Christopher Mammone - Steven W. Streit - Founder, Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and President Grace T. Wang - Chief Financial Officer.

Ryan Cary - Jefferies LLC, Research Division Steven Kwok - Keefe, Bruyette, & Woods, Inc., Research Division Glenn T. Fodor - Autonomous Research LLP Dain A. Haukos - Piper Jaffray Companies, Research Division Reginald L. Smith - JP Morgan Chase & Co, Research Division Tulu Yunus - Nomura Securities Co. Ltd., Research Division David M.

Scharf - JMP Securities LLC, Research Division Vasundhara Govil - Morgan Stanley, Research Division.

Good day, and welcome to the Green Dot Corp. Second Quarter 2014 Earnings Conference Call and Webcast. [Operator Instructions] Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Steve Streit, Chief Executive Officer. Mr. Streit, please go ahead..

Thank you, and good afternoon, everyone. On today's call, Steve Streit, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and Grace Wang, our Chief Financial Officer, will discuss 2014 second quarter performance and updated thoughts regarding our 2014 outlook. Following these remarks, we will open the call for questions.

For those of you that have not yet accessed the earnings press release that accompanies this call and webcast, it can be found at ir.greendot.com. Additional operational data have been provided in the supplemental table within our press release.

As a reminder, our comments include forward-looking statements about, among other things, our expectations regarding future results and performance.

Please refer to the cautionary language in the earnings release and in Green Dot's filings with the SEC, including the Q1 Form 10-Q we filed on May 12, 2014, for additional information concerning factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the forward-looking statements.

During the call, we will make reference to financial measures that do not conform to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. This information may be calculated differently than similar non-GAAP data presented by other companies.

Reconciliations of those non-GAAP financial measures to the most comparable GAAP measures are included as supplemental tables in today's earnings release, and are also available at ir.greendot.com. The content of this call is property of the Green Dot Corporation and subject to copyright protection.

Other than the replay noted in our press release, Green Dot has not authorized and disclaims responsibility for any recording, replay or distribution of any transcription of this call. [Operator Instructions] Now I'd like to turn the call over to Steve..

one of the comments we hear all the time, should we be lucky enough to secure renewal on this agreement, is that Walmart will "crush our margins." Many of the reports I read on this topic often make assertions along the lines that Walmart is well-known for bullying their suppliers. So I do want to comment on that.

In Green Dot's 7 years of working side-by-side Walmart, my experience is that it's just not true. We have been partners with Walmart since 2007, and over those years, we have signed many agreements and a number of renewals. Without exception, Walmart has always been professional, logical and fair in their economic proposals.

They do, however, demand the best products at the best prices for Walmart customers, but there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. In closing today, I'd like to help our investors better understand Green Dot's broader mission and our place in the financial services universe. Nearly 15 years ago, Green Dot invented the prepaid industry.

But over the past few years since our IPO, we have thoughtfully, deliberately and strategically embarked on a path to craft ourselves into something much larger and much more important than just being America's largest and best prepaid company.

Today, of some 14,000 banks and credit unions in America, only one bank of national size and scale is obsessed with serving America's low- and moderate-income families, and that's Green Dot Bank, serving the new America, the other 99%. This is Green Dot's place in the financial services universe.

We are a New Age, asset-light, technology-centric, data-driven, modern bank holding company. We are a high-growth company with an ironclad balance sheet, award-winning financial technology and rich data on as many as 25 million current and past Green Dot customers that you simply can't easily find at any traditional credit bureau.

We're a well-known and deeply-trusted national brand name with massive distribution at 92,000 technology-enabled retailer locations from Seattle, Washington to Key West, Florida, and practically every city block in between. And we're a national financial services platform where prepaid is only the beginning.

It is my belief that Green Dot's journey isn't one that will ultimately be judged by whether we overachieved a penny in this quarter or underachieved by a penny in that quarter. Ours is a journey that will ultimately be judged by how we completely changed the way low- and moderate-income Americans consume financial services.

