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Q1 2025 Shift4 Payments Inc Earnings Call

In This Article:

Participants

Thomas Mccrohan; Investor Relations; Shift4 Payments Inc

Taylor Lauber; President, Chief Strategy Officer; Shift4 Payments Inc

Nancy Disman; CFO & COO; Shift4 Payments Inc

Rayna Kumar; Analyst; Oppenheimer & Co. Inc.

Darrin Peller; Analyst; Wolfe Research, LLC

Adam Frisch; Analyst; Evercore ISI

Timothy Chiodo; Analyst; UBS

Andrew Harte; Analyst; BTIG

Andrew Jeffrey; Analyst; William Blair

Andrew Bauch; Analyst; Wells Fargo Securities, LLC

Dominic Ball; Analyst; Redburn Atlantic

Matthew O'Neill; Analyst; FT Securities LLC

James Friedman; Analyst; Susquehanna Financial Group, LLLP

Jeffrey Cantwell; Analyst; Seaport Global Securities LLC

Andrew Schmidt; Analyst; Citi

Presentation

Operator

Greetings. Welcome to the Shift4 first-quarter 2025 earnings conference call. (Operator Instructions)
As reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce Tom McCrohan. Thank you, Tom.
You may now begin your presentation.

Thomas Mccrohan

Thank you, operator, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Shift4's first-quarter 2025 earnings conference call. With me on the call today are Taylor Lauber, our President and incoming CEO; and Nancy Disman, our Chief Financial Officer. This call is being webcast on the Investor Relations section of our website, which can be found at investors.shift4.com.
Today's call is also being simulcast on X Spacers, formerly known as Twitter, which can be accessed through our corporate Twitter account at Shift4, our quarterly shareholder letter, quarterly financial results and other materials related to our quarterly results have all been posted to our IR website.
Our call and earnings materials today include forward-looking statements. These statements are not guarantees of future performance, and our actual results could differ materially as a result of certain risks, uncertainties and many important factors.
Additional information concerning those factors can be found in our most recent report on Forms 10-K and 10-Q, which you can find on the SEC's website in the Investor Relations section of our corporate website. For any non-GAAP financial information discussed on this call, the related GAAP measures and reconciliations are available in today's quarterly shareholder letter.
With that, let me turn the call over to Taylor.

