ASX BRIEFS

ONE CLICK GROUP LTD (1CG) - Fintech Growth Story: How One Click Is Tackling Financial Illiteracy One App at a Time

Andrew Musgrave

Send us a text

Financial management shouldn't be complicated. That's the driving philosophy behind One Click Group's rapid ascent in Australia's fintech landscape, as revealed in my latest conversation with Managing Director Mark Waller.

One Click has transformed financial services through simplicity. Their mobile-first tax platform pulls information directly from the ATO, allowing users to lodge returns with unprecedented ease—particularly valuable considering recent research showing 45% of Australian adults are financially illiterate. This approach has fueled remarkable growth: revenues have jumped from $1 million to nearly $5 million since listing in 2022, with this year's figures already shattering records. Most tellingly, their returning customer rate has surged to 72%, a powerful testament to their service quality and user satisfaction.

What began as a tax-focused service has evolved into a comprehensive financial ecosystem spanning tax, wills, lending, insurance, and mortgages. Their newest offering, the "Little Money" cash advance product, strategically extends their value proposition beyond the seasonal tax period. Next on their roadmap is superannuation services, targeting their predominantly younger customer base of transient workers who often accumulate multiple super accounts as they job-hop. By simplifying super management and encouraging early engagement, One Click aims to significantly improve long-term financial outcomes for Australians.

Ready to simplify your financial life? Discover how One Click is revolutionizing personal finance management for everyday Australians through innovative technology and user-first design. Listen to the full conversation now and see why they're outperforming the market while maintaining their commitment to simplicity and accessibility.

 

Andrew Musgrave Host

Welcome again to ASX Briefs. And today we welcome back Mark Waller, the Managing Director of One Click Group Limited, a rapidly growing fintech company offering a suite of financial and life admin services through its One Click Live platform. Mark, thanks for joining me again and welcome back to the ASX Briefs podcast.
 
 Mark Waller Guest

Thanks, Andrew. Thanks for having me
 
 Andrew Musgrave Host

Now. We spoke last year late September, so obviously there's been a bit going on with the company. But just to start off, do you just want to give us a bit of a recap and a brief overview of the company? 

Mark Waller Guest

Yeah, sure. So, One Click Group has a financial services platform called One Click Life. Key product that we have there is an online tax return, and then we have a variety of other financial services products surrounding that, and really, we started off with the concept of making tax simple right and we contacted the ATO. They said, yes, you can integrate with us. Great. So, we integrated with the ATO and what we've built is an online tax platform that allows really simple tax return lodgment. So, it pulls all the information in relation to your personal details, income details and everything the ATO has. You can then add in your deductions or connect your bank account to it and our system then goes through and pulls those deductions out for you. 

And a very simple way to lodge your tax return off your mobile phone. And it is really designed around simple. So simple is a core concept of ours and interestingly, there was a recent study by University of New South Wales and some interesting stats which I think really point to the need for simple is that 45% of adults are seen as financially illiterate these days. So, the ability to provide that really simple mobile-first format and allow people to manage that sort of part of their life in a simple way, I think, is ever more important these days. 

Andrew Musgrave Host

Yeah, okay. And if we just touch on your performance and platform growth, so you've already outperformed July 2024 revenue in the first few weeks of this year. So, what's driving the remarkable growth and what's traditionally your peak season? 

Mark Waller Guest

Yeah, excellent. So peak season is really from June to November for us. That's when things really fire up in the business. We listed back in 2022. So, we've been nearly three years listed now. This end of this September, will be three years listed. We've grown revenues from 1 million or a bit over 1 million the first year we were listed to just under 5 million last year. So, we've had pretty rapid growth and in that time, we put on 50,000 new users per annum and we'll we expect to do about the same this year. So, I think the cumulative effect of prior year's growth that we've experienced, the quality of our earnings and the growth this year has really just kicked off. I guess that acceleration of revenue growth and being able to achieve last year's July number in only 18 days this year, I think is a remarkable achievement for the business. 

