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spk01: Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Greetings and welcome to the Euronet Worldwide Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2021 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star then 1 on your telephone keypad. If you require any further assistance, please press star then 0. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Mr. Scott Claussen, General Counsel for Euronet Worldwide. Thank you. Mr. Claussen, you may begin.
spk03: Thank you. Good morning and welcome, everyone, to Euronet's quarterly results conference call. We'll present our results for the fourth quarter and the full year of 2021 on this call. We have our Chairman and CEO, Mike Brown, our CFO, Rick Weller, and the CEO of our ePay division, Kevin Kapaneki, on the call. Before we begin, I need to call your attention to the forward-looking statement disclaimer on the second slide of the PowerPoint presentation we'll be making today. Statements made on this call that concerns Uranet's or its management's intentions, expectations, or predictions of future performance are forward-looking statements. Uranet's actual results may vary materially from those anticipated in such forward-looking statements as a result of a number of factors that are listed on the second slide of our presentation. YourNet does not intend to update those forward-looking statements and undertakes no duty to any person to provide any such update. In addition, the PowerPoint presentation includes a reconciliation of the non-GAAP financial measures we'll be using during the call to their most comparable GAAP measures. Now I'll turn the call over to our CEO, Mike Brown. Mike?
spk04: Thank you, Scott, and thank you to everyone who's joining us today. I'll begin my comments on slide number five. Thank you very much. deploy ATMs in more markets, and two, expand our physical and digital distribution in both e-pay and money transfer. Our investments validated that these strategies remain effective, and we believe that they will continue to result in strong earnings growth rates in the coming years. We achieved these strong double-digit growth rates in revenue, adjusted operating income, and adjusted EBITDA for the full year of 2021, despite a year with highly irregular travel patterns that moved from heavy restrictions across most of the world to promising travel patterns later in the year, only to be set back by Omicron in the second half of the fourth quarter. Despite this setback, The current data suggests a strong rebound in travel recovery beginning in the second quarter of this year, 2022. As we ended the year and airlines increased flight capacity, we saw improvements in cash withdrawal trends, particularly through the first half of the fourth quarter. As the Omicron variant spread across the globe, air travel was interrupted and lockdowns were implemented in certain countries, resulting in lighter transaction recovery than early in the quarter. In ePay, we continued to see strong adoption of our digital products in many of our markets, and we achieved $1 billion in revenue for the first time in that segment's history. And in money transfer, we continued to deliver strong double-digit growth rates. on the U.S. and international outbound transactions, including the Middle East and Asia, which were offset by lower domestic transactions and transactions in the Middle East and Asia, where transactions still suffered from government-mandated lockdowns. All of the data from this fourth quarter, together with the continued global expansion of vaccine programs and many countries' decision to open borders to regain some of the GDP lost during past travel seasons, give us optimism in our expectation that 2022 will be a strong year for Euronet. Now let's go on to slide six, and I'll discuss the current travel data in more detail. On slide six, we have presented an updated version of the graph we've provided to you in the last couple of quarters, which shows actual and projected European flight data for this year versus 2019, overlaid with our total international cash withdrawals for the same periods, as well as our transaction recovery from non-EU cardholders. This chart really helps you see the trend we mentioned on the previous slide. that actual flight data continued to improve through the first half of the fourth quarter, and our international cash withdrawals were tracking better than flight data in the travel recovery transactions. As you can see, a sharp increase in non-EU transactions represented by the blue dots, and which represent 25% of the total international transactions presented on the gold dots. However, in mid-November, you can see that the flight data started declining with the spread of the Omicron variant, and our total international transactions, including non-EU transactions, also declined sharply as new travel restrictions and lockdown requirements were put in place in several markets. You'll notice the orange circles on the graph are industry predictions that were made prior to Omicron, which have not yet been updated to account for the new variants. What we see in the news continues to confirm a view similar to what these numbers represent. As we have said in the past, we tend to see intra-Europe transaction recovery ahead of flight recovery, largely because travel by automobile is faster to arrange and returns more quickly than airline travel. While the decline in transactions from Omicron couldn't have been predicted when we provided guidance in October, We continue to be encouraged that when borders were open with limited or no travel restrictions and when flights were operating, tourists were eager to travel, and that continued to translate into cash withdrawals for our EFT business. There have been many predictions of a strong travel recovery in 2022 as vaccine efforts continue to spread across the world and as people learn to live with COVID as part of their lifestyles. Let's go on to slide number seven, where we have presented some of these articles with a little bit more detail. At various points during the pandemic, we felt like we could see the light at the end of the tunnel, only to enter another COVID wave. However, this time, to steal a baseball analogy, it feels like we may be rounding third base and heading for home. We are seeing articles that quote various officials starting to predict that COVID will become an endemic during 2022 for some parts of the world. We are also seeing new treatments being approved, vaccines finally reaching the less developed countries, and airline expectations starting to climb back up in anticipation of better travel numbers this year. In January, a survey of Americans who travel for business or pleasure before the pandemic 91% of those respondents have plans to travel in the next six months, and 25% have said that the pandemic no longer influences their decision to travel, according to a travel market research firm, Logwoods International. We are seeing major brands like Visa and MasterCard