Shift4 Payments - Earnings Call - Q1 2025

Executive Summary

• Mixed print with strong profitability: Adjusted EBITDA rose 38% YoY to $168.5M with 46% margin, modestly above plan, on record Q1 volumes of $45.0B and GRLNF of $368.5M; GAAP diluted EPS was $0.20 and adjusted EPS was $1.07.
• Against S&P Global consensus*, FOUR delivered a major adjusted EPS beat ($1.07 vs $0.70*) but a slight revenue miss ($848.3M vs $862.1M*); GAAP EBITDA came in below consensus ($112.7M vs $160.3M*), reflecting sizable non-GAAP add-backs in the quarter.
• FY25 guidance raised: GRLNF to $1.66–$1.73B (from $1.65–$1.72B) and adjusted EBITDA to $840–$865M (from $830–$855M); Q2 GRLNF guided to $405–$415M with ~50% adjusted EBITDA margin.
• Catalysts/positioning: Stable spreads (~60 bps) and a $35B+ contracted backlog underpin visibility; management highlighted >$20M Q1 EBITDA synergies from recent M&A and expects Global Blue to close in early Q3, expanding cross-sell funnel and international reach.

What Went Well and What Went Wrong

What Went Well

• Operating leverage and margins: Adjusted EBITDA +38% YoY to $168.5M; margins 46% (50% ex recent M&A drag), modestly above the 45% plan. Quote: “Excluding the drag from these recent acquisitions, adjusted EBITDA margins would have been 50%” — CFO Nancy Disman.
• Stable unit economics and spread: Blended net spread was 61 bps in Q1 and management reiterated ~60 bps for FY25, supporting net revenue growth ahead of volume. Quote: “Our Q1 blended net spreads were 61 basis points… we still expect full year 2025 spreads of approximately 60 basis points” — CFO.
• Commercial momentum and synergies: >$20M in Q1 EBITDA synergies across Revel, Givex, Eigen; marquee wins across hospitality (e.g., Aspen Hospitality, The Setai) and sports (PGA Tour, F1 Miami), and accelerated international restaurant sign-ups (1,000+/month). Quote: “Across just these 3… acquisitions, we have already achieved more than $20 million in EBITDA synergies in the first quarter” — President Lauber.

What Went Wrong

• Top-line vs consensus: Revenue of $848.3M was modestly below S&P consensus* ($862.1M*), with subscription & other revenue sequentially moderating as the company “deletes parts” in acquired models.
• GAAP EBITDA vs consensus: EBITDA of $112.7M trailed S&P consensus* ($160.3M*), as integration, equity comp and other non-GAAP adjustments were significant; adjusted EBITDA was strong at $168.5M.
• Cash conversion optics in Q1: Adjusted FCF conversion was 42% in Q1 (would have been 64% excluding a $37M semiannual cash interest payment on 2024 debt), and operating cash flow declined sequentially due to timing and investment needs.

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Greetings. Welcome to the Shift4 First Quarter 2025 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. The question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone today should require operator assistance, please press star zero from your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It's now my pleasure to introduce Tom McCrohan. Thank you, Tom. You may now begin your presentation.

Tom McCrohan (EVP of Investor Relations)

Thank you, Operator. Good morning, everyone, and 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 @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 reports 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 (CEO)

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 number one in each, 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 Sati Hotels, Pittsburgh Pirates, Colorado Rockies, Formula 1 Miami Grand Prix, and the PGA Tour. We also refuse 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, Herberber Bakeries, and the Ace 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 page's 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 and 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 that 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. 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 U.S., 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 introduced 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 U.S. locations of Nando's, a fast-growing quick-service chicken chain that is expanding quickly in North America with plans to reach over 500 U.S. 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 and the Sati Hotels earlier, but there are dozens of examples ranging from boutiques like the Nantucket Hotel to large resorts such as the Cooper in Charleston, South Carolina. In stadiums, we are keeping our eye on the ball, puck, etc., across all major professional leagues and are partnering with organizations beyond the four major sports leagues. To that end, I mentioned this earlier, we have signed the Formula 1 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 Shift4 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 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 unlock 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 has a robust payments cross-sell funnel with over 7,000 locations going live on Shift4 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 into Shift4. 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 on combining the gateways into a single one and deleting the Eigen part. The talent that built Eigen now helps us execute on our platform roadmap 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. We have cross-sold payments to approximately 100 GiveX merchants since we have officially launched our cross-sell efforts just in February. We will also delete a part as GiveX 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 six 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 U.K., 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 made to 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, Hermès, Valentino, Fendi, Prada, Burberry, Cartier, 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 cardholder's home currency, which is something known as dynamic currency conversion. The Global Blue business is an exceptional standalone business.

