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spk01: Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Euronet's worldwide third quarter 2022 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in the 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 1-1 on your telephone keypad. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Scott Clausen, General Counsel. Sir, please begin.
spk05: Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to URNS Quarterly Results Conference Call for our third quarter 2022. On this call, we have Mike Brown, our chairman and CEO, and Rick Weller, our CFO. Before we begin, I need to call your attention to the forward-looking statements disclaimer on the second slide of the PowerPoint presentation we'll be making today. Statements made on this call that concern Uranet 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. Except as may be required by law, Uranet does not intend to update these forward-looking statements and undertakes no duty to any person to provide any updates. 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 we'll turn the call over to our CFO, Rick Weller.
spk11: Thank you, Scott, and thank you to everyone who's joining us this morning. I will begin my comments on slide five. On a consolidated basis, we produced revenue of $931 million, operating income of $168 million, and adjusted EBITDA of $212 million. We delivered adjusted EPS of $2.74, a 55% increase from $1.77 in the third quarter of last year. These strong double-digit improvements in all metrics were driven by double-digit constant currency growth from all three segments, including a strong rebound in domestic and international cash withdrawal transactions in the EFT segment, as the strong demand for travel continued following the lifting of COVID restrictions across the globe. Next slide, please. Slide six. presents our balance sheet compared to the prior quarter. As you can see, we ended the quarter with $967 million in unrestricted cash and $1.7 billion in debt. The decrease in cash is largely from the repayment of debt and the impact of foreign currency fluctuations on cash, partially replenished by cash generated from operations of $157 million. Next slide, please. And slide seven now. Here we present our results on an as-reported basis for the quarter. I'd like to point out that since we last spoke to you in July, we continue to see a strengthening of the U.S. dollar against most of the significant currencies where we do business. Similar to last quarter, many of the currencies in our most significant markets declined in the 10% to 20% range versus the U.S. dollar compared to the prior year. To normalize the impact of these currency fluctuations, we have presented our results on a constant currency basis on the next slide. Slide 8. The strong improvements in EFT revenue, operating income, and adjusted EBITDA were the result of increased domestic and international withdrawal transactions driven by improving trends from the easing of COVID restrictions across the globe, together with the addition of good performance from the acquisition of the Piraeus Bank merchant acquiring business in March of this year. On a year-over-year basis, revenue and gross profit per transaction also expanded as a result of improving international transactions, which generate more revenue per transaction than domestic transactions. ePay revenue grew 18%, operating income grew 29%, and adjusted EBITDA grew 24%, driven by continued expansion in mobile and digital branded payments, together with continued growth of the digital distribution channels. Also included in these third quarter results is a significant benefit from the loyalty reward programs offered by certain large retailers, which were recognized in the third quarter of this year, while similar programs were largely recognized in the earlier quarters of 2021. Revenue and gross profit per transaction were consistent on a year-over-year basis. Money transfer revenue, operating income, and adjusted EBITDA grew 11%, 23%, and 29%, respectively. This growth was the result of 14% growth in U.S. outbound transactions, 12% growth in international-oriented originated money transfers, and of which transfers initiated largely in Europe grew 10% and transfers initiated in the Middle East and Asia grew 23%. In addition to these impressive growth rates, XE transactions grew 21%, partially offset by a 13% decline in the U.S. domestic business. These growth rates include 40% growth in the direct-to-consumer digital transactions. Revenue and gross profit per transaction, as well as our average send amounts, were largely consistent on a year-over-year basis. And, as you can see across all segments, this third quarter posted margin expansion both year-over-year and sequentially. Moreover, I'd like to note that we have not yet seen any significant pressure from inflation in revenue or gross profit in any of our segments. We have only seen moderate impacts on higher SG&A expenses, primarily salaries. We continue to be watchful about how inflation may impact our business going forward. However, to date, the business has shown great resilience in light of the current inflationary conditions. Regarding FX pressure, I mentioned earlier that we have seen currency declines in the 10% to 20% range on a year-over-year basis. For that matter, these similar declines relate to the 2019 FX rates as well. The pressure continued, certainly intensified during this quarter, with currencies weakening against the U.S. dollar anywhere from 5 to 13 percent, with some of the more significant declines coming at the end of the quarter. Despite the impact of these FX rate changes since we provided guidance in late July, we continue to expect our full year 2022 adjusted EPS to be in the $6.30 to $6.40 range given current FX rates. As I conclude my comments, I'd like to reiterate that we are extremely pleased that each of our segments produce double digit constant currency growth across revenue, operating income, and adjusted EBITDA in the third quarter. This is a true testament to the resilience of our business, driven by our geographic and product diversity, as well as our best in class technology platforms. Taking into account the full FX impact on next year's results, including the accelerated FX declines we've seen in the latter part of the third quarter, We believe that this momentum will still allow us to produce mid to upper teens earnings growth rates for the full year 2023. For perspective, if we were to apply current FX rates to our 2019 earnings, we would see that they would have been approximately 11% lower. Accordingly, Next year's earnings growth would reflect a nearly 20% earnings growth over 2019 earnings with comparable FX rates. Moreover, increases in interest rates will have another 5% to 6% impact next year compared to 2019 earnings. Accordingly, if you adjust for FX and interest rates, you can see that our underlying business is robust and continues to grow very nicely. This gives us confidence in our expectation that we can continue our long history of compounded double-digit earnings growth well into next year and beyond. With that, I'll turn it over to Mike.
