Corpay, Inc.

Greetings. Welcome to the FleetCorp Technologies, Inc. 4th Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. Please note this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, Jim Egglesetter, Head of Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today for our fourth quarter and full year 2021 earnings call. With me today are Ron Clark, our chairman and CEO, and Charles Freund, our CFO. Following their prepared comments, the operator will announce the queue will open for the Q&A session. It is only then that you can get in line for questions. Please note that our earnings release and supplement can be found under the investor relations section of our website at FleetCorps.com. Now, throughout this call, we will be discussing organic growth. As a reminder, organic revenue growth neutralizes the impact of year-over-year changes in foreign exchange rates, fuel prices, and fuel spreads, and includes pro forma results for acquisitions closed during the two years being compared. We will also be discussing non-GAAP financial metrics, including revenues, net income, and interoperability share, all on an adjusted basis. These measures are not calculated in accordance with GAAP and may be calculated differently than at other companies. Reconciliations of the historical non-GAAP to the most directly comparable GAAP information can be found in today's press release and on our website. I do need to remind everybody that part of our discussion today may include forward-looking statements. These statements reflect the best information we have of today. All statements about our outlook, new products, and expectations regarding business development and future acquisitions are based on that information. They are not guarantees of future performance, and you should not put undue reliance upon them. We undertake no obligation to update any of these statements. These expected results are subject to numerous uncertainties and risks, which could cause actual results to differ materially from what we expect. Some of those risks are mentioned in today's press release on Form 8K and in our annual report on Form 10K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. These documents are available on our website and at SEC.gov. Now, with that out of the way, I will turn the call over to Ron Clark, our chairman and CEO. Ron?

Okay, Jim, thanks. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining our Q4 earnings call. So up front here, I'll plan to cover three subjects. So first, provide my view of Q4 along with full year 21 results. Second, lay out our 2022 guidance and priorities for the year. And then lastly, I'll share my thoughts on the company's midterm imperatives. Okay, let me make the turn to our Q4 results, which were quite good. So we reported revenue of $802 million up 30%, and cash EPS of $372, that's up 24%. Both record highs for the company. Revenue came in quite hot, almost $40 million higher than the revenue guidance we provided 90 days ago. Organic revenue growth for Q4, good, up 17%. Also up 7% against Q4 of 2019. Every line of business, double-digit organic revenue growth in the quarter. Our Q4 trends continued quite good. Record sales in the quarter, up 40% versus prior year. Steady revenue retention at 93%. Same-store sales healthy at plus 6%. We have had some notable call out since we spoke last. We formalized our partnership with the largest bank in Brazil, which will help distribute our total products. So we expect lift there. We launched formally our Corp A1 SMB platform business. So getting our corporate payments business into the SMB space. We just completed another investment in an EV software company. We upsized our term loan $750 million. We repurchased over 3 million FLT shares in Q4 and in January, and we completed the rebranding of our corporate payments business, all the brands now under Corp A. So in summary, really a good finish to the year, better than we expected, and the trends helpful as we look into 2022. Okay, let me turn to 2021 full year. I think we characterize 2021 really as a comeback year, where we moved ahead of our 2019 pre-pandemic baseline. really good financial results, uh, 21 revenue, uh, 2.8 billion, uh, up 19%, uh, cash EPS of 1321, uh, also up 19%. Both of those results, uh, record highs for the company. We did open 2021 with an initial guide of 1231, uh, of cash EPS at the midpoint. So now finishing 90 cents, uh, better than that initial guide. So clearly a better year than expected. Organic revenue growth for 2021 up 12%. That's the highest organic revenue growth that we've ever reported. 2021 sales, super good. Record levels up 46% versus 2020 and up 19% versus 2019. we've added 175,000 new clients, 175,000 new clients to our books in 21 across the world. So strong demand for our services. We did close two accretive acquisitions in 21 and expect to gather those to deliver 50 to 60 cents of incremental cash EPS here in 22. So all in all, a meaningful recovery from 2020. All right, let me cover now our initial thoughts on 2022 guidance along with the priorities for the year. We've mentioned before our stated midterm objectives for the company are to grow sales 20% plus, To grow organic revenue, 10% plus. And to grow cash EPS, 15% to 20%. Good news, our 2022 guidance meets all three of these objectives. So here goes. For revenue in 2022, at the midpoint, $3,220,000,000. That's up 14%. Cash EPS of $15.25 at the midpoint. up 15%, organic revenue growth overall up 10%, and sales growth just over 20%. This guidance does not include any forward capital allocation beyond deleveraging. There's no real macro help In these numbers, we're basically outlooking the macro to be neutral. Yes, higher fuel prices, but really offset by some weaker FX. We have assumed about a 1% COVID recovery in our same store sales client base coming back this year in 22. Confidence pretty high in these numbers. About half of the expected year-over-year performance improvements. It's already in our exit rate or run rate coming into the year, so that helps. Our recent sales and retention trends support the forecast. Most of the synergies for the two big acquisitions are really already baked, so we expect to get that accretion. And we have repurchased about 6.5 million shares from a year ago, so obviously going to be quite accretive. In terms of priorities, we have picked a few things that we'll invest in incrementally this year. So digital sales, we're expecting a big increase in digital sales production in 22 and are making thus incremental investments in digital advertising and staff. IT, big investments in IT transformation to accelerate our move to the cloud. And this platform business that I spoke of where we're joining up our walk-around services with our central AP services, going to push those platforms pretty hard and get a read on demand. So all in all, a pretty ambitious year. Okay, so last up today, I'd like to talk about our midterm prospects and the imperatives for the company. I thought it might be helpful to rewind just a bit For anyone new on the call, just remind everyone who Fleet Corps is and what we're trying to do. So in a nutshell, Fleet Corps provides B2B specialty payment solutions, really all intended to do one thing, which is to help businesses, our clients, spend less, primarily by controlling what they buy and what they pay for. Our differentiation strategy kind of really comes in two forms. First, our products are highly specialized. We target certain kinds of clients with very specialized needs. So our products would look different for trucking firms than they would look for plumbing firms. Our travel services would look different for blue-collar travelers than they would for white-collar travelers. So very dialed-in kind of product lines. And second, we operate more than 15 proprietary acceptance networks. That allows us to capture very unique data at the point of sale. We also enjoy very favorable economics, which we share with our clients. So this focused or specialized approach, coupled with a two-sided business model, has allowed us to deliver consistent growth over a long period of time. So let me turn to the three imperatives, the big things that we're on that we think are critical to driving sustained growth over the long term. So first up is EV. We're working EV and the energy transition hard. We do feel like we've made a lot of progress so far. So both here and in Europe, we've added public acceptance networks for EV. so public charge points or recharge points. We've invested in EV software companies that facilitate at-home recharging and reimbursement. We signed up a few hundred clients to our EV service to get feedback on the service. And initially here, we're seeing the revenue or the economics from our service, EV service, roughly in line with our more traditional refueling services. So look, we're on this EV. We'll manage along with the transition and continue to report out. Second imperative is digital. We're companies working super hard to make the digital transition accelerated by COVID. So the first thing I'd say is sales has really made the pivot. So last year, over 50% of our global fuel card sales came in digitally, and over half of those processing end-to-end with no human intervention. On the marketing front, we've moved our focus to top of the funnel. So we're using digital advertising, ABM technology to identify prospects interested in our services. On the client experience front, We've really advanced our UIs and their capability to allow our clients to do more themselves. So faster and easier than ever before. And at the point of sale, we've added new ways to transact with us beyond cards. So including mobile phones, RFID technology, even connected cars. So a lot of progress on the digital front. So last up is diversification, transitioning our portfolio to bigger TAMs and to higher growth segments. So you've heard us speak of beyond, going beyond, in which we extend each of our existing businesses into adjacent market segments to create more opportunity. So just a few examples there. So our corporate payments business, traditionally a middle markets business, now entering the SMV space. Our travel or lodging business, really a workforce, blue-collar-focused business, has recently added airline or lodging for cruise and displaced homeowners or homeowners insurance companies, really to extend the potential of that business. In Brazil, historically a toll-centric, highway-centric client base, we're now adding hundreds of thousands of urban or city dwellers to our expanded offering. So look, over time, we do expect these adjacencies to increase the opportunity for each of our businesses. Platform business, I mentioned we will join up our specialized payment solutions into one comprehensive platform in which a single business or client could use, for example, our smart business cards, our travel solutions, and our online bill pay services, all from the same UI and all from us. So this platform concept really combines our capabilities for employee walk-around kinds of purchases along with central bill pay. So we think the platform idea has big potential and can be quite additive to the specialized payment services that we offer now. As a result of these extensions, we are expecting our global fleet card business to account for about 40% of the company's revenue this year. That's down from about 50% five years ago. So again, repositioning for faster growth. So we do plan to work these three midterm imperatives hard, EV, digital, and diversification. Of course, we'll report progress as we go. So in conclusion today, back to Q4, again, better than we expected and good trends coming into this year. 2021, really, again, a comeback year, finishing much, much better than we thought at the outset. This year, 2022, another guide to growth, organic growth expected of 10%. Earnings expected to be up 15%, so a lot of distance from our pre-pandemic baseline. And the midterm, again, we're pretty focused on these three imperatives that I just outlined, key to sustainable growth of the company. So with that, let me turn the call back over to Chuck to provide some additional details on the quarter. Chuck?

