GM. This is Milk Road PRO, the market deep-dive that hits harder than realizing you bought the dip… and it actually was the dip.
Markets have been chaotic lately - especially across crypto and digital assets.
But chaos is often where the best opportunities hide.
I might have cracked the code on what separates the future winners from the falling knives.
Forget the chatter out there about investing, and focus on this four-point recipe. When a company meets all these conditions, it deserves your immediate attention:
- Financial sector open to blockchain innovation.
- Improving financials showing clear path to profitability.
- Growing KPIs.
- Defensible market advantage.
Now I have another company on my radar.
Because SoFi Technologies Inc. certainly meets all that, too.
The recent announcement of a partnership with Mastercard, allowing SoFiUSD (SoFi’s stablecoin) to be used as a settlement option across Mastercard's vast global payments network, along with the company's strong performance in 2025, made this an easy choice.
The close of Q4 marked the end of a highly successful year in 2025, characterized by robust growth across all key financial metrics.
Five years of consistent growth across all metrics? That’s exactly what we like to see.
The 'surface' look is undeniably strong, which is why we’re diving into the details today. Here is what we’re set to discover:
- What is SOFI?
- Why are they growing so much?
- Is their profitability and growth sustainable?
- Do they have any edge?
- What is the fair price for SOFI?
What is SoFi
SoFi Technologies was founded in 2011 at Stanford University.
The original idea was almost embarrassingly simple:
- Stanford alumni would lend money to Stanford students at lower interest rates than the government offered.
- Alumni got a better return.
- Students got cheaper loans.
Everyone won. That first pilot program raised $2M and refinanced loans for 100 students.
🔥 The early pitch was clear: there is a massive group of high-earning, creditworthy young professionals being ignored by traditional banks. SoFi would serve them.
They called this group HENRYs - High Earners, Not Rich Yet.
People with professional degrees, rising incomes, and strong credit who haven't yet built significant wealth. Traditional banks don't fight hard for them. SoFi decided it would.
Since then, SoFi has evolved from a student lender into a full digital financial platform.
Under CEO Anthony Noto, the company expanded into banking, investing, and fintech infrastructure through products like SoFi Money and Invest, acquisitions such as Galileo and Technisys, and a national bank charter obtained in 2022.
2024 was the first year the company became profitable.
Let's talk about the business.
SoFi business
SoFi operates across three segments, and each one feeds into the others. That flywheel is the real secret of the business.
Lending - The original engine (~50% of revenue)
Still the biggest revenue driver.
In 2025, lending brought in $1.8B (an all-time high) with a 56% contribution margin. For every $1 SoFi earns, it spends about $0.44 to generate it.
Let’s talk about all the products here:
Student loan refinancing
This is where it all started. But here is what makes SoFi unique.
Rather than relying on credit scores alone, SoFi uses "free cash flow underwriting".
It means they are looking at income, savings, education, and career trajectory to offer lower rates while maintaining attractive margins.
The business took a major hit from the federal student loan moratorium (March 2020 to August 2023). Still, with payments resumed and forgiveness programs being scaled back under the Trump administration, private refinancing is more attractive than ever.
✍️ With fewer government forgiveness options available, SoFi's core product is positioned for significant growth. Again.
Personal loans
These are SoFi's largest lending products by volume.
Loans from $5,000 to $100,000, targeting prime and super-prime borrowers, with no origination fees, no prepayment penalties, and an Unemployment Protection program that offers relief if borrowers lose their jobs.
In Q4 2025 alone, SoFi originated $7.5B in personal loans - up 43% year-over-year.
Plus, in 2025, SoFi also launched a major strategic initiative: the Loan Platform Business (LPB).
✅ Instead of keeping every loan on its balance sheet, SoFi now originates personal loans for institutional capital partners, earning fee income without taking on credit risk.
In 2025, LPB generated $576M in fees. That’s important because this is pure fee income with zero credit exposure.
That's a meaningful shift in the business model.
Home loans
They remain a smaller contributor, pressured by elevated mortgage rates between 2023 and 2025.
Management expects activity to reaccelerate if rates fall back toward the 5-6% range.