We love this market segment as a business because it's large, growing and extremely underserved by traditional banks. And we love our customers as people because they form the heart and lungs of America's working class and they deserve to have a bank to call their own.

Green Dot's mission is to reinvent personal banking for the masses and we are just getting started. Before I turn it over to Grace, I want to take a moment to thank the entire Green Dot team for their hard work and focus in delivering another solid result for our partners, our investors and most of all our customers.

We have the best team in prepaid and banking, and they are responsible for every ounce of our success. So thanks to all of you and I'll hand the microphone over to Grace.

Grace?.

the strong cash dynamics of our business and our updated outlook for 2014. First, we continue to generate strong cash flows in Q2 and maintain a very strong balance sheet.

We had cash flow from operations of $25 million in the quarter, which helped us increase our total cash and investment securities to a total of $850 million, an amount that's nearly 50% higher than this time last year. Our unencumbered cash position at the end of the quarter is approximately $204 million.

We define unencumbered cash as the cash and investment securities held at the holding company and not required to maintain regulatory capital ratios or liquidity requirements. Next. As Steve mentioned, today we're raising our full year adjusted EBITDA guidance.

We now expect our adjusted EBITDA in the range of $128 million to $132 million for the full year. At the midpoint, our new adjusted EBITDA guidance is 12% higher than our initial guidance and on a full-year basis would represent annual adjusted EBITDA growth of 26% year-over-year.

This revised guidance implies lower expected second half adjusted EBITDA margins than our first half results.

The reasons for this expected difference are the first half adjusted EBITDA margins were favorably impacted by a onetime $6 million benefit in Q1, which will not be repeated in the second half, and that we have a number of new growth-oriented activities that we expect will require incremental resources in the second half.

Nevertheless, our revised guidance implies significant adjusted EBITDA growth in the second half on a year-on-year basis, with the midpoint of our revised guidance reflecting growth of 43% year-over-year and margin expansion of more than 300 basis points versus adjusted EBITDA generation during the second half of 2013.

Now let's talk about non-GAAP total operating revenues. As Steve said in his remarks, we ended the first half a few points softer than expected.

Having said that, we are holding non-GAAP revenue guidance steady at the $640 million to $650 million range because we have a number of revenue catalysts that we believe can be an incremental positive to our second half plan and can help us hit that range for the full year.

Some of these catalysts include a better-than-expected number of active cards on the non-Walmart side of the house and higher revenue-generating usage on all our active cards that we think can help us incrementally grow revenue in the second half.

We're also doing a better job of ensuring in-stocks at our best-selling stores in all our chains, which will help increase card sales and active cards over the coming months. And we have a number of new growth-oriented initiatives that we believe can launch in time to benefit the second half.

Lastly, growth in the FSC channel continues to be better than expected leading to incremental revenue growth from that channel as well. So bottom line is, guidance is up on adjusted EBITDA for the year and non-GAAP revenue guidance is holding steady. With that, we'll open the phones for Q&A.

Operator?.

[Operator Instructions] And the first question comes from Ramsey El-Assal from Jefferies..

This is Ryan Cary for Ramsey. Just a quick question. Is there any pull forward in the metrics from 1Q? I know bad weather was a headwind. I was just hoping you could speak either quantitatively or qualitatively to any impact in the second quarter..

Impact, I'm not sure I understand what you mean.

You mean -- when you say a pull forward, you mean any bad weather impacts, you mean, in the second quarter or?.

Well it seems like in the second quarter we had much better weather across the country. So I was just thinking that maybe because of all those days that the weather was -- we had bad weather in the first quarter that maybe when it got better in the second it's -- we got a little bit of acceleration there..

It's hard to know. We think Q2 was pretty much, in terms of weather and customer behavior, fairly typical quarter. So it's hard to know if there was pent up demand and if so, how that would impact sales. Racked up [ph] cards, kind of a difficult metric to get at. But I don't think there was anything unusual about Q2, I guess..

Okay.

