International Money Express, Inc.

Good day and welcome to the International Money Express conference call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press the star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press the star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Alex Sadowski, Investor Relations Coordinator. Please go ahead, sir.

Good morning, and welcome to our quarterly earnings call. I would like to remind everyone that today's call includes forward-looking statements, including our 2024 guidance, and actual results may differ materially from expectations. For additional information on International Money Express, which we refer to as Intermex or the company, please see our SEC filings, including the risk factors described therein. All forward-looking statements on this call are based on assumptions and beliefs as of today. You should not rely on our forward-looking statements as predictions of future events. Please refer to slide two of our presentation for a description of certain forward-looking statements. The company undertakes no obligation to update such information except as required by applicable law. On this conference call, we discussed certain non-GAAP financial measures. Information required by Regulation G under the Securities and Exchange Act for such non-GAAP financial measures is included in the presentation slides our earnings press release, and our annual report on Form 10-K, including reconciliation of certain non-GAAP financial measures to the appropriate GAAP measures. These can be obtained in the investor section of our website at intermexonline.com. Presenting on today's call is our Chairman, Chief Executive Officer, and President, Bob Lissy, and Chief Financial Officer, Andrus Bendy. Also on the call today, are Chris Hunt, Chief Operating Officer, Joseph Aguilar, President, Latin America, Randy Nelson, EVP of Retail Sales, Marcelo Theodoro, Chief Digital Officer, Beth Erickson, Chief Human Resources Officer, Andrew Kube, EVP, Finance and Business Intelligence, and Karim Baroni, Director of Financial Analysis. Let me now turn the call over to Bob. Good morning.