Thanks, Ron. Thanks, Ron. So, jumping into the product category details behind our 17% organic revenue growth in Q4, corporate payments was up 18%, with another quarter of strong performance in full AP, which was up over 50% yet again. Our card products, virtual and multi-card, were up 16%, and cross-border was up 14%, which is normalized for the Apex acquisition we closed in June. In cross-border, we completed the final customer migrations from AFEX's systems to our core pay cross-border platform in December. We'll continue with the integration of back office systems and processes throughout this year. Our theses are holding with synergies and accretion in line with our expectations. I'd like to give a big shout out to our integration team as it's due to their hard work and dedication that the conversion has been so seamless and successful. Fuel was up organically 12%, with growth in every geography, largely as a result of our digital sales efforts and strong retention rates. Our ability to sell and retain Fuel Card customers around the world demonstrates the attractiveness of our offers, the competitiveness of our products, and the effectiveness of our technology. We continue to make good progress in developing and marketing our EV charge management solutions, particularly in Europe, where we now have over 5,000 clients with EV enabled cards or FOBs. We've also been actively expanding the on-road network acceptance of our EV solutions with approximately 6,500 charge points in the UK now accepting our products. This represents about 22% coverage of all publicly available charge points in the country. On the continent, we've got around 85% coverage as our products are accepted at roughly 190,000 charge points. We've built a dedicated organization to advance our EV efforts and will continue to support our fuel card customers as they slowly migrate to EVs. Tolls was up 17% compared with last year, as strong new sales, up 20%, and some new retention initiatives are really paying off. we made tremendous progress to expand our total business this year. We doubled our fuel locations year over year to nearly 1,200, and we had nearly half a million active fuel users as of year end. We recently signed Mitsubishi, Hyundai, Toyota, and Kia to install our tags on vehicles before they leave the factories. And as Ron mentioned earlier, we completed our joint venture with Caixa, Brazil's largest bank. Our lodging business continued to perform well, up 39%. Workforce lodging has improved with higher volume, and airlines especially outperformed, with organic growth over 100% as domestic air travel rebounded from COVID lows. The integration of ALE Solutions, a provider of lodging services to displaced policyholders of major insurance companies, is going quite smoothly, and we're increasingly confident in the value it will deliver. Gift organic growth was 19% year over year, as the new efforts we've discussed on the last several calls continue to produce results, especially the retailer online sales channel. We also saw a pickup in card replenishment orders, which had been delayed due to COVID concerns. Now, looking further down the income statement, operating expenses of $462 million represented an increase over prior year, primarily due to the addition of the AFEX and ALE operations, as well as higher deal and integration-related costs, increases tied to higher volumes across our businesses, stock compensation, and new sales generation activities and investments to drive future growth. Bad debt expense was $18.5 million, or five basis points. as credit losses have returned to more historical levels. Interest expense decreased 9 percent year-over-year due to a slight decline in LIBOR rates and the offset of higher interest rates applied to customer deposits and cash balances in certain foreign jurisdictions. We incurred $9.9 million of costs during the quarter associated with the incremental $750 million in Term B debt we added in December. On the Term B increase, the rate was the same as our existing facility at LIBOR plus 175 basis points and matures in April, 2028. Our ratings and leverage remained effectively unchanged, reflecting the strength and earnings power of our company. Our effective tax rate for the quarter was 25.6% versus 20.3% last year, with the increase driven primarily by the lack of excess tax benefit on stock option exercises. Now turning to the balance sheet, we ended the quarter with over $1.5 billion in unrestricted cash, and we had $1.1 billion available on our revolver. There was $4.9 billion outstanding on our credit facilities, which included the incremental $750 million term B debt I just mentioned. Finally, we had $1.1 billion borrowed in our securitization facility. All in, as of December 31st, our leverage ratio was 2.71 times trailing 12-month adjusted EBITDA, as calculated in accordance with our credit agreement. As Ron mentioned, in the quarter, we repurchased roughly 2.3 million shares. And in total, we repurchased about 5.5 million shares during 2021. We also bought 1.1 million shares in January under our 10B51 plan. You may have seen in our press release that our board authorized another $1 billion in repurchases. So taking all of that into account, we still have almost $1.4 billion authorized for repurchases as of today. We believe we have ample liquidity to pursue any near-term M&A opportunities and continue to buy back shares when it makes sense. I think it's important to remind everyone of the power that our earnings and cash flow gives us. Recapping 2021, we repurchased 5.5 million shares for $1.36 billion. Our guidance for share count for 2022 is down 7 million shares from what we guided a year ago. We spent $950 million on deals, which will generate incremental earnings of 50 to 60 cents per share next year and continue to provide growth in future years. We also raised an additional $1.55 billion of Term B debt, $800 million in Q2 and $750 million in Q4 at very attractive rates and terms, and our leverage barely changed. We believe the combination of our strong position, the structure of our business model, and high recurring revenues will enable us to deliver consistent quality growth year after year after year. Now let me share some thoughts on our Q1 outlook and our full year assumptions. Looking ahead, we're expecting Q1 2022 revenue to be between $740 and $760 million, and adjusted net income per share to be between $3.45 and $3.55, which at the midpoint is approximately 68 cents or 24% higher than what we reported in Q1 of 2021. You may notice the midpoint of our Q1 guide is also approximately 22 cents or 6% lower than what we reported in Q4 of 2021. This is largely due to revenue seasonality, where certain businesses such as gift and tolls have strong fourth quarters, while fuel and lodging tend to have soft first quarters due to weather and holidays. As such, the first quarter tends to be the lowest in terms of both revenue and profit for our company. I'd like to note a few assumptions underlying the full year 2022 guidance Ron provided earlier. We expect bad debt to be about $30 million higher than 2021 levels as we see a return to more normalized credit losses due in part to increasing sales production. Our interest expense guidance of 90 to $100 million assumes three 25 basis point rate increases throughout the year. And our tax rate is also expected to be higher. at between 24% and 26% as we expect any excess tax benefit from stock option exercises to remain low relative to the last few years. The effects of these higher expenses will be partially offset by the lower share count resulting from our repurchase activity over the past 13 months. The rest of our assumptions can be found in our press release and supplement. Now let's move beyond the results and the outlook. Since we last spoke, our new ESG report was published and is available in the investor relations section of our website. Some highlights you will find in the document are more details around our workforce advantage, including our comprehensive employee development and training programs, and our adoption of the Rooney Rule for all vice president and above positions, as well as some reporting on our global data centers, including the significant reduction in power usage and footprint, which are down 40% and 62%, respectively, over the last five years. Finally, I would like to thank our nearly 10,000 employees around the world who helped us deliver a strong finish to a great year and who will be the driving force to even greater heights in 2022. Thank you for your interest in Fleet Corps. And now, operator, We'd like to open the line for questions.

