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Text: On the call today are Jeff Jones, our president and CEO; and Tony Bowen, our CFO.
Some of the figures that we discuss today are presented on a non-GAAP basis.
Such statements are based on current information and management's expectations as of this date and are not guarantees of future performance.
You can learn more about these risks in our Form 10-K for fiscal 2020 and our other SEC filings.
I'm excited to provide an update today on the progress we're making on our Block Horizons strategy, as well as some perspective on the first half of the tax season.
Tony will follow with thoughts on our third-quarter results, outlook for fiscal '21, and additional detail on our strategic investments.
So let's jump right in.
Following our investor day in December, we've connected with many of you and have enjoyed hearing your perspectives.
Based on these conversations, I thought it would be helpful to start with an update on Block Horizons.
Our long-term strategy focused on three imperatives: Small Business, Financial Products, and Block Experience.
As a reminder, Small Business and Financial Products are both categories with structural tailwinds, where we have a right to compete and advantages that will help us win.
While these have been components of our business for years, historically, we haven't made a concerted effort to target either opportunity.
By leveraging our trusted brand, client relationships, and technology platform, we will accelerate growth in both areas.
Over the next five years, they will become a more meaningful part of our business, helping to balance our current once-a-year purchase frequency.
and given our existing assets in these areas, these will not require significant investment, as Tony will outline in more detail later.
Our third imperative Block Experience encompasses a new approach to tax as we blend digital capabilities and data with human expertise and care.
Through this imperative, we will continue to modernize the consumer tax business, blurring the historical lines between Assisted and Do-It-Yourself.
And by digitally enabling our human advantage, we'll increase the relevance of H&R Block.
I'll now provide an update on each of these key areas, starting with small business.
We're making progress on all three elements of our small business strategy: first, expanding our reach to more small business owners to grow in tax, which includes cross-selling and fully integrating with Wave; second, growing our bookkeeping and payroll services in Block Advisors; and third, embedding Wave money at the center of the Wave experience.
We've certified over 25,000 professionals to serve the complex tax and financial needs of small business owners.
This is a great example of the power of our scale.
We've also seen thousands of Wave customers start to engage with the Block Advisors brand for their tax needs.
We're continuing to build new capabilities in bookkeeping and payroll.
And in mid-February, we launched our Block Advisors marketing campaign to drive awareness of our ability to serve small business owners' unique needs and to reinforce our expertise as a trusted year-round partner.
At Wave, we continue to ship meaningful enhancements to our platform that are providing significant value to small business customers.
These include the beta launch of the new invoicing features to allow small business owners to better manage their accounts receivable, enabling remote deposit capture for Wave money, and creating new client interfaces to allow users to manage their bookkeeping faster and on more devices.
These efforts are paying off as we grew third-quarter revenue over 30% at Wave, continuing on the path toward pre-pandemic levels.
In financial products, our goal is to provide more value to our customers by transforming the Emerald Card into a fully featured consumer-friendly mobile banking alternative.
We are in the design phase and are excited about what we continue to learn with consumers.
For this season, we added a simple new digital feature to the Emerald Card, the ability for customers to automatically set up their mobile wallet on both Google Pay and Apple Pay directly from the MyBlock app.
This has resulted in a 10x increase in customers using their mobile wallets, which tells us that we're providing meaningful value.
And in Block Experience, we're continuing to infuse human help into our DIY offerings and bring Tax Pro expertise to our customers however they want to be served.
I'll provide more detail in a minute, but we're seeing positive momentum in several areas, including adoption of digital tools and Assisted, DIY filers engaging more with our tax experts, continued operational improvements in our offices, and enhancements to the DIY user experience.
The progress we're making in each of these three strategic imperatives in such a short time frame is a testament to the dedication and drive of our teams, and further evidence that we are building from a position of strength.
Because we have existing assets across Small Business, Financial Products, and Consumer Tax, it is important to emphasize that the investments we are making will be funded through cost savings, with future investments being success-based and tied to revenue growth.
Tony will provide additional color on this later in the call.
