WEX Inc. common stock

thank you for standing by my name is cheryl and i will be your conference operator today at this time i would like to welcome everyone to the wex q4 2021 earnings conference call all lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise after the speaker's remarks there will be a question and answer session if you would like to ask a question during this time simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad if you would like to withdraw your question press again the Star 1. Thank you. Steve Elder, Vice President of Investor Relations, you may begin your conference.

Thank you, Operator. Good morning, everyone. With me today is Melissa Smith, our Chair and CEO, and our Interim CFO and Chief Accounting Officer, Jennifer Kimball. The press release we issued earlier today and a slide deck to walk through our prepared remarks have been posted to the Investor Relations section of our website at wexinc.com. A copy of the release and the slide deck have also been included in 8Ks we submitted to the SEC. As a reminder, we will be discussing non-GAAP metrics, specifically adjusted net income attributable to shareholders, which we refer to as adjusted net income, or ANI, and adjusted operating income. Adjustments for this year's fourth quarter and four-year GAAP results to arrive at these metrics include unrealized gains on financial instruments, net foreign currency losses, acquisition-related intangible amortization, other acquisition and divestiture-related items, stock-based compensation, other costs, change in fair value of contingent consideration, debt restructuring and debt issuance cost amortization, similar adjustments attributable to non-controlling interests, and certain tax-related items as applicable. The company provides revenue guidance on a GAAP basis and earnings guidance on a non-GAAP basis as we are unable to predict certain elements that are included in reported GAAP results. Please see Exhibit 1 of the press release for an explanation and reconciliation of adjusted net income attributable to shareholders to GAAP's net income attributable to shareholders and a reconciliation of operating income to adjusted operating income. I would also like to remind you that we will discuss forward-looking statements under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ materially from those forward-looking statements as a result of various factors, including those discussed in our press release, the risk factors identified in our 2020 Annual Report on Form 10-K filed with the SEC on March 1, 2021, our quarterly reports on Form 10Q and subsequent SEC filings. While we may update forward-looking statements in the future, we disclaim any obligations to do so. You should not place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, all of which speak only as of today. With that, I'll turn the call over to Melissa Smith.