spk07: Thank you, Rick, and thank you, everyone, who is joining us today. I'd like to take a minute to focus on what Rick just said. We delivered double digit constant currency growth across revenue, operating income and adjusted EBITDA in all three of our segments with killer constant currency growth where it counts in operating income and EBITDA. This is further evidence that our business is resilient and that our model works Consumers across the globe not only want to travel, but can't wait to travel. And they still want to use cash when they finally arrive at their destination. In ePay, there is growing demand for mobile and branded digital payment content. And consumers and businesses want and need to send cross-border payments. In fact, I'd like to remind you that our ePay and money transfer businesses continue to grow during COVID. So these strong double-digit results are not on top of a down period, but rather in addition to all the growth that has happened over the last two and a half years. Moreover, when we finish this year, we will expect to see ePay and money transfer both grow constant currency revenues more than 35% over 2019. Now, that's impressive. We achieved these results because we have a strong balance sheet and a geographic and product diverse business that helps us navigate economic pressures. So while we cannot control the variance of COVID, inflation, interest rates, or labor shortages in the travel and hospitality industry, we are really good at executing on the things that we can control. And over the last 25 years, our business has continued to deliver growth through various economic cycles. As we think about how the third quarter unfolded, I'll tell you that it played out in line with what we anticipated when we spoke in July. We saw very strong demand for travel, which was capped, though, by passenger restrictions and staffing issues at airports and hotels across the world. In a review of the summer travel season, the European Tourism Association found that, on average, European international arrivals were about 26% behind the pre-pandemic levels, consistent with what we had seen in the Americas and Africa, while arrivals in Asia-Pac, in the Asia-Pacific area, still lagged 2019 by approximately 72%. They also validated our data that the travel recovery across Europe was not homogeneous. For example, the travel in Greece was 2% higher than 2019 levels. But in Portugal, the travel lagged 2019 by 10%. In Spain and France, travel lagged by 25%. And in the Nordics and Eastern Europe, international arrivals lagged 2019 by closer to 40%. These are largely consistent with the recovery that we saw in the international cash withdrawals across our ATM business, validating that post-COVID people still want and need cash when they travel. When looking forward, we have certainly seen mixed travel projections for 2023. Eurocontrol recently published a report stating that they now expect 2023 travel recovery rates to be around 92% of 2019 levels. The European Tourism Association was more bullish, stating that they still see pent-up demand for travel spilling over into 2023 due to unused travel credits from 2020, especially from the North American markets, and they believe that the stars are aligning for Europe to have a very strong travel season in 2023. We could all debate what next year might look like, and we'll all likely be wrong. What I will tell you is that even if we only get 92% of 2019 travel levels, that is still nearly a 25% improvement from last year. I remain bullish on the growth potential for Uranet because, number one, we believe that we continue to see improvement in the global travel trends. We have plans to expand our ATM estate to a half a dozen new markets. We will continue to introduce new products in ePay. We continue to expand our best-in-class money transfer network, and we have significant opportunities in the pipeline for both our red and dandelion products. Now let me give you some more details so you can really see why, starting with our EFT segment on the next slide. If you don't mind, please move to slide number 11. Here you can see that we continue to expand our EFT business. This quarter we launched a new independent ATM network in Estonia, making access to cash more convenient for travelers and locals. We continue to our expansion outside of Europe with the acquisition of 500 non-branch ATMs from the Bank of the Philippine Islands. These 500 ATMs position us as a catalyst of ATM consolidation with our superior technology, operational services, and extended presence globally. This is another important step in our growth strategy and further diversifies our ATM network outside of Europe. In Spain, we signed a network participation agreement with Mendelian Bank in Spain. This is the 15th network participation agreement in that country covering 73 banks across the country. Our U.S.-based Dolphin team signed outsourcing agreements with 15 credit unions in the U.S. and on U.S. military bases in Germany. And our merchant services business in Greece continues to grow. This quarter, we signed a reselling agreement with EpsilonNet, a leading software company in Greece, covering more than 100,000 small to medium-sized businesses. We also added approximately 3,000 new merchants, including a large supermarket chain that you've heard of, Carrefour, together with McDonald's, Odeon Cinnamon, and Heron Energy in Greece. Outside of Greece, we were able to add 770 new merchants through our Innova tax-free and pure commerce relationships. Finally, we continued to add more ATMs to our portfolio. During the quarter, we added 529 Urinet-owned ATMs, bringing our total to more than 1,800 ATMs installed so far this year. We also added 164 new outsourcing machines, and we seasonally deactivated 936 machines as the travel season began to wind down. As we mentioned to you last quarter, we are facing some challenges in the ATM supply chain, which has slowed down some of our ATM expansion, but we are working with new ATM manufacturers and expect that we can continue to