Points.com Inc.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for participating in today's conference call to discuss points, financial results for the fourth quarter and full year ended December 31, 2021. Delivering today's prepared remarks are Chief Executive Officer Rob McLean, President Christopher Bernard, and Chief Financial Officer Eric Georgiou. Following their prepared remarks, the management team will open the call up for any questions. Before we go further, I would like to turn the call over to Cody Slack of Gateway Group Points as he reads the company's safe harbor that provides important cautions regarding forward-looking statements. Cody, please go ahead.

Thank you. Please be reminded that the remarks on this call may contain or refer to forward-looking statements within the meaning of Canadian and U.S. securities laws. Management may also make additional forward-looking statements in response to your questions. Although management believes these forward-looking statements are reasonable, Such statements are not guarantees of future performance or action and are subject to important risks and uncertainties that are difficult to predict. Certain material assumptions are applied in making forward-looking statements and may not prove to be correct. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially and the assumptions used in making such statements were included in our fourth quarter and full year 2021 financial results press release issued prior to this call, as well as other documents filed with the Canadian and U.S. securities regulators. Except as required by law, the company does not undertake any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. With that, I'll turn the call over to point to Chief Executive Officer Rob McClain. Rob?

Thanks Cody and good afternoon everyone. We delivered strong growth across our key metrics in the fourth quarter, sustaining the momentum we generated throughout 2021. Our fourth quarter revenue reached the record and we generated not only our fifth straight quarter of sequential gross profit growth, but also our highest level of gross profit in the past eight quarters. Despite the onset of the Omicron variant late in the fourth quarter, we continued to generate transaction growth across our platform, both on a year-over-year and sequential basis. Similar to what we saw with the Delta variant during the third quarter, the impact from Omicron is proving to be temporary rather than a longer-term pattern, and our performance so far in the first quarter of 2022 has also been very strong. Even as we continue to operate in a dynamic industry environment, we believe that our partners' newfound appetite for even more growth within their loyalty programs is strengthening both our current performance and the long-term potential of our own business. As broader recovery trends continue, we believe that our partners' visibility for their businesses and the evolving new normal for today's travelers will continue to improve. While many of our hotel partners and some airline partners are already exceeding pre-pandemic performance, each of our partners still has significant room to grow. As travel restrictions continue to ease globally and more carriers gradually expand their international routes, we believe the current trends will create additional opportunities for us as we enter our next phase of growth. Whether they have already returned to pre-COVID levels or still have a long road ahead towards full recovery, travel and hospitality operators recognize the immense value and flexibility that loyalty programs have offered their businesses throughout these past two years. Loyalty programs not only outperformed the broader travel and hospitality industries throughout the pandemic, but they've also served as a source of financial collateral and a vital medium for engaging customers in times where global travel activity was at an all-time low. We've continued to see evidence throughout the pandemic that loyalty programs remain among many operators' most valuable assets. This was most recently demonstrated by Aeromexico's announced plans to repurchase its loyalty programs. By making strategic use of their loyalty programs, operators are strengthening a foundational element of their recovery efforts as well as the next phase of their growth strategies. Accordingly, many of our loyalty program partners have continued to adopt a more aggressive posture towards enhancing their offerings and leveraging our robust platform. As I reflect back on our performance since the onset of the pandemic, I'm pleased with the resiliency of our business and our ability to steadily execute on our growth drivers of launching new global partnerships, identifying cross-sell opportunities with current partners, and enhancing our marketing and merchandising capabilities to drive maximum performance of our existing in-market product deployments. Our loyalty commerce platform positioned us well to take advantage of a business development pipeline that strengthened significantly throughout the pandemic with both new partners and existing partners, and this continued in the fourth quarter of 2021. From a new partnership perspective, our new relationship with Eva Air that we launched in the fourth quarter represents our most comprehensive relationship with an APAC carrier. This partnership helped strengthen our presence in the APAC region, which is a key growth area for us over the long term. Importantly, we also renewed our long-term partnership with Air France KLM to a multi-year extension in the fourth quarter, another partner that is looking for outsized growth as we emerge from the pandemic. Christopher will provide more details on that in a few moments. On a broader operational level, we also announced a collaboration with Rocket Travel, a booking holdings company, which will maximize the efficiency of our platform for bookings customers and allow us to strengthen our focus on our core competencies. Booking joins a growing list of blue-chip third-party companies now leveraging our loyalty commerce platform to efficiently access the loyalty industry. The strides we're