Thank you. At this time, we will be conducting a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star 2 if you'd 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. Our first question comes from the line of Pete Christensen with Citi. Please proceed with your question.

Good evening. Which is good to see. Ron, looking at the outlook, which... Hey Pete, we're struggling to hear you. I'm sorry, can you hear me? Yeah, we're now. Maybe if you could dial back in, you can take the next question.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Ramsey Ellis, all with Barclays. Please proceed with your question.

Hi, thanks for taking my questions and I appreciate it. And congratulations on solid results in the fourth quarter here. I wanted to ask about CapEx as a percentage of revenue. It looks like it moved up to 4% from 3% where it's been from quite some time. Now, I know Ron called out a lot of, you know, critical business investment, but I'm just wondering, should we view the investment you're making as more kind of cyclical in nature and meaning you'll kind of finish with this investment cycle and then maybe CapEx as a percentage of revenue will tick back down again? Or is this sort of what we should expect in terms of a new level of business investment going forward?

Hey, Ramsey, it's Ron. I'd say probably the latter. Probably think about this level, this 4%-ish level, and the two drivers kind of new things in the last couple of years would be that Brazil network build-out that we've referenced before. So a fair amount of cost in getting those incremental few thousand stations up. And then, two, we've earmarked a fair amount of kind of incremental money for the IT transformation, so not just enhancing, obviously, the systems we have, but effectively building new ones in parallel. So I'd say those couple things would have at least probably a couple more years to run, and then it may bottom back down a bit.

Okay. Thank you for that. And on capital deployment or balance sheet deployment more generally, maybe, Ron, if you could give us your view on – the appetite for first buybacks versus M&A. Then on the M&A side, I'm really curious to see whether you're seeing more opportunities emerge or the deal pipeline increasing just because the valuation environment seems to have shifted down quite a bit. It might be a little too soon, but I'm just curious what you're seeing out there.

Good question. I'd say that our priorities are unchanged, Ramsey. We're first. M&A if we like it for capabilities and or it's accretive. But as you can tell from Chuck's comments earlier, we, what did we say, six and a half billion shares we bought back in the last 12 months. So we've had a bit of an appetite for our own stock, which we think is appropriate. In terms of the M&A, we did press the pause button call it three months ago when we saw the volatility both in our own stock and in some of the others in our category and so literally post this we're going to kind of reach back out to some of those things that are super late in the pipeline and test you know where where sellers are basically we've got a view of where we are now so I'd say you know ask me again in 30 days whether sellers have got the message that you know things are volatile and maybe that's a lower price that they'll take.