The luxury VAT tax refund industry has proven to be highly resilient, as affluent consumers wield 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 through bundling our 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, Ant Financial and Tencent, to remain shareholders in the combined business, and both of these wallets 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?

Nancy Disman (CFO)

Thank you, Taylor. We delivered another quarter of consistent and solid results in line with our expectations, setting new first-quarter records across all of our key performance indicators. Volume grew 35% year over year to $45 billion. Gross revenue less network fees grew 40% to $369 million, and adjusted EBITDA grew 38% to $169 million. Our Q1 adjusted EBITDA margins were 46%. We expect our margins to march higher as the year unfolds, and we unlock synergies from last year's acquisitions. Excluding the drag from these recent acquisitions, adjusted EBITDA margins would have been 50%.

We will also benefit from higher levels of operating leverage as the year progresses, and we add incremental payment volumes from cross-selling and working through our existing backlog. Our Q1 blended net spreads were 61 basis points, in line with our guidance for spreads to remain stable with 2024's exit rate. Importantly, spreads across our core business also remain stable, and we still expect full-year 2025 spreads of approximately 60 basis points. Subscription and other revenue was $93 million in Q1, up 77% compared to the same period last year. The growth was once again driven by our success across S&B, SkyTab, and further penetration of the sports and entertainment vertical, as well as contribution from recently completed acquisitions. The sequential moderation from Q4 levels was as expected and due to ongoing deprecation of legacy revenue from recent acquisitions.

Q1 organic growth revenue less network fee growth was in line with our expectations, and we are on track for 20% plus organic revenue growth for the full year. Our adjusted free cash flow in the quarter was $71 million, representing 42% adjusted free cash flow conversion. As a reminder, during Q1, we made our first cash interest payment of $37 million on the debt we issued last August. These cash interest payments will occur semi-annually in Q1 and Q3. For illustrative purposes, excluding this incremental interest payment, our adjusted free cash flow conversion rate for the quarter would have been 64%. We are on track to deliver over 50% adjusted FCF conversion for the full year.

During the first quarter, we repurchased approximately 686,000 shares for $63 million, and month-to-date in April, we have deployed an additional $85 million of capital to repurchase approximately 1.1 million shares against our remaining available capacity. You can find a complete reconciliation of our share in the back of our earnings materials. GAAP net income for the first quarter was $20 million, and GAAP diluted EPS was $0.20 per share. Non-GAAP adjusted net income for the quarter was $99 million, or $1.07 per share on a fully diluted basis. Beginning this quarter, we are now adding back acquired intangible amortization to non-GAAP net income and EPS in line with our industry peers. Our total indebtedness now has a weighted average cost of 3.4%, and our net leverage at quarter end was approximately 2.4 times.

We have a strong cash position with $1.2 billion of cash and cash equivalents as of March 31st, and we remain well-positioned to pay down the $690 million of convertible debt maturing in December this year. Now turning to 2025 guidance, we are updating full-year financial guidance and introducing Q2 guidance as follows. For the full year, we are raising gross revenue less network fees to between $1.66 billion and $1.73 billion, representing 23% to 28% growth. We are raising adjusted EBITDA between $840 million and $865 million, representing 24% to 28% growth. For the second quarter, we expect gross revenue less network fees between $405 million and $415 million, with adjusted EBITDA margins of approximately 50%. A few items to highlight as it pertains to our outlook for the rest of the year. As Taylor mentioned, we continue to see signs of a stable consumer.