making with adding new partners complement the new deployments and enhanced services we've continued delivering to our existing partners. During the fourth quarter, we launched our Accelerate Anything capability with two new carriers and added additional exchange options across the platforms. With this strong fourth quarter, we finished 2021 with one of our strongest business expansion periods in our history, adding three new loyalty program partnerships and launching a full 32 product and service deployments into the market. These excellent results have both broadened the number of loyalty program partners that we've added to our loyalty commerce network and also deepened our relationships with the world's most successful loyalty programs by adding new products and services to grow our respective businesses. Exiting 2021, we now have a product and services footprint that is 15% larger than when we entered the pandemic. And we are excited about the prospects of leveraging this to drive even more value to the loyalty industry in 2022 and beyond. While 2021 delivered one of our strongest periods of business expansion, we're very excited to see that this success is continuing here in the early days of 2021, sorry, 2022. As you saw last week, we renewed and extended our relationship with the Marriott Bonvoy Program. Marriott is one of our largest and most successful relationships, and we're thrilled to be working together during this multi-year extension. This extension comes with a significantly expanded mandate for growth, and we're seeing great early results on this enhanced partnership. The new partnership and expanded relationships we've built throughout 2021 have leveraged the strength of our loyalty commerce platform while deepening our footprint in new geographies and verticals. We have moved quickly and decisively to support our partners in today's rapidly evolving environment, and I'm very pleased of the continued progress our team has made. We will work to further execute on these opportunities throughout 2022. The travel and hospitality industries look very different today from where they stood this time in 2020. The pandemic certainly created unprecedented turbulence in the global travel industry, and as we navigated the past two years, we saw various spikes in that turbulence with the appearance of Delta and later the Omicron variants. Throughout this period, each time the travel industry faced these challenges, the loyalty programs were increasingly relied on to engage travelers and to drive strong financial results. The current violent invasion of Ukraine has presented another terrible situation, and we are actively responding to this event as well. We do not do any business with Russian airlines or hospitality companies today, and we have removed those companies from our pipeline so that we do not expect to operate in that market in the future. And while this could present another period of turbulence for the industry, we are confident we can continue to demonstrate our increasing value proposition during another challenging time for our loyalty programs partnerships. The journey from then to now was difficult for all of us in the industry. Yet within our business, our strategy remained intact, and we believe it has positioned us to meet our partners' increasing mandate for outsized growth. As we continue to develop and introduce loyalty products, implement meaningful product extensions, and further ramp up our marketing and merchandising efforts, we believe the long-term financial growth targets we established before the pandemic remain achievable. With that confidence in the longer-term opportunity and with a very positive start to the year, we expect to deliver strong growth in our key metrics throughout 2022. We work tirelessly to accelerate our execution on our core growth drivers through the end of 2021, and we will continue ramping up efforts on these fronts and supporting the powerful role loyalty programs are playing in the new normal of travel and hospitality industries. I will now hand it over to Eric to review our financial performance for the fourth quarter and full year, and then Christopher will provide some additional highlights and perspective on our partner activity. Eric? Thanks, Rob, and thanks for joining, everyone. As always, all figures on today's call are in U.S. dollars. I'll start by providing some color on our fourth quarter financial results I then provide some early thoughts on 2022. Fourth quarter results demonstrate the strengthening momentum we generated in our business throughout 2021 and were in line with our preliminary ranges provided in January. Total revenue in the fourth quarter of 2021 increased significantly to a quarterly record of $115.1 million, a 104% increase over the year-ago quarter and a 33% increase over the third quarter. Revenue was underscored by increased transaction volumes across our platform, reflecting strong performance from our marketing activity and aided by the benefits of recovery tailings, which benefited transactional activity that is more closely tied to near-term redemption activity. And despite the Omicron wave, which started late in the fourth quarter, we did not see our performance metric meaningfully affected, as the impact seems to be less severe and of a shorter duration than previous waves. Gross profit in the fourth quarter of 2021 was $17.1 million, a 38% increase over the third quarter, and up more than double from $8.5 million in the year-ago quarter. We were pleased to see strong organic growth from the majority of our partners in the fourth quarter, with several ending the year above their 2019 performance levels. Geographically, the U.S. market has remained our strongest market, particularly with our hospitality and domestic airlines in this region. Amid the strengthening transaction volumes we generated across our existing partner base in Q4, we also benefited from the impact of new partners and services we have brought to market over the last two years, as these new additions have continued to ramp through the pandemic and become a more meaningful portion of our quarterly performance. In