And then is there any update in terms of getting some reduced processing costs by either negotiating a different contract with TSYS or some other provider or taking the function in-house, is there any movement on that decision-making process?.

Yes. Quite a bit in fact. You may have heard in the discussion we had about operating expenses that one of the things where we continue to invest is processing capabilities. And so we expect that there will be significant savings, if you will, on processing coming up starting next year.

And without going into further details, I guess it's fair to say that we feel really good about our prospects in reducing the processing costs and having better technology too there as well..

And the next question comes from Sanjay Sakhrani from KBW..

This is Steven Kwok filling in for Sanjay. I just have 2 quick questions. I guess, the first one was around the revenue.

Can you just talk a little bit about the expected trajectory around revenues? Should we expect like sequential improvements heading into the end of the year? Or is it going to be a sub-function [ph] up and then it will remain that way? Just wanted to see if you could provide any clarity around that..

Yes, you should see steady improvement as the quarters build. And we're seeing that if you look at Q4 of last year, Q1, Q2 and it's our goal and plan to have that in Q3 and Q4 as well. I forget where the conference was, Chris. I want to -- I remember being in New York and I remember being at a hotel. It was KPW, there you go, my apologies.

And we showed a deck that had the ramp of what we expect quarter-over-quarter as more active cards build. And that is what you're seeing. The difference is we're slightly softer than where we thought we'd be, but the trajectory is the same and the storyline is the same.

So if we have all these active cards continue to build and throw off revenue, and as the portfolios and cohorts mature of cards we've been issuing since January, you should continue to see 3 and 4 increase to make the year. That's right..

Got it. And then just around expenses, can you talk about relative to expectations, it seems like expenses came in below our expectations. I'm wondering, is there anything that's driving that given that you're expecting expenses to build up again in the second half of the year.

Anything you could point out for this quarter?.

Yes. Let's talk about expenses because we've had such a fabulous result. None of which is accidental. We really, really worked quite hard at it.

And when we built our full year guidance and announced it, you know what you have in the plan, you know what you think you can achieve, but being that we're somewhat chicken, we never squeeze the lemon all the way to the maximum, if you will, when we look at savings.

But as it turns out, the certain line items, especially in processing with Green Dot Bank issuing our card accounts, the fabulous job that our technology leadership has done, Kuan and Steve and Dave and all the folks who run Green Dot's technology stacks around the world and around the country, have really over-delivered where all these fabulous plans are coming together.

So you're seeing costs come down materially. Risk management, what an amazing job that Eric Inkrott has done in leading our risk team or Lee Bugasian [ph] in our supply chain team. We are now using better technology, better processes, more thoughtful plans as we spend money more wisely.

But to spend the money more wisely, you have to have the technology behind it to better predict certain curves and trends and we're doing just a very good job at it. So that's all come together really quite well and that's why you're seeing the saves increase. We also did a good job with comp and benefits and SG&A, those other things as well.

But I think those areas of risk and supply chain and technology have been key contributors to that expansion..

Got it.

And just as a follow-up, just in terms of when we look out into third and fourth quarter, what are the areas that are sustainable heading there? Is the processing expense level sustainable, or?.

Yes. All the operational stuff is sustainable, both at scale and at a unit basis. So we feel good about that. We left ourselves a little bit of room. If you noticed the difference between first half actual returns and second half margin or the implied margins based on our revised guidance, there's about a $12 million gap.

And the reason is we wanted to save that $12 million in the second half because we know we're doing additional merchandising. We mentioned some of the new merchandising processes to get more cards and especially the best-selling cards off the shelf at all of our retailers nationwide and maintaining a certain goal for in-stock rates.

So that costs money. We know we have more production runs than we had scheduled because, especially on the Green Dot brand, we're just selling so many cards so what happens is, for those of you who are familiar with supply chain, we have this huge process around demand planning.

And if you exceed demand you have to go back to the drawing board, and then do make up stock runs, and that's what we're doing there. That's a good thing. In other words, I'll take that problem every day of the week. But nevertheless, it does have an impact to your expenses in a given period.

