MoneyHero Group wants you to focus on the bright spots. Revenue climbed 15 per cent. Its shiny Wealth vertical surged 53 per cent. Its AI transformation story is compelling. And its Adjusted EBITDA loss? Down a whopping 68 per cent year-over-year to US$1.1 million.
On the surface, the Singapore- and Hong Kong-based personal finance comparison platform appears to be a company turning a corner.
Also Read: MoneyHero’s ‘turnaround’ built on a shrinking user base and retreat from SEA
Dig past the press release language, and the picture is considerably more complicated.
The net loss nobody wants to talk about
For the three months ended 31 March 2026, MoneyHero posted a net loss of US$6.7 million, nearly three times the US$2.4 million loss it recorded in the same period last year. That is not a rounding error. That is a 175 per cent deterioration at the bottom line.
The company’s explanation? Non-cash accounting items: a US$1.1 million swing in the fair value of warrant liabilities and US$2.4 million in unrealised foreign exchange losses from regional currency weakness against the US dollar. Fair enough, these are real accounting adjustments. But even if you strip them out entirely, the residual loss still lands around US$3.2 million, worse than the prior year’s US$2.4 million net loss. The narrative that operational performance is “robust” requires significant suspension of disbelief.
The press release buries this detail in a single paragraph, quickly pivoting to the Adjusted EBITDA figure, a non-IFRS metric that requires stripping out no fewer than six categories of charges to reach that headline-friendly US$(1.1) million number.
The mystery of US$1.6M in legal fees
Perhaps the most glaring anomaly in the report is a line item that receives precisely zero words of explanation in the management commentary: US$1.596 million in “non-recurring legal and professional fees and other expenses” incurred during the quarter.
In the same period last year, this figure was US$0.
The company categorises this as a non-recurring item and strips it out of Adjusted EBITDA. But US$1.6 million in legal costs is not a footnote; it is 9.7 per cent of the quarter’s total revenue. What litigation, regulatory matter, or professional engagement generated this bill? The report does not say.
We have reached out to the company for details and we will update this piece with the details as and when we hear from them.
This is likely a significant contributor to the 60 per cent spike in general, administrative and other operating expenses, which ballooned from US$2.19 million to US$3.51 million year-over-year, another figure conspicuously absent from the management commentary.
Revenue grew, but gross margins compressed
MoneyHero’s revenue of US$16.5 million is real and commendable. Double-digit growth across its core verticals — Credit Cards up 10 per cent, Personal Loans and Mortgages up 13 per cent, Wealth up 53 per cent, Insurance up 12 per cent — tells a story of genuine commercial momentum, particularly in Hong Kong, which surged 33 per cent to US$8.5 million and now accounts for 51.3 per cent of total revenue.
Also Read: MoneyHero swings to profit, but only on cost cuts and FX gains
But here is what the report does not highlight: the cost of revenue grew at 23.6 per cent, significantly faster than the 15 per cent revenue increase, rising from US$6.4 million to US$7.9 million. Gross margins are quietly compressing.
The company instead draws attention to the combined decline in technology costs, employee benefits, and advertising and marketing expenses, which came down 13 per cent year-over-year to US$8.5 million. This is a legitimate operational achievement, but the framing deliberately excludes the cost of revenue, which is by far the largest single cost line. It is a selective presentation designed to emphasise efficiency while obscuring margin erosion.
The “strategic retreat” in Southeast Asia
MoneyHero’s two smaller markets (the Philippines and Taiwan) posted revenue declines of 17 per cent and 12 per cent, respectively. The company frames these as deliberate strategic decisions: optimising margins, cutting low-quality volume, and building structural leverage. Perhaps. But consider this: the Philippines is home to 6.9 million of MoneyHero’s 9.8 million registered members (70 per cent of its entire user base), yet it contributed just US$1.47 million, or 8.9 per cent, of total revenue in the quarter. A market representing seven-in-ten of the group’s members is generating less than a tenth of its revenue. That is not a margin quality story. That is a monetisation failure, and calling it “strategic” is cold comfort for investors watching Southeast Asia’s largest member base sit largely idle.
Meanwhile, the platform’s overall traffic footprint shrank dramatically: monthly unique users fell 31 per cent year-over-year from 5.7 million to 3.9 million, and total sessions dropped 29 per cent from 17.5 million to 12.4 million. Clicks fell 33 per cent. The company is converting a smaller, higher-intent audience more efficiently (that part is true and defensible), but the scale of audience attrition is a genuine long-term risk that the report effectively sidelines.
Cash burn and the runway question
MoneyHero ended the quarter with US$27.984 million in cash, down from US$31.185 million at the end of 2025. That is a US$3.2 million cash burn in a single quarter. The company describes its balance sheet as “healthy” and highlights its debt-free status, which is accurate. But net current assets also declined, from US$37.5 million to US$32.8 million over the same period.
At the current burn rate, the company has roughly eight to nine quarters of runway, about two years. That is not a crisis, but it is not the picture of financial comfort the press release implies. The clock is ticking toward the “sustainable Adjusted EBITDA profitability” the company keeps promising.
The Adjusted EBITDA problem
“Our Adjusted EBITDA loss narrowed sharply by 68 per cent year-over-year,” said Danny Leung, Interim Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer, in the company’s earnings statement.
That figure is technically accurate. But to get from a US$6.7 million net loss to a US$1.1 million Adjusted EBITDA loss, the company removes US$5.4 million worth of charges — unrealised FX losses, warrant fair value changes, share-based payments, legal fees, depreciation, and interest. The adjustments are five times larger than the resulting metric. When a non-IFRS measure requires stripping out more than 80 per cent of the underlying loss to produce a headline number, investors should treat it as a directional indicator at best, not a proxy for cash profitability.
What is genuinely promising
None of this is to say MoneyHero is without real momentum. Its approval rate expansion, from 36 per cent to 48 per cent, is a meaningful operational achievement, particularly as total approved applications held flat at 156,000 despite a significant reduction in total applications. The Wealth vertical’s 53 per cent growth and the broader shift toward higher-margin products are structurally sound strategies. Hong Kong’s dominance is real. The AI-driven cost reduction story, though early, has tangible evidence in the declining technology and headcount costs.
Also Read: Decoding MoneyHero’s Q1: The profit push amid shrinking revenues
The question is whether the company can translate these genuine operational improvements into actual IFRS profitability and do so before its cash reserves force a capital raise or a more dramatic restructuring.
For now, MoneyHero is a company with a strong narrative, a compelling direction, and some numbers it would rather you did not look at too closely.
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