addition, gross profit in the fourth quarter also benefited from our tier status product, which was reintroduced during the fourth quarter on a limited basis. As a reminder, this product, which is seasonal in nature and generally offered during the fourth quarter, was not in market in the year-over-quarter as airlines extended status to members free of charge due to the impact of COVID-19. Given the excellent results we saw with the limited reintroduction, we would expect to see more of these services moved into market later in 2022. Operating expenses in the fourth quarter of 2021 were $15.2 million, an increase from $9.9 million in the year-ago quarter. The increases were a result of the gradual easing of spending restrictions implemented at the onset of the pandemic, higher stock-based compensation, and the impact of wage subsidies reported in the prior year period. We recognized $1.2 million in subsidies from the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy Program in Q4 2020 and ceased participation in this program during the second quarter of 2021. Adjusted EBITDA for the fourth quarter of 2021 came in at $5.5 million, up significantly from roughly $400,000 in the year-ago quarter and $2 million in Q3 2021. The sequential and year-over-year increases were primarily driven by the high levels of gross profit I mentioned earlier. Turning to our balance sheet, our liquidity position remains strong and positions us well to deliver on our growth drives. Total funds available of approximately 109 million at the end of Q4 represented a significant increase from approximately 79 million at the end of 2020. To summarize 2021, we generated strong improvements across our key financial metrics, which were bolstered by strong marketing activity, the impact of new partnerships and products, and aided by recovery-related tailwinds. As we look ahead to 2022, we are encouraged by a very positive start to the first quarter, with activity across our platform looking very strong. We remain optimistic about 2022, but continue to operate in a volatile macro environment. The impacts of COVID-19 still remain in certain markets, and while we have seen positive signs of recovery over the last several months, the extent of recovery varies globally and is evolving. And as Rob mentioned, We are continuing to monitor the developing situation in Eastern Europe, which could cause further disruptions for travel. While our economic exposure to this region is low, and we have not seen any impact so far, the situation is obviously quite fluid. While we are not yet initiating annual guidance for 2022, I'll provide some color and early thoughts on the year ahead. Overall, we are optimistic about our ability to grow in 2022. Based on current trends we are seeing, we expect travel to continue to recover through the year and we'll work with our partners to capture their outsized world targets. Accordingly, our expectation is to drive meaningful year-over-year growth in revenue and gross profit in 2022. From an expense standpoint, we're taking a long view on where we invest. As we think about the significant opportunity in front of us and the growth mandates from our partners, we plan to make investments in marketing, data analytics, and engineering resources in 2023. These additional resources will be focused on supporting our partners' aggressive growth mandates, as well as adding scale to our platform to more efficiently facilitate this growth. Notwithstanding our plans for ongoing investments in our business, our expectation for strong top-line growth is expected to deliver material growth to our bottom line in 2022 and improve our effective margin or operating leverage, and to grow that metric even more in 2023. To be clear, the global environment presents risks that will be difficult to predict at this stage, and our expectations for 2022 are being made assuming no substantial disruptions. As always, we will provide updates and incremental color on our progress throughout the year as we gain further visibility and continue to monitor trends in our industry. And with that, I'll turn it over to Christopher. Thanks, Eric. Our progress on our growth drivers throughout 2021 highlights the resilience of our strategy and our dedication to providing flexible, high-quality loyalty commerce services to our current and prospective partners around the world. With many of our loyalty program partners pursuing more aggressive, long-term growth mandates coming out of the pandemic, our loyalty commerce platform, suite of services, and broad partner base makes us well-positioned to continue delivering on these objectives. To review the progress we made in Q4, we expanded the reach of Marriott Bonvoy's existing buy service in October by adding top-up capability directly in their booking flow. We now power Marriott's buy activity directly in the redemption flow, having moved this existing channel onto our loyalty commerce platform. This product represents a substantial channel expansion for us and the partnership, and will enable us to deliver significantly more revenue to Marriott over the long term. In addition, the new top-up solution enables Marriott to enhance its personalized loyalty marketing campaigns with a variety of promotional constructs, providing Marriott Envoy members with a wider range of new offers. We place a strong priority on proving the depth and breadth of our deployments for our long-term partners, ensuring that our loyalty solution represents an efficient, tailored experience to our program partners and their customers. While subsequent to year-end, I'd also like to highlight last week's announcement of a multi-year extension to our partnership with Marriott. Started in 2006, our relationship with Marriott is now well into its second decade. After its merger with the very popular FPG program and successful relaunch of the combined Bonvoy program, we have been proud to play our part in continuing to steadily grow our performance and successfully increase member engagement while driving significant economics in the partnership with this leading hospitality brand. We've seen this sector become an increasingly important