And then we have some growth initiatives that we're not able to announce today, but ones that will require a little bit of investment. So we sort of gave ourselves a $12 million margin, I guess, of spending opportunity in second half that's different from the first half, and that's why you're seeing that delta.

By the way, I do want to point out because this is something fascinating that Chris pointed out when we were doing the review of all the metrics, even though we're forecasting second half margins to be a little bit more compressed than what we achieved in the first half, it's still -- even at the implied -- what is the implied range? Like, 18%, 19% of the midrange? And we actually did 23% in real life in the first half.

But when you look at that, even with that lower implied guidance range, 43% higher year-over-year and 300 basis points better than last year over the same period.

So even though we're being conservative and giving ourselves that $12 million of room to make sure we can afford all the new initiatives and everything at second half, it still is massively better over the same period for last year and I think to your question, that points out some of the confidence we have in the other parts of our business continuing to perform quite well..

And the next question comes from Glenn Fodor with Autonomous Research..

I saw some talk online about GoBank now being available in perhaps select Walmart locations. Could you talk about that a little bit? I think it may tie in well to your comment on scale and ramping up GoBank..

Well, it's very rare that I'm surprised in earnings calls but you have a very astute eyeball, Mr. Fodor. So we've not made any announcement about that, although I think you just kind of did a little bit. But the answer is that we are in pilot in 20 Walmart stores only in the state of Texas and literally those just rolled out Monday.

What's today? Thursday. So they rolled out 4 days ago. And so the only thing really, Glenn, all kidding aside, I can confirm is that we are in a small number of Walmart stores in Texas on a pilot basis with a productized version of GoBank and we'll see how that goes, no pun intended..

Okay. Yes, we just found it around that small, little ecosystem called Twitter so it's out there somewhere. But....

Yes, you can imagine as a CEO, I have long since canceled my Twitter account, but we've been outed more than a few times on Twitter so maybe I should renew my membership..

And then just secondly, if you don't mind. The back end of Walmart, you were talking about more usage and you'll take a little pain now for more usage and more revenues later.

Is it safe to say that as we think about the revenue guidance for second half that includes very -- I don't want to put words in your mouth, but does it include very little lift from incremental benefit from the back half or have you assumed some acceleration in Walmart-related spending growth?.

I'm trying to think how I want to answer it. The answer is, a lot goes into the guidance and a lot goes into the full year projection, and we always have moving parts that goes into that process. And you're never exact. Historically, we'll guess higher in some and lower than others and it evens out and that's the way it goes.

So we probably are assuming that the Walmart portfolios are steady run rate through the second half, but we recognize internally that there's an opportunity for that upside if the extra usage behavior compounds over time.

But they're new cohorts, right, these are 9 SKUs, 3 new Walmart MoneyCard products specifically, that have only been on the shelf now, call it, 8 months as of the second half of the year, 7 months, as of the second half of the year. So the cohorts are young, the behavior is young.

So we believe that the usage, which is up materially as we pointed out in the prepared remarks, is up, and that's a great sign. Consumers are paying less, using the card more, exactly as designed. So that's a good thing. What that will contribute in terms of actual dollars and cents is a little bit more mysterious.

And so we don't really put a lot of that in to the second half. But we do think, as it relates to Walmart in particular, that the smarter merchandising that we're beginning to do there and they've been wonderful partners in driving us to work harder and to work smarter at that.

And some of the new upfront pricing initiatives that we made that I discussed in the prepared remarks, we think all of that can come together to increase a more robust result in the second half..

And the next question comes from Dain Haukos from Piper Jaffray..

I'm on Mike today. Just a couple of questions. I was curious how -- I noticed in the metrics that the active cards grew about 7% year-over-year, but the cash transfers grew a little bit slower rate at 3%.

I'm just curious will we see a pickup in those cash transfers as all these new cards that you're adding kind of season?.