add more ATMs next year as travel continues to recover. To sum it up, in EFT, I hear four questions frequently. The first one, When travelers go to new places, do they still need and have use of cash? And the answer is yes. Number two, do you expect 2023 to bring 2019 volume? Well, I guess from everything we see, not quite, but probably close to maybe 92 to 95% of 19. Remember, even hitting that number could result in a 25% growth in EFT's travel-related transactions for 2023. How much is the Ukraine war hurting our business? Well, we have seen some pockets where the impacts are significant in certain markets. The impact to our overall business has not been significant. We believe that the number of Central European travelers will still be muted in 2023, but we saw a late recovery of other key markets, such as Germany, making us more optimistic for next year. Number four, has inflation infected your EFT volumes? We have seen no evidence so far, but we are keeping a watchful eye on it. We continue to be pleased with the rebound in our EFT business. As you can see, we continue to diversify our EFT product portfolio with new products and new markets, which we expect to continue to pay off as more normal travel patterns resume. Now let's go on to slide number 12, and we'll talk about ePay. I am particularly excited about this quarter's EPA results. During the first half of the year, we saw lighter than expected results as certain of our large customers deferred their loyalty reward promotions to the third quarter. You can see that in these results that those campaigns came home and support our confidence that EPA can produce strong growth rates for the full year. Further boosting our confidence in our EPA business are the new agreements you can see on this slide. that continue to expand our mobile and branded digital payment offering. During the quarter, we launched T-Mobile activation program here in the U.S. in the independent dealer channel. You may remember during the last call, we mentioned that we had launched Apple's new gift card across 15 markets. As a reminder, this is an everything Apple gift card, which can be used for hardware products, apps, accessories, games, and much, much more. The launch has been well received across Europe, and we believe this supports ePay's continued growth outlook. We also launched Disney Plus physical and digital gift cards across Germany and Austria. In addition to the physical distribution, we continue to expand our digital distribution portfolio. During the quarter, we further expanded our relationship with Apple by launching Apple Content on Flipkart, a large mobile wallet in India. And we launched mobile top-up on FanPay, a neobank app for teenagers in India. Finally, we continue to sign new agreements that we expect will deliver results in the coming year. So now let's go on to slide number 20, pardon me, slide number 13 and talk about money transfer. Our network now reaches 509,000 locations. surpassing the size of our physical network before we shut down more than 20,000 locations earlier this year in Russia, Belarus, and Tajikistan. In addition to the half million physical locations, we now have 454 million wallet accounts and can reach more than 3.6 billion bank accounts across 188 countries and territories. Importantly, Our account deposit network continues to gain the trust and adoption of our customers. We saw accelerated trains in the account deposit with transaction growth of 28% during the quarter and the principal transferred amount to accounts reaching 34% of our total international outbound volume. These figures demonstrate the importance of building the right network with the right products for today's customer preference. During the quarter, we launched 14 new correspondence in 12 countries, including cash pickup service at Islamic Bank of Afghanistan, our first partner in that country. We also launched cash pickup at IFIC Bank in Bangladesh and Wifec Bank in Tunisia that will provide full coverage for bank deposit services for consumer payments and remittances and corporate payments. We also signed an agreement with Travelex in the UK to add REIA money transfer in over 200 locations across the country. Just as we have grown our physical network to the second largest in the world, we also continue to rapidly expand our digital network. During the quarter, our direct-to-consumer digital transactions grew by 40%. accelerating from 37% growth in the second quarter of this year. And we continue to add new offerings that we believe will allow us to maintain this growth. This quarter, we launched our digital money transfer offering, the RIA Money Transfer App, in two new countries, Portugal and Switzerland. We expanded our wallet network by adding service to five new digital wallets in Benin, the Ivory Coast, Liberia, Cambodia, and Pakistan. And we added wallet functionality to our digital product in Malaysia, allowing customers to send funds directly to their mobile wallet. Finally, we signed a bulk payment service agreement for Bang Reserva in the Dominican Republic, and we added corporate payments in 12 new countries. We are pleased that our money transfer business produced strong double-digit constant currency growth rates in the quarter. And with all of the activity on this page, we expect these growth rates to continue into 2023. Now let's move on to slide number 14 and talk about our technology products, starting with Dandelion. Slide 14. Our Dandelion network continues to grow. Our real-time payments network connects to bank accounts in 103 countries and territories, and we can now land corporate payments in 118 countries. countries and territories. This expansion has not only resulted in a 44% year-over-year revenue growth, but it is getting the attention of potential partners. Our pipeline of bank prospects is now up to 70 banks. About half of these are global or regional banks, including 15 of the top 50 banks in the world. Another 20 represent national banks, and the remainder are still evenly split between local banks and