one for us as it is being fastest to recover from the pandemic lows. We're very encouraged by the prospects of our newly expanded in-booking path service and look forward to continuing our focus on data-driven personalized growth initiatives with Marriott. In the fourth quarter, We're also pleased to renew our long-term partnership with one of Europe's largest frequent flyer programs, Air France KLM's Flying Blue, to a multi-year extension. The enduring support of our long-standing travel hospitality partners is a testament to the strong results and high quality of service that our team has worked to preserve across our partner base. Building upon the support we've provided the Flying Blue program throughout our partnership, we added our Accelerate Anything capability to their existing service suite in the fourth quarter. During this time, we also launched Accelerate Anything for Copa Airlines, a prominent Latin American carrier. After retooling our traditional travel-dependent accelerator product into this more flexible option during the pandemic, we have swiftly expanded its reach in less than two years after introducing it. Quality partners and customers alike have benefited from this product's optionality whether customers use it to accumulate loyalty currency for future travel use or leverage additional earning options to support near-term travel needs. We launched this new service in the spring of 2020, and now, with these two launches, have seven total deployments in market. We continue to expand deployments and integrations of some of our legacy product offerings throughout the fourth quarter. In particular, we continue to make strong progress with our exchange service, as we added both the Wyndham Rewards Program and Choice Privilege Program as exchange options for City Thank You Rewards. In addition, we enabled Air Canada's Aero Plan, Virgin Red, and Turkish Airlines Miles and Smiles exchange options with BILT Rewards, a newly launched rent rewards program. Having just launched our partnership with BILT in Q2 2021, we are pleased to be rapidly advancing our progress with this new type of loyalty program partner and to be doing so in a way that is mutually beneficial to many of our existing carrier and hospitality partners. Subsequent to year end, we continued our exchange services momentum by enabling Turkish Airlines Miles and Smiles as an additional Citibank thank you points transfer option, as well as linking Qatar Airways program to our AirMiles Middle East Exchange offering. Now turning to our progress with some of our newer partners launched during Q4, We launched several contract exclusions for APAC carrier EVA Air. We launched EVA's purchase miles offering at the inception of the partnership in November, allowing EVA's Infinity Mileage Lands customers to get their rewards sooner by buying additional miles at a preferential rate. EVA Air is also leveraging our industry-leading loyalty marketing expertise and data-driven insights to develop personalized campaigns for their infinite Infinity mileage lands membership base, which is expected to drive additional growth for the program. We track towards launching a series of additional solutions expected to follow later this year. We have created a strong foundation for both this comprehensive partnership and our continued efforts to expand our APAC footprint. Lastly, we announced a collaboration with Rocket Travel, the industry-leading provider of bespoke white-label travel booking platforms. that aims to enhance the overall booking experience offered to our loyalty program partners. Under the collaboration agreement, Rocca Travel's white label loyalty hotel and car booking service will replace the services previously provided by the points travel solution. This process will still leverage the capabilities of our loyalty commerce platform as we will continue to manage the loyalty program relationships and process the miles and points portion of each transaction. In addition, PointSound.com became a rocket miles channel provider, which will facilitate accelerated rewards and streamlined user journey for loyalty customers across an even greater selection of global loyalty partners. This new initiative allows us to continue building on our deep and longstanding loyalty program relationships, as well as deepen our focus on the core competencies and unique transaction capabilities of our loyalty commerce platforms. In fact, the collaboration is already off to a strong start as we expect one of our forthcoming service launches for EVA Air to include the first deployment of a travel booking service under this Rocket Travel partnership. Together with Rocket Travel, we will continue to seek additional opportunities to enhance our loyalty partners' and customers' experience and further complement each other's offerings. As you've heard us express throughout 2021, our commitment to our core growth drivers did not waver during the lows of the pandemic, and this resiliency enabled us to drive increasingly strong financial and operational results as we progressed through the year. Our Q4 performance reflects the high quality of service and support we have continuously delivered to our partners, as well as our execution on our pipeline of new partnership opportunities. We have moved into 2022 with a renewed confidence in our long-term growth prospects. And while we do not have a perfect visibility on how the broader recovery will play out over the coming quarters, we have proven our ability to move swiftly and aggressively in support of our loyalty industry's ramping growth expectations. As we progress further into 2022, we will work to continue creating new partnerships with global loyalty programs, deepening our current partnerships through launching net new service deployments, and enhancing the services we currently have in market. With our robust foundation and business development pipeline, we are well positioned to continue advancing our growth initiatives and supporting the essential role that loyalty programs are now playing in the travel and hospitality industry's recovery. Operator, we can now open the call up for questions.