Thanks, Steve, and good morning, everyone. We appreciate you joining us today. Before diving into our Q4 and full year results, I'd like to share my appreciation for our dedicated team members across the globe who continue to execute admirably with the backdrop of the ongoing pandemic. As a result of their remarkable efforts, 2021 was a very strong year for WEX. In the fourth quarter, we delivered record revenue of $498 million, a year-over-year increase of 25%, driven by the continued expansion of our platform. Approximately 12% of the increase in revenue was from higher field prices, so revenue grew approximately 13% for all other factors. Total purchase volume processed across the organization in the fourth quarter grew 79% year over year to $25 billion, reflecting the strong rebound in momentum we were seeing across each of our businesses. Worth noting that while travel volumes have not yet returned to pre-pandemic levels, we have more than made up for the loss of revenue, powered by the underlying strength across all of our other solutions. Record quarterly revenue paired with a unique efficiency and scalability of our platform resulted in adjusted net income for diluted share of 258, an increase of 78% compared to the same quarter last year. Before turning to the key drivers of our growth during the quarter, let me quickly touch on our full year 2021 results. On a full year basis, 2021 revenue increased 19% year over year. Approximately 8% of this increase was due to higher fuel prices and some benefit from foreign exchange rates, leaving approximately 11% growth for all other factors. Full year purchase volume of $88 billion was up 59% compared to 2020. in full year adjusted net income grew 51 percent reflecting many of the same benefits of scale and efficiency that i just mentioned overall 2021 was one of the best years in wex's history with record revenue and near record adjusted net income per share we entered 2022 with strong momentum underpinned by a return to healthy organic growth Now let me take a step back and discuss the key drivers of our fourth quarter results in more detail. First, as was the case in the third quarter, most existing customer spend returned to, and in many cases exceeded, pre-pandemic levels. Second, and core to our strategy, we're expanding our ecosystem with innovative new solutions to help our customers simplify their businesses. As an example, we recently signed a new agreement with MasterCard that allows us to add their broad merchant acceptance to our proprietary closed-loop fleet cards, enabling our customers to purchase a broader set of products through WEX, but still in a highly controlled manner. In January, we also announced the launch of WEX Fleet Tolls in partnership with BestPass, a leader in toll management solutions for commercial fleets. This solution allows our fleet customers to utilize cutting edge payment technology to improve their mobility needs. Not only does this allow our customers to free up capital by only paying for accrued tolls, it also simplifies account management by reducing the number of accounts held with different tolling authorities across the country. Our compelling suite of solutions like these, underpinned by WEX's global scale and reliability, Customer-focused innovation and specialized focus is leading to wins in the marketplace and helping us expand our existing relationships. To that end, I'm very pleased to announce that we have extended our agreement with one of the largest online travel companies in the world during the fourth quarter. We look forward to supporting their needs and innovating with them for many years to come. In addition, we continue to ramp our relationship with Avid Exchange, which we expect will continue to drive significant volume growth and profitable revenue growth over the coming quarters. Beyond driving growth for their existing clients, I'm also pleased to share that we signed several new customers during the fourth quarter, including the Commonwealth of Kentucky and Fleet, Anthem and UMB and Health, and Renewed PNC Bank, one of our largest and most important corporate payment partners, just to name a few. We continue to hear from new customers that they are choosing WEX for many of the same reasons our existing customers are deepening their relationships, because our unique platform allows us to offer tailored solutions that are seamlessly embedded into their workflows with a simple integration. In mobility, this includes our industry-leading products for over-the-road and local vehicles. In travel and corporate payments, we're leading with embedded payments and AP automation solutions and building out a regional sales force in the direct channel to bring these solutions to more customers with fast and simple integration. And in health, we're driving growth in our benefits platform for CDH and corporate administration, as well as our fully outsourced benefit administration platform and services, which is a significant growth opportunity for WACS. From an end consumer perspective, one in five HSA account holders are on the WEX platform. This large data pool allows us to reach beyond the product offering and also help educate people on the financial benefits of HSAs. WEX targets educational messages based on where people are in their life plans. from newly employed to people getting ready to retire, with the goal of helping people get the most out of money that they set aside in tax-advantaged accounts. And we do this in creative ways, through benefit toolkits, open enrollment toolkits, blogs, and podcasts. This helps both our partners with their offering and end consumers. To that end, I'm very optimistic about the momentum we've seen in health coming out of open enrollment season, which has exceeded our expectations and sets us up for a strong 2022. During the quarter, we also successfully moved nearly $1 billion in HSA deposits to Wex Bank, which were invested and we expect to be a significant driver of incremental revenue in 2022. Again, we'll discuss the details further in a moment, but this is just one of many reasons we see significant value in the health business. WEX has deep experience and is driving growth across each of our three verticals, but I'm even more excited about the opportunity ahead to further integrate our products and services and wrap our customers with an ecosystem of solutions that meet their evolving needs. To that end, in January, we welcome Karen Stroop as Chief Digital Officer and Carlos Carrieto as Chief Operating Officer International. Both Carlos and Karen will be instrumental as we continue to expand our global footprint and optimize digital solutions for customers around the world. We announced this morning that we will be hosting a Virtual Investor Day on March 23rd during which you'll hear more from Karen and Carlos, and we will discuss how our reorganized leadership structure will help WEX unlock the benefits of fully integrated customer relationships across our entire product portfolio. Turning now to our technology platform. Last quarter, I told you that we had nearly completed our efforts to move WEX's corporate payments card issuing technology to the cloud. I'm very pleased to report that the integration was completed successfully. Today, approximately 80% of WEX's platform is multi-cloud based, allowing WEX to exceed expectations for scale and reliability, while also being able to move quickly on new innovative concepts. Throughout 2021, our technology investments focused on continuing to enhance our cloud native capabilities, digital marketing engine, and artificial intelligence. As I mentioned last quarter, our digital marketing channels are proving very effective. We're expanding it to other parts of the business to drive enhanced conversion and customer engagement. For our North American fleet business, these marketing efforts delivered 56% more new accounts in 2021. On the AI front, we continue to take strides to increase automation across the business, driving efficiency and improving outcomes. One example is that all of our investments are geared towards creating an intelligent, secure infrastructure, enabling our capabilities in ways that can be seamlessly embedded in their business, including cutting edge. We believe these. enable us to help our customers solve increasingly complex challenges key among them the expected transition to hybrid and electric vehicles with our leadership position in providing fleet management solutions combined with new offerings like the partnership we announced with chargepoint last quarter we're uniquely positioned to help our customers with their mixed fleet needs these efforts also closely which includes identifying near and long-term opportunities to support our customers in improving their environmental sustainability. As fleet's becoming increasingly electric, customers make the transition. Looking ahead at 2022 and beyond, the future for WECC, we entered this year with significant momentum ...underscored by strong new sales and a robust... ...open enrollment season in our health business that exceeded our expectations. Our digital marketing channels continue to deliver, and we are well-positioned to capitalize on that success. We continue to make great strides in improving efficiency, driven by our investments to make our platform more flexible and scalable. All of these trends give me confidence in our ability to deliver on our financial targets, including revenue growth, within our long-term guidance range for 2022. Before I conclude, I'm sure you all saw the news that Roberta Simone will be leaving Wex in April and will be helping us work through a successful transition. I'd like to extend my sincere thanks to Roberto for his many contributions to WEX since joining in 2016 and wish him well in his future endeavors. I'm Chief Financial Officer. Jen has done a great job of leading our finance and accounting teams while we conduct this search for Roberto's replacement. I'll now turn it over to Jen to walk you through our results.