make statements that consumers are learning to live with the pandemic and also that spending surged in the final three months of 2021 despite the disruption caused by Omicron. Some of the more encouraging stories include comments that airlines are starting to recover. In fact, Wizz Air, a popular budget airline in Europe, reported a 243% increase in passengers year over year for the fourth quarter of 2021. Perhaps most important and to the most significant portion of our EFT business, beginning this February, a couple days ago, the EU made a policy shift from safe listing travelers to Europe, by country and replacing them with restrictions based on individual travelers' COVID status. These recommendations were based on three factors. First, the Omicron variant appears to be a much milder version of the COVID-19 and therefore less worrying. Second, citizens are tired of these ongoing restrictions. And third, these countries have concluded that travel restrictions do not prevent the spread of COVID-19. In their recommendation, they noted that a person-based approach will substantially simplify the applicable rules and will provide additional clarity and predictability for travelers. Outside of Europe, where strict lockdowns and travel restrictions have been in place for much of the pandemic, we're starting to see some easing of these policies. For example, the Philippines announced that effective February 1st, the government will allow fully vaccinated foreign travelers in the country. And several other Asian countries are considering plans to allow tourists into certain island beach areas of their countries. All of these third-party indicators give us optimism that we may now be where we thought we were a year ago. While there is not a universal view that 2019 travel levels will be achieved, the confidence of achieving near-2019 levels is continuing to build, giving us confidence that the EFT segment will deliver significant contributions to our consolidated results this year. While we do not expect the EFT results to fully achieve 19 levels, with the improved EFT results in 2022, together with the growth that we have achieved in ePay and money transfer over the last two years, we continue to expect that we will produce 2022 earnings similar to those in 2019. Now let's move on to slide number eight, and we'll talk about some of our EFT expansion in the quarter. Slide number eight. Over the years, we have consistently demonstrated our willingness and ability to expand our product portfolio and distribution capabilities. You may remember that in March of last year, we announced our intention to acquire the merchant acquiring arm of Preus Bank in Greece. Acquisition expands Uranet's merchant acquiring capabilities, including a leading position in Greece for online acquiring, in a market that continues to have the same growth trajectory that we saw when announcing the acquisition. This has taken a little longer to close than we originally expected, but we expect to close later this quarter. We also signed an agreement with SafePay, a fintech startup in Pakistan. SafePay is a developer of a financial platform that facilitates digital payments in Pakistan. The company's platform assists stores to increase checkout conversions, speeds up accounts receivables, and streamlines sales by helping customers to pay online. Euronet will provide the technology to help SafePay interact with Visa's Internet Payment Gateway services. In addition to a focus on expanding our non-payment, ATM services, we also continue to expand our ATM network. This quarter, we launched new ATMs in Montenegro. Montenegro is a beautiful country with rugged mountains, medieval villages, and beaches along the Adriatic coastline. In 2019, the country welcomed more than 2.6 million tourists, and year-over-year growth was booming. This will be a nice addition to our ATM networks across Europe. In Spain, we continued to sign agreements with banks so that their domestic customers have access to Uranet's more than 3,300 ATMs in the country, significantly expanding the convenience for the bank's customers. This quarter, we signed an agreement with Orange Bank and Euro 6,000, a consortium of 12 banks in Spain. We now have 25 network participation agreements with 72 banks in Spain, which is a reflection on the great value our ATM network provides to banks and their domestic customers. We also continued to add more ATMs in our existing markets. During the quarter, we added another 375 deployed ATMs, 511 outsourced ATMs, and 259 low-margin ATMs. We seasonally deactivated nearly 4,000 machines due to the slower travel season in the winter and the travel disruptions and new lockdown restrictions caused by the spreading of the Omicron variant. For the full year, we added more than 3,350 new deployed ATMs. We reduced our outsourcing count by about 850 machines and added 432 low-margin ATMs, bringing our total ATM estate to 48,619. As we look forward, we would expect to add between 4,000 and 4,500 ATMs to our estate this year. As we wrap up the year on EFT, we are encouraged that as travel came back, our growth strategy was validated. People will still travel. They'll still want cash when they do so. We even found that they were withdrawing more cash in each transaction. So as travel continues to trend back to pre-COVID levels, we are proud that we have a larger, stronger network to serve both our domestic and international customers in 33 countries around the world. Now let's move on to slide nine, and we'll talk about ePay. ePay had an outstanding year, delivering double-digit growth across all metrics and reaching $1 billion in revenue for the first time in its history. These exceptional results were achieved through the continued growth in our digital media distribution, both in physical retail as well as through digital distribution channels and through growth in mobile top-ups sold through the digital channels. The expansion in digital distribution has been extremely important for many consumers around the world for the last couple of years. Movement restrictions and the lockdowns imposed during the pandemic highlighted the importance of the digital economy. For people who previously relied on physical retail, the transition to the digital economy was challenging. By implementing new digital distribution agreements with retailers, by adding mobile wallet distribution, and perhaps most importantly, by digitizing traditional payment methods, ePay provided a path for these customers to fully participate in the digital economy. The technology to make these payments happen is complex, but the technology we have spent years developing and improving made these conversions achievable to our customers. And as you can see on this slide, we continue to sign new agreements for more products distributed through all of our channels. This quarter, we launched Apple products on PhonePay and Amazon Pay wallets in India. These two wallets do exceptionally high transaction volume, and Apple will be another nice addition to their product offering. We