home. And that's one of the goals that clients engage with most frequently. So we have reasonable visibility into what clients are looking to do with their savings on the platform, and that gives us pretty early visibility that they might be focused on buying a home and engagement with that goal, changing the number of bedrooms they're looking for or in what markets they're looking to buy a home is a great early indicator that they are more actively engaging in the home buying process. That gives us the opportunity to really present the ease of the experience that we offer, if we can support those clients in their home states, get them prequalification letters, which generally clients will pull even before they significantly engage with a realtor. So they start to understand what they can afford and the realtor will often ask for that prequalification letter early in the process. We think that gives us a great opportunity to be able to engage with clients very early in their home buying process, even kind of before the home buying process would normally be considered to have started. And as we're able to build that, we also have the ability to add incentives for the home lending process. We have nothing that we've rolled out yet, but it is something that we're actively looking at to provide incentives to help clients save for a down payment on the platform and then actively engage with our home buying experiences as well. Ultimately, we think if we deliver a great experience to clients, that will lead to word-of-mouth growth for the home lending product like it does for our Cash Management and our Investing product as well. And then on the ownership structure, we are working to revisit the -- or revise the ownership structure to have Home Lending -- the Home Lending subsidiary fall under the Wealthfront Corporation umbrella. The ownership structure that we have was formed intentionally to limit exposure of personal financial information of the LPs and GPs of the equity owners of Wealthfront as a private company. That disclosure was required by various state laws. The primary issuance via the IPO helped ameliorate these ownership thresholds. And once fully remediated, we do plan to restructure ownership of the Home Lending subsidiary. All that said and discussed in the S-1, it's important to note that the relevant management and financing agreements that Wealthfront Corporation has today gives Wealthfront Corporation the ability to direct the activities of Wealthfront Home Lending and absorb and fund all benefits and losses of Wealthfront Home Lending.

Q: And again, let me offer my congratulations on your inaugural quarter here post the IPO. The question I have to start with is you've had historically just a very high referral rate, very organic in nature to drive a lot of new clients and obviously asset gathering. But now that you've done the IPO, you've got a brand out there clearly that's going to be more obvious to people. I'm wondering what that go-to-market motion might look like? Would you be willing to kind of step up investments there? Especially at a time when investors are potentially coming out of the cash accounts and moving into the advisory space?

A: Yes. I mean the first thing that I would say is the business does follow some seasonal patterns and trends. So as we enter Q1, Q1 is historically -- or calendar Q1 is a solid time for sign-ups, sort of around the same period that people are focused on going to the gym, they're also focused in making improvements to their finances. Over 50% of our new clients in the last 2 years have been through referrals, and we continue to see referrals be a primary way to bring folks onto the platform. We did make some incentive changes recently, which give us a little bit of flexibility in the way that we do some of our paid marketing. So we added a benefit for new clients joining the platform that are not referred, and then we increased the benefit to the referral product from 50 basis points to 75 basis points, which continues to reserve the best incentive that we offer to existing clients that are referring their friends, family and coworkers, but at the same time, provides an incentive to folks that are either visiting the website organically or the app organically or are engaging through our paid channels. So I think you can sort of see from that, we are both trying to drive incentives, which optimize our ability to convert clients coming in through organic and paid channels, while still trying to make sure that the referral channel is the most valuable channel to come in both for clients and it obviously is the most valuable channel for us because folks tend to come in with higher asset levels and adopt more products more quickly if they come in through the referral channel.

Q: Other than the automated investing program, all of your products on the investment side are fairly new, either brand new or maybe less than 3 years old. So what has been the product uptake for the new investment products? Has this changed over time? And where did these new products stand in terms of contribution to total October 31 investing platform assets? And because of the differences in the fee rates, in a way, wouldn't it kind of be good if we saw a bit of a downtick in your average management fee rate?

A: Yes. Thanks for the question, Rob. I would start by saying our goal is to grow total platform assets. And so if clients want to engage with some of the direct indexing products, that's great. If they want to engage with the automated investing account, that's great. We think that we can offer all of these products profitably over the long term. That said, most new clients and most new assets on the investment side of the business join us for the automated investing account. The other products help us in different macro environments and different transition environments, and they help drive cross-product adoption of cash first clients to investment accounts over time. Each of the categories, so the Automated Bond Ladder, the Automated Bond Portfolio, the Direct Indexing Accounts and the Stock Investing Accounts are over $1 billion in assets, each. So we have seen good relative growth of all of those products. But the fastest absolute growth that we've seen continues to be in our automated investment account, which provides a globally diversified tax-efficient investment option that takes care of all of the difficult choices that a client might have to make in their asset allocation without them having to think about it.