Spending trends in Q1 were largely in line with what we saw exiting 2024, with a slight deceleration largely attributable to leap year and other seasonal factors. Since mid-last year, we have seen fairly stable trends in same-store sales, with some choppiness month-to-month within a very narrow band. We remain cautiously optimistic on the health of the consumer, but our guidance and outlook does not rely on any improvement or recovery from current market conditions. Reiterating what Taylor outlined, Shift4 has a proven track record of resiliency in uncertain times, and we are better equipped than ever to deliver strong results. With that, let me now turn the call back to Taylor. Taylor?

Taylor Lauber (CEO)

Thanks, Nancy. Before turning it over to the operator for Q&A, I thought I'd provide a few thoughts regarding the forthcoming CEO transition. We are eagerly awaiting the U.S. Senate to officially vote on Jared's nomination to head NASA, and assuming approval, the board will execute a CEO transition plan where Jared will step down as CEO and from the board, and the board will vote on my appointment. You should all be aware that the Senate Ethics Committee did not require Jared to divest any of his Shift4 shares. Jared will remain the largest shareholder of Shift4, which was something we're really excited about. Once the Senate votes on Jared's NASA appointment, he will convert all of his B&C shares into Class A, relinquishing his super votes and owning approximately 25% of the outstanding Class A shares. Going forward, he'll have the same one-share, one-vote privileges as all the other shareholders. With that, I'll turn it over to the operator for Q&A.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. We'll now be conducting a question and answer session.

If you'd like to ask a question at this time, you may press star one from your telephone keypad, and a confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two if you'd like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up the handset before pressing the star keys. One moment, please, while we poll for questions. Thank you. Our first question is from the line of Rayna Kumar with Oppenheimer. Please proceed with your questions.

Rayna Kumar (Senior Analyst)

Good morning, Taylor and Nancy. Thanks for taking my question and good results here. How would you describe the competitive environment in international markets that you're targeting? Seems like there's a lot of U.S.-based payment companies that are focused on the same thing. What do you think gives Shift4 an edge here?

Taylor Lauber (CEO)

Yeah, thanks, Rayna. It's a great question. I'll be honest, the international opportunity is something we identified as far back as, I don't know, eight years ago. The phenomena we experience internationally is that it looks like the U.S. did, call it 15, 20 years ago. What I mean by that is you've got kind of three different industries all evolving in parallel to one another without much convergence. What I mean by that is you have software companies building software to support merchant environments, you have hardware companies to help create the fulfillment experience, and then you've got largely traditional banks fulfilling the payment experience. None of them have done a lot to help these three things converge for the benefit of the merchant.

Now, why we saw the opportunity is because it's exactly the opportunity that Jared and the team identified 20 years ago in the United States. That's when they created the HarborTouch brand that bundled all these solutions together to make life easier for the merchant and eliminate multiple vendors. I can give you a long history on some of the technical reasons it's taken this long to get here, but there's no excuse for them existing today. It's not a surprise to us that if you have the right localized solutions, and that means local settlement, accepting local payment methods, paired with good software, merchants are kind of clamoring for it. I think we gave the stat that about one in four of the merchants joining Shift4 today are coming from outside the U.S.

It is simply riding a wave that we saw 20 years ago in the United States. To be frank, that's only a handful of markets that we're actually addressing at the moment. The rest of the world, there's a long way to go in this regard.

Rayna Kumar (Senior Analyst)

Very helpful. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. The next question is from the line of Darrin Peller with Wolfe Research. Please proceed with your questions.

Darrin Peller (Senior Analyst)

Guys, nice results here. Can we just touch a little further on what you're seeing in the market more broadly into April, what you're seeing and what you're including in the assumptions for guidance, given the conviction you had around your guide here, just really passing through the beat.

Just remind us, I mean, same-store sales generally, I know you do not typically incorporate much in the way of same-store sales as part of your outlook for volume, but maybe just remind us, if you do not mind, the building blocks that give you the conviction and the outlook still despite what is pretty uncertain macro times.