also saw nice growth in other Asian markets. In Indonesia, we launched digital media content at Alphamart, one of the largest convenience store chains in the country, as well as Tinder digital codes, which will be distributed through Tokopedia Indonesia, one of the largest e-commerce platforms in Southeast Asia. Finally, we launched digital distribution of Just Eat, a leading global online food order and delivery service, kind of like Uber Eats, in seven European countries, including Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. ePay has developed industry-leading partnerships with the most popular global brands, a vast network of retailer and digital distribution partners, and best-in-class technology that makes integrating the brands and the retailers quick, seamless, and convenient. Brands benefit from increased distribution, retailers benefit from having more content to offer their customers, and the customers benefit from having the choice in how they want to interact with their funds. whether in a physical store location or as a participant in the world's digital economy. All of this together is a result of many years of hard work and dedication from our teams to build a strong infrastructure, and this year it paid off with strong double-digit growth rates in the business. With our continued product development, distribution expansion, and technological advantage, we continue to believe ePay will achieve annual operating income growth in the low double-digit range. However, as we introduce more products into ePay's portfolio, the ePay business is likely to become more lumpy through the quarters, ending the year with an annual growth rate that we expect to be in the low double-digit range. Now let's move on to slide number 10, and we'll talk about money transfer. We continue to expand our industry-leading payments and remittance network, which now reaches 510,000 physical locations in 165 countries, as well as 3.7 billion bank accounts and 439 million wallet accounts. We also continue to expand our mobile wallet presence, adding service to another 20 wallets across 11 countries. including seven new markets, El Salvador, Myanmar, Pakistan, Tongo, Vanuatu, and Vietnam. We expanded our digital presence by launching our RIA app in two new countries, Australia and Malaysia, and we added two countries to our bank deposit network, Japan and Madagascar. COVID has certainly presented its share of challenges over the last couple of years, but our payments and remittance business were well positioned to address the changing needs and preferences of our customers, namely real-time account deposit and digital adoption. We've seen account deposit volumes grow in excess of 20% over the last five years, but there was a convincing shift in consumer preference to bank accounts and mobile wallets during the pandemic, and this increased our account deposit volumes by 44% last year in 2021. During this past year, 29% of REIA's cross-border remittance volumes were paid to an account, and including XE, 50% of our money transfer segments, cross-border international payment, and remittance volumes are sent directly into an account, with the vast majority of these being received in under five minutes. Finally, REIA continued to see strong digital transaction growth in the app and reiamoneytransfer.com site, with 55% direct-to-consumer digital transaction growth in the quarter, which gave us 72% growth for the full year. I should also mention that XD saw strong corporate and consumer payment transaction growth rates during the year of 29%. Now, those are some impressive growth rates. We made significant investments in our money transfer network, our teams, and our products in 2021, and we expect these investments and commitments to fuel double-digit operating income growth in 2022. Now let's move on to slide number 11, where I'll provide you with a brief update on our progress with the Dandelion platform. As we told you this past November, we launched our Dandelion platform, which offers our core money transfer infrastructure as a service to the broader financial services ecosystem. We have continued to make great progress on our network expansion and product improvement, where in this quarter we have enabled XE to re-arrails for B2C and B2B in Indonesia. This is the first country processing both B2B and B2C payments through XE and RIA. Additionally, we enabled corporate payments to four new countries, Costa Rica, Japan, Malaysia, and Mexico. We also launched services with STP in Mexico, creating real-time service for both corporates and individuals to all banks in Mexico. These are great enhancements for our Dandelion product, which allow us to enable new use cases into adjacent verticals that will contribute nicely to the money transfer growth in the coming quarters. I just want to remind you that Dandelion not only powers payments to third parties, but also powers our own assets, such as Rhea Digital and XD. In that regard, I believe it is worth pointing out the scope of our broader portfolio of consumer digital products and the success we are seeing with them. As many of you know, we offer REIA remittance services through our REIA app and reiamoneytransfer.com, and we offer consumer payments, including remittances, through our XE app and XE.com. When all three digital customer revenues are totaled, including the relatively insignificant dandelion revenues at this point in time, it accounts for approximately 9% of our total money transfer revenues in the fourth quarter, 2021. We're extremely excited about this sizable part of our business, where we are seeing hyper growth in what is beginning to be a meaningful part of our business. In the fourth quarter, we saw transaction growth of 50%, which gave us 68% for the full year. And on the revenue side, we grew at 35% for the quarter and 51% for the year. Certainly, these are impressive, exciting growth rates. As I reflect on our digital customer base, I can't help but to admire some of the trading multiples certain competitors in the digital transfer space enjoy, like revenue multiples ranging from six to 24 times revenue. So in theory, the digital transfer part of our business should be worth something approaching $3 billion alone. This valuation reflection confirms our conclusions to develop our digital assets and reinforces our resolve to push hard at nourishing this part of our business that's growing at 35%. Now, bear in mind that, as I pointed out earlier, inside these numbers, our dandelion volumes still play a smaller role, but with even more explosive growth. So at some point down the road, we might want to break these revenues out for you so that you can keep up with our amazing progress and potential that this product has for us. As we told you when we launched our Dandelion service, we're extremely excited about this new endeavor where with the incremental work that we have done, we have expanded our current total addressable market of $700 billion to a new TAM of $155 trillion, positioning us for continued double-digit growth