WEX Inc. common stock

Good day. My name is Chantelle and I'll be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the WEX Q3 2022 earnings conference call. As a reminder, today's conference call is being recorded. 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, please press star one again. Thank you.

Steve Elder, you may begin your conference.

Thank you, operator, and good morning, everyone.

With me today is Melissa Smith, our chair and CEO, and our CFO, Jagtar Narula. The press release we issued earlier this morning 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 an 8K we submitted to the SEC earlier this morning. 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, adjusted operating income and related margins, as well as adjusted free cash flow during our call. Please see Exhibit 1 of the press release for an explanation and reconciliation of adjusted net income attributable to shareholders to GAAP net loss attributable to shareholders, an explanation and reconciliation of adjusted operating income to GAAP operating income, and a reconciliation of adjusted free cash flow to GAAP operating cash flow. The company provides revenue guidance on a GAAP basis and earnings guidance on a non-GAAP basis due to the uncertainty and indeterminate amount of certain elements that are included in reported GAAP earnings. 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 and the risk factors identified in our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31st 2021, filed with the SEC on March 1, 2022, 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.

Thanks, Steve. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I'll open up a call with a word that most embodies our company, resiliency. This past year has witnessed significant economic and geopolitical events, from war in Ukraine to inflation and rising interest rates at home. Through it all, Wexis continues to grow its business and perform well for our customers, our employees, and our shareholders. I'll focus my comments this morning on three areas. Q3 financial results. highlights from the quarter across each of our segments, and updates on several initiatives. Let me start with Q3 financial results, which we released earlier this morning. I'm pleased to report that WEX had record quarterly revenue that exceeded our expectations. Revenue in the quarter was $616 million, a year-over-year increase of 28%. This strong Q3 growth, an increase of $133 million year over year, was primarily driven by continued volume growth across the business, the impact of higher field prices, and normalization of late fees. The majority of revenue growth was due to volume and fee growth, but the benefit of higher field prices represented approximately $56 million of the increase. On an organic basis, which excludes the impact of fuel prices, foreign exchange rates, and an accounting presentation change, revenue grew 22% compared to prior year's period. This performance reflects the power of our growth engine and the reoccurring nature of our business. Total volume processed across the organization in the third quarter grew 41% year over year to $57.5 billion. driven by strong performance in each of our segments. Record quarterly revenue, paired with the scalability of our business model, resulted in adjusted net income for diluted share of $3.51, an increase of 43% compared to the same quarter last year. I'm really pleased with our results this quarter. Let me add some color to this success by touching on a few highlights where we continue to gain momentum in the markets we serve, In our health and employee benefits segment, we continue to see strong account growth, including signing the American arm of a leading global consumer electronics company. I'm also pleased with our investment over the past few years to be able to serve as the custodian of our HSA accounts. For an offering that we did not provide in 2020, we are now the sixth largest HSA custodian, according to Devonier. Our customers continue to choose our health offering for our customer-focused innovation, the rich data insights, and the service we provide our customers' employees, along with the breadth of our health ecosystem. Our capabilities span HSAs, FSAs, COBRA, benefit administration, data exchange, and billing, all delivered with a strong focus on security, fraud control, and compliance. In the global fleet segment, we continue to build on our recent momentum. This past quarter, we won new merchant acceptance at Walmart and Sam's Club, as well as established new partnerships with McPherson and AEG. We're also pleased to have extended our contracts with NFI, a leading third-party logistics firm, and Bimbo Bakeries, one of the largest commercial bakeries in the US. We continue to implement and onboard new customers to our electric vehicle and mixed fleet solutions, both in the United States and Europe. Customers seek out WEX and our fleet segment for the unique benefits and controls of the WEX proprietary payments network and our specialized expertise applied to the rich data we capture. Turning to the travel and corporate solutions segment, we saw strong volume performance in our corporate payments portfolio as well as post-pandemic rebounds in the busy Q3 summer travel season. That volume growth is translated into strong revenue growth of 25% and even greater scale benefits realized in our operating margins for this segment. Over the past year, we have built a direct sales team which is selling to mid-market corporate payments customers. It's still in the early stages, but we are pleased with the results to date. We're also pleased to announce the First National Bank of Omaha is our next financial institution partner white labeling our corporate payment solutions. FMBO will join a portfolio of other top commercial card issuers that leverage our payment solutions in the corporate payments market. Now let me turn to a few updates on topics that affect our enterprise more broadly. Our purpose at WEX is to simplify the business of running a business. Each of our solutions, whether helping with accounts payable, employee health care, or managing vehicles in the field, simplify the running of the business we serve with solutions for any size business that are customized to their industry. We're focused on deepening our wallet share of our current customer set by enabling them to use our full suite of products. We're seeing encouraging results from our over-the-road truck customers. OTR customers have been our initial focus because of the common customer characteristics of trucking fleets and the lack of payment digitization in this sector. We focused on selling our corporate payment solutions to these customers, allowing them to achieve the benefits of digital payments. Today, we have hundreds of OTR customers using corporate payment products, which contributed $7 million of revenue to our quarterly results. With hundreds of thousands of customers, We see our ability to enable them to easily gain access to our full suite of products as a key enabler of future growth. Let me switch gears to next touch on customer-focused innovation. I want to update you on Flume, which is a new venture we've launched over the past 12 months with a mission to help our small business customers pay and get paid. The primary insight for us was that our smallest customers are demanding more consumer-like user experiences. We have an opportunity to meet them where they want to be met. Our approach is not just an easy UI, but powering it with a digital wallet technology and being able to participate in the funds flow. We recently promoted Flume from beta testing to a full launch and are focusing on bringing this solution to Wexis more than 450,000 existing small business customers. One of our Flume customers is a general contractor specializing in the preservation of landmark buildings in local communities. This customer has used WEX fleet products for years to power their small fleet of vehicles. With the launch of Flume, they were delighted to find a new avenue to expand their relationship with WEX. Before Flume, keeping track of payments, documents, and invoices for their more than 20 subcontractors was an entirely manual process powered by color-coded binders and filing cabinets. In particular, relying on checks for payments was a constant source of friction with subcontractors. They were drawn to Flume for its speed and transparency. Their subcontractors can now receive payment immediately with full visibility into the process, cutting out the need to chase their money. Additionally, for a business moving from paper to digital, Flume felt accessible and easy to use. Flume is a chassis on which we can provide incremental value to our small business customers. As we look to the future, this product and its modern architecture will help us unlock new revenue opportunities. Now let me take a moment to update you on our capital allocation priorities and further thoughts on resiliency. WEX generates a significant amount of adjusted free cash flow. Our move to providing an HSA custodial offering created a buffer against interest rate movements. During times of increasing inflation, our fleet, travel, and corporate payments and healthcare businesses see an increase in purchase volume due to rising prices, which also benefits WEX. These items add to the resiliency of our model. At the same time, we're focused on continuing to squeeze out costs to create an even more profitable and nimble organization with an eye on the use of technology to further automate the business. We expect to deliver $100 million in run rate operating improvements by the end of 2024 and to reinvest roughly half of this savings in further growth and optimization opportunities across the business. which supports achievement of our long-term growth targets. As we move forward, our ability to generate strong cash flows combined with the flexibility and diversity of our business model gives us confidence in our capacity to invest in the business and return capital to shareholders. As a reminder, our capital allocation priorities, which we outlined on Investor Day, are to invest internally for organic growth and scale, to execute strategic M&A that expands our customer reach and capabilities with a focus on EV and energy innovation, health, and corporate payments, and return capital to shareholders when conditions are appropriate, all while maintaining a healthy and flexible balance sheet. Earlier today, we announced an amended share repurchase program under which up to $650 million worth of WEX's common stock may be repurchased. This amended authorization reflects our board and management team's confidence in WEX's ability to generate strong earnings and free cash flow. To date this year, WEX has purchased approximately $225 million of common stock, including approximately $75 million under the now amended plan in Q4. Jagtar will share more about our fourth quarter, our resilient cash flow model, and some 2023 insights. But overall, I remain incredibly excited about our path forward. We're leveraging our powerful growth engine to win new customers, expand on relationships with existing customers, and diversify our offerings with compelling new solutions that extend our addressable market.