Thank you, Melissa, and good morning. I had the opportunity to meet many of you. I'm really excited to join Melissa and be here with you today. First, I'll provide an overview of our strong fourth quarter results. We'll then shift to our outlook for the first quarter and full year 22. We raised our fourth quarter and full year guidance in early January, and our results played out even better than expected, feeding on both top line and adjusted earnings. To put this into perspective, this is one of the best quarters in WEX history. As Melissa mentioned, we ended 2021 with a which demonstrates the strength of our organic business and gives us a nice tailwind coming into this year. Let's start with the results for the full year on slide 11. we delivered total revenue of $1.85 billion, up 19% over prior year. Gap earnings per share attributable to shareholders was breakeven. Adjusted net income per diluted share was $9.14, up 51% comparatively. Fuel prices and favorable foreign exchange rates added $124 million of revenue versus prior year. I'm pleased to report that each of our segments outperformed expectations. Full year revenue was a record high and above 2019 pre-pandemic levels by more than $125 million. Our fleet segment led the way with 21% growth over last year, followed by mid to high teen growth in traveling corporate payments and health. Now let's move on to the quarter results, starting on slide 12. Total revenue came in just above the high end of our range, up 25% compared to prior year, reflecting healthy volume increases across each of our segments. acquisitions, and higher fuel prices. From an earnings standpoint, on a GAAP basis, Q4 had net loss attributable to shareholders of $11.8 million or 26 cents per diluted share. Non-GAAP adjusted net income grew 78% to $116.8 million or $2.58 per diluted share. This reflects both volume-led top-line growth and significant adjusted operating income margin improvement. Turning to slide 13. Let's break down the revenue by segment. Fleet grew 30%. Travel and corporate payments reported a 9% increase. and health delivered 23% growth. Moving to segment results, let's start with fleet on slide 14. Fleet achieved $306.8 million in revenue, up 30% from the prior year, led by higher fuel prices, new wins and renewals, and the gradual recovery in local fleet. Payment processing transactions were up 12% year over year. Over the road continued their strong growth, up over 21%. North America fleet was up 12%, and international fleet was up 8%. The net payment processing rate in Q4 was 116 basis points, up seven basis points sequentially, reflecting better spreads in Europe and some favorable mix. Our net late fee rate this quarter was 48 basis points, up slightly from the 45 basis points we reported in Q3. As customer payment patterns return to normal, we expect to see modest increases in this rate. Finance fee revenue was up 42%. on significantly higher volume and fuel prices. The average domestic fuel price in Q4 was $3.42, up from $2.26 in 2020, leading to an increase in fleet revenue of $48 million. Turning to the travel and corporate solutions segment on slide 15, we recorded total revenue up 9% to $81.5 million. You'll recall we had a contract change beginning in the fourth quarter for corporate payments customer that required a shift from gross revenue presentation with no impact to operating income. If the fourth quarter of last year had been reported on this basis, revenue would have been $16.1 million lower. For additional transparency, we've added slide 22, which lays out revenue, operating margin, rate, and volume trends by quarter for travel and corporate payments to show the impact of the change on a consistent basis. I'll walk through the segment results, assuming this contract was recorded on a net basis for each period, which is reconciled in the appendix of the slide deck. Breaking down revenue, corporate payments was up 13%. but by continued strength in the partner channel. The election cycle in 2020 contributed $3 million in revenue last year, so the growth this year would have been even higher. Revenue from travel-related customers was up 127%, which reflects growing demand and significant contributions from E-Net and Optel. Purchase volume issued by WEX is also a really good story at $11 billion, up 120% over prior year. Travel-related customer volume was up nearly 400% over last year and represented over 60% of the total. We continue to be well-positioned to capture future upside as travel recovers. Corporate payments related volume was up 13%, consistent with revenue growth. The net interchange rate was 63 basis points, up sequentially from the previous quarter of 52 basis points. The fourth quarter generally includes true-ups to reflect actual volume performance. Otherwise, the rate would have been similar to the third quarter. We continue to benefit from our strong card network relationships and signed a new contract in the quarter. Finally, let's take a look at health on slide 16. We posted another quarter of meaningful growth with reported revenue up 23% over prior year powered by Benefit Express and strong organic growth. The number of staff accounts was up 12% over last year And as expected, there was a sequential decrease from temporary COBRA accounts being closed at the start of the quarter, which had no impact on fourth quarter revenue. Now let's move to slide 17. For the company overall, we delivered an adjusted operating income margin of 37.1%. Lease margin has now exceeded 50% for three consecutive quarters. The increase reflects revenue growth, higher fuel prices, and