Snowflake Earnings Review, ServiceNow M&A & PayPal + SoFi CFO Interviews
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Snowflake Earnings Review, ServiceNow M&A & PayPal + SoFi CFO Interviews

18 min read

Max readers, if you're caught up in the Discord, skip to section 4. The first three sections were already posted in there.

Earnings Reviews from this season:

My Current Portfolio & Performance.

Table of Contents

1. SoFi (SOFI) – CFO Chris Lapointe Interviews with UBS

There was not much newness in this interview with CFO Chris Lapointe, which is as expected. We're only a few weeks removed from CEO Anthony Noto's interview with KBW and SoFi's Q3 earnings.

We did get a few brief updates:

It sounds like SoFi will guide closer to the low end of their 2026 EPS guidance range of $0.55-$0.80. This is because growth opportunities are so strong. They've told us they'll be near the low end of that range if the environment is favorable (more growth spending) and towards the high end of that range if the environment is bad. It sounds like they're excited about new products. Two more things to note here. First, sell-side consensus is already at the low end of their range, so that comment shouldn't lead to downward pressure on estimates. Second, I think this is SoFi setting Wall Street expectations for 2026 in a way that allows them to comfortably beat and raise like we've grown to expect.

Next, there are no changes in credit quality trends. That's not surprising, considering Noto told us the same thing a few weeks ago. Still, it's always great to hear. I will happily listen to a creditor tell me their loan book is healthy as frequently as they want to tell me. Things look as good as they did when they updated metrics on their Q3 call.

They remain exceedingly confident in the Loan Platform Business (LPB). Expansion to secured loan types for this product should yield another large growth lever in addition to the momentum they're already enjoying. As a reminder, all of this success is tied to unsecured personal loans. Home and student loans will be added to LPB eventually.

Lastly, the tech pipeline was called "good." They're finding it a lot easier to sell entirely new things like crypto and stablecoin-related products. They think they'll be able to more quickly sell these tools to banks and large clients vs. their upgraded banking core. Adding new products for large incumbents is more seamless than convincing them to rip & replace.

  • 2 rate cuts would push their $400B student loan total addressable market to $500B.
  • The government backing away from GradPlus loans leaves a void for high-quality borrowers worth about $14B in potential originations. With SoFi's dominant market share, they're well positioned to capture that opportunity and view it as a highly compelling use of their large capital ratio cushion.
  • LaPointe again hinted at having balance sheet flexibility for inorganic growth.

2. ServiceNow (NOW) – M&A

ServiceNow is an AI workflow automation leader. Their AI control tower offers a central dashboard for monitoring, maintaining and optimizing AI agents. It makes AI work completion & triaging intuitive to show enterprises how to maximize return on investment and boost AI efficiency “from project inception to retirement.”

And while this is nice, it’s missing most of a key ingredient. Accelerating pace of enterprise AI adoption will require ensuring those clients can embrace this exciting new technology without crippling security trade-offs. That’s a big source of friction right now, as companies are often required to choose between modernization of assets and protection of those assets. NOW dabbles in security, but it hasn’t been a main focus to date. Veza changes this. It’s meant to fix that trade-off with an identity security focus, and the timing is very good. Identity demand is enjoying a revival at the moment. That’s why CyberArk just set net new ARR records, why Palo Alto is spending a fortune to buy them and why CrowdStrike is increasingly focused on this growth opportunity as well. Agents represent a new form of identity to secure. And this machine-based form can scale exponentially faster than human-based identities while accessing information from around the digital ether more expeditiously than people can. That’s both exciting as a source of productivity and new identity demand… and also anxiety-provoking as a vast extension of the overall attack surface.

Enter Veza. Their asset graph can visually lay out and contemplate identity access points across human and machine-based assets. They make sense of the massive attack surface so it feels manageable rather than chaotic. It handles permissions, access requests and powers “end-to-end visibility that legacy solutions can’t match.” With Veza, companies have full knowledge of who (or what) has access to which systems and an ability to fix improper access as it pops up. All of this happens from a central dashboard that provides end-to-end visibility and will perfectly complement AI Control Tower’s existing capabilities. This Control Tower will now be the orchestrator AND the protractor of proliferating agents, providing a clear source of incremental cross-selling, enhanced customer value, rising lifetime value and higher retention. This makes NOW an even more powerful point solution consolidator in the large world of workflows.

I like this move a lot. It’s not a tiny purchase, but it’s not massive either. The company was most recently valued at $800M by private markets this April and delivered 100% Y/Y ARR growth in 2024. Estimates for 2025 revenue widely range from $60M-$250M. Veza gives NOW significant incremental value to provide customers in ways that are highly relevant and related to its existing offering. This is a great source of total addressable market (TAM) expansion without veering too far from NOW’s established lane.

3. PayPal (PYPL) – CFO Jamie Miller Interviews with UBS