A Letter from Dave
At our first AGM as a publicly traded company, we looked back on what Mogo has achieved this year and previewed the exciting new products that will be launching soon. But we thought you should hear it from our CEO himself.
Last week, we held our first annual general meeting as a public company, at our new offices in downtown Vancouver.
Since we went public in June 2015, it’s become even more clear that the financial services industry is undergoing a fundamental digital transformation.
As we share the Mogo story, we’re sometimes met with skepticism over whether Mogo can truly disrupt banking in Canada. The Big Six banks collectively made more than $35 billion in profits last year and have tens of thousands of employees and millions of customers. This is the biggest and most profitable industry in Canada. When we completed our IPO about a year ago, we were positioned as an online lending platform, but as most of you know we have been evolving our strategy which is now summarized by “Not a bank. By design.” We have an opportunity to build a next gen bank in Canada without actually becoming a bank. That involves partnering with financial institutions such as what we are doing with our new MogoCard. Our focus will be to control the customer experience.
Our strategy isn’t about getting customers to switch everything away from their bank; instead it’s about getting them to add a free MogoAccount to their “financial wallet.” We don’t expect the banks to go away. We just expect that, as in every other industry that has faced major disruption, consumers will gradually move over to other services like Mogo.
Against this backdrop, we have been hard at work building one of the leading financial brands in Canada, by building out our technology platform, products, and brand. Our team continues to make good progress toward the near-term launch of our next-generation digital account, our new mobile app, as well as the new MogoCard and MogoMortgage.
This is the most compelling value proposition in Canadian financial services: a free account that only takes a few minutes to open online or through our new mobile app, where you can get instant access to credit, a free no-monthly-fee Platinum Prepaid Visa® Card, and a free credit score paid for by Mogo and provided by Equifax Canada. Just as importantly, the user experience will set a new standard for what digital banking should look like: fun, simple, and engaging.
Our successes to date are the result of a strong team we have assembled. We now have over 300 team members all focused on the objective of building Mogo into the leading digital financial platform and brand in Canada. No other player in Canada has this scale and no one else has the experience that we have in this space. This is early days, as this transformation to digital banking will happen over the next five to ten years and like every other industry being disrupted, there will be massive but gradual changes. It’s exciting to be an innovator in this sector in Canada.
Thank you for your support in getting us here and I can’t wait for you to experience the new Mogo that we’ve been building over the past year.
– Dave