Jagtar?

Thank you, Melissa, and good morning, everyone.

As you just heard from Melissa, we delivered a solid third quarter in which we achieved strong top-line growth while continuing to make good progress on our strategic objectives. As with prior quarters, this quarter showed the strength of our global commerce platform, the competitiveness of our offerings, and the power of our business model. Now, let's start with the quarter results on slide six. For the third quarter, Total revenue exceeded the high end of our guidance by $26 million due to a combination of record high travel and corporate payments purchase volume, fuel price impacts, and the normalization of late fees. Total revenue came in at $616.1 million, a 28% increase over Q3 2021 with more than 80% of revenue for the quarter reoccurring in nature. As a reminder, we define recurring revenue as payment processing and account servicing revenue, revenue from our factoring business, transaction processing fees, and other smaller items. In total, adjusted operating income margin for the company was 39.1%, which is up from 37% last year, largely driven by the travel and corporate solution sector. From an earnings perspective, on a GAAP basis, we had a net loss attributable to shareholders of $44.1 million in Q3. I would like to note that our GAAP earnings included a $136 million non-cash charge due to a goodwill impairment predominantly related to our European fleet business. Non-GAAP adjusted net income was $157.8 million or $3.51 per diluted share. This represents a 43% increase over the prior year. Now, let's move on to segment results, starting with fleet on slide seven. Fleet revenue for the quarter was $378.1 million, a 32% increase over prior year, powered by strong volumes from new customer wins and renewals, higher fuel prices, and increase in late fees and a continued recovery in the existing customer base. Payment processing transactions were up 8% year over year, which is in line with our historical growth rate. As you see in our metrics, the net late fee rate normalized following the rapid increase in fuel prices. Overall, finance fee revenue was up 43% due to increases in volume fuel prices, and an increase in the number of late fee instances. The domestic fuel price in Q3 2022 was $4.54 versus $3.23 in Q3 2021. We estimate the year-over-year impact of higher fuel prices increased fleet revenue by approximately $56 million, including a benefit of approximately $8 million for European fuel price spreads. The net interchange rate in the fleet segment was 1.10%, which is up slightly from the prior year, even with higher fuel prices. We continue to see a transaction mix towards slightly smaller but more frequent transactions as fleet owners cope with higher fuel prices, especially in the over-the-road space. This transaction shift has a slight benefit to our net interchange rate. The segment-adjusted operating income margin for the quarter was 46.2%, down from 50.6% in 2021. Let me briefly address increased credit losses we saw in Q3 that were the primary cause of the decline in margin. Flea credit losses were above the high end of our range at 30.9 basis points of spend volume, including approximately 11 basis points of fraud losses. Let me start with credit losses. While we have a healthy portfolio overall, in the over-the-road trucking business, we are seeing slower payments from newer small customers likely due to declining spot shipping rates after large increases during the pandemic. As a result, we increased our reserves for these customers, including a qualitative reserve based on our economic outlook. This was the primary reason for higher credit losses in Q3 versus the prior quarter. We are very focused on actively managing the portfolio, including hiring additional collections personnel, adjusting our credit models, and reducing credit terms where warranted. Next, onto fraud losses. While we have seen our application fraud rates improve sequentially, transaction fraud rates remain elevated. We are not satisfied with this outcome and we will continue to aggressively attack this problem until it is resolved. Our point of compromise model has determined that the transactional fraud is concentrated in our over-the-road business in a specific set of geographies with a limited number of merchants. Our actions include continuing to enhance our monitoring tools and account policies and updating our product offering with additional fraud controls while working closely with our merchant partners. Turning now to travel and corporate solutions. Total segment revenue for the quarter increased 25% to $114 million. Purchase volume issued by WEX was $20.7 billion, which is an increase of 61% versus last year. the net interchange rate in the segment was down three basis points sequentially, predominantly due to travel customers contributing a larger percentage of total purchase volume. Breaking the segment down further, travel-related customer volume represented approximately 74% of the total spend and grew 70% compared to last year. Revenue from travel-related customers was up 107%, versus Q3 2021. This reflects continued strength in consumer travel demand. We are very pleased with these results. Corporate payments customer volume grew 41% versus