Forge Global Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:FRGE) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Mark Lee: Yeah. Just Devin, I mean we’re — boy, our excitement about data is super high. I mean one thing I would start with is the feedback that we get on the research that we put out through the Private Market Update and the Forge Investment Outlook has just been tremendous. I mean a lot of the people, our customers and prospective customers that receive the information, I mean just we hear words like world-class. So it kind of starts with that. As Kelly talked about, expansion of our data strategy, there are a couple of key points. We’ve seen a lot of evidence that show us that when a customer signs up to our data product, they would do more trading with us after they become a data subscriber than what they did before. And I think this is a testament to as they get enhanced information that helps give them the data that allow them to transact with more confidence, it’s a win-win all around.

So as Kelly said, we are testing solutions that now start to bundle our enhanced trading capability with our proprietary data. And this is a product set that we do expect to roll out in 2024. And in addition, we’re bringing in new leadership to help drive this data strategy and product forward. And then the last thing, I mean we just had really high conditions in the opportunity that we have with derived data products. And that includes the Forge Private Market Index and the Forge price, which we talk about in the Forge Investment Outlook. So data continues to be kind of a spotlight that we’re prioritizing. And it’s one of the things that as you talk about developments in the quarter and feedback we’re getting, I would highlight that.

Devin Ryan: That’s great. Thanks so much guys. And then just a follow-up here just on custody. So you continue to have pretty nice growth in custodial accounts. Is that coming from Forge customers on to the Forge platform? Or is that kind of external just to kind of growth in some of your partners that are using Forge for custody? And then, Mark, you mentioned potentially some fee pressure because of the cash sorting, which makes sense because we just have to model through the decline in cash balances from 2Q to 3Q. The other part of the question is, are you still seeing more cash floating from here? Or if interest rates are kind of peaking, if that’s the assumption, that you feel like the kind of the majority of that is behind us. Thanks.

Kelly Rodriques: I’ll start with the accounts, Devin. So look, we’ve been kind of on a journey with the custodial platform. And I’d say we, for the last couple of years, have been upgrading, I would say, the offering and really trying to focus on high-quality growth accounts. And so there’s been a little bit of a trend up until now where we shed customer accounts within the custodial business, either because our predecessors weren’t collecting on time or we had accounts that were just older accounts that weren’t adding new cash or making new investments. I think we’ve reached the point now where we’re really excited about where we take and start to cross-sell custody going forward. And we really needed to get some foundational technology improvements around onboarding and a couple of other areas of integration for custody accounts moving forward.

So it’s a story that we think is going to improve in 2024. Certainly, up until now, at least in the last year, we’ve been the beneficiary of the rate environment. But that part of the business model is cyclical, like anybody would expect, and we’re in a hell of a cycle right now in terms of where we came from even three years ago with rates. So I’ll let Mark speak more about how we’re thinking about that environment. But our hope is that as we see rates come down at some point in the future, the composition of revenue that will improve relative to that rate loss revenue, we hope will be in our transactional markets business and in data. And we think that we’re going to find that balancing point in the period of a market that starts to settle down the volatility.

We never expected that we would get this kind of sequential growth from the custody business that we’ve gotten. So we’re excited to have it. But clearly, I think account growth is where our future is and growth in our other revenue contributors like data, index and the markets business is what we hope to see in ’24 and beyond.

Mark Lee: Yeah. Devin, I don’t have too much to add. I mean as you know, we don’t break out our accounts between what we’ve been calling our custody as a service, our CaaS business, which is through third — which is through partners versus our self-directed IRA customer base. So I mean what I would tell you is I follow the research you guys put out like on Schwab and others in terms of their trying to follow and watch cash sorting as it’s playing out across the industry. What I would tell you is that when we look at customer cash, obviously, the concentration of customer cash, which is spread out across all of our accounts, but the concentration has improved from year to year. If you look at our concentration from a year ago, obviously, the cash sorting impacts the accounts with the highest amount of cash.