scale in our cost space. Our fleet credit loss continues to be low at 9.6 basis points, but as expected is taking up from the 6.9 basis points we reported last year during the pandemic. Traveling corporate payments delivered a margin of 38.8%. Despite a seasonal decline in travel volume, we were able to hold the margin relatively flat to Q3, adjusted for the accounting change to provide a consistent comparison and significantly better than Q2 and Q1. We continue to see high drop-through on incremental revenue, which reflects our ability to cost-effectively scale and capitalize on $30 million of ENET and OPTAL run rate synergies. The remaining $10 million of the $40 million target relates to platform consolidation and back-end processing, which has a longer tail. In the health segment, adjusted operating income margins for the quarter was 19.2%, down 1.3% from 2020, mostly due to the acquisition of Benefit Express and some expense timing. Generally speaking, Q4 is the lowest margin quarter for the health business as expenses ramp up during open enrollment season while the related revenue comes in the following year. Changing gears to taxes on slide 18. Our gap effective tax rate this quarter was 50% compared to 7% for the fourth quarter of 2020. On an A&I basis, the tax rate was 25.3%, up 290 basis points from a year ago, reflecting a shift in the geographic mix of profits. Turning now to slide 19, we continue to generate strong cash flow driven by record earnings, which enables strategic investments to support future growth and pay down debt of $109 million. We ended the year with $589 million in cash, of which $153 million is corporate cash as defined in the credit agreement. We ended the year with $759 million of liquidity available under our credit agreement in debt of $2.8 billion. The leverage ratio as defined in our credit agreement came in at 3.4 times, which is within our long-term target of 2.5 to 3.5 times. We will continue to take a flexible and opportunistic approach to deploying capital. You may have noticed this quarter we added nearly $950 million in investment securities to our balance sheet, which will be a nice revenue stream for us going forward. You'll recall that in the second quarter, we acquired the rights to certain health savings account assets. We moved some of those accounts to WexBank and invested them to unlock a higher yield, which is around 1.5% currently. In addition to creating a new revenue stream within other revenue, as the investment portfolio matures, this will make the company less sensitive to future changes in interest rates and create a natural hedge with spending levels in the health segment. Finally, I want to close with some thoughts on our outlook for 22. We are emerging from the depth of the pandemic in a position of strength and expect the tailwind from 2021 to drive further growth. We continue to deliver profits consistent with our long-term guidance range when removing the benefit of higher fuel prices and expect 2022 will play out in a similar manner. Starting with the first quarter, we expect to report revenue in the range of $495 million to $505 million. On an EPS basis, we expect adjusted net income to be between $2.55 and $2.65 per diluted share. For the full year, we expect to report revenue in the range of $2.05 billion to $2.09 billion. As a reminder, this includes the impact of the accounting change we discussed last quarter, which moved revenue presentation for one customer from gross to net. In the appendix, you can see the impact of the change on revenue for full year 2021 was $52 million. And on an EPS basis, we expect adjusted net income to be between $11.20 and 11.60 per diluted share for the fleet segment we expect revenue growth to be towards the top end of our long-term guidance range of four to eight percent with fuel prices pushing growth rates higher we will continue to benefit from the new wins and renewals that we signed during the year we expect the late fee revenue and credit losses to trend higher than 2021 levels and generally offset each other. For the travel and corporate payment segments, we also expect revenue growth, when adjusted for the accounting change, to be within the long-term guidance range of 10 to 15%, with a high flow-through to operating income. Total volume is expected to grow in the mid-20s. The health segment is a highly recurring revenue business for us, Another strong year is expected after an encouraging open enrollment season. We expect health to deliver revenue growth in the high teens, which includes a full year of Benefit Express and revenues from the HSA deposits that are now on our balance sheet. Now let me walk you through a few more assumptions. Exchange rates are as of the end of December 2021. we estimate domestic fuel prices will average $3.52 per gallon for the first quarter and $3.55 for the full year, consistent with last week's NYMEX futures price. The adjusted net income tax rate is expected to be between 25% and 26% for the first quarter and the full year. And finally, based on the projected earnings, We are assuming that the shares related to our convertible debt will be included in the share count, resulting in approximately 47.5 million shares outstanding. This means that approximately $20 million of interest expense for the year related to the debt will not be included in the earnings per share calculation. As Melissa mentioned, we entered 2022 with momentum. I believe the future is incredibly bright. We look forward to sharing more with you at Investor Day. And with that, operator, please open the line for questions.