Andrew Musgrave Host

Yeah, certainly is, and your returning customer rate has jumped from 63% to 72%. So, what do you think is driving this loyalty and repeat usage on the One Click Life platform? 

Mark Waller Guest

Yeah, and look, that's probably one of my favourite stats from where we're up to in this season and that returning customer rate is a great proxy for retention, which so far this tax season has been really, really strong, which is excellent. And I think, Andrew, the reason for that is we've had a really disciplined approach to improving our product and our service over the last really since we started, but particularly the last three years since we've been listed. Since we've been listed and in that time we've introduced a lot of automation into the system and a lot of new features into the tax product, which, being able to do that and not increase our price or keep our price steady, I think every year customers come back and they see a better product, they get a better service and better communication just makes a massive difference. So, we've just seen that customer base just getting stronger and stronger and more loyal, and we have a lot of customers that refer friends and family as well, so that's a pretty good testament to what they're seeing at the quality of the product at the moment. 

Andrew Musgrave Host

Okay, and the ATO has reported a 10% drop in total lodgements this July, whereas your numbers are surging. So how do you interpret the performance relative to the broader market? 

Mark Waller Guest

Yeah, that surprised me quite a bit actually that the ATO has seen a reduction over all tax lodgement numbers when we've seen such a strong growth. And it probably excited me quite a bit because it means there's still a big portion of Aussies out there who haven't lodged their tax return a big revenue opportunity for us. And following that stat coming out into the third and fourth weeks of July, we've still seen very high lodgement numbers, higher than we anticipated during that period, which does speak to those numbers that the ATO have released there. So, I'm really happy about that and I think it just gives us a great ongoing revenue opportunity to tap into this tax season, which is great. 

Andrew Musgrave Host

And you've launched the One Click Little Money, a year-round cash advance product. So how does this extend your value proposition beyond the July October tax season? 

Mark Waller Guest

Yeah, I mean looking at our but firstly just our revenue in the business and how we generate our revenue. It has been quite cyclical, so through that June to November period is when we produce most of our revenue. So, what we're looking at is ways that we can increase that revenue outside of the, what we will call our tax season. So, the one click cash advance product we've called Little Money. That's a great way for us to be able to provide value to our customers all year round at times when they do need a boost to their cash for whatever reason and generate reasonable ongoing cash flows coming out of that and reasonable revenue outside of our core season. So, we're pretty excited about rolling that product out. 

Andrew Musgrave Host

Okay, and early testing has seen strong demand for the Little Money product. So, what's the roadmap for a full rollout and how do you plan to manage the credit and repayment risk? 

Mark Waller Guest

Yeah, Look, when we initially went live with the product, we saw a huge amount of demand, which was really good. So, I don't think there was any concerns around the demand for the product, and our early testing conversations with our customers indicated a strong desire for that sort of product on the platform, which is great. So, the key for us now is to work out who we want to provide that product to and make sure we get the target market correct for that, so that we're not providing a product to people that you know maybe have a low desire to repay those small cash advances. So, the initial part of it is really, you know, controlling that subset of customers that we provide the product to. Then the second part of it is our credit risk engine and just continuing to evolve and improve that over time to make sure that you know that we're getting as high repayments as possible from our customers. 

Andrew Musgrave Host

Okay, and the company now has services spanning tax, wills, lending and insurance. So, what's the next vertical you're most excited about to bring into the One Click Life ecosystem? 

Mark Waller Guest

Yeah, the core offerings for us is really around compliance, lending and wealth, right? So, the products that you mentioned, they're all fit into one of those three categories. So, our compliance is all around our tax and tax related products and they just get stronger and stronger every year and have yeah, they're quite mature now and continuing to improve. Our lending products include mortgages, so we have mortgage brokers that work for us and a nice mortgage book that we look after. And inserted into the lending products is our cash advance product, which is just going to continue to mature and mature. 