Yes. We should. So what happens is when you're selling so many new card accounts and acquiring initially more -- so many card accounts in a small period of time, the half-life is only 90 days old, right? So if you look at the first half of the year as a cohort, let's say, the average half-life of those cards is 3 months.

And so that means that they really only have a chance to contribute a small part of their activity in revenue. So in some ways, they're diluted to the average metrics.

Okay? So if you have a swimming pool with x parts of chlorine per gallon and you dump in a ton of freshwater overnight, your chlorine particles per gallon, this is a weird analogy, would go down just by a mathematical average. But the same is really true with a pool of active cards.

So when you have a group of active cards, some are older than 6 months, some are brand new, and you start acquiring more and more new cards, your average metrics will be watered down a little bit, to keep expanding on that analogy, just because you have so many new customers who haven't yet had enough life in the card account existence to contribute at the rate of an older cardholder.

So we think a lot of that is more an artifact of selling and issuing a lot of new cards in a small period of time. And so we would expect that cash transfer revenue to be consistent with the growth over time..

Okay.

And so you think it ramps probably more steeply into 2015 or is it late part of 2014?.

Well, the active portfolio has never stopped ramping in theory if you go back even 12 years, I suppose, and look at our business. But, yes, it should ramp and I think historically, I'll go out on a limb because I don't have our FP&A guys in the room but historically, reloads lag new cards issued by approximately 3 months.

That's typically the rule of thumb..

Okay and then just one other quick one. It looks like the check cashing effort has gone well with 1,200 stores added during the quarter.

How many cities is that in? And how much bigger do you think that opportunity can get as far as locations is concerned?.

Not sure how many cities, to be honest with you. I would guess it's pretty well dispersed. I'm going to say, I'll take a guess and say 20 states, but I couldn't tell you how many cities. But it's fairly well dispersed, number one. And number two, we think it can get a whole lot bigger.

We're really very early in that game and the sales funnel has been robust where we have a team of about 15 people within Green Dot on the FSC stack, we call it, that does nothing but on-board new clients. So it's a very, very rapid process and we've been very well received so we think there's a lot of upside still to go..

And the next question comes from Stephanie Davis of JPMorgan..

It's actually Reggie filling in for Stephanie. I guess, a few quick questions. I think, my rough math, I was looking at the Walmart concentration, I believe revenues are probably down in the low double-digit range. And I was just curious, I know you called out some pricing differences or revenue per card.

Is that like a fair approximation of what the active card basis has been trending like in the Walmart segment?.

Yes. It's a fair guess. We don't break those out in terms of a divisional reporting or anything of that nature, but the implied math, and you're very good at math, is what it is so I think that's a fair mathematical calculation. And as I mentioned on the prepared remarks and I'm happy to talk a little bit more about it, there's really 2 reasons.

One is, we've traded in longer lifetime revenue per active cardholder for some smaller revenue in the period, and when you have millions of active cards that can be a material amount of money in the course of a quarter. So that's one reason. And that's not a bad reason. That's something that we actually feel good about.

If in fact, the portfolios age and compound, like we think they might, but we don't want to predict the future but that's sort of the theory, right, and we'll know more next quarter. But that's one. The other one is that, we're a little bit softer in active cards than we should be just because our merchandising efforts need to be better.

Retailing is a very, very difficult task. I don't care if it's Walmart or any retailer you want to pick. It's difficult. You have a lot of facilities, a lot of inventory, a lot of hands touching supply chain, and we need to get better at it and do better at it.

And as we do merchandising runs and as we learn new tricks to how to keep the right selling SKUs in stock better, you see sales spike and that has a direct correlation to active cards. So I think that we've done a lot of things right with the new portfolio, and we have some areas of improvement to be fair in the new portfolio.

But life is dynamic, and that's why I said in the prepared remarks that we have so many people in so many locations. And one of the things we love about Walmart is that, that means you always have a fluid chance to improve on what you're doing so we have a lot of upside and a lot of opportunity.

We've done well but I think we can do better still to improve that active card count as well..