Taylor Lauber (CEO)

Yeah, sure. I will start with kind of the themes that we are seeing, and then Nancy can talk to how that gets incorporated into our forward-looking views. I think it is going to be relatively undramatic, which is that what we are seeing is more of the same. By more of the same, I do not just mean kind of the beginning of this year continuing through. I mean, the last kind of 12 to 18 months have looked very consistent across our merchant segment.

That is to say you've had restaurants with very modest same-store sales compression, and I mean 1%, and it's usually bouncing between 1% and zero for over a year now. You've got hotels that are generally bouncing somewhere between minus 1% and positive 1% or 2%. You've got retail, which for us is a smaller segment of the business, but that varies a little bit all within that same bound. The fact that even with recent sort of a lot of political rhetoric going on recently, we're not seeing meaningful change in consumer behavior suggests that it's stayed the course from our perspective. You alluded to this. We generally don't spend a lot of time looking at same-store sales. We put some kind of information in our earnings materials because I think the capital markets get a little bit ahead of themselves in terms of trying to predict things like consumer spending when, in fact, it's immensely varied across categories. Even within restaurants, consumers tend to typically go out even in difficult times. They just spend a little less when doing so. We put some data points in the resiliency we've traditionally seen in the business, which is that sign-ups generally grow during tough times, even if consumer spending's a little bit modest. We're not really seeing that. Nancy, if you want to kind of elaborate on how we kind of build the go-forward forecast with the current outlook.

Nancy Disman (CFO)

Yeah. I think Taylor captured it well, and I picked it up in my prepared remarks.

The one point I would emphasize is the volume bridge that we've shared with you all at Investor Day. Very little impact in any given year is from what we sign in year, right? We're not dependent on kind of new grabs in the market and a win rate. I think that supplements what Taylor said. The in-year achievement of anything we sign this year is the smallest component of any revenue bridge that we do. Much of our embedded volume and the annualization of what we already signed is going to achieve and really inform the forecast for the rest of the year. Again, any movement plus or minus 1% is really going to have almost no impact on our forecast going forward.

Darrin Peller (Senior Analyst)

Right. That's really helpful, guys.

Just quick follow-up would just be where we are on the, I mean, it was good to see the synergy update you guys provided, but to us, it's still more of a cross-sell revenue opportunity that really drives your idiosyncratic ability to grow so well in various macros. Where are you on, whether it's Vectron or it's Revel or others? Just give us a quick update, if you don't mind, on what you're seeing the most momentum with in terms of obviously turning into revenue from what you obviously bought over the past year or two.

Taylor Lauber (CEO)

Yeah, sure. This is like choosing which child is my favorite. I'm not going to do it, but I will tell you that we are at varying degrees of kind of success in pulling the levers across each one, largely because of when we started to work with the assets.

Revel, we mentioned this in the prepared remarks, really, really nice cross-sell of payments into that existing software base. Phase II of that plan is that those merchants over time migrate to SkyTab, but it's been going really, really nicely. The Revel team has been able to contribute meaningfully to our SkyTab development pipeline. As you could imagine, with kind of the number of customers we're winning, the number of geographies we're trying to tackle, and simply the sheer breadth of customers we're trying to serve within restaurants, the talent is incredibly important to us. It's not to be overlooked. I think too often in our industry, people think about M&A as a talent reduction strategy. That is not how we approach M&A. We approach M&A with the purpose of kind of attracting good talent towards problems we were struggling to solve before the transaction began.

Revel is doing really nicely in that regard. Vectron, I think you're probably seeing kind of the green shoots of this inside of our international growth statistics that we've shared. It took quite a while to kind of get that business where we wanted it to be. For some procedural reasons, we actually don't control the business today. We expect to very, very shortly. It's contributing nicely to production today. Eigen, it's a playbook we knew extremely well, right, a $30 billion-plus hospitality-oriented gateway, but we really didn't close on it until November. All of them are kind of at the right stage of their evolution, with maybe a modest concession being international has always taken longer than we expected. We're very mindful of that when we try to set go-forward expectations. It's not that the playbook is misunderstood.

