Gen CEO Vincent Pilette on Norton, Security and Financial Wellness

Today on After Earnings, we have Jen, the cybersecurity and financial wellness platform behind brands like Norton, Lifelock, and MoneyLion. And joining us, we have the CEO, Vincent Polette, to discuss how those different brands are coming together in a synergistic way. So let's get into it. Well, Vincent, first of all, happy new year. You're our first guest here on After Earnings in 2026. We could not think of a better way to kick off than to hear some more about Jen the business. Break it down for us because there are different components. Some may be familiar to our audience, some perhaps will be newer. Lay out the four pillars for us. Talk to us about what each of your business lines are spending their time doing.

Yeah, let me do that. As I told you, and Gendigital is probably the least known company, certainly tech company in the S&P 500 because we come from a set of acquisitions and we are more known for our brands. Initially, our core business is really providing core security, core safety for the consumers under the brand of Norton and Avast. And then we extended that core security to identity protection with the brand of Lifelock. Lifelock that started as a credit monitoring tool if you want or services, and then expanded it to really monitoring your entire reputation online. And then we recently acquired MoneyLion FinTech company, which we call secure financial wellness, which is our views. We're now managing the company into two segment, the core cybersafety, Norton and Avast protecting the user in the digital life. That's about three billion of revenue. Avast is a freemium brand.

(01:40)
Norton is a premium brand. So from an innovation customer experience, we differentiate there. It's running at 60% operating margin and it's growing slightly better than market at slightly above mid-single digit growth rate. And then we bought MoneyLion and Lifelock together as the second segment we call it trust-based solution. It's roughly $2 billion. It's growing over 25% and it's really bringing your identity, your reputation, and your financial wellness together along one journey for the consumers. That's delivering around 20% operating margin and is really driving that new category embedded secure financial wellness that we're driving. That's how we manage the company today.

Well, let's talk about the cybersecurity piece of it. Norton is a brand I'm familiar with. I've used Norton for absolutely ages, and I think many consumers have too Vincent when it comes to protecting their laptop or their desktop, and they use it to make sure that when they're doing their internet searches, that their computers aren't getting infected with things like malware. So I think there's a lot of brand recognition. How do you think about growing Norton? How do you think about consumer versus commercial applications and how those two sides of your business could evolve over time?

Yeah. So we're very dedicated to protecting the individuals. So we're all consumer oriented. Now, when we go to the market, maybe 80% of our revenue is coming from direct to consumer and 20% in what we call B2B2C. So we're selling to some enterprise, but really to protect the end users. That's our primary mission. Norton is a core brand. And one of the element that it has is this trust factor because I'm protecting you. I'm protecting your PC, of course, but behind your PC, I'm protecting your data, your data that has moved into the cloud. So I'm really protecting the digital user. And that trust, if you want, gives Norton a very strong platform to go into trust-based solutions. So that's why under the brand of Norton, you're going to have the breadth of our portfolio from the core initial device protection, which is still very relevant.

(03:51)
Malware still exists, but all the way to reputation management and some financial wellness features under the Norton 360 membership approach. So we've written our platform to be white label, modular, and we can add different element of the portfolio under one brand following a specific customer journey and Norton is one set of the customer journeys.

So let's talk about the customer journey and what that actually means in practice, Vincent. So as you said, you bought MoneyLion, which is the financial planning and financial wellness app last year. And just to put that in context, MoneyLion, just for the purposes of setting some context, was itself a public company, came in at about 546 million in revenue for the fiscal 24. How do you see now as you put together your integration execution? How do you see as you follow one user coming into Norton, for example, then moving over to Lifelock, then moving over to using the MoneyLion application? Do you now have a set? Do you have a cohort now, Vincent, where you can actually prove the consumer journey from adopting one brand to adopting everything else under the Norton 360 umbrella?

Excellent question. And we've learned through experiences that actually cross-selling brands is very difficult. A customer trust one brand, a set of customer experience is specific to a specific brand, and a certain set of customers have expectations around those brands. And so that's why we have rewritten our overall platform to be fully white label and modular, to be able to put some of the features depending on your journey under that specific brand. So if you take Norton, you're more likely to have come to the portfolio first to what we call a security entry door. So you were worried about something, a risk out there being into your digital environment, either protecting your device, but frankly, more of our users today, they want to protect their data. And so data signals, scanning the web, making sure that we make the consumer aware of all of their risk and then provide some solutions is part of that journey.

(06:02)
Overall, then the Norton customers will evolve and say, "Hey, but my core device or data is not enough. I also have an identity. I have a credit score. I want to protect this. " And that's where we've seen 65% of the normal news moving to Norman 360, which includes some of the livelock element around credit monitoring, dark web monitoring, restoration services all the way to the end. And now we're incorporating not only are you worried about making sure you protect your bank account or your credit number, but some customers say, "Hey, can I also understand what should I do with this data? I have five credit cards. What would be the best credit card?" And now we're incorporating the money line engine, the recommendation engine in a white label format, an embedded view into the North 360 or into the Lifelog brand and we haven't done Avast yet, but we will do it at one point in time as the customers evolve through their journey of both digital and financial wellness.