last year, and revenue was down 14% as reported, but is up 9% after adjusting for an accounting presentation change. This growth was led by continued strength in the partner channel. The segment delivered an adjusted operating income margin of 52.9% up from 34.1% in Q3 last year. There has been significant improvement in these margins as travel-related volume accelerated. Our business model here is very strong and revenue drop through for this segment is high given our relatively fixed cost base. Finally, let's take a look at the health segment. We continue to drive strong growth resulting in Q3 revenue of $124.1 million. This represents an 18% increase over the prior year. SAS account growth was 8% in Q3 versus the prior year. Adjusting for approximately 1 million temporary COBRA accounts last year, account growth was 13% in Q3. Health segment purchase volume increased 15%, leading to a 16% increase in payment processing revenue. We also realized approximately $16 million in revenue from the HSA deposits that were invested by Wex Bank starting late last year and funds held at third-party banks. The health segment adjusted operating income margin was 24.4%, compared to 22.6% in 2021. The revenue from the invested HSA deposits is the primary driver of the increase in margin. Shifting gears now, I will provide an update on the balance sheet and our liquidity position. We remain in a healthy financial position and end of the quarter with $759 million in cash. We have $811 million of available borrowing capacity and corporate cash of $129 million as defined under the company's credit agreement at quarter end. As you'd expect, we saw a sizable $615 million decrease in our accounts receivable versus last quarter as fuel prices moderated. At the end of the quarter, the total outstanding balance on our revolving line of credit, term loans, and convertible notes was $2.7 billion. The leverage ratio, as defined in the credit agreement, stands at 2.7 times, which is nearing the bottom end of our long-term target of 2.5 to 3.5 times, and down from the end of 2021 due primarily to strong earnings. Next, I would like to turn to cash flow. WEX generates a significant amount of cash. We have included the graph on slide 8 with a summary of adjusted free cash flow, which is how we view the cash generation performance of the company. Using our definition, adjusted free cash flow is $407 million through Q3. As Melissa discussed, our primary use of free cash flow this year has been to repurchase shares. We will continue to manage capital allocation between organic investment, M&A, and returning capital to shareholders. Finally, let's move to revenue and earnings guides in the fourth quarter and full year on slide nine. The third quarter was a very good quarter for us, and I'm pleased to share that we are again increasing our guidance for 2022. Starting with the fourth quarter, we expect to report revenue in the range of $570 to $580 million. We expect ANI EPS to be between $3.15 and $3.25 per diluted share. For the full year, we expect to report revenue in the range of $2.30 to $2.31 billion. We expect ANI EPS to be between $13.24 and $13.34 per diluted share. For the full year, these updated ranges represent an increase of $42 million in revenue and 12 cents of EPS compared to the midpoint of our previous guidance. You can find additional assumptions for guidance on slide 10. As I complete my prepared remarks, I would like to emphasize how pleased we were with our Q3 results and to take a moment to reflect on our 2023 expectations. At the top of everyone's mind is the macro economy. Let me start with fuel prices, which have been volatile, and we may continue to see movement heading into next year. As of last week, the NYMEX futures curve is showing an average fuel price of $3.87 for next year. We will obviously update our fuel price assumptions when we give formal guidance in February. Next, I will turn to interest rates. which have increased significantly over the past year. We think the impact of higher interest rates on WETs is more balanced than is generally understood. Obviously, we have some floating rate debt today and $750 million of interest rate hedges that will expire between Q4 and Q1 next year, increasing the effective amount of floating debt that we have unless we add to our hedges. We also have an income stream from $1.4 billion of HSA deposits that are invested and another billion dollars of HSA assets held at third-party banks, including $500 million monetized at floating rates. Interest rates have also risen to the point where we will see some benefit from interest rate escalator clauses in our fuel new merchant interchange rates. In the low rate environment that we've been in for the last few years, we have not talked much about this lever, but we have the contractual ability to raise interchange rates as interest rates go higher once we hit a negotiated floor level in rates. Given all of this, over the long term, we see the impacts of interest rate changes as more balanced. Finally, we have great confidence in our ability to win new customers expand with existing customers, and bring new products to market, leading to long-term growth targets of the company. With that, operator, please open the line for questions.