Got it. And then I guess, just to make sure I'm hearing this correctly.

So is it safe to assume -- you talk about a higher lifetime value for the account, are people opting into some of your more premium cards that have higher activation fees and lower ongoing fees? Is that the conclusion that should be drawn?.

I can't really comment on that because we don't give SKU-level data. That's really Walmart's proprietary information and so I feel wrong in sharing that.

But I think if you look at the portfolio in aggregate, without regard to which particular SKU a customer is buying, all the SKUs were designed to better appeal to the customer who's self-selecting into that product, if you will. And so our ultimate goal would be to see aggregate retention and aggregate lifetime revenue increase.

The only way we'll know if that happens is we have to just watch the clock tick and see how that all turns out. But that's the theory, exactly right..

Got it. And if I could sneak one more in.

On the cash transfer side, just curious, is -- so a 3% growth rate this quarter, is that kind of similar for both Green Dot and third party or is there a divergence in kind of growth patterns between the two?.

Well it's a bit different. That's an average. Hang on, I'm getting for a piece of paper here, unless, Chris, you have it. What was the -- for example, on the Green Dot brand, we had cash transfers that were up what? 33% on the Green Dot brand. Yes. It was in the release I think, the press release.

So it gives you a sense that we're a company of a lot of portfolios. We're a well-diversified company, right? We're in 92,000 retailers, we're in check-cashing locations, we're online, we're in the App Stores. And so the averages sometimes can help or hurt investors' and analysts' understanding of what's happening in a particular part of the company.

But if you look at the Green Dot brand year-over-year growth, you'll see that cash transfers mimics closely the growth in active cards. But when you average it all together, it has a lower number.

So we think as active cards build, if we do our jobs properly on the Walmart side of the house and if Green Dot's able to continue to grow, you'll see all those metrics improve over time..

And the next question comes from Tulu Yunus from Nomura Securities..

So just with the -- I wanted to dig into the check-cashing channel once more.

Is the ramp in this channel going to look like the retail ramp that you laid out at the conference earlier this year? Is it different? Can you just give us an idea of how to think about that because if I'm not mistaken, the economics from that particular slide I'm referring to referred just to the 27,000 retailers that you added last year, not the check cashers..

Right. Well the answer is, the formulaic mathematical theory would be the same. In other words, you sell a new card, it contributes its lifetime revenue over x number of months. And so as the portfolio grows and the cohorts age you have an ever increasingly highly-producing portfolio. So that is the same without regard to what channel you're in.

The absolute dollars in check-cashing will be lower because there's just so many fewer outlets. If you think about what we did in Q4 of last year, oh, my gosh, it was 22,000 dollar stores or something, if my memory is correct. But then we also added Home Depot and a number of other locations as well.

So you had just a whole lot more number of buildings and more customers and more units because that size of the add was so much bigger. But the same concept is with the check cashing.

But as well-behaved as those cardholders are, they really do contribute much more per unit, the total number of units available in the check-cashing channel will never match the total number of units available in the retail channel. But it can be material and it's a nice add and it becomes a nice contributor to the company overall.

But -- so the answer is, yes, the tale is the same but the scale is lower just based on the number of accounts issued.

Does that kind of help answer the question?.

Yes. It gives me a good color on it. And the -- I mean, just related to that channel again. I mean, as far as because it is a brand new one, I just wanted to spend a little bit of time on it.

How are the incentive structures different with your partners there? Because I understand the usage behavior of these cards are quite different, a lot more direct deposit behavior, just in terms of how you incentivize via commissions, et cetera on these cards versus your retail cards?.

Well, I don't know that I can get into specifics because as you can imagine, it's competitive and so I wouldn't want to get too specific. But in general, it's not too different than what we do in the retail channel. It may be structured slightly differently.

Our retailers have other needs and expenses and types of things that they look for in their overall package, if you will. Our partners in the FSC channel have different needs and different goals.