It's not that execution is challenged. It just takes longer to kind of get operational control and to affect the change we want to affect.

Darrin Peller (Senior Analyst)

Right. All right. Thanks again, guys.

Operator (participant)

Our next question is from the line of Adam Frisch with Evercore ISI. Please proceed with your questions.

Adam Frisch (Senior Managing Director)

Thanks, guys. Good morning. Quick question for you, Taylor. Thanks for all the color here. On the 40% GRLNF growth in the quarter, what was organic and inorganic the way you guys define it? I have one quick follow-up.

Taylor Lauber (CEO)

Yeah, sure. I think Nancy alluded to this. We generally don't provide quarter to quarter, mainly because acquisitions provide a lot of noise. There's acquired revenue we're parting ways with. There's synergized revenue coming in very quickly. I will say we set the expectation that for the year, organic revenue growth would be north of 20%.

We are exactly on track with regard to that full-year metric.

Adam Frisch (Senior Managing Director)

Okay, cool. Just one follow-up. Good to see some nice wins here in hotels and stadiums. I wanted to dig in a bit to the conversion figures on page 16 of the deck. New wins are on the right side of the page and some relatively low, but very early initial conversion numbers are in the middle. Does that imply that you're still selling under different brands while also consolidating the underlying backbook?

Taylor Lauber (CEO)

Generally, we don't sell under multiple brands. I think I'd encourage folks to go back to Luke gave a really good kind of M&A walkthrough in our Investor Day to highlight the brands we acquired versus the brands we go to market with. Generally speaking, no, we don't go to market over multiple brands.

In certain cases where the product is well entrenched and we don't have those capabilities like a Vectron in Germany. We are not selling SkyTab in Germany today. We're selling the Vectron product and hope to be able to introduce SkyTab over time. No, generally speaking, it's our payments bundled with it's either SkyTab, it's either our payments platform, or it's our stadium software that any of acquired merchants are being converted into when we buy the business. I wouldn't sort of look at each one of those numbers as homogeneous, right? Whether it's a Revel customer being converted over or a GiveX customer or an Eigen customer, they're all very different in terms of size of merchant and the number of dollars and effective spread you get on all of them. We're very pleased with the pace of progress we've made across all of them.

I don't want to set the tone that we think this is kind of too slow or too fast. It feels all very adequate to us.

Adam Frisch (Senior Managing Director)

Okay. Yeah, that's what I was asking because the presentation at the Analyst Day was one thing, and then I saw all these marquee wins on the right, which was a little bit I just wanted to square that. It seems like initially you're still selling under those brands, but the goal longer term is to consolidate everything so you don't have to do that, and then it makes the conversion easier. Is that the right playbook to think about?

Taylor Lauber (CEO)

In most cases, it's actually go after the existing customer base. It's not even a selling against a brand. It's bundling payment processing within the customer base that's been acquired.

When those sales teams are going and finding new customers, they introduce exclusively Shift4 products. Again, it's not lost on us that the quickest and most immediate opportunity inside of an acquired business is generally the tens or hundreds of thousands of customers that are using just one piece of the payment solution, and we can offer the rest.

Adam Frisch (Senior Managing Director)

Okay. All right. Thanks. I'll take this offline so I save time for other guys to ask questions. Thanks, guys. See you in a bit.

Taylor Lauber (CEO)

Great.

Operator (participant)

The next question is coming from the line of Timothy Chiodo with UBS. Please proceed with your questions.

Timothy Chiodo (Equity Research Analyst)

Great. Thank you very much. I wanted to touch on the backlog disclosure of the $35 billion. That's up from the Q3 earnings that was a $33 billion number.