Thank you, sir. And at this time, we will be conducting a question and answer session. If you would like to ask the question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment, please, while we poll for questions. And our first question comes from the line of Drew McReynolds with RBT. Please proceed with your question.

Yeah, thanks very much and good afternoon. A couple for me, just starting on the long-term targets, so great to see those being achievable within the next three years.

Just to confirm, that's the $90 million in gross profit or gross margin and $40 million in EBITDA. When you look at your kind of playbook for growth, I know there's obviously the three key pillars of growth to get there. Is there one or two that stands out as the bigger delta in the growth equation? Thank you. Okay, Drew, it's Chris. Thanks for the question. Yeah, those numbers are correct. And I would say not necessarily evenly balanced. Obviously, that growth would rely on all three. I think we have such a large installed base of partners now that we see increasing opportunities and hence our ongoing investment over the last number of years in the operational capacity and automated marketing capabilities that we've been developing to really expand the current services in market. a little bit more aggressively. So we're excited about that element. But again, with the larger portfolio of partners also comes more cross-selling opportunities as well. And there's a long list of net new partners that we're still going after. So it'll be a balanced approach to that growth profile. Okay, super. And just keeping on, I guess, the outlook here, Thanks, Eric, for all that color. Very, very helpful and great to see the momentum in the business. Just in terms of, you know, maybe a quarterly pacing, if you will, for 2022, I know probably almost impossible to give much precision, but is there anything that kind of stands out from your perspective as to, you know, outside of the typical seasonality? Is there anything else we should kind of factor into our forecast? Yeah, hey, Drew, it's Eric here. I think from a quarterly standpoint, I mean, we're going to steer away a little bit here in terms of providing any kind of quarterly guidance there. But I think, as we indicated on our call, Q1 is coming in very, very strongly for us. We would expect to see, in line with how we described the full year, we'd expect our year-over-year growth on a quarterly basis to be quite significant as well, and certainly over historical periods. factors we had in previous years. So I think what we've seen over the last few quarters is going to continue in terms of year-to-year growth, but that's about as much as I'd want to provide there. Okay, that's perfectly fine. In terms of the launch of the EVA relationship in November, I would assume in Q4 it clearly didn't capture uh you know the the full kind of run rate of that uh given that you've got a lot incrementally planned uh in terms of that agreement in 2022 is there you know any kind of quantum you can put around it in terms of what the eba contribution was in q4 um i'm assuming you can't do that uh but but anything can would be helpful any context Yeah, sure, Drew. It was quite small. That was launched – I don't have the exact date in front of me, but probably mid-quarter. We have a number of products slated to launch with them, so I believe we only started with our traditional buy service out the gate. And so we probably only had about six weeks of that activity, and that's continuing to ramp up. Our expectation is to launch – more products with them for 2022. So it was certainly quite small during the fourth quarter. Okay, super. Well, I've got you, Eric. On the NCIB, I don't think there's been any change, certainly in the MD&A. It doesn't point to it where you're just going to be limited to kind of tactical use only here in the near term. Wondering, you know, what are the kind of trigger points to I get back to being a little bit more active on the buyback. Yeah, thanks, Drew. For sure, the MCIB is on pause for now. You know, in line with our guidance conversation, we're certainly still looking at Eastern Europe and want to see a bit more recovery in other regions as well. But I would expect us to, you know, for Chris, Rob, and I and our board to have that on our board agenda in the next three to six months in terms of firming up our capital allocation strategy going forward. Okay, super. One last one for me, sorry for the list here. I don't know who wants to take this one, but obviously a lot of activity out there from all of your partners, and I don't know anybody who's not traveling here in March, so all of this very good. You've talked about the last kind of six to eight quarters where coming out of this, loyalty programs and partners are using these programs much more effectively than they perhaps were in the past. Trying to get a sense of to what extent there's a pent-up level of activity here that's going to flow through in 2022. And you see, you know, at some point hitting kind of a tougher comp on some of that pent-up activity getting through the pipeline, or are we just you know, climbing back up to a higher level that can more or less be sustained going forward. Yeah, Drew, it's Rob. Yeah, look, I think your commentary around pent-up demand, just generally we're seeing, you know, we're well into the recovery. We've had, you know, a number of quarters where we've continued to see improving transactional performance, financial performance, We see the demand and kind of feedback from our partners globally that that is continuing, I think, very ambitious views on 2022. In terms of overall travel growth, I think like you, just anecdotally, we're all happy to be talking about travel and more excited about being back on aircraft and staying in hotels. We definitely saw the hotel performance rise. pick up earlier than air aviation travel recovery. That's been really leading the way for us. We see that continuing here in 2022 and into 2023 for sure. I think generally most travel prognosticators are not expecting business travel really to be back into late next year. So still a tremendous amount of lift coming from a travel recovery in our view. I think the second question, if I understand that, in terms of bringing on new partners and backlog, I think if I understood that, we've been, as I mentioned in my prepared remarks, very pleased with the business development efforts and the demand for our products and services from the loyalty industry. That's continued here in 2022. You should expect to continue to see us deploying more and more products with new partners and existing partners. I don't see that shifting. As Chris spoke about, as our footprint continues to increase and we're 15% plus larger than as we entered into the pandemic, as that continues to increase with new logos, we get that many more new cross-sell opportunities, and that's proving to be a very strong kind of channel of growth for us as our partners are looking to leverage their programs more and provide more utility for their membership. So I don't see a waning in terms of that growth. I think as you described, maybe tougher quarter-over-quarter metrics. I don't see that in the foreseeable future. I think we're just going pretty hard to try to capture and keep building the momentum on this.