Okay, Ron. Thanks so much. That was really helpful. Appreciate it.

Thank you. As a reminder, we ask that you please limit to one question and one follow-up. Our next question comes from the line of Darren Peller with Wolf Research. Please proceed with your question.

Hey, thanks, guys. Nice end to the year. You know, when we look forward on the fuel segment, you know, on a stack basis, you're running in the low single digit range now. But I think embedded in your outlook is definitely an acceleration. Can you talk through that a bit in terms of the OTR side versus the fleets, the local fleets, and really how you're going to, you know, bridging from the run rate now to a higher level of growth? And then I just have a quick follow up on the corporate payment side.

Hey, Darren. Hey, it's Ron. Yes, I'd say the guide embedded in the guide for 22 would be high single digits for fuel cars, so off of obviously more normalized comps this year. And part B, yes, the OTR, which is, I don't know, call it 30% of our business globally. across here, Europe and Brazil continues to run softer, right? The COVID impact and getting drivers has softened that business more. So I think if inside of our high single digit, that thing would be a smidge softer than, than the local or partner business.

Okay. And you've had a decent sales. That's probably flowing through too, right?

Yeah. You kind of cut out a bit, but if you said we had decent sales, I mean, we've had,

literally record sales in the fuel car business right yeah i figure that's blowing through and starting now just a quick follow-up on the corporate payment side i mean really i'm trying to figure out when the cross sell you think is going to really kick into full gear for core pay right when we think about the opportunity and really the software and invoice pay side versus the uh the the virtual car alone but really the holistic offering where do you think we're going to be when do you think we're going to be at a full scale effort around that initiative, which sounds like I know there's been a lot of good industry chatter on it, but that could probably flow through to some meaningful trends. Thanks, guys.

Yeah, another good question. I'd say probably another quarter or so, and let me tell you why. So we started out, call it in the second half, testing. going out to call 1,000 clients, 2,000 clients, putting them on a new payment platform, seeing if they had an interest in our new platform, bill pay solution, saw some decent reaction to it. And so what we've decided to do is kind of be careful in changing the payment platform and basically presenting a new service at the same time. We want to be super cautious around not upsetting, if you will, the golden goose of these fuel car clients. So we're moving to put that platform in against a broader set of clients, get them comfortable using that, and then effectively present, hire this add-on for them. So my guess is probably somewhere in Q2 we'll be able to report out on it.

That's great. That's good to hear. Thanks, guys.

Our next question comes from the line of Sanjay Sakrani with KPW. Please proceed with your question.

Thanks. Good evening. Just a question on the expense growth. Obviously, very strong coming out of the pandemic, sort of deflationary there. Could you just talk about how much is driven by inflationary pressure versus more investments you're making and kind of what you're assuming that's going to translate to in terms of top-line growth?

Yes, this is Charles. So the expense growth you're seeing comes from a couple of different areas. One, we've got the Apex and ALE acquisitions that are rolling in. So that's number one. Two, we've got the normalization of credit losses.

We expect that debt to be quite a bit higher. Some extra stock comp in there. Also related to the deals, we've got ongoing integration costs. The Apex is Integration is probably the most advanced we'll have taken as a company, sort of really move them off their systems, close redundant offices, et cetera. So it's a multi-year journey there. We're spending money to basically create synergies for the future. So that's also kind of baked in both in the fourth quarter here as well as into our guide for next year. We are seeing some inflationary pressure predominantly around staffing, so wages in some of the call centers and such, and we've taken measures to remedy that. As it relates to vendors, a little bit, but I'd say that that will help us eventually as it flows through to vendor payments and, say, our corporate payments arena. So it's a tale of two cities, right? We're going to have some additional costs from inflation, but we'll also get some benefit from it on the revenue side.

Hey, Sanjay, it's Ron Lloyd. Let me just jump on to the last thing Chuck said, which would be some of the increment is really directed by us, you know, choice that we made found, you know, easy. capabilities and sales, again, some testing and advertising things, and even in IT to really better position the business. We like the profit number we got to. So in addition to the factors that Chuck just laid out, I do want you to hear that we've chosen to chase some things that help the company on a forward basis.

Understood. And I actually have a follow-up question on the EV point. Yeah, I'm just curious, Ron, like how you think – the distribution channels are going to look like in the future. Some of the, some payment processors have partnered with like the auto manufacturers. And I'm just curious how unconventional the partnerships that you're trying to forge are going forward. I know you have some of them, but maybe you just speak to what you're targeting. Thanks.

Yeah, I think it's actually been the other way so far. I think that, you know, we announced again, a follow on and kind of a new investment, you know, in software companies. I think that, companies that are working on software see people like us, you know, in leasing companies as the best distribution, you know, pipe into fleets, particularly as they're mixed and stuff. And so we continue to like our chances both offering that back to our client base because we're first to see if they're moving off of a, you know, a fuel, an internal combustion approach to something else so we can spot it in our client base. And then, B, we've got obviously lots of coverage generally, right, to bring new clients, you know, into the fold. And so I'd say for sure, you know, our distribution capabilities are probably as good as any. With that said, we did mention the Brazil thing, which is a bit of a case study where we've now basically – put tags, effectively toll tags, in with three or four partners literally as those cars come off the line. When you buy your new Kia, whatever the heck it is, Nissan in Brazil, it's got a SEMPRA tag when you come out. Look, we think over time these cars are fundamentally coming off the line connected where they're sending data every couple of seconds. We mostly want to be set up just to grab that, to have relationships where we have access to that connected car information and can then help, again, the client, whether he's at a public location, you know, a work location, or at home, basically, you know, pay for the thing. I would say, as I said earlier in the office, we are just so much smarter on this transition now and how to play and how we're advantaged or not and what help we need. So I don't know if we're communicating it well, but we are just in a way better spot than we were.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Trevor Williams with Jefferies. Please proceed with your question.