Taylor Lauber

Thanks, Tom, and good morning, everyone. We had another busy quarter, and it was great to see many of you at our recent Investor Day event in February.
This morning, I'll provide thoughts on our first quarter results, key priorities that give us confidence in the years ahead and an update on our recently announced acquisition of Global Blue. I will then turn the call over to Nancy for a detailed review of our quarterly results and our upcoming guidance. Before providing the financial metrics, I wanted to provide some grounding on the growth drivers within the business, which are especially important during times of economic uncertainty.
We have strong product offerings across several large markets and are generally on a with the exception of restaurants where we are strong number two. We had world-class customers in each of these verticals, such as Aspen Hospitality, the Setai Hotels, Pittsburgh Pirates, Colorado Rockies, Formula One Miami Grand Prix and the PGA Tour.
We also refused to leave our success to chance. As such, our M&A strategy has afforded us a massive collection of customers, whereby we can cross-sell our services. The Boston Red Sox, Herbert -- bakeries, and the AC Hotel Toronto are just three examples of this strategy in action, although there are many more, and we've highlighted a few of them in our materials, which you can find on our website.
Interestingly, though, these recent wins will matter more in the years ahead as the largest contributor to our current performance is generally the wins of last year fully seasoning. Those of you who can recall Jared reading what seemed like a yellow pages worth of wins from last year's earnings calls are now seeing the fruits of that in our results.
As such, we posted strong Q1 results that were largely in line with our expectations and are raising our full year 2025 guidance to reflect our confidence in our ability to execute. Some highlights. Our volumes increased 35% year over year to $45 billion.
Quarterly volumes were in line with our expectations with year-over-year growth modestly impacted by the timing of leap year in the Easter holiday. We witnessed stable volume trends across all of our end markets and continue to monitor trends closely in light of the recently implemented trade policies. It should come as no surprise that we never count on an improving economy to drive our success.
Gross revenue less network fees increased 40% to $369 million, a combination of stable spreads and subscription and other revenue resulted in our net revenue growing faster than our volumes. We are unlocking significant value from our recent acquisitions, and I will provide some additional details on topic in a few minutes. Adjusted EBITDA increased 38% to $169 million.
We delivered 46% adjusted EBITDA margins, which were modestly above our guidance of 45%. Nancy will comment on our forward margin profile a bit later during the call.
And lastly, we delivered adjusted EPS of $1.07 per share. We are pleased with these results and are very excited to execute on our priorities for the balance of the year. I think it's important to note that these priorities are not new, but rather a continuation of what has made us successful for the past 26 years. Our first priority is to keep doing what's made us so successful in the first place.
In the US, we are focused on adding new merchants while simultaneously expanding our share of wallet. In restaurants, we continue signing up new merchants onto our SkyTab offering and also introduce SkyTab Air, our latest handheld device that's going to be launching in the next few weeks.
It's something we're quite proud of, and I'd encourage you all to take a look at our shareholder letter for some details on it. I gave a few examples of wins earlier, but the product is scaling nicely across a variety of environments. For example, we signed all US locations of Nandos, a fast-growing quick-service chicken chain that is expanding quickly in North America with plans to reach over 500 US locations over time.
This is replicating its enormous success already in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. In hospitality, we continue to add net new hotels and resorts, while simultaneously cross-selling our payments to hotels operating on our gateway. I mentioned Aspen Hospitality in the Setai Hotels earlier, but there are dozens of examples ranging from boutiques like the Nantucket Hotel, the large resorts, such as the Cooper in Charleston, South Carolina.
In stadiums, we are keeping our eye on the ball, puck, et cetera, across all major professional leagues and are partnering with organizations beyond the 4 major sports leagues. To that end, and I mentioned this earlier, we've signed the Formula One Miami Grand Prix and the PGA Tour, but also the Red Rocks amphitheater.
Our second priority is unlocking synergies from acquisitions such as Revel, Givex and Eigen. We are already making progress across all of our recent deals with each effectively following the ship for playbook to a T. Across just these three most recent acquisitions, we have already achieved more than $20 million in EBITDA synergies in the first quarter.
Deals from many years ago also to continue to bear fruit, as I cited in some of the cross-sells that I mentioned earlier. As a reminder, our playbook is focused on identifying a unique capability critical to the commerce experience which we then bundle with our payment processing expertise.
We are not buying a company simply to do the same thing as us and then drive cost synergies by removing overlaps. Instead, we unlocked meaningful recurring payment revenue by bundling our own payment capabilities with the unique and scarce technology capability we now own. Once we own this new capability and the talent involved in building it, we are inherently more competitive and win more new business in addition to the embedded cross-sell.
Some examples of this in action are Revel, which we acquired in June of last year. Revel already had a robust payments cross-sell funnel with over 7,000 locations going live on ship payments as of the Q1 close. Of note, many of these are chains, which was a segment of the restaurant market that was a unique strength of Revel. We have already incorporated many of these Revel capabilities into SkyTab, which make it naturally more competitive in enterprise. We have also integrated the product teams from Eigen to ship for.
As a reminder, Eigen is a payment gateway we acquired in November of last year with a presence in Canada and the United States. We have already cross-sold payments to approximately 100 large Eigen gateway-only customers and are making significant progress in combining the gateways into a single one and deleting the Eigen part. The talent that -- Eigen now helps us execute on our platform road map much more quickly.
It should come as no surprise that the gift and loyalty capabilities from Givex are in the process of being fully integrated into SkyTab as our default offering. And we have cross-sold payments to approximately 100 Givex merchants since we've officially launched our cross-sell efforts just in February. We will also believe part as give gift and loyalty capabilities were far superior to our native offerings.
As a reminder, we acquired Givex just a few months ago in November of last year. Last but not least, is executing on our near-term strategy while also thinking about the future. By taking what has made us successful for 26 years and replicating it all over the world, we can set ourselves up for success for decades to come.
As we shared at our recent Investor Day, we are currently operating in 6 continents, up from only one less than two years ago. We recently unlocked Latin America and are already in the process of signing marquee enterprise clients in that region. In Europe, where tightly bundled software plus payment solutions are less common, we are making tremendous progress signing up restaurants, particularly in the US, Ireland and Germany.
Our momentum has picked up significantly this year, and we're now signing up over 1,000 restaurants a month internationally. These are the priorities that I believe will ultimately enable us to deliver on our financial commitments we may see you all and to drive meaningful, profitable growth over the medium term.
Before turning the call over to Nancy, I thought I'd provide a quick update on Global Blue. For those of you that possibly missed our February announcement, Global Blue is a market-leading payment platform, supporting tens of thousands of luxury brands worldwide, including Louis Vuitton, Erez, Valentino, Fendi product, Burberry, Cardi and many, many more.
Global Blue operates a two-sided payment network with over 15 million consumers utilizing Global Blue's quick and seamless mobile app when purchasing luxury goods at over 400,000 retail stores around the world. When shopping abroad consumers purchasing these luxury items are eligible for a VAT tax refund, which is facilitated by Global Blue. Global Blue also facilitates the option to convert purchases into the cardholders home currency, which is something known as Dynamic Currency Conversion.
The Global Blue business is an exceptional stand-alone business. The luxury VAT tax refund industry has proven to be highly resilient as affluent consumers wheel substantial economic spending power account for half of all consumer spending and hold an estimated $1.3 trillion in excess savings. We have high confidence in unlocking $80 million of revenue synergies from this transaction by the end of 2027, primarily to -- embedded payment solution with Global Blue's VAT tax refund and dynamic currency conversion capabilities.
We estimate the embedded payment cross-sell opportunity alone to be over $500 billion in volume. In addition, we continue to expect two of the world's largest fintech companies and financial and Tencent to remain shareholders in the combined business, and both of these wallet providers have committed to collaborate with us on e-commerce opportunities around the world. We are on track for an early Q3 close, subject to regulatory approvals.
As I mentioned in my shareholder letter, we have a track record of growing volumes during the most challenging of economic times. Since the company was founded, we have successfully grown our payment volumes every year, including during COVID and the great financial crisis of 2008 and 2009.
We have experienced five recessions in the past 26 years, and we have grown our payment volumes in every single one of them. I hope that by understanding our strategies that I just highlighted, it becomes obvious to you all that in many ways, we welcome uncertainty. We thrive in times of uncertainty and because it's our operating model, product lines, unit economics and enormous cross-sell funnel all become more valuable when the future is uncertain. That's not to say we operate with rose-colored glasses. And in fact, it's exactly the opposite.
We operate out of an abundance of caution and a mindset of paranoia. We are never complacent and constantly finding ways to evolve. With that, I'll turn the call over to Nancy, who will outline our 2025 financial guidance and key other stats for the quarter. Nancy?