I wanted to talk a little bit about what's implied in the guidance in terms of the in-year volumes that will come out of that. I just wanted to see if our logic was accurate. We think about that $35 billion as most of it able to be implemented this year. Maybe not all because some of it requires waiting for a current contract to expire, maybe more on the ticketing side. If you were roughly able to take maybe $25-$30 billion of that and have it implemented this year, and you think about a mid-year convention, you can pretty quickly get to sort of a low to mid-teens billions of volume contribution for the in-year Fiscal Year 2025.

Is that a rough way to think about it, or is there anything that you would guide us to maybe higher or lower, any other nuance to call out? Thanks.

Taylor Lauber (CEO)

Yeah. No, I think that's the right way to think about it. Generally speaking, if you're in our backlog, you either have been installed and we're waiting for the annualization impact, or you are highly likely to be installed over the course of the next 12 months. It's the rare exception, although we've had some success in this regard of the multi-billion dollar enterprise that takes kind of longer than I call it nine-ish months to fully implement, although we have named a few of those in the last few quarters. Yes, I think that number is a number we have confidence coming in largely throughout the year.

Although keep in mind, those customers still have yet to annualize the next year, right? We still expect kind of the lion's share of an implementation this year to annualize in the following year, if that makes sense.

Timothy Chiodo (Equity Research Analyst)

Thank you, Taylor. Yeah, it makes a ton of sense. The minor follow-up is, is it fair to assume that ticketing is a meaningful portion of that $35 billion, or if you could just put some context around some of the categories in there?

Taylor Lauber (CEO)

I don't think it's a disproportionate portion by any stretch of the imagination. I think if you look at the past kind of handful of quarters' worth of enterprise wins, you've got more than a few that are multi-billion dollars just themselves. We obviously have one ticketing.

This will be a big year for seasonalizing ticketing, that's for sure, because we've activated a lot of ticketing customers in the last year. We had the contribution of appetized customers, and those customers are seasoning and will give us a full year in 2025. I wouldn't say it's a disproportionate amount in the backlog.

Timothy Chiodo (Equity Research Analyst)

Thanks. Helps a ton. Thank you, Taylor.

Operator (participant)

The next questions are from the line of Jason Kupferberg with Bank of America. Please proceed with your questions.

Hey, this is Tamika Mosley on for Jason. Thanks for taking my question. I wanted to ask about international as well. I know it's still kind of early days, but can you provide any color on the current revenue split between U.S. and international and where you see that mix evolving by the end of the year?

Also, just given the number of countries you're in now, which market outside of the U.S. is your largest in terms of revenue contribution? Thanks.

Taylor Lauber (CEO)

Yeah, sure. I know we have some disclosures around international revenue contribution, which largely comes in the form of e-commerce business that is seasoned for a little bit, plus all these sites we're adding. I made this comment in my prepared remarks. The contribution of merchants added in year tends to be less significant because they give you, by definition, on average, about half a year's worth of revenue. We're not expecting a meaningful contribution, although we do think this is a meaningful priority for the business so that three to five years from now, we've sufficiently kind of planted the flags to capitalize on this software plus payments convergence that's going on in the rest of the world.

There's kind of two flavors it's taking on at the moment. There's enterprise customers that we're enabling in lots of different geographies. I mentioned this stat recently, but I love to repeat it because I think it just speaks to the speed within which we can operate when we have conviction that Shift4. We were in one country like 18 to 20 months ago, and now we're facilitating payments in over 50 for certain customers. That's one element, enterprise customer enablement all over the world. The other is SMB product plus software plus payments bundling that we're delivering in a handful of markets that we think are really ripe for that and expanding the markets much more methodically.

We have a joke called beer drinking countries before wine drinking, but I think it helps allude to the markets we're operating in in kind of an elegant way, which is like U.K., Ireland, and Germany are all really strong for us at the moment. We expect to expand into those wine drinking countries, Italy, Spain, France, when products are better localized for them.

Okay, cool. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Our next question is from the line of Andrew Hart with BTIG. Please proceed with your question.

Andrew Hart (Analyst)

Hey, thanks for the question and nice results. Taylor, it's great to hear how consumer spending is holding up okay. I guess, can you talk to us a bit about how growth is balanced between net new and cross-sell?