neobanks. We believe our dandelion value proposition is attractive to banks compared with the legacy SWIFT and correspondent banking rails due to its speed, transparency, and predictability of the payment together with the access to alternative payment channels, including mobile wallets and cash. In addition to traditional banks, the team has continued to explore partnerships with national and regional switches. These switches are beginning to seek bilateral agreements with other national switches, but struggle with the lack of interoperability, governance, and variant technologies, among other things. Dandelion can be a one-stop shop to service cross-border payments for all of their bank members. Finally, our pipeline also includes non-bank prospects. Right now, we are working with 55 non-bank prospects across various msbs fintech payments and payroll companies this is a very significant sales pipeline and while these agreements take a little longer to negotiate and sign we are confident that these customers understand the value of band alliance uh what that it what it can bring to their businesses and we anticipate that we will have some exciting announcements in the coming quarters and let's not forget where we are in the life cycle of this new endeavor. In 2019 through 22, we repurposed our C2C family remittance product to be able to handle B2B payments, which require much more sophisticated compliance, regulation, and licensing. This, by the way, is a never-ending task. While we were already producing revenues and healthy growth, in October 2021, we announced this product to the market to enhance our sales leads, sharing that we would be ready for prime time in Q2 of this year. In March of 2022, we were ready with 81 countries in real time. So, to have so many leads in process at this early stage confirms our belief that we are quickly being known as the modern generation of B2B real-time cross-border payments. Now let's go on to slide number 15, and I'll give you an update on REN. Slide 15. This slide highlights our continued momentum in selling our REN platform across the globe. On the heels of our successful implementation of REN in Mozambique, I am very pleased to announce that we have signed an agreement with the African Electronic Trade Group, called AE Trades, to develop a new pan-African payments cross-border switch using our REN payments platform. The switch will serve as the financial foundation for an initial 44 of the 54 possible countries in the African Continental Free Trade Area that connects a population of about 1.4 billion people. Utilizing Uranet's REN payments technology, the switch will enable central banks regional processors, financial institutions, and small and medium-sized enterprises to easily make transactions with each other in real time and bring new banking benefits and capabilities to African citizens. So, yes, you heard that right. Uranet's RAN platform is going to be the real-time cross-border payment switch across Africa. This is a tremendous win for our RAN team, and we look forward to updating you on our progress in the coming quarters. In the Philippines, we signed an agreement with Advanced Intelligent Group to provide issuer processing services for another new digital bank. Euronet will be deploying its REN Foundation to support card lifecycle management, transaction switching, card scheme connections, among other services. This is our second digital banking deal in the Philippines, following our successful launch with Union Digital Bank earlier this year. These digital banks just love our tech stack. In India, we signed an agreement with Axis Bank, the largest private sector bank, to provide them with prepaid processing, including lifecycle management and interchange processing for domestic and foreign cards from Uranet's private cloud. This bank is among the leading prepaid issuers in the country. They have a large card base. and transacting customers, which will be migrated to our prepaid platform as part of the program. This win signifies our graduation into the large bank category, beating competition from major global players in the space, and validates our platform's capabilities to handle large volumes, many complexities, and multiple levels of regulation. As you can see, our pipeline for REN continues to strengthen as entities around the world are beginning to see the benefit of our scalable and flexible technology. We have now signed agreements which we expect to contribute $125 million in revenues over the next six years, and we look forward to even more good news in the fourth quarter. Now let's go to slide number 16, and we'll wrap up the quarter. Ladies and gentlemen, as I reflect on this quarter, And more broadly, on the diversity of our business, I'd say that by any measure, when you have all three segments producing constant currency double-digit growth rates, it's an outstanding quarter and consistent with what I've been telling you the business has the capabilities to do. And while I am extremely proud of these results, I'd be remiss not to remind you of our history. Our businesses have all consistently produced strong growth rates through all sorts of economic cycles and weird economic events. Over the last couple of years, two of the three segments produced growth during COVID, and we have endured recessions and even unusual events like countries demonetizing their currency. And as they say, history oftentimes is a good predictor for the future. And while we don't discount the real impacts of inflation and potential recession in the economy, we are confident that our products are in demand. We believe that the diversity of our products and our geographies, together with our market expansion plans for EFT, our new product and channel deployment plans in ePay, and our network expansion and money transfer, will enable us to continue to grow as we always have. We delivered a great third quarter, and I'm really excited about our prospects for next year. With that, we would be happy to take questions. Operator, will you please assist?
