カードリティクス (CDLX) 2026年第3四半期決算説明会：売上高30%減、第4四半期は増収見通し

要点

• 2026年第3四半期の取扱高は前年同期比32%減の5,720万ドル、売上高は同30%減の3,290万ドルとなった。前年同期との比較には、Cardlyticsが2026年第1四半期に売却したBridgは含まれていない。
• 調整後貢献利益は24%減の1,940万ドルとなったが、調整後貢献利益率は前年同期の54.4%から59%へと改善した。
• 調整後EBITDAは前年同期（2025年第3四半期）の330万ドルから減少したものの、40万ドルの黒字を確保した。フリーキャッシュフローはマイナス270万ドルからマイナス160万ドルへと改善した。
• 経営陣は当四半期の減速について、特に食料品分野における広告主の予算引き締めと、英国の提携銀行におけるシステム障害が要因であると説明した。同社は両問題について、第4四半期や2027年に向けた先行指標ではなく、一時的なものと位置づけている。
• Cardlyticsは当四半期中にYahoo!、VodafoneThree、RoveとCRPパートナーシップを締結し、四半期末後にはCoupertとも締結した。経営陣はこれらのサービス開始が2027年から業績に貢献し始めると見込んでいる。
• 2026年第4四半期について、Cardlyticsは取扱高を6,300万ドル〜6,900万ドル、売上高を3,500万ドル〜3,900万ドルと予想しており、前四半期比でのプラス成長への回帰を見込んでいる。

主要財務データ

Cardlyticsは、営業費用の減少について、2025年下半期に実施した人員削減とクラウドインフラの最適化を反映したものだと説明した。経営陣は、時間の経過とともにフリーキャッシュフローが調整後EBITDAの水準に近づくと予想しており、バランスシートとキャッシュフローの改善に向けた選択肢を検討していると述べた。

事業および営業実績

新規事業の取扱高は第2四半期比で25%増加した。第2四半期に開始した広告主は第3四半期に取扱高を58%拡大させ、70%が新たな予算で契約を更新した。レストラン、ガソリンスタンド、食料品関連企業がアクティブ広告主の29%を占めた。

Cardlyticsによると、同社データに基づく米国の個人消費は2025年第3四半期比で10%増加した。購買頻度は7%上昇し、平均取引単価は約3%増加した。旅行関連の支出は17%伸び、アクティブな旅行関連広告主の数は前年同期比で50%超増加した。

英国の取扱高は前年同期比4%減となったが、これは主に提携銀行1行でのシステム障害によるものである。経営陣は、英国の上位10社の広告主における成長は堅調を維持しており、小売の取扱高は約5%増加したと述べた。

同社はCRPパートナーシップを通じて、従来の銀行経由の配信を超えた拡大を進めている。Yahoo!はYahoo Mailユーザーにパーソナライズされたオファーを提供し、VodafoneThreeは当初、リワードアプリ「Three+」にオファーを統合する予定である。また、Roveは会員向けにパーソナライズされたリワードを提供する。Coupertはウェブサイト、ブラウザ拡張機能、モバイルアプリを通じて、米国および英国でオファーを配信する見込みである。

経営陣によると、CRPを通じて連携されたカードの半数以上はCardlyticsの既存の提携銀行ネットワーク外からのものである。同社はこれにより、ターゲットを絞った成果報酬型広告モデルを維持しながら、消費者へのリーチを拡大できるとしている。

Cardlyticsは提携銀行向けカスタムリワードの階層制も導入し、6カ月以上オファーを利用していない顧客を対象にブーストリワードをテストした。提携銀行を対象とした初期テストでは、テストグループの取扱高が13%増加した。

経営陣による業績見通し

取扱高の見通しは、前四半期比で10%〜20%の成長を示唆している。経営陣は、広告主の活動に加え、プロモーションやブーストリワード、その他のエンゲージメントプログラムに対する複数の大手提携銀行の投資に支えられ、Cardlyticsが第4四半期に前四半期比でのプラス成長に回帰すると予想している。