Great. Thanks. Good afternoon. I wanted to ask another one on expenses, kind of similar to what Sanjay was getting after. So margins in Q4 were down about 300 basis points from the third quarter, despite all the revenue upside. I mean, is this kind of a new stepped-up level of spend that's just kind of rebased higher that we should just expect to run through 2022, just kind of as we're thinking about how much leverage you can get from your guiding to 14% revenue growth next year if you do better than that, if we get kind of another leg back just on some of the pieces of the revenue pie that are still kind of lagging versus 19. So just give us a sense for kind of what you're, for how we should be thinking about operating leverage Going forward, given that you've already, you know, it seems like in the last couple of quarters, there's been a stepped up level of investment to kind of prepare for the new go-to-market strategy. Thanks.

Yeah, Trevor, it's Charles. I'd say that, you know, it is a bit of a reset.

So some of the acquisitions that we bought do operate at slightly lower margins. Some are dealing with big airlines or insurance companies, right? They're very, very focused on the rates they pay. And they also require very, very high levels of service. And so we need to make investments. And as the airline volumes of revenue is pouring back, we need to staff up to accommodate those service-level requirements. So I think the 54% is probably a good assumption going for next year. And as Ron mentioned, we are continuing to make investments for future growth.

And so I'd say operating margins should hold at that level for the remainder of this year.

Okay, got it. And then, Charles, just to follow up on interest expense, it sounds like you guys have three hikes built in to what you're guiding to for 22. Can you give us a sense, and even if it's not an exact number, that's fine, but if we end up at five or six hikes, what the interest expense sensitivity could look like in that scenario? Thanks.

We've got about $5.9 billion that would flow with LIBOR. So for every 25 basis points, you're looking at kind of $14 to $15 million of incremental annualized expense.

So you've got to lay that in over time. On the flip side, we do have customer deposits and cash balances that sit around the world. We're earning pretty good interest on those. And so if interest rates continue to rise around the world, we might actually see a net benefit.

Got it. Okay, perfect.

Thank you. Alice? Okay. Thanks, Trevor. Apologize for technical difficulties. Looks like we're going to take attention next. Except I can't promote it. Alex, can we take attention? All right, guys. Let's see if we can move to the next one. Alex, hear us? Okay, yes, they can hear us, but I don't know where the operating one is. Okay, guys, give us just a minute to try to get this sorted.

Okay, well, while we wait for that to get squared away, Pete's questions from earlier were, how should we think about expectations on the Corporate One SMB initiative factoring into the guide, trying to understand if there's upside opportunity versus normalized corporate payments growth expectations?

I don't know if... Yeah, can people hear us? Yeah, they can hear us. You know, Pete, I don't know if you can hear, but it's Ron, so... I kind of answered a bit of this earlier, that we're going a bit slower to be cautious on the cross-sell, and we are obviously selling to new prospects in the market. So I'd say it would be pretty minimal. So if you looked at our overall corporate payments guide for the year, the SMB piece would still be relatively small. Again, mostly because we're trying to be careful and make sure we have the acquisition economics right. In terms of upside, I think, yes, since we don't have scalable views of that yet, I'd say as we get into the second half and get through some of the testing that's going to go on, there could be some upside. We could step on the gas there a bit if we like what we're seeing and maybe lift the growth rate a bit in the second half.

Okay, and then another question is, can you flesh out the Brazilian banking relationship a bit? How do you see this impacting the value prop, and how could this impact user revenue growth going forward?

Yes, so we've completed the joint venture with CaixaBank.

It's the largest bank in Brazil. It tends to focus a bit more down market. So if you look at our historic SEM for our business, we tend to focus a bit more on, I don't say affluent, but kind of more middle class users and such. And with Kaisha, we'll be able to, one, move a bit down market and leverage all of their distribution capabilities, so all of their branches, their ATMs, et cetera. And so we view it as extensive distribution but also reaching a slightly different segment around the country that we just weren't as focused on historically.

Let me just jump on, Jim. Hey, it's Ron. I would just add to it that we love how incremental different distribution channels are. So when we bought the business, I can't remember, 70% or 80% of all due sales came through the stores, kiosks and stuff in the stores, and in toll booths where people were waiting in line. And we diversify that into digital, hang things at retail, outbound sales, et cetera, and then a whole slew of partners, including the manufacturers that Chuck referenced. So what I say mostly is we just love the incremental nature of a bank. and those accounts and those relationships and being in that channel. So we haven't put a ton into the guide yet because that thing just lifted off, I think, a couple of months, two, three months ago. But we are super excited about it because it is the single largest bank, largest set of account holders in the entire country. And so we're super hopeful, again, that that will be additive at a check point because it targets a slightly different set of user than the traditional one.

And I think we have Alex back. Alex?

Ladies and gentlemen, we apologize for the technical difficulties. We will now take our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Tianxing Huang with JP Morgan. Please proceed with your question.

Hey, Ron, Charles, Jim. It's Andrew actually on for Tianxing. Congrats on the quarter. I wanted to ask a question on retention. So obviously still running strong compared to pre-pandemic, a little bit of a slide quarter over quarter. But what I wanted to ask was, as you guys start to sell more services in bundles with the corporate pay integration, could there be any lifts in terms of retention as you sell potentially stickier products?

Yeah, hey, Andrew, it's Ron. Yeah, we actually have statistics on that, so we look at different cohorts, similar sets of clients, and look at whether they have one, two, three kinds of services, and your thesis is absolutely right, that as you move beyond one service, you're stickier and Would clients have a deeper relationship? Yes. So to the extent that we get what we call our platform or bundle to work and someone had walk-around products and then we were able to get their central bill pay, we do think we'll get a lift. And particularly when the bundle could include smart business cards or fuel cards, which are the predominant walk-arounds.

Great, thank you. Just one more quick follow-up. I was just curious, were there any hiring pressures or wage pressures that impacted your clients, whether it be in the fuel or corporate payment side, that might have been a little bit of a headwind to the results this quarter that could expect to normalize over time? Thank you, guys.

Yeah, we had a little bit, actually. Chuck referred to this earlier in our lodging business where we have a decent-sized servicing group which is one of the lowest wage groups in the company. I'd say that's the place that we felt some pressure and responded to that in the fall, both to retain people that we were losing and to add additional people. I think like the rest of corporations in America, we're seeing some pressures in different areas in IT, digital, certain pockets. But we basically have built that in, again, to the guide. I think it's been going on for, call it, three to six months now. So I think we're comfortable with what we plan.