At this time, I would like to remind everyone to ask a question. Please press star 1. To allow time for everyone to ask a question, please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. Our first question comes from Ramsey LSL with Barclays. Your line is open.

hi thanks for taking my question and nice to see uh super strong numbers this quarter um could you give us any any read that you have on whether you're seeing sort of macro stress in the portfolio it sounded like the credit deterioration fleet was a little more due to changes in in shipping spot rates are you seeing any broader macro impacts and i guess how does same store sales look in that context yeah hey ramsay thanks for the uh words on the uh quarter uh this is jack let me let me address the uh

what we're seeing on the macro side. Obviously, we talked about credit and fraud losses being up this quarter. I'll break that down into two parts. On the credit loss side, that was 20 points of the 31-point movement that I talked about. What we're seeing there really came down to a judgmental reserve that we took. What we saw, it's limited to our over-the-road part of our business. where we're seeing spot rates declining, and as a result, that putting some pressure on smaller fee cost customers, mostly owner operators. We haven't seen specifically an increase in losses, but we did see some delayed payments, as I talked about. And as a result, we took a judgmental reserve in that, just accounting for the higher rates of delinquent payments. So we're seeing overall things pretty balanced. You know, the overall quality of the fleet portfolio, the North American fleet portfolio is still good. So we feel generally good about things. But, you know, we saw some parts in certain areas that we addressed.

And to expand on that, you asked about same-store sales. It's Melissa. On the North American fleet business in the quarter, we saw up 5% in same-store sales. So, you know, a real strength. The over-the-road business was flat. And same source sales. So what we're seeing within the portfolios, Jack talked about the smaller over-the-road customers that are losing some share because of what's happened with spot rates. But so far for us, that volume has been picked up with some of the larger guys. And you can see that continuing through in what we're seeing for results in October as well. So if you look kind of across the portfolio of WACs, Overall, we've seen really strong trends, which factored through to the volumes that you saw us post in Q3.

Great. Let me sneak one last one in here. In the slide deck, I think you talked about expanding product set usage in the OTR segment and a $7 million contribution. I think that's cross-sell. If that's the case, can you give us more color on what is working there, where you're seeing success, and should we expect that number to grow as we move forward?

Yeah, we've done actually a lot over the last quarter. So we talked about the $7 million of revenue that we had specifically of increasing wallet share between the over-the-road customers and our corporate payments products. We have, over the last quarter, segmented the portfolio. So we've gone across and built a qualified sales lead list. And so if you think about the portfolio, the smaller customers we attend to really go after more digitally. The larger customers is where we've created this qualified lead list that we are working our way through. We feel really bullish about the ability to extend the wallet share that we have with our customers. And the way that we think about that is on investor day, we had framed in our long-term growth framework, four to 5% growth that should come from existing customers. And this is one of the mechanisms we intend to hit that.

Terrific. Thank you very much.

Our next question comes from Nick Primo with Credit Suisse.

Your line is open.

Good morning, and thanks for taking my question. First, I just wanted to get more color on the $100 million in run rate efficiency improvements by the end of 2024, and how much of those benefits could WEX realize next year in 2023? And also related to operating expenses in 2023, I know that There were some more one-time investments in the back half of this year, so I did on the last call, and I was just curious if we could ballpark the size of those investments.