while disrupting the status quo of the cross-border payments world. We look forward to giving you more updates on this new business line. Slide number 12. Now let's transition to another of our exciting technology solutions, REN. REN is really starting to take off with implementations of numerous significant payment projects throughout the world and a strong pipeline of new deals. In December, Banco Atlantida, the oldest bank and the largest bank by assets in Honduras and the fifth largest bank in all of Central America, expanded their relationship with Uranet by licensing REN self-service, our multi-vendor ATM terminal driving software. Banco Atlantida is looking to expand its presence across Central America and implementing REN self-service will enable that bank to use their fleet of ATMs as what they call a digital conversation channel with each customer individually as opposed to it being a cash dispensing cost center. Offering new services to customers outside of traditional bank branch is a major challenge for banks saddled with old technology infrastructure. Implementing REN self-service will provide a path to offer new services to their customers in a more efficient, integrated, and secure manner. In Singapore, and this is really cool news, we signed a REN deployment agreement with Trust Bank Singapore Ltd. which is a digital bank joint venture between Standard Charter Bank and NTUC Enterprise, the largest supermarket chain in Singapore. Amid soaring demand for online and mobile alternatives, new digital players are transforming the banking landscape. The bank was looking for a strategic partner to provide consumer services based on a microservices-based cloud-native digital platform deployed in the public cloud. Our REN technology aligned very well with their strategic goals, so our team conducted a proof of concept using Amazon Web Services Cloud in just seven days to demonstrate the technical capabilities of REN. Our REN team blew away the bank's expectations and is now working to fully launch the product, which we expect to happen in the next several months. This will be the first project where we will offer REN payment services from a native cloud and also our first collaboration with Amazon Web Services. We are excited about the possibilities that this will afford us as more cloud-first and digital-only banks are emerging globally and as traditional banks look to move their payment workloads to the cloud. This quarter, we completed the first phase of a multi-phase modernization product with standard charter banks in Hong Kong. Finally, we signed an agreement with Touch & Go Digital in Malaysia. Touch & Go, the parent company of the Touch & Go Digital, was established to set up a road toll system in Malaysia through a closed-loop card. Touch & Go Digital was incorporated to digitize the closed-loop card and create frictionless payments in order to expand the closed-loop card beyond the toll roads. They launched a mobile wallet, which has become the largest wallet in Malaysia with more than 22 million users, which for some perspective means that nearly 70% of all Malaysians have the Touch & Go mobile wallet powered by REN. Through the partnership with Touch & Go, we will leverage our REN technology to enable the issuance of virtual cards, and or physical cards, allowing the customers to utilize the balances in their e-wallet through Visa's global merchant and ATM networks. In short, REN will be the backbone for one of the largest fintechs and the largest payment wallet in Malaysia. This is possible because of REN's ability to bring a new card program to market quickly, its developer-friendly APIs, and its secure and highly resilient platform. These implementations are extremely impressive, so I'd like to pause for a moment and reflect on the significant power of REN. The attractiveness of REN is that it uses a modern microservices-based architecture that is compatible with the most popular programming languages, hardware, databases, and best practices. The modular architecture enables specific areas of an application to be created or upgraded without interruption to the rest of the system. We have proven this power again this quarter using APIs to create a significant structure for TrustBank in just seven days, not seven months or seven years, as might have been the case with more antiquated payment options, which are currently used in the marketplace. Wren also connected to AWS Native Cloud, which is at the high end of what fintechs are looking for. This allows our partners to address locally the services that AWS provides. offers internally increasing the speed to market for these fintechs. REN provides a platform for complex projects, For Touch & Go Digital, we developed a platform to allow our customers' users the ability to use a closed-loop card to do open-loop transactions. That is not easy and not something every tech partner can provide. We are seeing an increasing number of technology leaders at fintechs and banks relying on these inherent features of REN to provide the powerful payments technology they need while maintaining their freedom of choice to work within the development environments that are best suited to their teams. Wren is also crucial in helping these teams leverage the latest advancements, such as real-time payments and ISO 20022, digital wallets, and cloud-based solutions. And most importantly, Wren enables them to quickly meet the demands of their customers for faster, more convenient, and highly secure experiences. The overview of the details in these rent agreements gives you a much more tangible understanding of how rent really is a difference maker. To underscore the tangibility of the momentum of our success, we have now signed 21 rent agreements, which we expect to contribute a minimum of $78 million in revenue over the next six years, and it's worth noting that this is revenue which comes with very high margins. And our pipeline will continue that momentum with opportunities with more than half of what has already been signed. So while we've always known that our REN technology is special, there's nothing like customers validating its usefulness through the signing of long-term contracts. We look forward to continuing to share more REN success stories with you in the next quarter. As I close my comments, I think you can see from these highlights that we have the potential for a long runway of growth ahead of us through our sound strategies to grow each of our segments, and through our new technology that is transforming the way payments are made. COVID presented a small setback in terms of growth, but it also gave us an opportunity to sharpen our focus, to validate these strategies and emerge stronger on the other side. And I hope that 2022 is the beginning of the other side. I believe the double-digit consolidated growth rates we achieved this year are just the beginning of a new streak of strong growth rates, and I'm excited to talk to you about our achievements as we move through the year. With that, I will turn it over to Rick.