But if you look at the margins of those cards, they certainly have the opportunity to be the same or maybe better if those usage characteristics stay true than our retail cards. So -- but for the purposes of the overall model, I wouldn't bake in anything more in terms of margin, good or bad..

And the next question comes from David Scharf with JMP Securities..

Steve, I guess in the ongoing quest to try to get a handle on what we ought to be thinking about as "normalized margins," I just want to dig into that $12 million gap between first and second half.

In particular, understanding how much of it is truly variable, just the cost of growing your business and how much of it is more sort of onetime in nature or associated with specific new initiatives. Because it sounds like things such as additional merchandising or production runs. I mean that sounds more like the cost of doing business, if you will.

Can you give us a little handle on how much of that $12 million you would characterize as more onetime or very program-specific in nature?.

88,000 freestanding buildings of the parking lots and locations and everything else that you have to make sure your products are on the shelf. And that's hard.

So we've done a way better job of sort of superservicing our high-selling locations, if you will, underservicing our low-selling locations and trying to find the right balance, and that means we're making a lot more packages than we were. And if you do have some of that, that's about timing and catch up that could have hit somewhere.

So you're right, it's the normal course of doing business, but the timing is that it's in the second half this particular time and another year could've been in first half. So you're right, that's sort of the normalized cost of running your business.

I think the remaining, call it, $7 million is about specific merchandising efforts and specific growth-oriented activities that we believe will be incremental and onetime in nature as we launch a new initiative here or there, and so we're saving that for dry powder.

Now it could be that we don't use it, or something else, and we end the year better, we don't know. But generally, we've been pretty good at estimating those kinds of costs and we're getting better at it all the time. So I wouldn't guess much beyond our range.

I think we've guided appropriately and I do think we'll end up spending that money for this initiative or that initiative..

Got it, fair enough. And maybe as a follow-up, switching back to Walmart. A couple of things.

One, can you talk a little bit about maybe what their rationale was for introducing one of your branded cards and particularly one that's at a higher price point?.

Right. Well I think that I can and in fact Walmart has talked about this publicly as well. And that is they really want to have the best products and the best variety of products for their customer.

And if you like to use their cereal analogy in their cereal aisle, if you like Post Raisin Bran better than Kellogg's Raisin Bran, they should have both there because overall your overall raisin bran sales should rise. I know that may be a silly analogy, but it's actually the right analogy to have.

And I think that Walmart realized that the Green Dot brand was a big seller at our other retailers and the feeling is, "Look, we have a fabulous house-branded portfolio in the Walmart MoneyCard and people who want it are buying it.

But let's also make sure that if they want to buy a Green Dot card given that they see it on TV and they see it marketed, well, we should have that brand as well." And as you know they also have the Serve brand from American Express and Amex has invested in that and they may well put on other card brands as well to build out that category, and that's -- to me that's perfectly fine and legitimate.

So that's really why. I think you're right that in the old days there was a view maybe that they only want to sell the house brands of this or that.

And as Walmart themselves has announced many times in their earnings calls and in other public forums, they really want the best variety for their customer base and the best assortment and I think adding the Green Dot brand is part of that strategy..

Is the initial placement on the prepaid rack displacing one of the MoneyCard products or is it additional? Are they looking at growing the entire category?.

No, it replaced -- I'm not sure what we replaced. The folks in the room are saying it replaced our AARP SKU so if that's the case, then so be it. I don't know to be honest with you. But it did not replace any of the Walmart-branded SKUs, it would've replaced another Green Dot Bank-issued SKU..

Got it, got it. And this is maybe more just a kind of nuanced reporting issue. I mean, as we think about Walmart revenue per se, in future reporting, would sales of Green Dot-branded products inside Walmarts be reported as Walmart revenue? I assume it would be..

I think it is. Yes, I think we do. The short answer is, yes. I think anything we sell inside of a Walmart without regard to the brand comes from Walmart and therefore, under our reporting rigor would be reported as Walmart revenue..

Got it, got it.