Yeah, why don't I start, and Zachary probably will fill in a little bit here, but when we were looking last quarter, we started talking about the fact that we were making investments. What we've been focused on is where we can use technology to create automation that increases the customer experience. I think that is a twofer. You have the ability to actually have a better customer experience at a lower cost and more scalability. When we first started down this path, we were really thinking about how to de-risk growth because of just what we're seeing were labor shortages in the marketplace. So that was really our primary focus. As we've got into this, we think it just builds into the resiliency of the model. And a lot of this work has pretty quick payback periods. So, again, what we're looking at is that end-to-end experience. You've heard us talk a lot about how we've transformed our technology stack and moved into the cloud, how we've increased the digital marketing capability that we have. And so this is just taking that thread and pulling it all the way through that customer experience.

I'll jump in and just answer a couple of questions on how we expect it to ramp and what we're seeing from the investment side this quarter. On the ramping, as we said in the prepared remarks, we expect $100 million of run rate savings by the end of 2024. We're still working through our 2023 budget, so I'm not going to get into a guidance discussion, but we do expect that to ramp through 2023. So we'll exit 23 with half to two-thirds of that from a run rate basis. And then on the investments that we're seeing, so we talked, I think, last call about $5 to $10 million a quarter that we expected to see in the back half of the year from the investments we were making. And you can see that in the sequential results. If you look at Q2 versus Q3, you can see that the $5 to $10 million is roughly $6 million laying ahead.

the Q3 results. Got it. Thanks so much for all the incremental color.

If I could just begin a quick follow-up on the corporate payments yield. I know it was expected to taper down in the back half of this year related to a large customer. It looks like it came in low to mid-70s, like 73. How should we think about that yield at the Q4 in 2023 if that's like a good run rate to use or if it should come down a little more. Thank you.

I think it's really important.

Sorry.

Let me start and then you can go, Dr. I think it's really important when you actually look at that segment to parse it into two pieces. So I would think about, and we've actually been disclosing for probably four quarters now the split between the two. So you can see With our travel business, there's been a lot of stability in the rate in the course of this year. We said that going into the year, and that's what we've experienced. And then with the corporate payments business, it has been really about mixed shifts to the extent that we're seeing more of a mix into our embedded payments products that mixes that rate down. We said we expected that to happen during the course of this year, and it has. And so there's a lot of mix that plays out. You can see from a profitability perspective, that we've seen, you know, significant drop through of revenue, which has increased our margin profile. So while some of the take rates in some of the products may be lower, there are less costs associated with those as well. And that all factors into, you know, how we think about it from a pricing perspective. So going forward, you know, as Jack said, we're still working through the budget, and some of this will depend on mix of what we expect to see next year. But we've seen a lot of stability in the overall travel rates. And, again, when it gets to the corporate payments business, it really depends on mix. We have had great success with our embedded payment products in the marketplace, which, again, has that lower take rate. So, you know, we'd expect to see that continue to factor into that rate declining, you know, a little bit going into 2023.

Understood. Thanks so much for explaining that.

Our next question comes from Mayor Badia with Bank of America. Your line is open.

Good morning. Thank you for taking my question. I wanted to start with travel volumes. Nicely this quarter and a little better than we expected. But just can you talk about where the improvement came from quarter over quarter in 3Q and any geographies worth calling out and then just staying with travel into 4Q? Is there more recovery tailwind to come, just thinking between holidays in the U.S., summer in Australia, that can maybe contribute some outsized growth again in 4Q there?

Thanks. Yeah, with travel, what we've been doing is comping it back to 2019, so pre-pandemic, and then proforming it in as if we owned the eNet nozzle. And Q3 was about 107% of Q3 volume in 2019. The thing I would say that stands out, and it was true last quarter, even more so this quarter, is that there are definitely price increases that are coming through in that. When we talk about some of the resilience that we have against inflation, this is a great example of that. Even sequentially from Q2 to Q3, the average ticket that we saw went up 8%. So the volume is still below the 2019 levels, but spend volume is above. And that has a lot to do with pricing increases or mixed change that's happened within the portfolio. But it's a higher average ticket price. From a GEO perspective, I'd say similar trends to what we saw in the last quarter. Great growth in Europe. We're still down in Asia, which is a smaller part of the portfolio.

Got it.

And then maybe just on Flume, appreciate some of the anecdotal or rather a little bit of detail that you provided in the prepared remarks. But of the 450,000 customers that you're targeting, what's a realistic target for how many you can sign up in, let's say, the next year or so? Are there any mile markers you can share for us, which you'll be using to judge if Flume is performing in line with expectations and the growth is coming through? Thank you.

Yeah, it's an interesting question. We think of our existing small customer base that 450,000 customers is an opportunity for us to increase market share. And we've had some evidence of that with the products that we've rolled out and specifically with Flume so far. I think that we're still early. We went from beta launch to this quarter. We had told you last quarter that we would go into full launch in the third quarter, which we did. And that we were going to learn from this full launch of what that looks like from an actual take rate across the portfolio. So I think you need to give us a little bit more time, get more experience behind us. But we feel really bullish around a bunch of things here. First of all, just the ability to bring product into the marketplace. And I talked earlier about all the work we've done on the technology side over many years. You can see the benefit of that as we're moving product into the market. It's part of why we added in a whole digital team at the beginning of the year is that ability to actually take advantage of the technology. But the ability to move the product, the ability to rapidly introduce new features into the product, the ability to integrate through APIs across our portfolio so that you can share technologies is just in a totally different place. And so I think we're going to learn a lot on not just how we sell this into the marketplace, but how we use, you know, talk about using this as the chassis for us in small business, because there are a lot of pieces that we've developed that we will deploy in other parts of the company.