spk08: Thank you, Mike, and good morning to everyone who's had a chance to join us. I'll begin my comments starting with the balance sheet on slide 14. I think it's worth repeating that we were pleased to finish the quarter with consolidated double-digit growth. As it has been for the past two years, our balance sheet remains strong and continues to allow us to invest in our physical and digital networks, our technology, compliance, new products, and new markets. As you can see, we ended the year with more than $1.2 billion in cash. This sequential increase is the result of $65 million in cash generated from operations, $125 million cash returned from ATMs, and a drawdown on our revolver to enable effective treasury management for year-end settlements across many currencies, the majority of which was repaid after year-end, partially offsetting these increases in cash returns. were capital expenditures of approximately $30 million and share repurchases of approximately $228 million. Finally, as we move through 2022 and see the return of earnings to pre-COVID levels in lockstep with the continued recovery of tourism, we anticipate this year the return of pre-COVID leverage ratios. Slide 15. For the fourth quarter, we achieved revenue of $811 million, operating income of $25 million, adjusted operating income of $67.6 million, and adjusted EBITDA of $113 million. The slightly lighter than expected EBITDA growth rate was largely the result of the impact of the Omicron variant on the cash withdrawal trends in the EFT segment, as Mike discussed earlier. Had it not been for the travel interruptions caused by Omicron, our transactions were on course to put us within the range of our adjusted EBITDA expectations for the quarter. We delivered adjusted EPS of $1.15, a 4% increase from $1.11, for the fourth quarter last year. Slide 16 shows our three-year transaction trends by segment. EFT transactions grew 42% as a result of improving domestic and international cash withdrawals, together with a continued benefit from a significant increase of low-value point-of-sale transactions in Europe and low-value payment processing transactions from an Asia Pacific customer's bank wallet, and e-commerce site. E-pay transactions grew 21%, driven by continued strength in mobile top-up and digital media content distributed through digital channels. Money transfer transactions grew a net increase of 10%, including 19% growth in both U.S. and international outbound transactions, excluding the Middle East and Asia, as well as 55% growth in direct-to-consumer digital transactions. This growth was partially offset by declines in the domestic business and a 26% decline in transactions from the Middle East and Asia, where transactions still suffer from the government-imposed mandated lockdowns. Absent the declines in domestic and Middle East and Asia, our money transfer transactions would have grown about 15% year over year. Next slide, please. On slide 17, we present our results on an as-reported basis. Year over year, most of the currencies in the major markets where we operate declined in the mid-single-digit range, with a few outliers, including the British pound, which increased about 2%. To normalize the impact of these currency fluctuations, we have presented our results on a constant currency basis on the next slide. Slide 18, please. The strong increase in EFT revenue, operating income, and adjusted EBITDA were the result of increased domestic and international cash withdrawal transactions driven by improving travel trends stemming from the gradual lifting of travel restrictions across Europe, particularly in the first half of the fourth quarter. We also continued to deploy new ATMs in anticipation of a more robust recovery this year and a full recovery in 2023. Fingers crossed. No more nasty variants lurking in the shadows. ePay revenue and operating income each grew 7%, and adjusted EBITDA grew 5%. from increased digital distribution of digital media and mobile content. However, I would also like to point out that in last year's fourth quarter, one of the mobile operators passed through certain incremental commissions to retailers to support them through the financial difficulties brought about by COVID lockdowns. Similar amounts were not passed through this year in the fourth quarter. Moreover, in the fourth quarter, This year, a key customer from our Caduce business in Germany took in-house their voucher processing. If we were to exclude the effects of the supplemental mobile operator commissions and the key customer results from the fourth quarter last year on a pro forma basis, the ePay business revenues and operating incomes would have grown about 10% year over year. Finally, For ePay, setting aside mix driven by the large increase in low-value transactions in India, revenue and gross profit per transaction both expanded nicely in the quarter. Money transfer revenue grew 11%. Adjusted operating income declined 6%, and adjusted EBITDA declined 5%. Revenue growth was the result of strong 19% growth in the U.S. and international outbound transactions, excluding the Middle East-Asia, as well as 55% growth in direct consumer digital transactions, which was partially offset by weakness in the U.S. domestic business and larger than expected declines in the Middle East and Asia due to continued strict lockdowns and travel restrictions in the region. These factors, together with increased investments in our network, new products, technology, compliance, and advertising, contributed to operating income and adjusted EBITDA declines of 6% and 5% respectively. Revenue and gross profit per transaction remain stable year over year as well as sequentially on a quarterly basis. As you saw in our press release, The money transfer results also included a $38.6 million contract asset impairment due in large part to COVID-19 related disruptions, which resulted in lower than expected transfer volumes on certain contracts. The drivers behind the full year results for each of the segments are largely the same as this fourth quarter. So I won't go through the full year results in detail today, but we have presented the results on the next few slides for you. With increasing optimism of travel resuming to more pre-COVID type levels, albeit somewhat delayed due to the Omicron variant, together with the investments we have made to continue to grow our physical and digital networks across the business and our new product deployments, we would expect first quarter 2022 adjusted EBITDA to be in the range of $75 to $85 million, and that year-over-year first quarter revenues will come in at double-digit growth rates, likely in the low teens range. Despite the lingering impacts of the Omicron variant on the first quarter results, we expect travel trends to improve in the remaining three quarters, and we remain optimistic in our view that our full-year earnings will be similar to those of 2019, fully recognizing that we still do not expect a full recovery of our most profitable cross-currency transactions in 2022. But it's likely, it's looking more likely that we might see a full recovery in 2023. I can't wait for that to happen, And I'm sure most of you have similar thoughts. As I draw my comments to a close, I think it's worth noting that these strong double-digit growth rates we achieved for the full year are considerably better than we expected when we started the year. And we are excited to anticipate delivering stronger growth rates as the world returns to a new normal. With that, I'll hand it back to Mike to wrap up the quarter on slide 25. Thanks, Rick.