Thank you. As a reminder, please press star 1 to ask a question. Your first question is from Ramsey of Barclays. Please go ahead. Your line is open. Hi.

Thanks so much for taking my question. Hold on. Can you hear me?

I can hear you.

Can you hear me okay?

You're cutting in and out. I heard you ask about MasterCard, but you were cutting in and out. Yes.

Let me try to change my virtue. Hold on.

Thank you. Is that any better? Much better. Thank you. Okay. That's exactly right. I was asking about MasterCard and that new arrangement and whether you could help us think through the size of it and also kind of the distribution strategy, how does it roll out?

Yeah, sure. So we find that when our customers come onto the fleet program, part of the attraction for them is the ability to lock down their controls. really particularly like the idea that they can lock down to very specific things like fuel um moves and then we find over time with that customer base they are interested as they build trust with us to be able to actually purchase more uh more readily and so uh this arrangement we have with mastercard is really allowing the best of both worlds where we'll embed the open loop capability where our proprietary network doesn't extend. And so customers, if they want, would be able to actually use our proprietary network in our locations and then purchase on top of that. And where we find that to be particularly interesting is with our smaller fleet customers who, you know, have a desire to continue to have more capability with us than one has integrated within their systems, you know, within one point. And so we see this as just a nice extension that the product capability have right now. And in terms of revenue opportunity, you know, this is what we'll see better as we go into the marketplace, you know, what we're hearing from customers and what we're seeing for demand. We think this will actually give us a nice little lift.

Okay. And my second question is about the take rate in travel and corporate payments. There's a lot of moving parts. I guess the first question I wanted to ask on that was, will we see any incremental kind of yield compression from the large new travel renewal you called out? And I guess you also talked about some renewal with the networks, and I'm just wondering if that creates sort of an offset. So how should we think about that take rate sort of trending over the next, you know, stretch with these inputs?

Yeah, yeah. On page 22 in the DAC, we actually added in some detail around this because we know that the change with that one customer going from gross to net adds a little bit of complexity. So we showed that on a comparable basis on both page 22 and page 23. And what you can see is that travel and corporate payments volume was up 120% over Q4 of last year. And then we also showed the rate. So the net rate went from 52 basis points when you adjust it for that gross to net change to 63 basis points in the fourth quarter. So it went up actually 11 basis points. Now that's largely due to true-up adjustments that we make in the normal course at the end of the year. So what I would say is if you parse the rate out and you were to look at it split between travel and corporate payments, We expect the travel rate to look pretty consistent to the average of the full year for 2021. And we expect the corporate payments rate as we bring on more embedded payments customers to trend that rate down through the course of 2022. And that you can see the margin on there as well. So we're showing the margin adjusted by quarter for movement of that customer from gross to net. And you can see we've seen some pretty significant margin improvements. We had 39% operating margin in the fourth quarter. So we expect to see a continued nice drop through in terms of profitability as we bring on that additional volume. And Jenna talked about that when we gave our guidance expectations that for this segment, we expect revenue to be in our long-term range of 10% to 15% and spend to come in around the mid-20s.

Got it. That was all very helpful. Thanks so much.

Your next question is from Sanjay Sukrani of KVW. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Thanks. Good morning. I'm curious if there's a way to think about where the key segments are across the business relative to pre-pandemic levels. I know there's been a lot of mixed differences. Some parts of the business have come back and others haven't. Maybe, Melissa, is there a way to sort of parse through that? And then when we think about the guidance, how much of a rebound are you assuming inside those specific verticals?

Yeah, let me talk about guidance for a minute to just make sure that that's clear. So if you look at our guidance for 2022, the midpoint, we're guiding up the revenue growth of 12% and ANI EPS growth of 25%. Some of the things that affect comparability from year to year, we mentioned the fact that we have the customer that's going from gross to net, which would have brought down our 2021 revenue number by $52 million to make it comparable. And then we added in between $60 and $65 million for additional field prices year over year. and a little bit of offset on NFX, and you kind of take that all into account, you end up actually in the same place. We have about 12% revenue growth at the good point when you adjust it out for all of those factors. If you look within our guidance itself, we have an expectation that we have a really strong sales tail going into 2022. And that's one of the things is we look at what our growth is going to be, how much have we actually signed up for customers that are just in the implementation phase. We feel pretty strongly about that, and that's part of why we're leading to that midpoint guide. There's probably about a 1% pickup to your original question around what's happening from just additional volume that's untapped from pre-pandemic levels. You can see across the business, our North American fleet business volume is now higher than it was in the fourth quarter of 2019. The over-the-road business has been higher for a while. You kind of run across the business and see that we've had a lot of volume pick up gradually over the last year and a half, and that's been reflected in the numbers today. Okay.