Got it. Thank you. And if I could just squeeze one last one in there, just on the impairment charge, what happened this quarter? Did something change in the quarter that made you take it this quarter? Just trying to understand, like, you know, it's a fairly large amount. So thank you.

Yeah, I'll address that one. So, you know, the impairment charge was largely macro related, right? So, you know, we're seeing rising interest rates, which impact the discount rate we use in our impairment analysis, you know, market valuations of change, which also impact the number nine impairment analysis. And then, you know, the economic environment in Europe is, you know, impacted kind of the cash flow of the business, you know, in the near term. So we factor that all together. It's largely macro related and, you know, we determined that the impairment charges were too.

Thank you.

Our next question comes from Bob Nepoli with William Blair. Your line is open.

Thank you and good morning. Having watched Rex through a number of macroeconomic cycles, your payment processing transactions have been a pretty good leading indicator. We're getting a lot of mixed news out of the trucking and space, but your transactions held up pretty well this quarter. What are your thoughts as you look in, Melissa, as you look into next year on the macro and are you seeing, I mean, how are those transactions holding up so far in the fourth quarter? I mean, have you been

surprised by this you know the stability there uh well if you look across the portfolio in obviously we're looking at volume when we give guidance for the fourth quarter but it's um in october you know we continue to see volume growth um across the fleet business um really strong involving growth of us traveling corporate payments um and really strong value growth in our health business so But I think about macro, and I'm going to talk a little bit about resiliency for a minute because I want to hit on some of the points that we said in our prepared remarks. But the business, when I think about how much more diversified that we are, and we've done a lot to buffer our interest rate sensitivity, the HSA deposits that we've added into the mix are really helping. And we look forward at many different scenarios of what could happen in the future. We're benefiting right now from inflation because you're seeing that coming through not in just higher energy costs, but higher costs that are getting charged across the portfolio. We're going into open enrollment season, and we're trending positive from that. We've got 80% of our revenue that's reoccurring in nature, and we're much more diversified across the business and across the DOs. So we feel good about all of that when we talk about resiliency. And it's part of why we felt really comfortable around increasing our share buyback program was looking at many of the different scenarios that could play out in just the cash flow generation that we have. From a macro perspective, when we talk to our customers across the different segments, the number one thing we continue to hear from them is still about labor and access to labor. The over-the-road marketplace, We hit on earlier, the smaller over-the-road customers, which is a micro-segment of a micro-segment for us, is being impacted by spot rates. Again, so far, a lot of that volume has been picked up by the larger customers. We do think that this is a more cyclical part of the business. And if you go back to even 2019, there was softness. In that part of the business, same-store sales were down 2% or 3%, I think, in 2019. It was flat, again, this last quarter. So, you know, that's one segment that I think we are hearing a little bit of distress, again, with a micro-segment of that. But then across the broader portfolio, we're seeing actually really positive trends.

Great. Thank you. Interesting.

Follow-up just on... your M&A and your historical M&A. I guess you have been active, but should we see more M&A, I guess, going into 2023? And as you look at some of your acquisitions in the past, how would you say you've done overall? What grade would you give yourself or what acquisitions have outperformed, which have underperformed? Obviously, Europe has been tough in fleet, but some of your U.S. fleet acquisitions. So just any thoughts around M&A, historical M&A, and performance versus expectations?

Yeah. One of the things we do is look back across the portfolio of M&A, and we feel really good about the way that we've delivered against the original deal models, how we've reached synergy targets across the portfolio, and the most recent with ENET. being folded in you can see that you know just how we've delivered really strong earnings growth you can see that coming through this segment you know related to that transaction which again is the most recent one so when we think about M&A and more broadly of a capital allocation we still start with how we're going to invest money internally which is a key focus of ours as we also think about building capability as opposed to just buying Then we look at M&A. We've got a pipeline that we have had active. As long as I can remember, we're moving assets through that pipeline. In the market so far over the last, you know, probably six to nine months, we've seen still continue to have elevated multiples and or assets that, you know, either are we think complicating in what we're trying to do strategically or therefore distracting. And so we haven't executed on something recently, but we are very active in the market in the marketplace We think it's an important part of our growth It's part of the two we say two to three percent of a long-term growth framework is going to come from M&A what we really spend time is if you look at the current market environment we see the purchase of our own shares is a very compelling value and And we think we can do both we had generate, you know a lot of cash and It's an ability to continue to be active in the marketplace from an M&A perspective and to buy back shares.

Thank you. Appreciate it.

Our next question comes from Sanjay Sakrani with KBW. Your line is open.