(06:59)
So

Let's just go through some numbers, Vincent, related to this very specific example. How many subscribers, how many users does the core Norton product have today?

So over two-thirds of the customers have moved to a membership structure. So it's a plan view and you have the base, the overall to the ultimate plan, and you can have, you start with some certain features, it started with a basic antivirus, move now to an anti-scam, move to a VPN, and then you start to move into your identity, a dark web monitoring. All of that is part of one membership structure. And if you are limited into your needs and you need something else, then we upsell you to the next membership level. I would say less than a third of our customers on Norton have just a single product or single feature when they come in.

Well, let me rephrase the question. If you look at Norton and Avast, how many users in total does that represent globally, roughly? Oh,

Very good. So overall, we have about 77 million paid customers. We have 200 million free active users and 500 million endpoints connected to the platform. Two thirds of the paid customers are coming from that security, Avast and Norton View. So it's still the vast majority of the view, then Lifelock, and then we have MoneyLine customers.

So in terms of success, Vincent, for you, if you take those 77 million paid, 200 million free users, call it 300 million roughly, what proportion of those converting to using MoneyLion two years from now means success to you?

The beautiful thing is we've accelerated our growth. We are around a mid-single digit growth rate on the core cybersafety, which is a mature market, and we've moved towards that financial wellness first by putting some of the financial feature into Lifelock and then integrating and then buying MoneyLion. We now are on a proforma basis for the first half of our fiscal year, around the 10% organic growth rate, and that's really because of the performance of Moneyline that has been growing at 40 to 50% depending on either engine or the PFM tools. So it has been really accelerating our growth. None of our revenue synergies yet are in our model because it takes time. We're not just a pure cross-sell, let's go and blast emails or blast in application messages. We really want to integrate those financial wellness features at the right moment in your journey when you are in your platform.

(09:33)
We expect that over the next few years, we're going to have a significant portion of the core security customer, cybersafety customer, to adopt financial wellness. We haven't published any commitments, so I don't want to put numbers out there, but I would highly disappoint it if within the next few years, we are not at 30 or 40% of that core security having adopted some sort of financial wellness features.

So let's put this in the context of an analogy, Vincent. Before we start at the cameras rolling, we talked about how the challenge at these moments of transition, like the one that you are leading at the moment is that you run the risk of being known by consumers, but also importantly for this show by your investors, neither as the cybersecurity simple pure play that you could be known as, and you're not known as a pure play financial wellness business either, and you risk in these moments of being known for neither.

Our objective, of course, is to be understood by the consumers and what value we provide to the consumers. And I think that will be the core of what we do. We came into financial wellness because more and more of our customers were moving from device protection to data protection, to identity protection, from identity to financial protection, and they were asking some insights. We have a vast amount of data that we can really nurture and develop our models to provide best recommendations. That's how we first got organically into that financial wellness and then brought money line to accelerate it. It's driven at the core by the customer needs asking for more of those things. So that's what gives us confidence. Now you're totally right. I reported to you the anecdote that when we acquire MoneyLion, I heard from somebody on a podcast saying, "Hey, there is one less player in FinTech.

(11:19)
It's Money Lion because you got acquired by Gen Digital." And I was thinking, no, wait a minute. I wanted to call the person and say, "No, you have one more player. And by the way, it's a player that bring 77 million paid customers, 200 million free users into this journey with a strong balance sheet, with a strong trust factor and with an upgrade security system to the FinTech world." And so we got to prove that. We got to be on the road and really explain to investors. When I meet with investors, they either come from security and say, "Oh, I don't really want to hear about FinTech." And if I go to FinTech and say, "What is this security? You're not really of FinTech." And so we got to really convince ... I always believe that as the numbers play out for investors, they'll start realizing it.

(12:03)
And as long as we focus on the core consumer needs, that's where we give confidence we're on the right path.

The story reminds me a little bit, Vincent, of the story of super apps. If you go to Asia, you see super apps which have done a really good job of gaining a stronghold with a consumer using a Trojan horse of one particularly strong offering, whether it's ride hailing or whether it's financial services, and then spreading out to encapsulate lots of other services so that the consumer can go to one app to one place and get the benefit of personalized offerings and the benefit of scale. Do you see yourself as on the path to Super Appid?

100% in a longer customer journey with a foundation which is trust and security. So that's our differentiation if you want that coming into the play, we have a lot of data that enables personalization at scale in a one-to-one relationship with the customers of what's the best secure digital lives, financial lives for them all combined. And I think you're going to see adding more and more features we call trust-based solutions. And what is trust-based solutions? It's solution that for you as a consumer using your own personal data that is secure, in your control, private, but leverage the overall patterns to give you that personalized offer. And of course, scale for that is a tremendous differentiator.

