StoneCo Ltd. (NASDAQ:STNE) Q3 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Lia Matos: Hi Tito, Lia here for the question. So first, regarding credit, I think no big update other than what I just said in the call and what we also highlighted last quarter. We’re still in test mode, and we’ll keep you posted as we have more updates. Our plan looking ahead is really to be ready to relaunch towards the first half of next year. But we really want to take a conservative approach to be able to test the full credit cycle with clients before making the decision to scale further, which will probably happen more towards the second half of next year. Now, we have Gregor on Board, which is really great and the team is in place and working really hard towards this plan. So I think that’s the update that we can give regarding credit.

We still think that that’s a big opportunity ahead like Thiago said. And we’re really focused on implementing this plan. I think regarding interchange cap, the impact is really going to be very dependent on competitive dynamics. We do believe that players will be more rational and it will take some more time until the full effect this past due to merchants. With that said, we believe that this benefit could be somewhere between a 100 million and 200 million in our EBT for 2023.

Tito Labarta: Thank you, Lia. It’s very helpful.

Thiago Piau: Tito, Thiago here. Just to complement Lia’s answer about the interchange changes. I think that if we pass anything to our clients, it’ll be a small amount. We are focusing on improving margins. With that, I think that we gave away our margins in order to benefit our client base over time. I think that this change creates a more balance in the industry and should be recognized as an improvements in terms of margins for our industry. So we’ll be focused here on trying to keep as much as we can to benefit our margins.

Tito Labarta: Great, thanks, Thiago. Thanks, Lia. One follow up on the credit, any of the under receivables market and do you plan to eventually ever use that the collateral to back the credit? Have all those issues been resolved? Is that something that you won’t consider? Again, just curious, any updates on that?

Thiago Piau: Hi, Tito. Thiago, here. Yes, they are part of our execution in our plans, but I think that the big evolution we are doing here is increasing the level of data that we can take from other providers of our clients and including the information relationship that we have in our hub. So yes, we are considering the receivables as collateral. We’ve defined our strategy previously based on that. I think that what we are doing is improving our ability to access €“ the ability of our clients to pay back the loans and improving the data that we can take from third-party partners and improving our ability to access our clients through the hubs.

Tito Labarta: Great. Thank you, Thiago.

Thiago Piau: Thank you very much, Tito.

Lia Matos: Thanks, Tito.

Operator: Our next question will come from Kaio Prato with UBS. Please go ahead.