Thanks. Good morning. I want to start where you just discussed, Melissa. It was nice to see the large increase in the repurchase authorization. I'm just curious, like how aggressive do you expect to be with that $575 million or so that's remaining? And are there any limitations on how much you could buy?

I think Jack is probably going to plug in another piece of this. You can see in the course of this year we've been pretty radical about how we've used and opportunistic about how we've used our share buyback authorizations. So far, it kind of keeps that in the backdrop of how we're thinking about that. And then, Jack, do you want to talk any more about limitations?

Yeah, we have some limitations in our debt covenants, Sanjay. I'm doing this off the top of my head. I think it's $350 million once debt to EBITDA goes up above I want to say two, it's like two eight times, something like that, a few times. So, you know, we've got some room there. And, you know, should we end up with those levels and hitting the limitations, we can obviously go back to our lenders. So I feel pretty good about our ability to continue to execute our share with purchase program along the lines that we're authorized.

Okay, great. And then I'd just like two quick follow-ups on a couple of points that were discussed before. On the interest rate sensitivity, I just want to make sure I understand, like the HSA deposits are a hedge and the assets that you have against them aren't a hedge against the floating rate debt that you have, as well as the hedges, right? And the discount rate ladders, I mean, you expect to use them if you need to, but those other factors are the hedge. I'm just trying to think through how we make the machinations of those. And then, yeah, and I'll have one more, sorry.

Yeah, sure, Sanjay. Why don't I walk you through the math? I think it would be helpful. So we have about $2.7 million of financing debt. This is our term loans, our convert, our revolver. We have another $3.6 billion of what I call operational debt. So these are the bank deposits, money market deposits, and the HSA deposits. When I look at within that group of liabilities, the interest rate swaps that we have that fix some of it, and things like the convert that are essentially fixed, we end up roughly with about $2 billion of liabilities that float with interest rates. On the asset side of the equations, we have the items we talked about. So we have the HSA assets, the assets the HSA deposits are invested in, as well as the escalator clauses in some of our contracts with merchants. So when I net those two together, I end up with roughly about a billion dollars net liabilities that would move with interest rates. So think of it as 100 basis point movements. The net result is a $10 million interest impact. So it nets down a bit lower than you would look at if you were just to kind of look at our balance sheet.

Okay. All right, wonderful. And then just final point on the impairment charge. I mean, how should we think about any further necessary charges. I understand, like, this was related to macro. You made a change, but should we see more of these going forward if need be, or is this pretty much it? Thanks.

Yeah, no, Sanjay, I'm not expecting any further charges. You know, there's no remaining good will on our team three business, and I would say the rest of our portfolio has got a lot of headroom. So I'm not expecting any further charges.

Great. Thank you very much.

Our next question comes from Darren Peller with Wolf Research. Your line is open.

Hey. Thanks, guys. I just want to start off going back to the fleet side for a minute. When I look at the macro-adjusted growth, I think mid-teens type levels, I know comps got a little bit easier this quarter, but where are we in terms of recovery back in terms of normalized trends? It just seems a little stronger than one would have expected even with that and so I guess I wonder if there's something some nuances or drivers that you see as sustainable that can drive a little bit more of an elevated growth rate or is it really just the you know the comps and recoveries um you know if you could just touch on that for a moment I think the part that's important is we continue to win business we have high retention rates we have a you know a very strong sales capability

And so what you're seeing is the combination of those two things coming together so that rebound in some areas are continuing to see rebound from the pandemic levels. And then on top of that, you're seeing our execution of things that we sold last year that we're adding into the portfolio, things that we're selling this year that are adding to the portfolio. Here's an example. If you look at vehicle growth in the quarter, As we added, we talked about the Exxon portfolios that we were going to add into the mix, and we did in the course of the quarter. So you can see the benefit of that coming through, which we'll realize through the next four quarters. It's part of why we keep talking about names of customers that we're bringing on, because it is an important part of our ability to grow in the business. So in the fourth quarter, you start to see it normalize a little bit more. So the growth in the company is more about just organic sales growth that's coming through, and again, customer retention, some increased penetration with existing customers. The long-term model that we put out there, just as a reminder, we said that we would grow 4% to 5% with existing customers, 3% to 5% net new, one to two from products, and three from M&A long-term. And we clearly over-delivered on that in the course of this year.

Okay. Thanks, Paul. So the other question I have is really more about expense management now just kind of through a cycle and potentially a tough economy next year. And just it's really a combination of a willingness and a capability in terms of what you want to do to protect the bottom line on that front. And then maybe just if you could remind us the levers you think you have to be flexible.

Let me start and then, Jack, you can add to this. I think we have so much opportunity that we want to make sure that we are being thoughtful about investing through cycles and that we continue to invest to make sure that the enterprise can reach its potential and to hit our long-term growth targets. And I think that's an important aspect of that. We manage the business as if it's field price neutral. Now, that being said, We talked about some of the ways that we're focusing on squeezing out efficiencies. We're trying to do that thinking about ways that we can create a better customer experience and create an efficiency. So it's a very big focus of ours of simplifying the way that we do business for their customers for their benefit. And we think that that is a way of creating an investment. It's a relatively short-term investment. You actually get quite a bit of benefit from that. And I don't know if we need to add Jack to our...