But, Andrew, just to pick up on that, I think you were talking maybe wage pressure on some of our customers. And what I'd say there is we have seen that in lodging in particular.

And so our workforce lodging business, which has recovered, but just not to the extent where it could, is that they've had to actually small businesses turn down jobs.

And I can't travel there and do the work because I can't hire the people. And so it'll be interesting to see as government subsidies and other things fall aside and see what happens to the employment market. But we think there is some upside opportunity there. I haven't built a whole lot into the plan, a little bit, but not a whole lot.

But we'll wait and see. Maybe truck drivers, too. Yep.

All right. Thank you, guys. Thanks, Andrew.

Our next question comes from the line of Bob Napoli with William Blair. Please proceed with your question.

Hi, good afternoon, and nice job on the quarter. Ron, I guess, can you give some color on your expectations for the growth of the corporate payments business in 2022? And I guess, over the medium term, and maybe, you know, the various pieces for AP versus, versus cross border versus other?

Sure, Bob. I'd say the guide for that business in totality is in the high teens. And again, to your point, there's different pieces. The payables portion of that, you know, virtual cards, full AP. Chuck mentioned the full AP, I think, grew 50% last quarter. So that'll grow a bit faster. The partner business that we called out will grow slower than that. And probably the cross-border business would be closer to the mid-teens. So there would be those different pieces in it. And you ask me this every time, you know, hey, can you grow it faster? Well, obviously, if we could, you know, spend more money. But, again, we try to balance that. what we spend to hit a growth target, hit a profit target, and spend wisely so that we don't, again, have 50% new people or advertising that doesn't work. So we try, again, to be disciplined in terms of productive in terms of the monies that we spend.

Thank you. Then a follow-up question. Ron, as you called out at the beginning of the call, Fleet Corps has 15 proprietary acceptance networks, I think, you know, for your fuel card business. Are that many necessary? Is there, you know, how do you think about, you know, those proprietary acceptance networks versus leveraging an open loop network? You know, what benefits are you getting out of that? Is there an opportunity to optimize?

Yeah, that's a great question. So the answer is, It's not only our fuel car business. It's kind of the underlying core of the company. So it's the same thing in lodging. We've got 15,000 hotels here in the U.S. out of, call it, 45,000 or 50,000. We have super economics, again, and unique data. We've got a toll network, for example. In Brazil, we have fuel networks in, I don't know, 10 countries. where it's impossible for you or someone to go try to create a proprietary network today. So I call it out really just to remind new people that those networks and the volume that we run through them and the data that we collect and the economics that we collect are just massively advantageous to us when we turn around to the client side, to the business account side, you know, and pitch our offer to them. So I was really just trying to let people know that it's not some plain vanilla, you know, jumping on someone else's network that everyone else basically has access to.

Thank you. Appreciate it.

Our next question comes from the line of David Tolga with Evercore ISI. Please proceed with your question.

Thank you very much. The lodging business did nicely exceed our forecast for revenue in the quarter. Could you walk through what your forecast is for lodging revenue growth in 2022? And if you could discuss some of the underlying drivers, kind of the domestic business, you know, versus the international business? And then, you know, talk a little bit about Traveliance, which you acquired a couple of years ago. And are you seeing a nice recovery there?

Yeah, David, this is Charles. So, you know, a lot of you performing extremely well. We do have some continued recovery to go there, particularly in the airline space. So a lot of the performance you're seeing here is reflective of the domestic air travel. The international has still been way, way down versus historic norms. So we're doing that kind of swimming back a bit next year. Workforce has a bit of room to recover, but it's also just chugging along and doing pretty well. The ALE business, which was a recent acquisition, a creative goodbye for us. Still work to do to realize those synergies, but I'd say we're We're confident that the plans come together, so that looks pretty good. In terms of that specific line of business or product category, I don't have it in front of me.

Yeah, David, hey, it's Ron. I'm leafing here as Chuck is talking. So the guide on that thing is plus 20%. organically and obviously crazy high in the in the 40s on a print basis because we we bought something I guess closed in September and the drivers again of that are the sales plan is way up I think the sales plan is up 35 or 40 percent is our plan for 22 and then what Chuck said that there's super sensitivity and that one particularly the airline for example about a quarter of of that segment historically of our revenue came from international flights, which in Q4 was still effectively zero. To the extent that the world opens and airlines go back crossing borders again, let's say in Q2, we have the contracts and we're already serving the airlines on the domestic legs. We've assumed a little bit of kind of bounce back in that kind of in the second half. So it's big sales. It's bounce back in the airline thing. It's synergies that are baked into the recent acquisition. It's a big sales plan. There's just a lot of things going right in that business.

Thanks for that. Just a quick final question on capital allocation priorities for 2022. You've been very active. opportunistic, you know, with the stock at the current price, you've also been able to make some solid acquisitions. You know, what's your thought process for the year ahead when you look at your stock at the current price versus what you have in the acquisition pipeline?

Yeah, we're still buyers. I mean, I guess, you know, I mentioned in my opening comments that not only do we buy a couple million shares in Q4, but we made a decision with the board to to keep buying at the price into January, right, through a 10B5. And so I don't know where the stock's going to be, but at this price, we're buyers. And, you know, I think Chuck said it super well, David, earlier that with the liquidity we have, you know, $1.5 billion, depending on what cash, you know, we elect to use, we can do a lot of things, right? At this kind of stock price, we can buy back still a lot more of the company. And as I mentioned, we're going to unpause a set of deals that we worked on in the summer and in the fall. And so my guess, if you said to me, hey, we talk in six months, is you'd see us do both.

Understood. Thank you very much.

Yep, good to talk to you.

Our next question comes from a line of George Mahalos with Cowan. Please proceed with your question.

Hey, guys, thanks for taking my questions. I guess first, just to build off David's question, the last one, Can you sort of break down for us now the composition of revenue within lodging from your traditional blue-collar business of the airlines business now, just trying to get a sense of how they are in terms of size and how much you're thinking about that bounce back in airlines going forward if it materializes?