With that recap of Block Horizons, I'd now like to provide some perspective on the tax season.
We are executing on our playbook, digitally enabling our Assisted business in integrating human health into our DIY products to deliver a best-in-class experience however consumers want to file their taxes.
It's early in the season, but we're seeing hundreds of thousands of our Assisted clients choosing to interact with us digitally by uploading documents electronically through MyBlock, using video chat, or approving their completed return online.
And our continued focus on operational excellence in our offices is translating to a consistent experience for our customers that provides tremendous value.
All of these efforts are resonating.
As we continue to see strong client satisfaction scores.
We've also improved the DIY user experience around document import, offered additional support to help users understand the pandemic's impact on their taxes, and provided real-time tax information updates for our mobile users.
Our work to personalize the experience and to make it faster for our customers to complete their return continues to resonate.
And finally, we're using data to offer human help in the moment clients need it most.
Resulting in online assist and Tax Pro review adoption significantly outpacing last year.
And as I mentioned earlier, in small business tax, we have seamlessly integrated the Wave and block Advisors experience, leading to increased adoption of our tax services by Wave clients.
We're accomplishing all of this during another season in which the industry has experienced a delay in filings, which resulted primarily from the move of the IRS e-file open date from January to mid-February.
While the slow start in the industry has obviously impacted our results, we've seen positive trends throughout the business.
I'm encouraged by what we're seeing in our efforts to blend human help with digital capabilities.
We're seeing greater uptake of our digital tools by Assisted customers and the desire for more human help from our DIY customers as we continue to see the lines between these two categories blurring.
An example of this is the double-digit increase in online assist returns that I mentioned earlier, which is remarkable considering the overall decline in returns due to the delayed start.
Elsewhere, we're seeing a meaningful list in DIY net average charge as mix has been favorable, and we've been able to partially close the gap in pricing with our primary competitor.
And our efforts to deliver exceptional service and Assisted are paying off with continued strong client satisfaction scores.
While we're off to a good start, we recognize there's certainly a long way to go.
We're focused on executing our playbook in the second half of the season to build on our momentum.
In summary, we're executing on our Block Horizons strategy, seeing significant progress in key areas.
We're performing well in the tax season and, assuming an April 15 deadline, are on track to deliver our financial outlook for the year.
With that, I'll now hand the call over to Tony.
Today, I'll provide an update on our third-quarter results, thoughts on our outlook for the fiscal year, and additional color on the investments we're making to support our strategic imperatives.
Starting with the third quarter, our results were significantly impacted by the delayed start to the tax season, which resulted in an industrywide shift to returns from the first half into the second half.
This resulted in both lower return volume through January, as well as a deferral of revenue related to the e-file open date moving to February.
As a result, we reported revenue of $308 million for our third quarter, a decline of 41%.
This was primarily related to the delayed return volume, while approximately $69 million was due to the deferral of tax prep fees and the delayed recognition of refund transfer fees to Q4.
Partially offsetting this decline was continued strong performance at Wave, where we posted an increase of over 30% for the second consecutive quarter.
Additionally, Emerald Card revenue improved due to additional loads from the second round of stimulus in January, and we saw improved performance in our international businesses.
Total operating expenses decreased 15% to $572 million.
Approximately two-thirds of the decline was related to variable compensation and product expense, which was driven by lower return volume.
Additionally, marketing expenses were lower as we shifted spend to the fourth quarter.
Reductions in travel, legal and occupancy costs account for the remainder of the decrease.
Interest expense declined $4 million, which reflects lower draws on our line of credit, as well as a lower interest rate on our debt issuance earlier in the fiscal year.
The changes in revenue and expenses resulted in pre-tax loss from continuing operations of $284 million.
GAAP loss per share increased from $0.66 to $1.27, while adjusted loss per share increased from $0.59 to $1.17.
Though the majority of this change was driven by the increase in pre-tax loss, it was also impacted by lower effective tax rate, as well as lower shares outstanding resulting from repurchases earlier in the year.