The next big focus after that is around our wealth products. 

So, something that stands out to us in our research of our customers and certainly talking to our customers, is superannuation. So, a lot of our customers and if you think about our customer base, they're largely transient workforces. So we're talking about hospitality, retail, warehouse workers, where they're jumping from job to job, and when this is happening, what they often get left with is multiple super funds, unclaimed or lost super with the ATO, and the product that we're building out at the moment is around being able to consolidate all of those superannuation funds that they currently have, including lost or unclaimed super, and bring that into one environment that they can manage in a really simple, mobile first way, with really strong communication. And really what we're trying to get is that younger demographic that we look after to really engage with their superannuation. And if we can get them engaging early, Andrew, I think we can get them a significantly better outcome in terms of what their retirement income might look like down the track. 

Andrew Musgrave Host

Okay, now just touching on the technology. You're building a mobile-first self-service life admin platform, so what role is tech, especially automation and API integration, playing in driving scalability? 

Mark Waller Guest

So, it's about getting for us, about getting all of your financial life into one place where you can manage everything together, so all of your compliance, your lending, your wealth and hopefully down the track and banking and those sort of services as well. 

So for us, having an API-driven architecture where we're able to pull in a lot of information from different sources is very important and to use AI to really start to perform those simple tasks and automation in the product just to allow people that more immediate service that people look for these days. So core to us is using technology really to drive that service and, from a scalability perspective, we've been able to run, in terms of the overall cost of running the business, at the same cost for the last three years, which is $3.5 million a year, excluding our marketing, which during that time we've grown revenues, as I mentioned, from about $1 million the year that we listed to nearly $5 million last year and will be significantly more than that this year and certainly based on what we're seeing at the moment. 

Andrew Musgrave Host

Now you've also launched a One Click Verify as a B2B product for identity checks. So, is this a standalone growth engine or more of an enabler for your consumer platform? 

Mark Waller Guest

Well, it did start off as an enabler. So, we need a digital ID journey within our product, within One Click Life. We wanted to make that as frictionless as possible, although just having just the right amount of friction to not make it too simple. But in doing that, what we found is we were getting a lot of interest from third parties to how are you doing this? Can we use your tech? So, what we actually built was a product called One Click Verify, which uses the same tech that we're using, and also an API called One Click Services, which is all about providing our stack of digital ID services to other third-party software providers to use to their customers. And so, yes, it's certainly an enabler of our business, but as a standalone growth engine, we're just seeing revenue increasing month to month on that sort of slow and steady manner, which is nice. 

Andrew Musgrave Host

Okay, now finally Mark. What does success look like for One Click Group over the next six to 12 months, and what key milestones should investors and customers be looking out for? 

Mark Waller Guest

Sure. Success for us this year and we've said this a number of times but the key to this year, for successful years, is generating a profit. So, for us, generating a profit this year is pretty important, so certainly something we're very focused on. A couple of the key milestones to look out for is our July revenue, which we've obviously given a lead indicator of. A nice high retention rate, which obviously we've given a key indicator in this announcement. I think breaking through 200,000 users on our platform is a really key indicator. That's our break-even point from our internal calculations. So, we started the year with 170,000 users, so that's kind of the next big milestone for us. And then the introduction of our superannuation product and the key there is we have, you know, hopefully soon 200,000 users on our platform and how do we generate more than just tax revenue out of those customers? So those lending products and the superannuation wealth products that we're talking about certainly go a long way to increasing the overall value of the business. 

Andrew Musgrave Host

Okay, Mark. Well, it's been great to catch up again. So, thanks for your time and we look forward to further updates from One Click Group in the upcoming months. 

Mark Waller Guest

Yeah, thanks, Andrew. Thanks for having me on the podcast again. 

Andrew Musgrave Host

That concludes this episode of ASX Briefs. Don't forget to subscribe and we look forward to catching you on our next episode.