And I guess just to follow up on Ramsey's question, I think you answered this, but just to be clear, that travel renewal shouldn't have a meaningful impact on the travel part of the yield. And you mentioned sort of the scale and efficiency gains. How do we conventionalize the efficiency gains on a go-forward basis, specifically in the segment and maybe broadly speaking for the company?

Yeah, again, if you go back and look at the rate, what we're saying is we expect to see rate stability within the travel segment. I shouldn't say segment, but within the travel customer base of the travel and corporate payment segment for 2022 compared to the full year rate for 2021. And so I guess it's a long-winded way of saying, yes, we don't expect to have a material change net of what we're seeing across that customer base. um and in terms of how we dimensionalize the volume you can actually see on page 22 you can see margin improvement each uh period as volume has increased through the business uh so i think actually we've got that graph gives you a pretty good sense of how much drop through we're seeing is we have incremental volume and then the broader effects business Yeah. And that should continue. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Just making sure that should continue to go up.

Continue. Yeah.

Yeah. And is there a way to sort of range that? Like, is it just a complete drop through or?

That segment, the pre-pandemic operating margin was in the 40s. We're approaching that. So we do feel like we're going to continue to see drops through of incremental revenue that goes to operating margin. But we've seen huge step improvements during the course of 2021. We think you'll see incremental improvements as you go through 2022. And then the last big part that we talked about is that we still have significant synergy remaining for the integration of eNet and Opto as we consolidate the platforms together. We've talked about the fact that we have $30 million worth of run rate synergies that we've recognized so far, and we have another $10 million hanging out there that will come in 2023. Great.

Thank you so much.

Your next question is from Bob Napoli of William Blair. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

No, thank you. Good luck to Roberto and welcome, Jen. To the calls here. I guess congratulations on the on the performance and the execution to I guess, to the WEX team. It's really nice to see, you know, on the the margin improvements. You know, what is you know, what exactly is made a very impressive margin improvements? What is driving I know you've been making significant investments in your tech stack, but what are incremental margins for that business, and what have you done to improve incremental margins, if you would?

Within the travel and corporate payment segment, and this is Melissa, the improvements came from three different things that came together during the course of 2021. The first was the synergy realization that we had with ENET and NAWPL. As we went through that process, if you recall, we closed the business at the beginning of that period. And so we rapidly went through a process of making sure that we could rationalize what those two businesses should look like together. And you can see the benefit of that throughout the course of the year. The second thing is we saw volume increase. through the course of the year. And that leads to my third point, which we've done a lot of work over the last several years around the platform, making sure that it was scalable. We saw the negative of that happen in the middle of the pandemic, but we're seeing the positive of that. We really had done a lot of work to set up the cost structure so that it could be highly scalable. We know the embedded payments product in the marketplace, but having a best-in-class product, having high reliability is really important to our customers, but also being able to make sure that we can participate in the market at the appropriate cost structure makes sense because it's more of an infrastructure play for a lot of What we're doing on top of that is embedding other services and other capabilities at more of a premium price.

Thank you. To follow up on the health care business, you know, very nice growth in the SAS accounts. The revenue growth is growing faster than accounts, so revenue per account going up as well. And, you know, nice to see the $900 million investment. starting to benefit from investment income. But if you can comment on the revenue per account, the improvement in revenue per account. And the $900 million, is that the full? Is there more to go? And will your interest income go up in step with Fed rate increases on that investment portfolio?

I'll answer the first part, and Jen will answer the second part of that. The revenue increase is a combination of the fact that we continue to offer other services to our customers. So as they come on, we are offering the ability to provide their own online technology. We earn a reoccurring revenue stream in SAS fees, and that's still 70% of the revenue. um 70 75 of the revenue in that part of the business but on top of that we provide services where our customers are interested in having us doing some of their outsourced services for them and on top of that is the new revenue that we're getting from our deposits and jen if you want to elaborate on that yes so um there is opportunity um there's certainly

additional deposits that we could bring into West Bank, just keeping in mind the regulatory capital requirements that we have there. That's certainly going to continue to look at that opportunity as we move forward.

Thank you.

Your next question is from James of Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Thanks a lot. Good morning, everybody. I wanted to follow up on the margin question there and just wondering how you're kind of thinking about your op-ex and investment going forward and particularly the trade-off between investing for growth versus maximizing profits, particularly given that we've seen other players in the space indicate that they're planning to increase their OpEx. Just wondering, like, how you're trying to walk that very fine line.