Okay, fantastic. Thank you very much.

Our next question comes from the line of Gavin Fairweather with Cormark. Please proceed with your question.

Oh, hey, good afternoon. Congrats on strong results. I thought I'd start out just on the long-term targets. Nice to see you kind of put a pin in the timing of that in terms of three years now. I guess my question relates to you know, what assumptions you've made for kind of travel volume underpinning your confidence of putting the timing of three years upon us.

Yeah, hey Gavin, it's Eric here. So certainly a lot of estimates out there in terms of when we see travel more broadly come back to pre-pandemic levels. I think based on the, you know, external research we've done and what we're seeing with our partners, most are pointing to a 2023 timeline sometime in there. So we're trying to be very conservative with how we apply a recovery curve in our forecast. What does bring us some comfort is we've seen loyalty be at kind of the lead so far with respect to travel. Certainly how we've performed has being quite strong we think loyalty is going to be a leader over the travel recovery and so 2023 would kind of be our estimate right now probably later in that year I'd say Gavin it's Rob you know to reiterate Chris's comments around the growth drivers the overall recovery of travel certainly contributes to our optimism and confidence in the long-term performance but we're really seeing such strong performance on kind of new partner engagement and launches that we put in place, the cross-selling opportunities, the 30-plus deployments that we put in the marketplace in 2021 is a good example. We see that continuing. And then going deeper into these databases and optimizing the existing footprint, those three kind of core drivers of our business alone give us, you know, a high degree of confidence on, you know, how we forecast that over the long term. Frankly, more difficult to forecast that kind of stuff in the short term, but high degree of confidence on a kind of normal course business, how that evolves in 2020, 22, 23 and 24. So, you know, we're pretty confident on those long term objectives. And I think as the recovery continues to evolve, it only strengthens the growth curve.

That's great. That's super helpful. And I did want to chat about just kind of the sales success that you've had next. Obviously, three new programs, 32 expansions in 2021, lots of progress there. It doesn't sound like that's really going to slow down here in the near term. I guess I'm curious, are you, you know, replenishing the pipeline at the top of the funnel? Is there any kind of thoughts about, you know, whether there's going to be, you know, a bit of a slowdown from the surge? Just kind of curious for any kind of trends that you're tracking in the pipeline there, just given how hot the markets have been here.

Yeah, no, it's a good question. I think that, you know, the short answer is we're not seeing a slowdown. We have had We felt very good really through 2020 and 2021 in terms of our business development teams' success in migrating partners through the pipeline and into close and into launch. They're very cognizant of filling the top of the pipeline as well, as per your question. I think we're pretty comfortable with how that's evolved. Loyalty broadly is gaining momentum, so we're seeing more and more companies move into that sweet spot for us of larger currency-based programs with a profit motive. So as more of those kind of organizations move under that umbrella, that kind of gives us an opportunity to keep building the top of the funnel. So I generally feel very good about it. And as Chris said earlier, when we think of the pipeline and the funnel, It is a good mix of new logos coming into the pipeline, but then also new products and services. And certainly that side of things, we're kind of filling the funnel on that pretty much every day.

That's great. And then lastly for me, just kind of given what's going on over in Europe, can you just refresh us on maybe the gross profit sensitivity of your business or how much would be kind of tied to either transatlantic travel or continental Europe travel? Can you help us out on that front?

Yeah. Hey, Gavin. It's Eric here again. Very small exposure right now. You know, it would be far less than 1%, a very, very small number in terms of any sort of activity coming out of Russia or Ukraine. We don't really have any partnerships in that region right now, so we don't think there's much exposure there. We haven't really seen any major impacts so far in Q1. It is something we're looking at in terms of whether it impacts routes of our current partner base, but so far so good.

Great. I'll pass the line. Thanks so much.