spk04: I think there are a lot of highlights and information on these slides, so let me summarize a few of the key takeaways as I see them. First of all... All industry data, and more of this comes out every day for you to read on the Internet, point to a significantly better travel season across the world, which gives us confidence in our view that our EFT segment earnings results will again significantly contribute to our consolidated earnings growth. Let's remember, EFT did roughly $370 million in EBITDA in 2019, dropped to only $39 million in 2020, jumped back up last year to $90 million in 2021, with really only four and a half months of real possibility for travel last year. That's a $50 million swing in a year, so you can easily see the leverage that we have in this business as travel resumes. ePay and money transfer both continue to grow at strong rates. Both of these divisions have had an extraordinary growth over the last two years, and we have doubled down to invest more in personnel and programs to continue strong double-digit growth in the future. Consumer digital plus Dandelion is 9% of our total money transfer revenue and is growing at exceptionally strong double-digit growth rates. We are still on track to deliver connections for the B2B portion of this project that will connect our customers and their customers to more than 80% of the world's GDP by the end of the first quarter 2022. Our red technology is really gaining steam, and in the fourth quarter, we signed contracts Actually, it was third and fourth quarter. We signed 21 new agreements worth $78 million in revenue over the next six years. Demand for RFPs, proofs of concept have just about overwhelmed our staff, and we're adding capacity to sell more and deliver more deals more quickly. I cannot promise, but I am optimistic that 2022's rent sales will be at least two times that of 2021. So, while COVID caused a reduction to our historically strong double-digit growth rate trajectory, it did not diminish the value that our business, employees, and products and technologies have added to the payments world. And we expect that 2022 will be the year where we get back on the rails of those double-digit growth rates. With that, I will be happy to take questions. Operator, will you please assist?
spk01: Ladies and gentlemen, if you have a question or comment at this time, please press star then 1 on your telephone keypad. If your question has been answered or you wish to remove yourself from the queue, simply press the pound key. Again, if you have a question or comment at this time, please press star then 1 on your telephone keypad. Our first question or comment comes from the line of Andrew Schmidt from Citi. Your line is open.
spk05: Hey, Mike, Rick, Kevin. Thanks for taking my questions here. I appreciate all the detail on the technology and the agility. It's all good stuff. I want to start off on the EFT segment. Could you talk about your assumptions for the recovery in high-value international transactions in that segment and how it might have changed from what you outlined in the third quarter? Just curious, the level of recovery in the high-value portion of those transactions to get to that $7 number. from 2019. Thanks.
spk08: Yeah, our thinking hasn't changed, albeit we have seen a little bit of backdraft because of Omicron. But if it weren't for really, I would call it the enthusiasm that we're seeing across the travel industry, it could have led us to a more conservative kind of view. But with the enthusiasm we've been seeing out there, I'm going to say which is largely supported by the fact that the Omicron variant is proving to be less worrisome, less impactful on health, and therefore, I think, causing people to be more resilient and more interested in getting out. And I think people are just quite frankly tiring. Our assumption back then is that we would see that the international travel will resume to about, let's call it an 80% to 90% of 19 levels kind of trajectory, and that our high-value transactions would be somewhat north of 70%, but kind of in that ballpark. And so if we see that we get a much more robust recovery than that, obviously that would be very beneficial. And I would tell you, look, a few months ago I would read some things after Omicron came out that just kind of didn't settle well with me, thinking, oh, crap, here we go again. But as we've washed through this wave, we've really, I think, started seeing that there is – such a more significant level of optimism of getting back and starting to travel. In fact, Mike even shared with me this morning a discussion he had with a friend of his who has recently been trying to book a trip to go to Europe this summer. And the agent said, you know, look, things are getting tight. You might want to think about booking in 23. I mean, that's great news for our business. So, again, we're kind of thinking total in that 80 to 90, the high value, something north of 70. But that's kind of where we're shaking out right now, Andrew.
spk04: And just that one point I need to make here is that, The EU has come out and told all their member states that they don't think lockdowns help curtail the spread of this pandemic. So when you come to that conclusion, all of a sudden, all that friction, which is what's been the challenge to get people to go back out, all that friction starts to disappear. So that's what's exciting.
spk05: Yeah, that's great to hear, and that's consistent with the trends that we see as well. I appreciate that commentary. Just as a follow-up before I hop back in the queue, on the money transfer margins, down on an EBITDA basis from a margin perspective in 2021, it seems like a combination of comparisons, mix, and then investments. Just trying to get your thoughts on 2022, What are the factors we should think about in the margin directory there? Thanks.