Yeah, that's a good question. So I think we probably have the details of that, but we do think of it in three pieces or three verticals. So we have what we call workforce, which is, You know, the original business we've owned for 10 years, which targets, you know, blue-collar travelers, you know, a tree-cutting firm that goes, you know, when the power lines are down. And then a couple of verticals that we've gotten into the last couple of years of airline crew. So the airlines, again, it's a global business. There's 10% of the lodging rooms, I think, are crew around the world. So a nice segment for us to be in. And then this newest one for us of homeowner insurers basically put people, when you have water damage or a fire or something like that, they're putting people up and then putting them into longer-term housing. So, you know, there's super unique, things in terms of the systems that we integrate into, right, into the crew management system or into the claim system in the case of the insurer. The networks are a little bit different that we try to put together, you know, depending on, you know, who the traveler is. And so I say that The two newest things would be circa 40% just to give you kind of a number relative to the workforce, McGilliv. And the good news is all three of those, again, are growing for the reasons that I outlined a bit ago.

Okay, that's super helpful. And just a... Hey, can you guys hear me?

Yeah, go ahead, George.

Okay. Just a quick follow-up on the expense side. I know it's something that's been talked about here, but if we look at 22, I mean, certainly it sounds like there are some expenses that are somewhat more transitory, right? You've got a big increase as the bad debt normalizes and starts to come back. Obviously, you've got some integration costs, but can you just help us think about how much of those are a transitory specific to 22 versus sort of structural over the next several years as you accelerate investment to the cloud and to your tech transformation.

Yeah, George, let me take a swing and then Chuck can maybe provide a bit more detail. The way that I think about it, we think about it is what I'll call kind of discretionary expense so that we think about the business sitting there to operate and run the book of business we have. We need a set of expenses, right? We need IT to run and comm and people and credit and things like that. And then the big incremental expenses are really sales and IT and then a little bit of management to figure out the way. And so those are gigantic. They're all those things I'm talking about, $600 million to $700 million of our total expense plan in 22. So the call for us is really just how much do we spend in those things, which, again, are – 50% or more helping 2023 and 2024, right? Because by the time you sell the thing and get it on board and you do it by next Thanksgiving, get the business to the following year, you build an IT thing, roll it out for Christmas. So that's the message I think that you ought to hear is we've made the call when we like the revenue and profit guide that we can get to, to basically chase some things that we like, that we think are additive and incremental in the future years. The answer is it depends. If those things go well, we'll double down on them. Or if they don't, we'll probably back off. If we need a different profit target, we may back off. If we don't, so I'd say that those are the ones we kind of keep in our hand on the steering wheel and decide kind of how much we want to do with it. Unless investors told me, hey, they don't care about what our profits are, and then we might do more of it. I haven't heard that yet, but we're still balancing it.

Okay, thank you.

Our next question comes from the line of Andrew Jeffrey with Truist. Please proceed with your question.

Thanks. I appreciate you squeezing me in. You know, Ron, lots of pretty interesting initiatives. I think, you know, first digital, which you noted, is now half of fuel sales and the progress toward the platform selling motion. I'm trying to wrap my head around a little bit, you know, and I don't expect you to speak to anything beyond 22, but you know, is there anything that we should be thinking about as sort of leaking out of the bottom of the funnel? If you're having success with more value added solutions, maybe expanded spend on fuel cards. I'm not sure you called that out this quarter in particular, but all this stuff collectively, should we think that maybe this business can grow faster?

Faster at the current margin or is there's I just want to make sure I'm not missing any any Puts and takes here that you'd want us to focus on It's a super good question Andrew and my answer a little waffly would be it depends so so what I would say to you is This direction we're going of effectively repackaging and integrating you know, a bunch of the products that we have, has enormous incremental potential for the company because it'll be served out differently and it'll appeal to different businesses than we're targeting today. So the first message I'm trying to get everybody to say is we're on to something that leverages the capabilities we've built over 20 years, that it's a 10x kind of opportunity for the company. the profits that we can make is going to be a function of the selling economics of that, which we're just getting into. So if you said to me, hey, how do you think the profit margins will look in two or three years? My answer is probably pretty similar of the set of businesses that we have because we've got great experience and history and statistics and we know the curves. We kind of know what we can produce. I would say we don't know that answer for some of these platform things. And so if those things sell kind of at a line average or even a smidge worse, I think you'll continue to see, you know, growth with similar kinds of margins. And if not, then we'll, you know, fight that fight when we get there and ask people, hey, would you rather see accelerated revenue at slightly lower margins, if that's the conclusion. But it's really just a bit too early to call. Okay.

That's helpful. And then just philosophically or theoretically as a follow-up, is this a business that at some point you'd like to be simpler? Or do you feel really good about all the businesses you're in? I know gift has sort of been kind of a mixed bag over the years.

Yeah, I think we, it's a great question. I think that, you know, it's the old, it's the vantage point. Like, we made the great idea of talking to you guys and people about, you know, the way we run the company and we have these different things and stuff. When we sit around in the company, it's really pretty simple. I try to say in my opening remarks of basically we just work for businesses and we work on their expenses or their spend and we try to reduce it. And the programs that we created, you know, control what they buy and what they pay for. So for us, whether it's a lodging room piece of spend or a fuel or business card piece of spend or a vendor, it all looks like a business expense that we're trying to help control. And the reason that it seems complicated is we've made like super specialized ways to do it. So we ended up like talking to everybody, hey, let me tell you about the super secret sauce I use in lodging versus whatever. And I think we're going to start to talk to the marketplace, to your point, a little simpler and just say, hey, look, we're about to try to help you spend less on kind of non-payroll expenses and we've got super special stuff and we've got kind of more generalized stuff and, you know, what's your need and we've got a product line and let's see if we can help you. And maybe get back off a little bit of all the detail that we provide everybody on how we make the sausage, I think.

Yeah, I think that could help a lot. Great. Very insightful.

Like the selling, you know, is a perfect example or whatever. Like we use this pivot we've made to digital. We use it everywhere in the company. We figured out how to build a tech stack. We figured out how to advertise. We figured out how to automate bidding. We figured out how to get applications processed through the system. We figured out how to make credit instant. We've done so many things that we can basically print and copy into the other businesses that we have. I think you'll see more of that as we As we launch this platform line, you'll see us tucking the things that we have into the platform, and they may seem more the same to people than different.