As we've discussed, while beneficial on a full-year basis, the lower tax rate and share count negatively impacts earnings per share in quarters in which we report a loss.
In discontinued operations, there were no changes to accrued contingent liabilities related to Sand Canyon during the quarter.
Turning to our outlook for the fiscal year.
We expect industry volume to recover in the second half and then relatively flat for the tax season, assuming the deadline remains April 15.
Based on these expectations and the positive trends Jeff mentioned earlier, we continue to expect revenue in the range of $3.5 billion to $3.6 billion and EBITDA of $950 million to $1 billion.
We have identified additional favorability in corporate taxes and, as such, now expect our effective tax rate to come in at the low end of our 18% to 20% outlook range.
Turning to our strategic imperatives.
I'd like to spend some time on the related investments and how we plan to fund them.
As Jeff mentioned, our established operations in Small Business, Financial Products, and Consumer Tax provide a strong base from which to build.
It's also important to note that we're implementing each strategic imperative in phases over the next several years.
This allows us to take a methodical approach, making modest initial investments with incremental investments being funded through revenue growth.
In small business, current investments are primarily in technology necessary to develop our capabilities, compensation as we build the team required to provide services, and marketing to acquire customers.
In financial products, the investment this year is limited and is primarily related to product design and experience.
This will continue into next year as we invest in technology to support the mobile banking platform.
And in Block Experience, we continue to invest in technology and new operating models to deliver expertise and care to consumers however they want to do their taxes.
All in, these costs total approximately $20 million to $25 million in fiscal '21.
We've done an excellent job this year of finding efficiencies and eliminating unnecessary spend to fund these investments.
To summarize how we're thinking about this, our initial investments will be in the tens of millions of dollars, not hundreds of millions.
We'll fund them through cost reductions elsewhere in the business.
Additional investments will be funded by incremental revenue growth.
And as a reminder, M&A is not a core part of our strategy.
Though we'll remain open to opportunistically investing in external capabilities when we believe they will drive appropriate returns.
On a related note, following our investor day in December, we received several questions regarding our baseline earnings and expected run rate going forward.
We understand the importance of providing this perspective and plan to do so following the conclusion of this fiscal year.
Ultimately, our goal is to grow our top line at a rate in which we leverage our fixed cost, which translates to improved earnings and free cash flow.
This ability to generate a significant amount of cash, while our strategic imperatives provide a platform for accelerated growth, gives us confidence in our future and supports our capital allocation priorities, which remain consistent.
At the top of the list is maintaining adequate liquidity for our operational needs to account for our seasonality.
Next, we will fund the investments I discussed earlier.
Finally, we will deploy excess capital through quarterly dividends and share repurchases.
We're committed to continuing our dividend with the goal of increasing it over time.
The health of our business and our outlook for the future have allowed us to increase the dividend in four of the last five years, amounting to a total increase of 30% during that span.
We are also committed to repurchasing shares to offset dilution and we'll opportunistically repurchase shares beyond that.
This fiscal year, we have repurchased 5% of shares outstanding.
And during my tenure as CFO, we have repurchased 19% of shares outstanding.
In summary, we're accomplishing great things in our tax business and are on track to deliver our financial objectives for the fiscal year.
And our prudent, measured investments and our strategic imperatives are putting us on a path toward long-term growth in revenue, earnings, and cash flow.
I couldn't be more excited about the future of H&R Block.
The dedication and resolve they've shown over the past 12 months are truly remarkable.
I'm confident in where H&R Block is heading.
We're redefining the tax category, blending human expertise and care with technology and data, delivering more value for our customers, and we're making good progress in our small business and financial product strategic imperatives, which will be key growth drivers in the future.
We're not only poised to deliver on this year's outlook but are also well-positioned for an even stronger future.
I look forward to sharing more with you when we report our full-year results in June.

user
q3 revenue $308 million.
qtrly loss per share $1.27.
qtrly adjusted loss per share $1.17.
reiterates its revenue growth and earnings outlook for fiscal year.

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