同社は、提携銀行との関係変更の影響が一巡する2027年第1四半期まで、前年同期比で厳しい比較環境が続くと見込んでいる。

リスクと注視点

• 第3四半期は特に食料品分野で広告主の予算への圧迫が続き、一部の支出が縮小または他のフォーマットへとシフトした。
• 英国の提携銀行におけるシステム障害により、当四半期中の長期にわたりオファー配信と取扱高が減少した。
• 提携銀行との関係変更により、月間対象ユーザー数は前年同期水準を大幅に下回る水準にとどまった。
• Cardlyticsの第3四半期末時点の現金および現金同等物は2,990万ドル、フリーキャッシュフローはマイナス160万ドルとなった。経営陣は、引き続きバランスシートとキャッシュフローの改善に注力していると述べた。
• 新たに契約したCRPパートナーからの財務的貢献はサービスの本格展開が成功するかどうかに左右され、経営陣はその効果が2027年に現れると見込んでいる。

アナリスト質疑応答のハイライト

経営陣は英国の銀行における問題を一過性のインフラ障害と位置づけ、影響を受けたシステムの強化に向けて両社が協力して取り組んだと説明した。また、食料品分野の低迷については、2027年まで続くと予想される継続的な傾向ではなく、循環的要因と広告主固有の要因が重なったものであると説明した。

CRPの採算性とターゲティングについて、経営陣はオファーの基本的な体験は銀行チャネルと非銀行チャネルの双方で共通していると述べた。購買履歴がターゲットを絞った成果報酬型広告と利用実績の検証を引き続き支える一方、非銀行パートナーはCardlyticsのリーチを現在の銀行ネットワーク外の消費者にまで拡大している。

Cardlyticsが最も強い拡大機会をどこに見出しているかとの質問に対し、経営陣は特定の業界を優先するのではなく、高頻度の購買環境にいる消費者にリーチすることを重視していると強調した。銀行が引き続き同社の中核パートナーである一方、CRPによってオンラインメディア、通信、旅行、キャッシュバックプラットフォームへと配信網が広がっている。

決算説明会の全文字起こし

決算説明会の完全なトランスクリプト

経営陣による説明

Operator

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us, and welcome to the Q3 2026 Cardlytics, Inc. Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] I will now hand the conference over to Chris Cheng, Chief Legal Officer. Chris, please go ahead.

Chris Cheng

Good evening, and welcome to the Cardlytics Third Quarter 2026 Financial Results Call. Before we begin, let me remind everyone that today's discussion will contain forward-looking statements based on our current assumptions, expectations and beliefs, including expectations around our future financial performance and results, including for the fourth quarter of 2026, our capital structure and operational and product initiatives.

For a discussion on the specific risk factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from today's discussion, please refer to the Risk Factors section of our 10-Q for the quarter ending September 30, 2026, which has been filed with the SEC. Also during our call, we will discuss non-GAAP measures of our performance. GAAP financial reconciliations and supplemental financial information are provided in the press release issued today, which you can find on the Investor Relations section of the Cardlytics website. Today's call is available via webcast, and a replay will also be available on our website.

On the call today, we have CEO, Amit Gupta; and CFO, David Evans. Following their prepared remarks, we'll open it up for your questions. With that, I'll hand the call over to Amit.

Amit Gupta

Good evening, and thank you for joining us. Q3 was another quarter of execution against our priorities, deepening our bank partnerships, expanding our publisher network, driving incremental revenue for our advertisers and investing in our technology platform that differentiates us. Billings and revenue were down from Q2, and we came in below our guidance. We experienced some sluggishness in the third quarter. One of our bank partners in the U.K. had issues unrelated to us that reduced our billing and caused offers not to get served to their consumers for a long stretch of time.

Macro pressures weighed on advertiser budgets, particularly in grocery. And in some industries, budgets contracted or moved to other formats. We don't view this as a signal for Q4. David will take you through the details in a few moments. What encourages us is that we are building for the next stage of growth. New brands are coming on to the platform at a faster pace each quarter, and we are expanding our publisher network with new CRP partners. Starting with our network and supply. We have signed 3 new CRP partners this quarter. We welcomed Yahoo! to our publisher network and we'll start by bringing offers to Yahoo Mail users.