Yeah, I would, I think, generally concur with what Melissa said. I think, you know, our focus for the next year will be on the cost savings that Melissa identified. So I think, you know, when we have some levers to work on costs, I think our focus next year will really be that $100 million number and getting as much of that into next year as we can. I think that's a big lever for us. Okay. Thanks to the economic environment.

Got it. All right. Thanks, guys.

Our next question comes from Sherrick Sumar with Evercore ISI. Your line is open.

Okay, thanks a lot for taking my question. The health and benefits account, I mean, that's all like a nice pickup in the average SANS accounts. I believe you said a win on the American side. But just to kind of for our understanding as to what's the strength out there in terms of VEX's offering versus the competitor's, And how should we think about that trend going forward from here?

We talked about the fact that we saw 8% account growth, but we had some temporary accounts last year. So if you normalize that, it was up 13%, which tracked more consistently with spend-on that we saw in the health and employee benefits segment. But really, the big things for us, we're really uniquely positioned in the health and benefit ecosystem. because of just the sheer size of customer base that we have both directly with our partners. We have 18 million staff accounts, over 50% is Fortune 1000 that do business with us. And that enables us to collect data that can do things like help a consumer determine, you know, where's the best place, how much money should they be putting away in an HSA or an FSA account, helping them determine, you know, benefit options and all of that. data creates wisdom for our customers and creates this nice cycle for us. Also, the end-to-end capability with our partners and our customers because we were able to do FSA and HSA and admin and a whole host of account types and capability that sits across our portfolio. They like that ease of use of being able to do that all with one partner. And, you know, just to highlight again, we're going into open enrollment season, which is a really important time and trending positively right now. I know it's a testament to the fact that the offering is resonating in the marketplace.

Got it. That's helpful. And if I can just squeeze one in, can you provide an update on where does Flume stands and what's the cross-selling opportunity out there for Flume?

It's a fluently moved from a beta launch into a full product launch this quarter and really early. The offering that we have in the marketplace, we're seeing we have customers that are both outside of our business and customers where we're increasing wallet share with their existing customers for us. And so we think that this creates a unique opportunity for us to deepen wallet share that we have within the small business. business portfolio, the 450,000 customers that we have. It is a model that's SaaS plus. So we charge SaaS fees plus other transaction-related fees. And so it also gives us an opportunity to broaden and diversify our revenue stream. But it's early, and we will talk more about it as we go through next year.

Thank you so much. Thanks a lot.

Our next question comes from Jeff Cantwell with Wells Fargo. Your line is open.

Hey, thanks so much. Most of my questions, I would answer. I wanted to ask a follow-up question on flume based on a prior question. And you highlighted, you know, now it's in full production. So, obviously, we understand it's so rare these days, but we've been hearing a lot of good things about flume. So, just a couple questions. First, the way that we're understanding, you know, the underlying point of the commentary is, you're thinking offensively for flume into 2023 and 2024. I just want to confirm that. So this business is a creative, is kind of the underlying question. And then second, have you thought at all about what type of growth you expect there in revenue and what are the impacts directly on firm line margins? Or help us kind of think about the potential for flume as you're thinking about it. And in color, that would be great. Thanks very much.

Yeah, sure. I'm going to kind of unpack that a little bit. The way that we're thinking about Sloom is it gives us an ability to increase wallet share with our existing customers. The way that we designed it was working with very small customers that think of this as kind of like a micro segment that sits within. When we started segmenting our small business customer base, we were targeting the customers that we're seeing within our existing portfolio. We also, through the product process, brought in people who were not using our existing products as well. So it was very customer informed. The places that we have been focusing on, it was pretty clear that getting paid is an important part of the small business offering. And the other things that became clear is that This customer base wants something that is digital in nature, but moves them into the digital age. These are often customers that are not highly digitally enabled. And instead, the way that the look in the field, the way that was designed was with that in mind. It appeals to people who are digitally enabled, but is really thoughtful about the fact that, you know, many of these customers, and I gave an example in prepared remarks, are using very manual processes now. And so, as we thought about this, we were able to move it into the marketplace rapidly. We have an ability to cross-sell it into our existing customer base and, you know, and potentially use that more directly in the marketplace outside of our existing customer base. I'd say kind of the primary focus as we were thinking about this was meeting a need that we have with our existing customers and then maybe opportunistically being able to pick up customers outside of that. But again, we're early. We're going to learn a lot, and then I think we'll be better able to size what the opportunity is.

Okay, great. Appreciate all the color. Thanks very much.

We have run out of time for the question and answer session, and I'll turn the call back over to Steve for closing remarks.

Thank you, everyone. I know we went a few minutes over, but I appreciate everyone's attention and time for the call today, and we'll look forward to speaking with you again for our fourth quarter earnings.

This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.