spk01: Yes, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, if you have a question or comment at this time, please press star 11 on your telephone keypad. Again, if you have a question or comment at this time, please press star 11 on your telephone keypad. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Our first question or comment comes from the line of Andrew Schmidt from Citi. Your line is open.
spk08: Hey, Mike and Rick. Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions here. Jerry, I want to start off just a quick confirmation in terms of the 2023 outlook or early outlook. I just want to confirm you said mid to upper teens adjusted EPS growth. And then if that is correct, maybe you could talk about some of the key variables that are assumed in that, particularly, you know, your assumption as it relates to high value ATM transaction recovery. I know, Mike, you said, you know, 92% plus. But I wasn't sure if that was travel or high value transaction recovery. I'll leave it there, guys. Thanks a lot.
spk11: Okay. I think there's probably three of the big ones in there. On the travel recovery, as Mike said, you know, some new information has come out. So our expectation is that that'll be kind of in that low 90s range, that 90 to 92% kind of range there. If we see a more robust travel next year, it'll just be that much more beneficial to us, but in that low 90s number. That's on the international travel there because those are the real rich value transactions. The second important part in the math is the FX rates. We've not tried to outthink what will happen in the future. We just use what's there today. As you can see, unfortunately, the Euro is trading sub-value to par on the dollar. The pound is at about 110, 111. And again, if you take a look at those numbers back to 2019, those are fairly compressed. But we've assumed the current FX rate numbers. The other piece that moves the map is interest rates. We've kind of read the signals from the Fed. We've got another 125 basis points in our numbers, even following this most recent lift. So we'll kind of see how that shakes out. You know, maybe we won't see as much in the next two bumps, but we've assumed a 75-bit bump in December and November, I guess, in November, and then another 50-bit bump in January.
spk08: Got it. Thank you for that. And just quickly, maybe to talk about just how the high-value transaction trended as the third quarter progressed. I know I think you were targeting, you know, the revised target was mid to upper 60s. Just curious if there's any update to that. And just kind of where we're trending relative to that.
spk07: Yeah. Andrew, we pretty much hit that on the nail on the head, you know, something between 68% and 70%, which is about – I think it was 68%. I think that was the number we might have even used on the last call where it was trending. We saw significant – compression in the number of travelers coming from England, which is our single largest source of international cross-border transactions. Those numbers were down quite a bit. You can read that in all the travel stuff. We compared the exits out of the London airports compared to prior year, and they were down I think it was 28%, is that right? Yeah, they're down 28% from prior year. So if the Brits start traveling again next year, that would be very lucrative for us.
spk11: And, you know, what I would just follow with is, as Mike said, look, the predictability of this is, you know, probably anyone's guess as to what the exact number is. But as we've taken a look at our ATM transactions, And we've looked at the flight data. And we've looked at this across multiple countries where there's, you know, varying degrees of flights leaving and different landing rates in different countries. We've seen a nice correlation between those. So it gives us the confidence and continues to see. We've seen this, you know, really, you know, kind of almost since the pandemic has started to recover, if you will. is that there's good correlation between our ATM international cash withdrawals and those flights. So we believe strongly that if the flights are moving, if the people are moving, our transactions will follow.
spk07: Thank you very much, guys. Thank you. Yeah, thank you, Andrew. Next question, operator?
spk01: Yes, thank you. Stand by. Our next question or comment comes from the line of Andrew Jeffrey from Truist. Mr. Jeffrey, your line is open.
spk10: Hey, guys. Good morning.
spk01: I think that was my name.