Through Yahoo Mail's primary ad unit, users can link a card, browse personalized offers and earn Yahoo! cashback automatically on the purchases they're already making. This puts CRP in front of millions of consumers on one of the largest platforms globally, and we expect the experience to roll out over the next few months. In the U.K., we recently signed a partnership with VodafoneThree for Three mobile customers to use Cardlytics on the Three+ rewards app. VodafoneThree is the U.K.'s largest mobile network operator serving the fixed and mobile market formed following the merger of Vodafone U.K. and Three U.K. We will start with launching offers with Three+ with plans to bring it to VeryMe in the future.

This partnership also marks 3 firsts for Cardlytics in the U.K. Our first open banking partner at scale, our first U.K. CRP partner outside of financial institutions and our first to offer rewards as a credit off the phone bill. We also announced a partnership with Rove, a universal airline mile program built for Gen Z and millennials. Rove members can link a card and earn Rove miles through personalized offers on top of the miles they already earned through flights, hotels and shopping. The offers experience will roll out later in Q4 to all Rove users. Since the end of the quarter, we have also signed a fourth CRP partner, Coupert, a loyalty platform that will bring our offers to its users in the U.S. and U.K. through its website, browser extension and mobile app.

Each of these partners sits outside the traditional banking across telecom, online media, travel and cashback verticals. Together, we see CRP gaining traction and our supply diversifying to new services beyond banks. It also expands who we reach. More than half of the cards consumers link through CRP come from outside our existing bank network. So each partner brings us consumers we could not see before. We continue to have positive conversations with other potential bank and nonbank partners, and we look forward to sharing more as these launches roll out and we see an impact in 2027. On the bank side, several of our largest partners are investing heavily in Q4 to promote their programs and boost engagement.

That includes bank-funded offers, bonus redemption days, boosted rewards and sweepstakes. Turning to our advertiser base. Despite the challenges we noted in some of our existing accounts, we continue to be encouraged by growth we see in new business. New business billings grew 25% from Q2. The advertisers that launched with us in Q2 ramp quickly with this cohort's billing up 58% in Q3 and 70% of them renewed with new budgets, so those advertisers are valuing the Cardlytics channel. Over half of the advertisers that launched with us in Q2 but more in Q3, including a national electronics retailer that nearly tripled.

Everyday spend is a growing part of our advertiser base. Restaurant, gas and grocery advertisers now make up 29% of our active advertisers. Advertisers are still watching their budgets closely, but they know Q4 is an important quarter, and we expect that to show up in our results. We are bringing them new ad formats and new programs. And as I said earlier, our bank partners are investing alongside us. Our purchase intelligence also shows that the consumer is still spending. We saw U.S. consumer spending grew 10% compared with the third quarter of last year. Shoppers made 7% more purchases and the average transaction size was about 3% larger compared to Q3 2025.

Spend on gas and convenience also grew 27% because of higher fuel prices. Travel spend grew 17% in the same time period. And we see that in our advertiser base, too, with the number of active travel advertisers up more than 50% from a year ago, including new airline, hotel, cruise and online travel agency logos. Travel brands come to us for verified redemptions and because we can deliver revenue within a set window, which helps them hit specific goals like Q4 targets. We plan to bring verified redemptions to other industries such as retail. In the U.K., billings were down 4% year-over-year.

As mentioned earlier, the decline primarily came from a technical disruption at one of our bank partners, which reduced billing during the quarter. Underneath that, our advertiser base was healthy. We saw growth across our top 10 advertisers and retail grew about 5%. Our U.K. data shows a change in shopper behavior versus last year. Instead of concentrating purchases around the deepest discount days like Black Friday, shoppers are making more considered purchases spread across the whole holiday season. In response, new and existing retail partners are investing earlier and more steadily instead of timing their spend around seasonal spikes.