spk04: Well, I'll let maybe Rick talk about margins in specific, but the general thought here is our two largest areas where over 70% of our money comes from is Europe and North America. and you saw that those transactions are way up, you know, continued strong growth. We're getting whacked in the Middle East and in Asia, and that kind of pulls us down. But when we were watching these huge growth rates, you know, well over 15% in those two areas, we said, let's kind of double down here. Let's expand to more digital apps in more countries. Let's make some investments. We've done so, and that's really, you know, whacked our margins significantly. here on the outset. So what we hope is that as our revenues continue to grow this year, we'll grow more into the margins that we've seen in the past. But it is going to be in the first quarter and probably not in the second quarter. Would that be right?
spk08: Yeah, I think that's well said, Mike. You know, I would just add on to that that, you know, unfortunately we've seen more pressure out of the Middle East and Asia than we've kind of – really than we've seen in the rest of the world. For – all practical purposes, we've really only seen what I would call the virus impact in our domestic business, again, kind of localized, if you will, and then also in the Middle East, Asia. And as we said, we had 26% backdraft on that. And even if that decline just slows as opposed to continues, which you know, at least the signs are out there that it would, then, as Mike said, it'll kind of keep us from maybe getting that rebound recovery in the first and second, but we expect to enjoy more of that benefit coming in the third or fourth.
spk05: Got it. Thank you very much, guys. Appreciate the comments. Okay.
spk01: Thank you. Our next question or comment comes from the line of Peter Heckman from D.A. Davidson & Company. Your line is open.
spk06: Hey everyone, this is John on for Pete. In prepaid, what was the background for the loss of the key customer? He generated approximately 5 million annual operating profits. And what was the competitive takeaway or was that a customer required or something else? Do you guys think that prepaid can grow at double digits in 2022?
spk08: Yeah, you know, I'll jump in here and comment real quickly and then ask if Kevin has anything else to offer here. But this was just an in-house versus purchasing from outside decision. As you can appreciate, the volumes that we were doing were admirable. They were, you know, we were very happy with that. But, you know, at the end of the day, it was just simply a cost kind of a decision that they made to bring it in-house. And so on one hand, it's bad that you lose it. On the second hand, it's great that you know that you can drive and grow a customer's business to where you're that meaningful for them. And so it was just simply in-house versus outsourcing, if you will. So So, Kevin, if you have anything else you'd like to offer, jump in.
spk02: No, no, that's right. And then with regard to the expectation, I think Mike and Rick both articulated that we're shooting for low double-digit growth through 2022. Got it.
spk06: Got it. Thank you. Yeah, and I know that management anticipates, you know, double-digit growth in money transfer in 2022. And how do you guys think we should think about the relative growth rates between digital and agent-based transfers as well as a contribution from Dandelions?
spk04: Okay, so Dandelion, you remember that was kind of a little mix of apples and oranges there. You saw that we had huge growth in our digital business this year. We expect that to continue. We ended up with around 50% growth for the year in our digital business, and Dandelion will be a piece of that as we go out there and sell this to more and more fintechs like we have been doing in the past. So we'll see that start to contribute. We really believe that once we get through Q1 and we've got 80% of the world's GDP connected to us with those countries, Then we've got kind of a full product to sell. Right now we've got a few early adopters, and that's great. But by the end of Q1, we'll really have kind of more of a full product to sell, and we should see those contributions. When it comes actually to the margins of do you make more money on a physical transaction versus a digital transaction, I would say that a lot of people – this is a great way to lie. You can kind of bake these numbers any way you want. The reality is because I don't have an agent to pay on a digital transaction, the gross profit per transaction seems to be greater right off the top. But that leaves out the fact that when you do digital, you've got to market digital. and you've got to consider what it costs you to acquire those customers. So I would tell you that at the end of the day, the digital transactions that we do have a better margin than our physical ones, but not a way, way better margin.
spk08: Well, and what I'd also tell you is to not get yourself preoccupied with margins. Worry about how much money you drop in your bank account. Profits, okay? So while I could mathematically produce a better margin on a digital transaction, I may not make as much money. And as you know, we're in the business of making money. So I think what we'll continue to see is an outsized growth of our consumer digital product here. As we said, it makes up about 9% of our business, with a fraction of that being the dandelion. We said that it grew 35% on a year-over-year basis here in the fourth quarter. On the revenue side, even better on transaction side, And we would expect that kind of growth rates to continue. And if we really start hitting our stride on Dandelion, it could give us some, you know, yet even better opportunity there. So I think we'll continue to see some very nice growth, nice hyper growth out of our digital consumer channel. And, again, looking very forward to the contributions from Dandelion as it kind of comes into its, you know, kind of first phase of maturity.
spk06: That's great, Cutler. Thank you so much.
spk01: Thank you. Our next question or comment comes from the line of Darren Peller from Wolf Research. Your line is open.
spk07: Hey, thanks, guys. I want to hone in on EFT for one more minute. When we look at the run rate, it was trending off of about 80, mid-80% of 2019 levels per And when you look at the underlying $7 in EPS for 22, are you assuming that that rate generally holds? I know you're talking about reopening, but that Omicron offset, some of it. Really, the big question would just be if you can give us a sense of what you're incorporating for travel into the 22 numbers and maybe remind us, if you don't mind, the earning sensitivity. So if we go back from the 80-ish percent rate or 60 to 70 percent rate we're at now up to 100 percent and 120 percent, you know, what kind of step function would you expect to see in earnings per share?