Thanks, Kevin. Our next question comes from the line of Gary Prestofino with Barrington Research. Please proceed with your question.

Hi, guys.

Hey, I just want to make sure I'm right on these long-term targets. So is that a four-year event from here? So we're looking at 22, 23, 24, exiting 24, exiting 25? Exiting 24. Okay. All right.

And then could you maybe talk about, you know, 32 product launches, service deployments and all that.

Were there any products or services that really drove a real strong level of incremental revenue that, you know, has really experienced the tremendous uptake from your partners and that you would expect this to continue into 2022? Yeah, I'll jump on that to start and then maybe Eric can add some color. It's pretty broad when we think of the products that we're deploying. The Accelerate Anything product that we launched in the pandemic has been very well received by the market. I think we've got approaching 10 deployments of that in the marketplace in pretty short order. We've had a significant amount of exchange activity as more and more companies are engaging with the loyalty industry. I think the BILT relationship where we've added a number of exchange partners with BILT which is kind of an innovative and very interesting loyalty program that's emerged here in the last year and a bit, and leveraging our platform to be able to move quickly and efficiently and to launch their business. And then as we bring on new partners and launch new buy, gift, and transfer kind of core products, we've seen and will continue to see, we believe, very strong growth on the performance of those products and services. So it's a pretty broad mix in terms of deployments and different kinds of products that we have into the marketplace. I think we see that accelerating going forward as the footprint continues to build. Our products and services, we've always been highly confident that If an accelerate anything type product is relevant for one partner, it's likely going to be very highly relevant for the rest of our 30 or 40 or 50 partners. So we have a team of people that are spending a lot of time demonstrating results and demonstrating the success of our products, and that's really helping us deploy more and more products into our existing footprint. So lots of good stuff that we were really pleased on 2020 as well as 2021. And that's, you know, that approach is continuing here in 2022. Okay. And then would it be applicable? I mean, you're 15% bigger than when you exited or than when you started the pandemic. So if we look at 2019 and where you were in terms of total revenue and adjusted EBITDA versus where you are at year end here, you know, it would seem that you would certainly be exceeding the $401 million of revenue that you generated in 2019. But there's a big differential in the adjusted EBITDA generation. You know, it looked like it was about 33% on net revenue in 2019, about 24% in 2021. Is there anything that's really structurally changed or is that just a reflection of more marketing activity that is, you know, impacting your gross profit line. I guess what I'm trying to get at, I know you're not giving any guidance, but, you know, it would seem that if you're bigger versus pre-pandemic, that that 21 million adjusted EBITDA number, you know, should at least be achievable that you did in 2019. Yeah, it's Eric here. So I'll kind of steer away from providing any guidance clearly, but maybe just touching on your 2021 comment a little bit. So finishing the year at just under 51 million of GP, and then comparing that to how we exited 2019, which was just under 60 million. So really the way we think about it is exiting 2019 with $60 million roughly. We've layered on a bunch of new products and services throughout 2020 and 2021. And so that is certainly contributing to our economic profile in 2021 and will continue to do so in 2022. I think what's underlying all of that and what's impacting the EBITDA line is in that existing business from 2019, most of our partners are simply not at their pre-pandemic levels yet. If I were to kind of estimate how many partners have kind of hit that number, it's probably 9 or 10. There's a lot more partners that have a lot of growth, a lot of room to grow in 2022. You know, with respect to 2021, certainly the operating leverage wasn't as strong as 2019, simply because most partners haven't come back yet. As we think about a long term, I think what I would lean on there is our long term outlook and the implied leverage in that outlook. I think you get to the mid 40s or so or roughly 40%. And so you know, we kind of look to that outlook in terms of what our long-term targets are. It's not necessarily going to be a straight line, but we do expect the operating leverage improvements in 2022 over 2021, for sure. And then could you maybe just give us numerically what you ended up in terms of loyalty partners at the end of 2021 versus where you were in 2019? Yeah, I don't have that number offhand here. We can certainly take that one offline. I mean, the way we report on it and certainly the way we think of it, I mean, we've got roughly 60 loyalty program partners with either commercial contracts that are integrated into our platform. That hasn't closed over time. We've had a couple partners merge. I think we've had a couple, but that has grown generally over the last three years or so.

Okay, thank you.

Our next question comes from the line of Greg Giba with North End Security. Please proceed with your question.

Hey, thanks for taking the questions, guys. You know, you touched on this in your prepared comments, but I'm wondering if you could comment a little bit further on the impact that you are seeing in Q1 or have seen in Q1 as a result of the Omicron surge, and then also if you could comment on, you know, where promotional activity levels are in Q1 versus Q4.