So let’s see.
Credit cards
The SoFi credit card (2% unlimited cash back, 3% with direct deposit, no annual fee) serves as a key cross-sell tool, deepening member relationships and growing net interest income over time.
The reality of any lending business is that risk control is everything.
SoFi is managing that risk in three ways:
- Improving underwriting.
- Offloading risk through the LPB model.
- Diversifying revenue so that lending makes up a smaller share over time.
That last part is where the next segment comes in.
Financial services - The fastest-growing segment (~43% of revenue)
Financial Services revenue grew 69% in FY2025 to approximately $1.5B, with 88% net revenue growth year over year while expanding margins.
Management expects this segment to surpass Lending as SoFi's largest revenue contributor by FY2027.
That kind of confidence from management is nothing. And this would help mitigate the risks associated with lending.
So let’s look at the products in this segment.
SoFi Money
FDIC-insured checking and high-yield savings are the platform's front door.
The critical metric here is direct deposit.
When a member routes their paycheck to SoFi, they become a "direct deposit member," and these users generate 50–70% more annual revenue than members without it.
By the end of 2025, SoFi had 3.2M direct deposit members, representing 23% of all members.
That growing base of highly engaged, high-ARPU users is the foundation on which SoFi's long-term valuation is built.
👉 Growth in direct deposit members is also a key signal that users are graduating from a single product to the full SoFi ecosystem.
SoFi Invest
Commission-free stock and ETF trading, crypto investing, and robo-advisory were just the next logical steps to keep members inside the ecosystem for their investment needs.
It puts SoFi squarely in the ring with Robinhood, Coinbase, and other financial super apps.
The results are already showing:
Approximately 48% of new loan originations now come from existing members, a direct result of the cross-sell flywheel SoFi Invest and SoFi Money created together.
That brings us to the last segment of their business, which powers everything. And not just for SoFi.
Technology platform - The most underappreciated segment
This is arguably the most exciting part of SoFi's business and the most misunderstood.
The platform provides the full infrastructure behind financial products as you can see on the left above (cards, payments, accounts, AML, KYC) that fintech companies, smaller banks, and other platforms need to operate.
In 2025, it generated $450M in revenue with a 32% contribution margin despite losing a large client that removed 40M accounts.
This is how the whole platform was built: 2 acquisitions.
1. Galileo ($1.2B acquisition, 2020) is one of the core infrastructure providers behind the American fintech industry.
Its payment processing APIs and card-issuing infrastructure power 130M accounts across 200+ clients, including Chime, Robinhood, and Dave. Revenue is earned per account and per transaction, which results in high margins and is nearly cost-free to scale.
2. Technisys ($1.1B acquisition, 2022) added cloud-native core banking software to the Galileo stack.
Together, they form Cyberbank Core - a full-stack digital banking platform that manages regulatory reporting, high-speed ledgering, and real-time interest calculations for millions of accounts.
But you might be wondering: why not have it all run on the blockchain?
Hear us out.
In 2022, regulatory hostility toward crypto made fully onchain infrastructure risky, so SoFi built on cloud systems with the ability to integrate blockchain later.
✅ That's exactly what started happening in late 2025 and early 2026.
SoFiUSD (their stablecoin) and SoFi Pay (cross-border payments via public blockchain) are now live.
The result is a hybrid model that can interact with both traditional finance and onchain systems at the same time - composable, adaptable, and largely chain-agnostic.
And there is a huge market for it.
Cyberbank Core is targeting a massive underserved market: more than 3,000 community banks in the U.S. still run on decades-old core banking systems that are slow, expensive, and block modern digital services.
Cyberbank replaces that infrastructure and monetizes through licensing fees and implementation contracts. 👍
So now we understand the products. And on the surface, it all sounds great.
But the real question is: What actually stops competitors from copying this model?
Uh, Oh… 😧 The rest of this report is exclusive to PRO members!
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WHAT’S LEFT INSIDE? 👀
- How can the company protect its business?
- What do the latest earnings show?
- What are the future projections?
- What are the key risks and catalysts?
- Is the stock worth buying at this price?
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