Okay. Look forward to that evolution. Thank you again.

Yep. You're welcome. Thank you. In the interest of time, we ask that you please limit to one question. Our next question comes from the line of Ken Sugoski with Autonomous Research. Please proceed with your question.

Hey, good evening, everyone. Thanks for taking the question. Ron, I wanted to follow up on some of the questions on EV. I think you mentioned in your prepared remarks that the EV economics are roughly in line with traditional fueling services. So can you provide some insight on what the unit economics might look like for the EV offering? It's impressive that the transition to EV is revenue neutral. So I'm just curious what's driving that. Thank you.

Hey Ken, this is Charles. Good question.

I actually had our analyst pull data from the Netherlands, a country that's a little bit further ahead in terms of EV migration than the UK, which is further ahead than the US. There we have about 18,000 clients. We said, okay, let's split those clients into two categories. A group that only buys fuel and has no EV, so So I see internal combustion engine only. And then mixed fleets. And what I tell you is about 14% of the clients, about 2,500 clients, are mixed fleets. So they've got both types of vehicles. And they tend to be larger. So the enterprise-level clients are moving faster. So the mixed fleets average about 20 cards per account or vehicles per account, whereas on the fuel- cards per account. When I look at those mixed fleets, the actual revenue per vehicle that we receive on EVs versus fuel, it's actually slightly higher. And part of the reason is that these enterprise-level clients get rebates when they go out in the fuel networks, which we provide to them, which we don't give on the EV reporting side. And so the economics turn out to be neutral but actually slightly favorable on the EV side. And so without getting into specific client level type of revenue per, I would tell you that the EV is about 20% higher for these mixed fleets. Now of their cards, they've got about 15 to 20% over to EV already. So we're seeing some real data points here. But that just gives you a sense of who's moving, kind of the size of accounts that are moving, how far they've moved, and the economic kind of relationship there and why it's comparable.

Hey, Ken, it's Ron. It's a super important question, so let me, it's Ron, just jump on to what Chuck said. So to me, you know, there was and is maybe a massive misconception that, hey, when a business moves to EV, you plug it in, everything's free. So you know, goodbye fleet court, tough days. So the two things, and I can't not admit that some number of years ago I was worried when I was dumber, but the two things that are clear are, one, it costs way more to recharge an EV vehicle than people thought, certainly when you do it publicly. You know, there's a huge markup on the electricity, obviously, because And there's way higher MDR for people like us because they're trying to build up volume. So the first misconception is, oh, it costs $50 to fill up a van and only $5 to recharge a van. So that's not true. And then the second thing, which I think we all missed, is most of the recharging is going to happen at home. So there's millions of charge points that we're not in the business today. We only do stuff at gas stations. And so to me, those are the two things where you go, oh, my God. Most of the recharging is going to happen at home, and it's got to be measured and reimbursed. So who's going to do it? So separate from the math that Chuck ran through, I just want to stick those concepts in people's heads that it is different than all the thought coming into the thing. There's more money helping businesses in this thing, and it's going to cost them more than they think when they think about their golf cart.

Extremely helpful. Thank you, guys. Appreciate it.

Our final question comes from the line of James Fawcett with Morgan Stanley. Please proceed with your question.

Hey, sorry about that, fumbling with my phone. I wanted to kind of follow up on that question and just ask, on these minority investments that you've made, I think at least in my mind, the case to be made for managing those expenses and the costs associated with it, as you just highlighted, are probably more significant than people may have imagined. But can you talk about strategically why or under what conditions you do the minority investment versus acquisition, what you're expecting that to lead to down the road, and how we should think about that trajectory of relationships and potential contribution directly to Fleet Corps?

Yeah, James. Hey, it's Ron. It's a good question. You know, it's kind of, you know, try before you buy. So the category is new. There's a couple of partners that we called out today have been working on software, you know, pretty hard and stuff. So for us, it's kind of a no-brainer to be supportive to them, give them money to keep kind of built. And we have obviously commercial agreements that state the economics and the roles of the two companies. And so we like it. Some people have been working on it here in the U.S., and some people have been working on it in Europe. We integrate it into the stuff we have, and off we go. We've got a product that works, and so we can focus on trying to sell the stuff, which is what those two partners are looking for. Obviously, to the extent that the thing is a super big deal and we want to get more of the value chain, we would clearly look at other options and stuff down the road and obviously in other geographies. But initially, we're super pleased with these partners. We screened a lot of them. We like the offerings that we have. And we're still in the mode that I said we can. We're still trying to learn exactly what the client's want and need and to make sure that the products, including the software, are dialed in for that. So we didn't want to get out over our skis before we were clearer.

That makes sense. And then just as a quick follow-up, you've talked a lot about the strength we're seeing in things like hotel and recovery and travel. Can you just give us a little bit of color on what you saw as we went through the Omicron wave and And, you know, where you're at on a run rate trajectory, if there was any impact there, just trying to measure near-term sensitivity to recent events.

Yeah, another good question. I'd say a smidge. Chuck and I obviously did a reconnaissance of January, you know, with our folks. And I think we, you know, had a bit more in Europe again, you know, exiting December and a bit into January. But I'd say it's a pretty soft month. James, for us anyway. So a smidgey impact. Obviously, we've rolled that into our guidance that you have today. We've had our eyes open the whole time. And I'd say the most recent stop call, the last week or two, that smidgey thing's kind of going away. So it's, you know, I don't want to get over my hoeskies here, but it's sure feeling like we're coming out, you know, a bit into a clearing of Finally, and again, I just want to reaffirm that the forward numbers we've given for 22, we're pretty confident in them sitting here, you know, beginning of February.

That's great. Thanks for all the great color on.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we have reached the end of the question and answer session. This concludes today's conference.

Can we make just a quick comment? We just want to apologize to those on the call for the technical whiteout. Hopefully it wasn't super confusing. So as always, appreciate the interest and the support.

Thank you. This concludes today's conference, and you may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation. Have a wonderful day.