No, it's a great question. If you look, again, at the midpoint of our guidance range, when you exclude the impact of fill prices, FX, and this movement from cash flow from gross to net, then you'll see midpoint revenue guidance is 12%, midpoint ANI EPS guidance is about 15%. So I feel like actually we are balancing those things. We are intending to spend about 6% of our revenue in CapEx. Keep in mind that we've been on a journey for a number of years of transforming the company. And so we're not in a position that we have to pivot or play catch-up. We're actually just building on the momentum that we've created. And you can see that, actually. We've got products now that we're able to put in the marketplace where we're going into beta launches really quickly. And that's really the power of the movement that we've made over many years into the cloud. So I feel actually very comfortable about the fact that we are balancing both the need to invest and have over a number of years with the ability to actually do that profitably.

Yep, yep. No, I think that's pretty clear. And then, you know, another investment-related question. Obviously, EVs have been a topic for quite a while. You mentioned you're on the call of partnership. But how are you thinking about the investment strategy, particularly into that segment? And, you know, what are the things that you're looking at to determine where, when, and how much you should invest to increase capabilities there?

Sure. The concept of expanding our solutions is one of our key concepts as we go into 2022, and EV is certainly a very important part of that. I reminded the fact that we had extended our relationship with ChargePoint because that gives us access to over 200,000 ChargePoints in the U.S. and in Europe. And so it extends our network capability. We already have customers that are using the product that we have in the marketplace now. We announced last quarter that we've extended that with a relationship with Element. We're learning as our customers are using that product, and we've built out our expectations of what we're going to deliver into the marketplace. And we talked about the fact we want to have a home charging model in the wild charging model and then a depot charging model. So our product teams are working in earnest to continue to build up functionality. You'll see us deliver that incrementally as we do other products through the course of the year. We think that this creates great opportunity for us. We're in this unique position with our customers who have 17 million vehicles who are coming to us as they go through this transition period and looking for us to help satisfy some of the needs that get created that weren't there before, just because of the increased complexity that comes with having a mixed fleet. So I feel like our ability to continue to build into this marketplace is something that we're already active in the marketplace on, that we're continuing to build upon, and it creates opportunity for us. To the extent that we saw an ability to do more here, we would not be shy to move more money into this category. It's clearly important to us.

That's great. Thanks for all the color there, Melissa.

Your next question is from Nick Cremel of Credit Suisse. Suisse, go ahead. Your line is open.

Great. Thanks for taking my question. So would it be possible to get the breakout of what's embedded in the 2022 mid-20s travel and corporate payments volume guidance between travel and corporate individually? It looks like travel is implied to be about 30% below 2019 levels, approximately.

I will tell you in the fourth quarter, what we saw first split, about 60% of the volume was travel and about 40% of the revenue was travel. And in terms of what's going to happen in the course of the year next year, we do expect to continue to see growth in both areas, both in travel and in corporate payments. I talked about the fact that we intend to or are in the process of implementing AVID. The pace of that implementation will affect what you see from a volume perspective sequentially. And then on the travel side, what we saw as we go into the fourth quarter of this year was a little bit of dip that happened at the very end of the year. You can see that on our graph, which was Omicron. We've seen a little bit of impact in the first quarter. of 2022, but still significant growth year over year.

Great. Thank you very much for the color. And then would it be possible just to get a sense of how you're thinking about, like, the various, like, growth components of the corporate payments business between, like, the various channels, just, like, directionally between, like, FI, partner, direct, or should they grow generally similar? Yeah.

No. Historically for us, the FI channel has been a slower grower. The embedded payments products that we have in the marketplace have been the highest growth in terms of from a volume perspective. That being said, we've been ramping our sales force, so the direct part of the business that will, if you can play out the course of the year, that will become a more important part of the business as we exit 2022. But we do anticipate that the largest amount of growth is coming from the embedded payments products in 2022. Great. Thank you very much.

Your next question is from Trevor Williams of Jefferies. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Thanks. Good morning. Melissa, I just wanted to ask on the strategy within corporate payments specifically. I mean, you've had some good wins in the partner channel this year, but if we think of how the business is positioned, just give us a sense for kind of where you feel best competitively about the assets you have. how you get comfort around virtual card issuance, particularly in the partner channel, not becoming commoditized longer term. And correct me if I'm wrong, it sounds like for 22, you're expecting the take rate on corporate pay volume to come down, which I'm assuming has to do with the ramp in habit exchange. But any color you can give us just on how you're balancing volume growth against pricing longer term would be really helpful. Thanks.