spk10: Anyway, appreciate the color, Mike, in terms of what you're seeing in international travel and demand for cash and ATMs. One of the questions we're starting to get more and more with the emergence of tap and pay and generally the use of cards in Europe is kind of how you sustain growth and whether you worry about an accelerated shift to electronic payments from cash. I know you're expanding into new markets, which is going to be really helpful, but could you just sort of help us with an overview of how you think about the relevance of the ATM business broadly over time?
spk07: Well, listen, there will continue to be, more and more kind of non-cash or tap and pay kind of alternatives as time goes on in the more advanced countries, so places like Europe, okay? And we recognize that, but we also recognize that most people are using cards for most everything they travel with right now, whether they tap it or they swipe it or they insert it. So we do expect some pressure due to this, However, there's countervailing pressures as well. One is for the little bit of cash that you may need on vacation, you know, to tip the bellboy or to buy a beer or something like that, the places you can get this cash from are dwindling because the European banks are closing branches like crazy. I mean, they're closing somewhere between 8% and 10% of the branches per year every single year. So if you're an international tourist and you're in a new country, you're going to get your little bit of cash that you use from the first ATM you kind of trip over when you're on vacation, okay? And with more and more branches closing, there's a higher likelihood they'll trip over my ATM versus a bank's ATM. So those are the countervailing, you know, they kind of are fighting each other in Europe. But now let's look at the rest of the world. The rest of the world is still cash-based. And the new markets that we're going into, Egypt, the Philippines, We'll be announcing probably another one or maybe two new markets next quarter. These are all very cash-based markets. Our experience there is that these ATMs are twice as profitable as our European ones anyway, because in these markets, there are very few POS terminals, much higher percentage of your vacation spend will be with cash. EFT is going to be robust for quite a while. I think we've got a very long runway with this as we expand around the world.
spk10: Okay, that helps a lot. I appreciate that color, I think, for investors too.
spk07: And I don't disagree with these people who say that. I'm not putting my head in the sand. There will be non-cash alternatives, but we see time and time again all our data points to A little bit of cash is used on somebody's vacation, and the new markets we're going into are extremely lucrative.
spk10: Yeah. I mean, I know I always use cash when I'm on vacation, avoids the uncomfortable interaction with a taxi driver whose language I don't speak, whatever the case may be. Money transfer, you're doing great, obviously, globally. U.S., and again, I appreciate the quantification of the drag on the U.S. business. Anything you can do about that? Any reason you think that abates? Or is this a structural drag on your money transfer growth?
spk07: No, I think if you look at our U.S. business over the last many years, we've been growing kind of double-digit in transactions in the U.S. for a long time. We do have that, still have a little bit of that drag from Walmart on the domestic money transfer business, the cash-to-cash, Walmart-to-Walmart product. But now Walmart's starting to really take off nicely with both their international outbound and specifically their single product that they call Walmart-to-Walmart Mexico product, which is done by us. It's another kind of white-labeled product of us, powered by Ria. And so that continues to garner a lot more transactions. These are transactions that would go from a Walmart here in the U.S. and be paid out in a Walmart in Mexico. So every quarter, this is a little bit less of a drag because the numbers go down on the domestic – what we lose domestically is starting to reduce. And then what we're gaining on the international outbound continues to grow.
spk10: Terrific. Appreciate it. Thank you.
spk07: But you look at the overall numbers for money transfer, they're pretty darn impressive, particularly, and that's, that's in the bricks and mortar. I mean, look what all our competitors are doing. I mean, I mean, we're not, they're not even in our ballpark, you know, And then on top of that, we've got the 40% growth in our digital transactions.
spk11: And I just also mentioned that, you know, while we would prefer to have not lost over, you know, some of the domestic, it's down to a low single-digit kind of a number here. So, you know, it's a piece of our mix, but it's not an important piece of our mix.
spk01: Perfect.
spk04: Thanks, Rick.
spk01: Thank you. Our next question or comment comes from the line of David Tuggett from Evercore. Stand by. Mr. Tuggett, your line is open.
spk09: Thanks so much. Rick, you called out an incremental 5% to 13% revenue headwind from the strengthening dollar since you gave guidance on the Q2 call in late July, and yet you've kept the 630 to 640 in EPS guidance. So what parts of your business are performing ahead of your expectation versus the guide you gave in late July?
spk11: I wouldn't call out any particular one. I think like we saw in third quarter here, we saw nice, good, even, consistent growth across our business. So I wouldn't say that it's coming from any particular one, just a good fundamental growth that we're seeing out there.