And just lastly, in the same vein, cutting to the chase at the end of the year, another 5, 6 months of seasoning of the newer SKUs at Walmart, are you anticipating exiting the year with year-over-year revenue growth for Walmart?.

Well I don't know that I can answer it, not because I don't know or I don't believe in it. It's just a model question that I don't have in front of me and I'd hate to say something on a public forum that after I get off the air, someone tells me it's inaccurate.

I think we clearly have a view that we'll exit the year at a higher revenue year-over-year for the company and we're a company with a lot of different retailers and a lot of different products. So I feel confident about that, and that's why we're guiding the way we're guiding.

Whether or not that revenue growth comes from Walmart versus Rite Aid versus Walgreens versus Dollar General, I'm probably less inclined to comment on..

And the next question comes from Smitti Srethapramote from Morgan Stanley..

This is Vasu Govil for Smitti. Just for quickly a modeling question first. Can you help us think about what line items the expenses related to the new growth initiatives will hit.

Will it mostly be sales and marketing?.

It would be -- is that where merchandising -- yes, the answer is, the accounting team says, you are correct. You may be filling in for Smitti but you're a fabulous fill-in..

And then can you maybe -- nobody else asked you about it, so maybe I'll do that.

Can you talk about the reload at the register program that you're rolling out at your retailers? Maybe help us with how far you're rolled out already and maybe help us also think about any revenue impact or cost savings that you might be realizing from that? Yes, happy to talk about it and the question was about reload at the register, which is our new SwIT technology, Swipe Interface Technology, S-W-I-T, that we've installed at most all of our retailers nationwide and will have installed at all retailers by the end of the year.

And that will facilitate our ability to sunset the MoneyPak product, which maybe many of you have read about and have heard about and MoneyPak will be gone by early first quarter next year and fully replaced by the ability to reload your cards by swiping it at the cash register without having to buy a paper chit or scratch off for a PIN number or do anything else.

The benefit of getting rid of MoneyPak is twofold.

Number one, reloading at the register by swiping your card is a more intuitive customer behavior, easier to teach for the new customer, easier to train for the cashier and it really completely eliminates the opportunity for this third-party victim-assisted fraud, which I'm sure you've read about in the news quite a bit, has been a real challenge for us with that MoneyPak product.

Which is a shame because it's a teeny tiny -- if you look at the nefarious, what I call nefarious, use of the MoneyPak product, it's a tiny piece of that product maybe less than 1% or 0.5% of all transactions. But in terms of -- it's a good product. We sell a lot of them.

So in terms of the numbers of human beings that are impacted, it's just too much to deal with and so the answer is get rid of the product, get rid of that fraud and push all reloads to strictly swipe. Today, we're predominantly swipe anyhow, that's already the majority of how all of our reloads get done.

And then we'll come up with some other technology to facilitate, for example, PayPal cash reloads and other things that we do with that MoneyPak today that are not related to reloading of cards.

So SwIT rolled out first at Walmart about a year ago and the MoneyPak's already been gone from Walmart, Dollar General and some other retailers, Dollar Tree for some time, and then you'll see that product continue to go away, giving way to the swipe technology exclusively. And there are, to your question, good advantages to that.

You're not printing gazillion MoneyPak packages, you get rid of all that third-party fraud opportunity, which is really we don't think clearly has helped our brand name because every time you turn on the news you hear about something like that. And so we think it's going to be a good thing for the company.

It will save expenses, it will cut down on a lot of refunds and other things we've done to try to make customers whole. We'll protect our brand and our brand image and we'll also facilitate a way easier and more logical method of reloading for our prepaid cardholders. So we think at the end of the day, it's a win.

And so that's the story of reload at the register and MoneyPak. I hope I've answered that.

Did that all make sense the way I described it?.

And this does conclude our question-and-answer session. So at this time, I would like to turn the call back over to management for any closing comments..

No, that was a fast hour. Thank you all for listening. We appreciate your help and I'm sure we will see you at conferences coming up as Chris advertises, and we appreciate you listening in today..

Thank you. The conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect. Have a nice day..