Here's Why I'm So Excited About SoFi Going Public

Fintech company SoFi Technologies (SOFI 0.26%) has completed its merger with Social Capital Hedosophia Holdings V, and is now officially a publicly traded company. In this Fool Live video clip, recorded on May 24, Fool.com contributor Matt Frankel, CFP, and Industry Focus host Jason Moser discuss why they're so excited to watch this growth story unfold.  

Jason Moser: You'd recently just gone through some earnings results for the business and you were impressed with what you saw.

Matt Frankel: Yeah. Assuming everything goes according to plan with their meeting and the shareholder vote and all that, they'll be trading on the 1st, which is the first trading day after the Memorial Day weekend. It will be on the Nasdaq. The current symbol IPOE, the SPAC is on the New York Stock Exchange, so it's moving exchanges. At that time, the shares and the warrants, which ever ones you own, will automatically convert over to the new ticker symbol. There's nothing you need to do. If you still own the original units, if it was the IPOE units, those will automatically break apart into shares and warrants of SoFi upon closing, just so you know what to expect. There is nothing you need to do. Looking at the results, they pretty much knocked it out of the park. First-quarter net revenue was $216 million. They had been guiding for $190 to $195, so they came in above the high end of their own guidance range.

Moser: Nice.

Frankel: Their earnings were a little over $4 million. They've been guiding for a loss of $5 million to a gain of $1 million. So they blew that expectation out of the water, too. On the top and the bottom lines, they really just smashed their own expectations. Their member count is 2.28 million. That's 110% higher than it was a year ago.

Moser: Wow.

Frankel: This is the seventh consecutive quarter where their growth rate has accelerated, and it's pretty impressive. If you remember, a year or so ago, they acquired the Galileo. It's the back-end fintech infrastructure platform. They provide third-party infrastructure services. They now have 70 million client accounts, up from 59 million a year ago. The Galileo platform is one of the big biggest parts of my thesis on the company. They originated $2.5 billion of loans in the quarter. A little less than half of that was personal loans and they had some student loans. That was what SoFi was originally founded to do. They expect just under $1 billion of revenue this year, which is pretty impressive. That would be 58% growth over 2020. They're just starting to launch some new verticals, auto loans. They are really just ramping up their brokerage business. They're just getting their banking charter. If you remember, SoFi just acquired a small bank for the purpose of accelerating that process.

Moser: Yeah.

Frankel: It's putting a lot of its own capital behind it. So the numbers look pretty impressive, and the shares are up significantly since that was announced. I think it's pretty plain to see why. These numbers were just impressive all around.

Moser: Yeah. It sounds like Anthony Noto has got the business really headed in the right direction. I remember at the time when he left Twitter to go to SoFi, it was a little curious, but now, it makes a whole heck of a lot more sense. He really did seem to get in with the business there at the right time to help them start building up what is I think something pretty special here. It seems like they're on to something big. Including all of the numbers that you've just gone over, the initiatives are leading to a business, and the investors really had to have this one on their radar.

Frankel: I was thrilled when they announced that this was going to be their merger target for IPOE, and I'm not planning on selling my shares. I've added to my position since they announced it. I'm a big SoFi fan. I think they're a very disruptive financial company, and I think they could be the next Square in my portfolio.