spk09: Got it. And then what's embedded in the mid to high teens EPS growth guide for 2023 in terms of the revenue and earnings outlook for each of your three businesses?
spk11: Well, we haven't, you know, we wanted to try to give the market a bit of a view on what next year was, especially, and I think it is very significant here on what has happened on FX rates and, you know, to another degree, the interest rates. And so, you know, we just wanted to try to really maybe help people understand that. We've not published what we think each of these numbers are going to be on a segment basis. but I think that our thesis continues to be the same in that we see all three of our businesses as being double-digit earnings growers, okay? I think that on the revenue side, ePay will be maybe a little bit lighter on the revenue growth, but still get us into double-digit earnings growth. Money transfer, I kind of feel that moving up into the into the lower teens kind of number, so call that 12 teen, 13, or something like that, kind of feels pretty right. And as Mike said, you know, even getting to the lower end of the 90s on the travel recovery, you know, that's a 25% improvement over those high value travel numbers of EFT. And so EFT naturally will produce very strong double digit numbers next year. So, you know, that gives you maybe a little bit of perspective on what we expect in the growth rates of those businesses. And I would say that that's consistent with what we've been saying for some time, and we've consistently seen that come home in our results there.
spk09: Got it. Just a final question. Any specific call-outs on... you know, key R&D investments in 2023 and more broadly how you're managing expenses in this environment?
spk07: Well, with respect to the R&D, I mean, we're a high-tech shop. I mean, we spend a lot of money on R&D, and that's why we've got these tech stacks that continue to win more and more business. But we don't whine about it. I mean, we don't say, oh, we're spending this much more on R&D this year just to, you know, make your future better and use that as an excuse for bad results today. We will continue to do so. And as we move forward in the, you know, with Ren and Dandelion.
spk11: Yeah, but we don't have any kind of what I'd call outsized expectations of, let's call it ramped up or incremental investments to spend for next year. You know, that's always, you know, potentially subject to change if we win a really important, significant opportunity or something like that. But I think, as Mike characterized, it's kind of business as usual.
spk04: Got it. Thank you very much. Thank you. Stand by.
spk01: Our next question or comment comes from the line of Darren Peller from Wolf Research. Mr. Peller, your line is open.
spk02: Hey, thanks, guys. Thanks for all the details you managed through all these macro headwinds. You know, when we think about 2023, the 92% travel recovery, I just want to first of all be clear that, you know, you believe you can track that now. I mean, because the headwinds you see in certain markets being in, whether it's Eastern Europe or the UK, you know, craziness or any other market, sort of idiosyncratic factors to Euronet, is that going to allow you to go back and track to the market 92%? Or are there any changes we should keep in mind on that front? And then just on the same segment for a minute, Mike, maybe just revisit the investments needed to build out this business and whether or not internationalization into Asia is going to cost more. Is the margin structure, really what I'm getting at, is the margin structure able to get back to what it used to be?
spk07: Okay, so when you look at the margin structure, that sounds like we do have some increases in some of our costs, but our margin is a direct result of less transactions. I mean, we have very lucrative transactions. When we do that next big international cross-border transaction, we're going to bring 80% to 90% of that revenue straight to the bottom line. So you can see with us only hitting, call it 68% or 70% of those transactions this year versus 19%, that's going to affect our margins considerably. So as we get closer to 100%, you're going to see the margins go up, and that just is going to happen with that flow through. And with respect to the cost of going into these new markets, we're pretty darn good. I'm losing track. We might be in. 25, 30 markets with our ATMs right now. And as we go into new markets, even in Asia, it doesn't cost us any more than what we do today. And so you won't see any big ramp up. What you will see, because those markets are very heavily cash-based, they're just much more profitable.
spk11: On a per ATM basis. And, Darren, I'd add to Mike's comments on the margins here. I mean, we take a look at now compared to 2019. I think there's really only two things that would soften our margins a bit, okay? 19 was a great year. I think in our EFT segment, we were in about the 33% operating margin range Since then, one of the things we had is we moved, shifted a little bit more to our own ATMs. We had a couple instances where some large groups of ATMs from banks were taken back in-house upon acquisition of those banks. And in those cases, while we will ultimately, well, what we essentially did is increase the number of deployed ATMs we will ultimately make more money from those, but mathematically the margin will be a little bit lighter. So I would expect that to have a little bit of a pull in on that margin. And the second thing is, as you know, in the inflation here, inflation is coming into the business. We mentioned that we've got some higher expenses there. Unfortunately, in the payments world, rarely do you have the opportunity to take prices up. We would love to be able to do that, but I don't see that there's many opportunities to increase the prices. And so we'll have to use volume to kind of grow through that. But it will make a difference on the mathematical calculation of the margin. So I would expect that that EFT margin will be a little inside of what that 33 was in 2019. All right. That's very helpful.