So Vincent, where do we see you go next? And let me give you some context for the question. We've been so lucky here on after earnings to have conversations with the likes of the CEO and co-founder of Lemonade, which is the consumer-facing insurance company. I was lucky to speak with Karen Seidman-Becca, who's the CEO of Clear, who's talked about taking her business from biometric-based solutions going through TSA in travel to now folks being able to use their biometric data to access their health records, for example. Should I be thinking of a future or I see Jen or I see you coming back on this show talking about moving or buying into the insurance space, moving into the healthcare documentation space? Are those the kinds of areas you might go after next and would you use acquisitions to do so if so?

So first of all, where are we going as a strategic framework for the company? We realized that first of all, our foundation is security and security, cybersafety broadly defined, which means you devise security, your data, your privacy, your overall identity protection. All of that we need to continue to make that a very strong foothold. And you're never strong forever. The environment moves today, the 80% of the consumer issues they face is through scam. And the number one needs that they need is to be protected against financial scams. So that's an evolution, if you want, in which AI-driven scams, deep fix, other things get embedded, and we need to continue to make our platform the number one platform in the world. That's number one job. Then we said, "Hey, consumer realized that once they are protected, they are in control of the API. They are services that they can benefit from that would have more value if they use their personalized data in a control and private way, yet benefiting from AI and overall skilled advice that they get into the environment." Financial wellness is obviously an obvious one.

(15:32)
We still have a lot of room to grow in that financial wellness. We mainly in the US, we need to expand globally since our security footprint is global. We need to expand and build some of the gaps we still have into that overall financial wellness views. The adjacencies are pretty obvious. Some are already asked by our customers. Some of our customers say, "Hey, by the way, I have these assets. Can I go into trust and will? What's the best solution in trust and will? What's the best solutions in other areas?" And so we are exploring every areas that I would say is using that overall personalized data that you feel safe and private to be able to give you a service online. And that's what we call trust-based solutions. And you'll see us continue to expand on that. So that's where we're going. And I definitely would love to come back on the show and explain to you as we grow and as we drive our journey over the next three to five years.

(16:26)
When it comes to acquisition, we are a very strong cash generating business. We really driving the majority of our revenue from membership. So with very resilient, predictable cashflow, if you want, very high operating margin. And we do say that we use our cashflow in a balanced way between debt payment, buyback if we are misunderstood or continue to build up through acquisitions. On the acquisition side, we always start organic, try to test, really do consumer research, do prototyping. And then if we find a business that's already at the right value, at the right moment, at the right culture, all of those fits if you want, then we normally, yes, try to do an acquisition.

Vincent, what are your customers saying to you about demand for blockchain-based solutions?

Well, our consumer don't really understand the technology behind blockchain. You always have a very thin layer of your consumer that are more very strong around the technology side, but what do they ask? They ask to have flexibility, privacy, control, visibility. That's what they want. And then they say, "You know what? I don't want to be the expert. Just enable me to be there. I want that peace of mind. I want that ease of use." And so when you look at whether it's security or FinTech, you have the underlying layer from the infrastructure, the systems, et cetera, where we don't really play. So we leverage the banking rails, we leveraging some of the security infrastructure play. And then we build really around the data, the databases, the LLMs, and then mainly the app and the user experience with the services and the overall experience. That's peace of mind, if you want, that we provide to the consumers and they're ready to pay

For. And just as a final question to you, Vincent, talk to us about the global footprint, if you don't mind. Obviously, you're listed here in the Unitited States. You do have a global business. You've got offices around the world. Talk to us about where you think the mix shift is going to go geographically.

I think initially we were mainly US-centric, and then we bought a business advanced that was based in Prague in Europe and had a lot of footprint in European, Middle East, Asian countries. And it was very complimentary. Today on the core business, the cybersafety, we have 60% US, 40% global, in 150 countries. A lot of the free users are out there outside of the United States. When it come to lifelock and financial wellness, I would say the identity protection service is 90% the US, 10% in international and start to grow. So the concept of expanding from core security to identities, taking roots internationally, and then financial wellness today is for us 100% in the US. We believe that the international footprint will follow, but in a delayed way, the same evolution that we've seen in the US with our consumers coming from security, moving to identity, moving to full cybersafety, and now touching financial wellness, that journey will happen internationally as well, starting with various countries.

(19:37)
Every country is at a different maturing level, and so you really have to understand the local customer consumer behaviors, and that's where our cybersafety footprint on a global basis will give us an advantage.

Vincent, I know that you've got your earnings coming up in the weeks to come. You're soon in April, you're going to lap that one year anniversary of buying money line. I'm sure there's going to need to be updates to the market on how that integration is going and building out this platform. So come back, we want to hear more. Meanwhile, thanks very much for joining us. We appreciate your time. I'm Anne Berry. Thank you for tuning into After Earnings, the show that brings you up close and personal with the executives behind the world's most interesting publicly traded companies. If you learn something today, don't forget to like, subscribe and share with your friends. We'll see you next time.