Yeah, sure. And when we think about our corporate payments business, we do lump it in two different categories of products. One is embedded payments, which the beauty of embedded payment is that you can give an API to a partner. They can embed it in a work stream, and as their business grows, they're benefiting from the infrastructure that we have, from the product capability that we have, and what we benefit from is a partner channel that can have some really nice growth rates associated with that. When we are utilizing an embedded payment, this comes from the technology conversation we had earlier. We've done a lot of work to make that technology highly scalable. And so the incremental costs when we enable that product are actually really quite low. And so it is highly profitable even though it has a lower take rate. Then If you go to the other side of our product set where we're doing AP automation, a lot of that work we're doing directly with our customers. And as a result, there's just more work that we're doing on behalf of that customer. It tends to be a little bit more individualized, and so it's got a higher take rate. But from a profitability perspective, both are good for us from a business perspective. And where we see this going, you know, I talked a lot earlier about the fact that we are exposing more of our capability across the business, and it's one of the benefits of going to our new org structure is this idea that not only are we looking at bringing in new customers, but how can we create more wallet share across the portfolio and do more for our customers? And corporate payments is a great example of that. We have been Cross-selling that product into our fleet customers, we're starting to do that in a much more digital way now. And, you know, it's early, but we're interested in that as a model as well. So I think that the way that we have historically gone is the market has been thinking about this as two discrete products. As we go through 2022, you'll see that becoming much more of a digital offering into our customer base with the ability to actually think about this across the whole portfolio of customers we have.

Got it. Okay. No, that's really helpful, caller. Thanks. And then just as a quick follow-up on your capital allocation priorities for 2022, now that you're sitting within the longer-term leverage targets, I mean, how are you thinking about the balance of capital allocation this year between M&A, potentially starting to buy back stock, or just continuing to pay down debt? Any color there on how you're going to stack ranking priorities for this year would be great. Thanks.

Sure. Yeah. The first priority for us has been internal lease capital. And, you know, as I said before, we've actually increased the allocation. And so we are intending to spend about 6% of our revenue in CapEx. And then beyond that, we continue to have a very strong orientation towards long-term growth. And the type of assets that we continue to look for are those that extend our scale, extend geographic capability, or give us product extensions. We've been very disciplined about when we utilize the capital to acquire other businesses. And so we have financial criteria and hurdles that we need to hit, as well as obviously making sure that it meets our strategic criteria. And then we have a $150 million share repurchase program in place. which we intend to use opportunistically to buy back stock.

Okay. Very clear. Thanks.

Your next question is from Darren Peller of Wolf Research. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Thanks, guys. Can I just follow up on the corporate and travel side for a minute? When we think about really the assets you've added and built into the travel side in particular, I think the need in an optimal and Even your extensions in the corporate side, your arsenal moving into a better reopening, especially on travel, should be pretty robust. So can you talk about the strategy now, having all those assets in place, what the difference is today and what you can do as we get more travel resumed versus what you were able to do in 2018 and 2019 before and what that can mean for both revenue growth rates and profitability for the second, let's call it, median term?

Sure. Yeah. Yeah, sure. As you said, the fact that we're embedded within our customers is really important as you see rebounds from a spend perspective. The offering that we have within our travel base is a combination of an embedded payment surrounded with a bunch of currency capability. These are Global customers are interested in their ability to be able to settle an issue all over the world. There's a lot of complexity that comes with that that we eliminate. We do that in a very integrated way that allows them to think about things like chargebacks in a highly automated way. All of that's really important from a future growth perspective, and it's a place that we will continue to build upon. So as you mentioned, we will benefit as you see travel come back, and so we do expect that we'll continue to see nice both revenue growth and volume growth that comes as the travel market rebounds. And our ability to build upon that really gets at this idea of thinking about a product set as an ecosystem. So the ability to actually extend our capability and offer more to that set of customers just like any of our other customers is part of the embedded strategy that we have. So when we think about long-term growth rates, we've talked about 10% to 15% is the long-term growth rate in that segment. I mean, that's thinking about the long-term growth rate coming from a normalized period of time.

Both sides, right. Just to remind us, I mean, if we were to get to, let's call it 100%, 120% of 2019 levels from a travel standpoint, any way you can give us a sensitivity of what you'd expect to see pass through, in terms of revenue and earnings potential for the company overall?

Well, I think, again, you can look at operating margins that we've had in that business have been in the 40s. And so expectations longer term is that we've given you the the actual take rate that we're seeing within that business and that that would drop through at, you know, somewhere around that 40-ish percent rate, maybe a little higher.

Okay. So I guess just normalizing there. All right, guys. Thanks very much.

Thank you. We have completed the allotted time for questions. I will now turn the call over to Steve Elder for closing remarks.

Thank you, Cheryl. I just wanted to thank everyone for joining us once again, and we'll look forward to speaking with you with our first quarter earnings release.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.