Intermex is proud to announce fourth quarter earnings that are a testament to who we are as a company. On page three, you can see that in the quarter we delivered revenue of just under $172 million, up 11.2% year over year, and diluted GAAP EPS of 49 cents, up 40% year over year. Furthermore, adjusted ETA was up 14.5% to $33.3 million, and adjusted diluted EPS up 21.7% to $0.56. We continue to deliver solid earnings and cash generation for our shareholders in every environment, and our fourth quarter results fully demonstrate that. We believe our omni-channel strategy is the most efficient way to serve the varying needs of the consumer in this market. Intermex continues to offer our best-in-class service and loyalty offerings through both our retail and our digital products. This is an advantage that no other provider can claim. Our retail network required years of careful precision effort to build, and as a result, is very difficult to replicate. Our technological advantage makes transacting fast and convenient for both digital and retail consumers. These critical factors have made our model highly profitable and drives exceptional generation of cash. How we deliver our products and services to the market is even more important. At retail, Intermex has taken and will continue to take a highly refined rifle shot approach while building our network of retail agents. This strategy enabled the company to deliver products and services to consumers through the highest performing retail agent network in the industry. All this occurs while maximizing agent retail performance that drives ROI and profitability. We are most interested in connecting with consumers in markets where our value-added approach resonates the strongest. This is when and where Intermex is able to best differentiate our value-added service, where we can in turn tax your margin, and where we ultimately benefit our shareholders. Our retail model requires a modest investment. Our sales and marketing costs are roughly 8% of gross margin and only 3% of total revenues. In our digital offering, we continue to demonstrate that same focus on efficiency and profitability while growing our transactions 43% this quarter, and doing that by way of a highly efficient customer acquisition spend. As a result, we're delivering a highly attractive margin. Finally, we continue to develop and introduce new features and functionality to deliver a user experience that is among the best in class. We continue to upgrade our application, and it has received a rating of 4.8 out of 5 from our users. Our expanding margins related to our digital product place us in a great position to expand to new markets, including India, the Philippines, and others, through our new partnership with Visa. In the broader market, significant amounts of capital have been spent by some providers to grow digital market share. In many cases, spending may not have achieved an ROI that would support that investment. Our strategy is to carefully cultivate and grow our digital business with the same efficiency that we have demonstrated while building our retail network. That is one key reason why our current digital business is profitable and growing. We're taking the approach that no one else in the industry has taken by offering a value-added product and carefully crafted strategy to capture share in the right markets. As we do with our retail business, we will leverage our best-in-class customer service and our metrical orientation to drive profitable fire growth. This translates into consistent product expansion, strong margins, exceptional cash generation, and a fortress of balance sheet. As we talked about previously, the LaNationale acquisition we closed in Q4 of 2023 brings Intermex meaningful presence in the U.S. to Dominican Republic market. With that acquisition on board for over 12 months, you will see on page five we have recast our market share calculation over time to include the DR. In 2023, we captured a 21.4% share in the top five markets to Latin America. We have successfully grown our market share over time while sustaining attractive margins year after year. Our Q4 of the DA margins excluding acquisitions were well north of 20%. some of the best we have seen in the history of the company. We have been able to attain these outside results through the execution of our metrically-driven strategy. We have a highly efficient base of retail agents who rely on our products and services. We offer and deliver these products to the customer base who appreciates Intermex's value-added approach. We continue to strengthen our relationship with our retail agents while deepening our competitive moat and growing our mutually beneficial high-margin business. Additionally, we have the ability to carefully select where and when to aggressively pursue wires at reduced gross margins. This practice is put in place when meaningful incremental transactions can be captured in areas where Intermex has a low market share and the upside potential is quite large. This approach enables us to capture new business in such a way that we do not affect margins at our current high-profit retailers. As a result, we're able to generate incremental earnings for our shareholders. We refrain from reacting to market pressures with a broad brush approach that degrades margins for the company. Our approach is simple, but not easy. It requires focus and discipline execution. These behaviors are in our corporate DNA, but are very difficult to replicate. In our quest for new business and to catalyze incremental growth, we have launched bold strategies to penetrate previously untapped and underdeveloped markets. Our focus sharpens on locales ripe with untapped wire potential detailed to the zip code where our presence has been minimal. As a part of our aggressive approach to drive revenue in high potential areas, we've decided to expand our outside sales force by adding six new positions to our already robust team of 40. This expansion is a fresh strategy designed to intensify our market penetration and coverage. Moreover, we've taken a decisive step by significantly enlarging our inside sales team, a move that marks a departure from traditional methods by tripling the team size from 12 to 36 members and strategically positioning these roles offshore. We're not only enhancing our capacity to engage with our current agents, but also tripling our daily interactions in cost-effective manner. This strategic enhancement is expected to dramatically boost our same-store sales. representing an almost 60% surge in our total Salesforce capacity. This considerable investment in our sales infrastructure is an approach we are confident will yield substantial returns over the next 12 to 18 months, signifying our aggressive pursuit of growth through innovative staffing strategies. From an inorganic perspective, we're also making great progress. The iTransfer business in Europe grew at 17% in Q4, We continue to expect great things from our European division, including strong digital opportunity to access in the coming months. While the national business in the U.S. is much more profitable and efficient than a year ago, we believe significant opportunities to remain to expand to additional corridors through our current agent base. To Mexico alone, now armed with the Intermex payer network and fee structure, we see potential for millions of dollars of increased margin annually. We have begun to execute against this plan. Additionally, there will be more efficiencies to be leveraged as the year unfolds. These businesses are proving to be great additions to Intermex, and we're excited and optimistic about their combined future. Before I turn the call over to Andres to go deeper into the numbers, a few final thoughts on operating discipline and why we say Q4 was a testament to who we are as a company. While almost all key measures were strong and exceeded market expectations, we faced some revenue headwinds. In spite of that, we persevered and delivered a solid quarter of growth. We talked about our plan to capture incremental wires in Q3. I am pleased to report that our efforts are continuing to be productive and the sales team continues to execute on that plan. At the same time, shortly after Q3 earnings, we saw Mexico market growth slow considerably to levels we have not seen in years. In true Intermex fashion, we put a critical eye on our business and challenged every corner of the company to maximize efficiency. We delivered on what we set out to do and generated strong earnings despite a weaker than expected top line. While it is difficult to predict what our key markets will do in 2024, the guidance Andres will take you through later in the presentation anticipates underlying softness in that market for a period of time. Our guidance also anticipates a tenacious focus on efficiency and execution, that is part of our culture, and why we feel better positioned than anybody else in the market. We are confident in our differentiators, and the management team and the board feel there is tremendous value in Intermex stock. We will continue to be highly profitable and produce considerable free cash in spite of the investments we are making in our future growth. And finally, we will use a share of that free cash to increase our stock buyback program. We anticipate being twice as active in our existing program and will continue to assess block trades that benefit our shareholders. With that, I'll turn the call over to Anders.