spk08: Well, let's see. What I would tell you we're kind of seeing right now, especially on our high-value transactions, we wouldn't be quite at the 60% range there. We're probably closer to a 50% range, and we're a little higher on other international, but we don't make the kind of profit on just call it a plain old interchange transaction as what we do on a DCC type of a transaction there. So So maybe what we're seeing in the business is just a little bit inside, but let's call it directionally correct with what you're talking about. And as Andrew Schmidt asked earlier what our assumptions were for 22, you know, we're expecting those high-value transactions, you know, to come up and run just north of 70%. But that's kind of on an average for the year. So, you know, given that we're a little less than that right now, we would expect that would be ramping up a little bit more. But also keep in mind that we get a significant volume of our cross-border transactions in the second and third quarters. To give you kind of a general perspective, we get about 10% of our high-value transactions in the first quarter. We get about 43% to 45% in the third quarter of and then that balance is split between second and fourth with a bigger bias towards second. So we start seeing that stride kind of develop in the second quarter and really coming in the third. So just a few percentage differences on what we see peak out in the third quarter can be dramatically different. With respect to the leverage of that, you know, I could go through lots of different math, but I think it's easiest to see in kind of what Mike said earlier. You know, when our volumes are increasing, you know, we expanded our business on a year-over-year basis in the, you know, $50 million, $60 million kind of dollar range. So... So there's incredible leverage. Even the delta difference between taking a look at our EBITDA number in terms of 2019, what we generated in EFT, and you kind of compare it to, I'll just say, some of the street average numbers out there, you'll still see that there is a very big delta difference in that EBITDA number. You know, I mean, in the ballpark of approaching, you know, $80, $100 million. It's substantial. So that's really what you see is the leverage from these high-value transactions coming through.
spk04: And that $50 million... differential that we just talked about between last year and this year, in 20, those markets were open for about two and a half months. This year for four and a half months. One extra two months bought us 50 million bucks. So that just shows you a huge amount of leverage on that.
spk07: All right. That's helpful. And then just one quick follow-up. I know, you know, Mike, you've always talked quite a bit about the focus on profitability over revenue in the business. You know, when I look at the margins of some of your growthiest parts of your business that we see, and let's focus on ePay for a minute since Kevin's on also, I mean, it still comes in at a relatively lower margin that I'd like to see for a very good operating leverage scale opportunity. So can you talk through that? I mean, it's going to be an area.
spk04: Oh, yeah, yeah. Let's not. Okay, so let's not forget. We'll let this be the last question, operator. Let's not forget ePay is a distributor of digital content around the world. we have to split the commission, the revenue that we make with our partners, either physical or digital. So on average, we give away 80% of every revenue dollar in ePay. So this idea that our margins can accelerate to teens or 20 or whatever is impossible because if we had no cost at all with an ePay, I'd have a 20% margin. So what you really have to, and EBITDA margin, what you have to really do is look at the operating margin. Operating margin in that business is probably 60-plus percent. And it is the most crushingly good margins that we have in the entire business. So you've got to remember the kind of business it is. We have three different businesses that have three different econometric models, and you've got to factor that in.
spk08: I just would add to that, as I would like it to be 60, it's more like 50, Mike, but that's okay. But if you look back to the last couple of years, and if you would take our either EBITDA margins or operating margins of the ePay segment and divide them into gross profit rather than into revenue, what you would see is about 50%. And, you know, I mean, it's, I think, arguable. Anyone would accept that 50% margins in a business are absolutely brilliant, right? But that's because we give 80% of it to the retailer. So if we didn't account for it on what I'll call it a gross commission basis, you would see that number much, much better. And, you know, I mean, at the end of the day, that's really what you saw as the leverage that came through in 2021 on the ePay business. is that as we grew that business, it gave us very nice operating income leverage expansions through the year. Now, we're being more conservative on what that number is going to be as we go forward, but I would also really ask you to think about ePay in a world of being a deposit processor, a digital economy enabler. Because what we're doing is we're allowing people to put money into an account that they can use to buy digital commerce, whether that's music or video or it's even physical good like Amazon or Google. Uber Eats kind of stuff. I mean, this is all what I'll call digital economy purchases, and that's really where you've been seeing the momentum of our business grow is in this, I'll call it, digital economy facilitation process. And we're starting to see the lines, if you will, blur a little bit between our ePay kind of business and our EFT kind of business, where it's payment processing. And So I think that there's incredibly more margin out there to go after, more opportunity. We're going into more countries. We're getting more products. So I think we'll continue to have a very good business there, but I would look at that margin maybe slightly different than the way the, let's just call it the basic top and bottom of GAAP produces a number.
spk04: All right. Thank you very much for that question. With that, operator, I think we're a little bit over time here, so I'll close these questions. I look forward to talking to you in about 90 days. Hopefully we'll be seeing the end of this Omicron thing by then, and we'll have some good news. So talk to you all later, and thank you very much.
spk01: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for participating in today's conference. This concludes the program. You may now disconnect. Everyone, have a wonderful day.
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