Now to our technology platform. We launched the ability for banks to set custom reward tiers. A bank can now offer a higher reward multiplier to encourage customers to move up to a higher account tier. We worked with one of our bank partners to extend our program to a broader part of its customer base. We also tested boosted rewards for customers who had not redeemed an offer in more than 6 months. In early tests across bank partners, billing rose 13% in the test groups. We are finalizing the plan to expand it. We scaled our AI insights agent and expanded our industry outlook reports to 7 sectors, including quick service restaurants, grocery and travel.

The agent now produces this content across hundreds of brands with very little engineering effort, which lets our sales team build custom campaigns for advertisers quickly and with minimal effort. Advertisers tell us our share of wallet insights change how they plan. That's the concept behind our newly released Cardlytics Demand Index. It is designed to turn our networks verified purchase data into aggregated privacy safe insights on consumer spending. Our goal is to give advertisers more confidence in how they plan and add a better view of consumer health to the broader economic conversation.

Finally, as consumers begin shopping through AI agents, we plan to bring our offer network into those experiences. We are designing our technology so AI shopping agents can become a new type of publisher in our network, showing consumers relevant offers at the point of purchase and tying those offers to verified redemptions. Looking ahead, with VodafoneThree, Yahoo!, Rove and Coupert signed, we are excited about growth in CRP, and we are focused on launching these partners successfully and carrying that momentum into 2027. We expect to return to sequential growth in Q4. David will take you through our financials. With that, I'll turn it over to him.

David Evans

Thank you, Amit. As Amit mentioned, we experienced some sluggishness in the third quarter, but we don't view it as a signal for what we're seeing coming in Q4, and it's not indicative of how we will move forward given momentum from advertisers and supply partners. Turning to Q3 results. For awareness, all comparisons to prior year will be presented excluding Bridg, which we divested in Q1 of this year. Bridg's specific results can be found in the 10-Q. Also, the comments will be year-over-year comparisons to the third quarter of 2025, unless stated otherwise.

In Q3, our billings were $57.2 million, a 32% decrease year-over-year. We will continue to see tough comps year-over-year until Q1 2027 when we anniversary the previously discussed changes in our bank partner relationships. Over the course of the year, we have seen supply stabilize. Q3 revenue was $32.9 million, a 30% decrease year-over-year. Q3 adjusted contribution was $19.4 million, a 24% decrease year-over-year. We materially increased our adjusted contribution as a percentage of revenue to 59% from 54.4% in the prior year. Our Q3 adjusted EBITDA was positive $0.4 million compared to $3.3 million in the third quarter of 2025.

Q3 adjusted operating expenses were $19 million, a decrease of 14% from prior year. This was largely due to reduction in force actions taken in the second half of 2025 and optimization of our cloud infrastructure. Q3 free cash flow was negative $1.6 million compared to negative $2.7 million year-over-year. From a liquidity perspective and on the balance sheet, we ended Q3 with $29.9 million in cash and cash equivalents and approximately $10.4 million available on our credit facility. We remain focused on free cash flow with investments targeted at driving near- and medium-term growth that is self-sustaining.

We see free cash flow trending in the right direction and converging closer to adjusted EBITDA going forward. We are laser-focused on the balance sheet and are actively evaluating any and all options as it pertains to improving our balance sheet and cash flow going forward. Our MQUs for the quarter were 187 million, down from 230 million a year ago due to the previously discussed changes in our bank partner relationships. That is, however, up 1.2 million from the end of the second quarter.

Now turning to our outlook for Q4 2026. For Q4, we expect billings between $63 million and $69 million, revenue between $35 million and $39 million, adjusted contribution between $20 million and $23 million and adjusted EBITDA between negative $1 million and positive $2 million.

Our guidance represents 10% to 20% growth in billings quarter-over-quarter and a return to sequential growth. We remain focused on executing against our priorities as we close out the year and build towards 2027. I will now turn it back to Amit for closing remarks.

Amit Gupta

To wrap up, Q3 slowed our recovery due to tighter advertiser budgets and issues on the bank side that were unrelated to us. The fundamentals haven't changed. The new advertisers coming on to the platform and the partners signing on tell us Cardlytics platform is delivering value to consumers, our partners and advertisers. I'll now turn it over to the operator to begin Q&A.