Yeah, Greg, it's Rob. You know, I think in the prepared remarks we commented Omicron, we were watching pretty carefully, obviously, in the fourth quarter and then into the first quarter. It had proven to be pretty nominal impact. And I would say, based on what we've seen largely through it, so it was a bit like Delta in September, October, proved to be a fairly temporary blip. And it was a pretty minor one in the first place. So I'd say That would be kind of the short and sweet response on Omicron. I think around promotional and campaign activity, we have been speaking at some length now about what we viewed as quite a change in the overall posture of the loyalty industry and our loyalty program partners in particular. where they are taking a much more, I think, sophisticated and expansive view on what the potential contribution of their loyalty programs are to their overall corporate revenues and profitability and engagement metrics. That's translated through 2021 and into our 2022 plan very directly, just a much more ambitious approach to it. When we think about our marketing and merchandising and campaign activity, You know, with the vast majority of our partners, we would have full year marketing and merchandising plans in place and approved and kind of in motion now. We've seen really, really positive uptake from program memberships here in the first quarter. But on the kind of different offer sets and campaigns that we're running, I think our marketing and merchandising teams, our analytics teams have been just getting better and better every day on getting access to more data, being able to better utilize that data and leverage it to the advantage of our partners and our business. And I think we're going to continue to see that happen. Generally speaking, these long-term and annual plans You know, we're constantly refining that and adding reach there as we demonstrate success on campaign one versus campaign two. And so I'm going to expect to see that continue in 2022. I think one of the comments, you know, Eric has spoken about this over the last year and a bit with the benefit of our data and analytics work. I feel like we're getting more efficient in terms of how we're putting campaigns into market. We're finding ways to be a bit more profitable for our partners in terms of how we target and what kind of offers we put in place. I think that's great news for our partners. It's great news for us. And so it allows us to continue to be very active, but being active in a way that is very kind of fiscally responsible. So I think you'll continue to see that happening during the course of 22. Got it. Very helpful.

And, you know, if I could, A high-level question. Just wondering if you could touch on maybe how far out your visibility is on new partner launches or new services with existing partners. You know, you talk about the pipeline being very strong. I'm just trying to, you know, gauge on is your visibility, you know, six months out, still year-end, kind of multi-year? How should we think about that?

Yeah, I think there's, from a pure launch standpoint, pretty good visibility through 2022 in terms of new partners and new products that are in the development cycle and in the delivery channel. That's one of our busiest groups in the company right now, we're happy to say. I think as you get out into 23, and even in the last quarter of 22, but certainly out into 23, We've got lots of kind of slots identified as being, you know, partner X or product Y that we would expect to be in those slots. But that will evolve a little bit as we get closer to kind of end of the year and into 2023. But pretty good visibility for sure through the rest of 22.

Okay, great. Thank you. And as a reminder, if anyone has any questions, you may press star 1 on your telephone keypad. It will ensure your spot in the question and answer queue. Our next question comes from the line of Ed Wu with Ascendant Capital. Please proceed with your question.

Yeah, congratulations on the quarter. You seem to be doing very well in travel and hotels, vertigos. What about non-travel and hospitality industries? Are you guys looking at expanding the pipeline to bring in new partners in those areas?

Hey Ed, it's Chris. Thanks a lot. Certainly some vertical expansion is a key element of our plan. And we are seeing the exchange activity as I talked about and Rob mentioned a little bit as well. We've been regularly adding new programs to our exchange platform. And just a reminder, we run the exchange activity for the Chase Bank Ultimate Rewards, majority of the Citibank Thank You program, a couple of Middle Eastern deployments on the banking side, and that new loyalty program Rod mentioned called Built Rewards, which is a rental. People pay their rent and earn Built Rewards. And one of the key redemptions for Built is transferring into a number of our loyalty program partners. That's a key portion. While half of an exchange is still in the travel and hospitality space, the way out, the funding of that is not. It's in the financial services usually and now more in the sort of retail with the built activity. So we're seeing that side of the fence growing and also adding kind of non-travel options onto our platform to allow programs to redeem for non-travel as an ancillary redemption. I think we've talked about the Lyft relationship that we power for Hilton. We see some expansion opportunities there as an example of that ability to take your travel-based points and redeem them for some non-travel activities.

Great. Well, thank you for answering my questions, and I wish you guys continued good luck. Thank you.

At this time, this concludes our question and answer session. I would now like to turn the call back over to Mr. McLean for closing remarks.

Great. Thanks, Operator. I would like to thank everyone for listening to today's call and look forward to speaking with you when we report our first quarter results in the not-too-distant future. Thanks again for joining us.

Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's teleconference. We may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.