spk02: Just one follow-up. I'm trying to figure out the best question. There's a bunch. But, you know, first, technically speaking, Piraeus, what was that in terms of the impact on transactions or even on revenue, if you can help us? And then, Mike, if you could just quickly give us a thought on the Africa win for REN. It does sound really interesting. I don't know the timing of it or the magnitude of what it could be, if you have any sense of that.
spk07: Well, we... On all these rent deals, you really never know until you get there. We do have very nice revenues that are guaranteed based upon minimum number of transactions. Actually, Kevin's here. Do you know, Kevin Kapanek is with me, and he oversees that. Do you have anything a little bit more color, Kevin?
spk06: Yeah, so the good news, Darren, is from a technical perspective, It's very similar to the project that we did for CIMO already in Africa. So the lift in terms of a technical deployment is going to be easier than the previous projects so we can leverage what we've already delivered. Timing for it is we're starting the development as we speak. It'll be some time the first The first country will go live sometime towards the end of next year. So from a revenue and operating profit standpoint, it's kind of a 2024 play, but it has the potential to be quite meaningful because there's, as Mike said, there's a There's a minimum guarantee component, and then there's a transaction, a per-transaction component. And so if the transactions meet anywhere close to what the forecast of AE Trade is, it'll be a really nice project for us.
spk02: Thanks, guys. Just parade if you have any quick numbers.
spk11: Yeah, and on Piraeus, we added in the ballpark of $30 million of revenue in the third quarter here because of Piraeus. Piraeus, if you recall when we announced it, we said that they have about $80 to $90 million in annual revenue. And I would also just point out that Piraeus has a bit of a seasonal effect where where their third quarter, just like our ATM business, because a lot of tourists go to Greece, obviously, is better than what the other three quarters of the year is. So that gives you a perspective. But I would say in the ballpark of about a third of their revenue comes in the third quarter, and then – It's, you know, maybe in around the 20% kind of range in the first quarter and then balanced between the third and the fourth. But that gives you an idea of what was in the third quarter for Piraeus.
spk06: Thank you.
spk07: Operator, I think we're pretty close to the top of the hour, so I think I'll let Darren's question be the last question. Do we have time for one more? No, no, I'm being told we have time for one more question.
spk01: Okay, our final question will come from the line of Ken Schachowsky from Autonomous Research. Mr. Schachowsky, your line is open.
spk03: Hey, good morning, Mike and Rick. Thanks for taking the question. I wanted to ask about the outlook. It looks like EBITDA was largely in line with our expectations, but the 4Q EPS If you just do the implied math on it was maybe a little bit light. So I was just wondering if you could talk about what's driving that. It seems like there might be some kind of below the line items.
spk11: Yeah, I mean, you know, that's kind of a hard question for me to answer since I'm not the guy who drives the models that come up with what the consensus numbers are out there. What I would have to say is there's a little bit more interest expense in there. And then typically, we will have, you know, a little bit better tax rate in the fourth quarter. But it's really hard for me to give you a good answer on that because I think I would have to be familiar with the math that arrives at the consensus numbers. But, you know, at the end of the day, I don't see anything being really unusual or different out there. It might just be some math at the margin here.
spk07: And one thing we have noticed is that the people who follow us, the analysts that follow us, don't quite follow the FX as tightly as they should. And so what you find is if, you know, the dollar continues to strengthen, everybody leaves their models the way they were. But when you translate our 75% of our of our profits all come from overseas. So when you translate that back to dollars, it's certainly negatively affected when the dollar strengthens. So that's one of the things that you might keep in mind. And I would say that as just a general guide to all the analysts on the call.
spk03: Okay. All right. We'll have to do the FX model. I think if I heard you correctly, I think you guys talked about the Next year going earnings in this like mid to upper teens range. Is that a reported EPS figure? So if I run the math, I think I'm shaking out at like called 725, 760 in EPS next year. So is that how you're thinking about it? And does that earnings growth figure include any share repurchases?
spk11: We assume no share repurchases in that. And I would tell you that your calculator works in a similar fashion as mine does. So sounds like you're pretty close.
spk03: Okay. All right. Thanks a lot. Appreciate it.
spk07: All right. And with that, I think we'll end today. Thank you, everyone, for joining. Do appreciate your time.
spk01: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for participating in today's conference. This concludes the program. You may now disconnect, connect, Everyone have a wonderful day. Bye.
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