Operator

Your first question comes from the line of Jason Kreyer with Craig-Hallum.

質疑応答

Jason Kreyer

Wondering if we can parse out some of the commentary that created a little bit of headwind in the quarter. The issues in U.K. seem largely onetime and poised to reverse themselves. So maybe you can just give a concept on timing when that gets better. But then some of the issues you'd highlighted like in groceries and other verticals, again, maybe we can dive into that a little bit more, like that was created headwinds in Q3. Does that persist into Q4? Can some of this stuff persist into next year? Just looking for more color there.

Amit Gupta

Craig, thanks so much -- sorry, Jason, thanks so much for the question. We appreciate it. I think just the 2 part. On the bank issue that we experienced in U.K., very much a onetime one-off issue. They were going through a change in their infrastructure that led to this. So we very much see this as a one-off. And happy to share that our teams work and collaborated quite actively to make sure that not only does it not happen again, but just hardening the systems overall.

On your second part of the question around grocery, again, I think these are a combination of cyclical and a few advertiser-related issues that we saw. We don't see this as a recurring pattern, definitely not in 2027. And as you saw, our Q4 growth from -- there's a sequential growth that we see. Again, furthermore, to address this, we're also bringing new ad formats to some of these grocer verticals that allows them to share and spend the budget in different ways, which they want to. So we see this more as a onetime effect in this quarter, and that's why we said we don't see this as a signal for Q4 at this time.

Jason Kreyer

As we kind of compare and contrast CLO versus CRP solutions, I'm curious if you can talk about how different is the purchase history that you're obtaining that allows you to show targeted offers? And maybe if there's any difference in your ability to tie an offer to actually utilization at a POS.

Amit Gupta

Yes. I think the way I would suggest we think about CRP is simply an extension of the surface area where we're publishing the offer. The core experience is quite analogous, whether it's on a bank experience or a bank surface or a nonbank surface, Jason. So there's less kind of pull and push about differences in the actual purchase history, the purchase history that we get from a nonbank CRP partner is quite similar and that we use that data to target because the core -- the secret sauce is very much about relevance and targeting and it's not a kind of one of those spray and pray.

So we're very much continue to be in the lower end of the performance funnel. And whether it's served on a CRP surface or a bank surface, it continues to be a targeted performance advertising funnel. So there's less kind of differences there. The other thing that CRP brings to us, as I mentioned in the prepared remarks, it gets us access to consumers that we may not see from a current banking partner network footprint. So it allows us to grow the footprint with a similar experience.

Jason Kreyer

Very helpful. I'm going to sneak in one more. You talked a lot, you're clearly looking beyond FIs to find additional supply. Just wondering if you can talk about what areas would represent maybe the most promise as you look to expand?

Amit Gupta

I think simply put, we want to meet consumers where they are. So none of this expansion in beyond banks changes our strength of relationship or our focus with banks. Bank partners continue to be paramount to us, our first priority. And as you mentioned, we continue to have more conversations with other bank partners who we hope to welcome to the network soon. But in addition, this is allowing CRP funnel allows us to meet consumers beyond banks. So in terms of which verticals, you've heard us talk about Yahoo! and Vodafone and Rove. So frankly, it's less specific on verticals.

We want to be where consumers are, where consumers are in the fast frequency purchase patterns because that's where they can actually get more and more value from our offers. And we're excited about bringing newer budgets that might meet the requirements of the new publisher partners. So hopefully, the way we think about it, it's about getting access to more consumers, more advertisers can now publish their ads on the Cardlytics network, and they get the benefit of having one stop to get a larger access of consumers across banks and nonbanks.

Operator

We have reached the end of our Q&A portion. I will now turn the call back to Amit Gupta for closing remarks.

Amit Gupta

Thank you again for joining. As we shared, we continue to see progress with our bank and CRP partners. Our gratitude to all the stakeholders that help grow our ecosystem so we can deliver more value to the end consumer. We're excited about what lies ahead, and we'll be back soon. Thank you.

Operator

This concludes today's call. Thank you for joining us. You may now disconnect.