If we think about a scenario where macro does become a bit more challenged, how much harder can you press on the cross-sell funnel, thinking about kind of a stick versus carrot approach here?

Taylor Lauber (CEO)

Yeah, sure. I'd love to tell you that there's a scale we have in the back office and that we've weighted according to net new wins or cross-sell when it's most important for us. The reality is it just simply doesn't work that way. M&A tends to give us a very quick access to lots of customers that, in all honesty, would likely not answer the phone if a payments company or a software company were calling them with a solution.

They'd likely just say, "hey, we're content, and there's no reason to look at this right now." M&A gives us access to a wide swath of customers that is incredibly valuable at all times. It also gives us capabilities that, when bundled tightly and we get to delete all these parts and deliver a single cohesive solution, it makes us more competitive on a net new basis. I would say in the most normal of times, meaning modest economic growth, not a ton of uncertainty, you tend to have a mix of about half and half, where lots of customers are joining us off the street, but there's also this cross-sell. When times get tough, people answer the phone far less frequently. We tried to give evidence to this on a resiliency page we put in our earnings materials, and the cross-sell becomes invaluable.

These customers are only going to listen to the vendors they're already working with. They're actively looking for ways to consolidate, make life simpler, save money, etc. Again, I want to be very specific. We are not predicting the economic environment ahead. We feel quite content with our ability to operate in a variety of economic environments, including those that are less rosy from a consumer spending standpoint. It's that cross-sell funnel that, to your point, does become more valuable when times get tough, but it contributes, as do net new wins, very consistently when times are less tough.

Andrew Hart (Analyst)

That's helpful. Thanks. Nice to hear the commentary on spreads expected to be consistent around 60 basis points for the year. I guess if you look at the chart on page six, it looks like there's actually some expansion in the restaurant vertical.

I guess, is that related to SkyTab success or any details you can share there?

Nancy Disman (CFO)

Yeah, I think it's a little bit of everything. We've got SkyTab success. We've got just the mix based on size of merchants, which will always blend into that spread, and really a lot of stability around that legacy base that we keep talking about. I think it's really the combination of all three that has allowed us to kind of maintain and inch up spreads in that category.

Thanks so much and nice results again.

Taylor Lauber (CEO)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Our next question is from the line of Andrew Jeffrey with William Blair. Please proceed with your questions

Andrew Jeffrey (Equity Analyst)

Hi, appreciate you taking the question today. Taylor, I wanted to see if we could drill down a little bit on Global Blue, recognizing that the deal hasn't closed. I guess a couple of questions.

One, one of the things we've heard from investors is just questions around sort of the goodness of fit, the existing business, as well as your confidence in the ability to cross-sell into that big $500 billion-plus or captive volume base. More pointedly, perhaps the $80 million in by 2027 feels like it's related to or assumes a relatively low proportion or percentage of that addressable volume as monetized. Could you talk to both of those things?

Taylor Lauber (CEO)

Yeah, sure. I can understand kind of the juxtaposition there and the questions it raises among investors. Maybe just to help clarify, the set of capabilities that Global Blue possesses are extremely rare for the merchant verticals they serve, and they're very valuable.

We see a tremendous opportunity in owning that set of capabilities and, again, having just a much wider offering with a lot of components that very few people possess, being able to deliver it into merchant categories. With that being said, it is a phenomenal standalone business, and we actually do not need to count on much in the way of revenue synergies for it to be an incredible pro forma contributor to Shift4. What we delivered to the street in terms of expectations is you can actually forecast a modest degree of decelerization in their core business and replace that with incredibly modest cross-sell synergies and still feel really good about the combined business. Those are kind of the facts, right? You can feel good about our ability to execute against this business and that the capabilities are exceptionally rare.

The merchants they serve would highly unlikely ever answer the phone if someone called them to try to approach them with a net new solution. Now we have this incredible foot in the door. That is really, really valuable. It also underpins all of our international expansion. I would think maybe the subtext to all of this is we would not deploy the kind of capital we did, which is the largest transaction in our history, without having incredibly high conviction that we can do better than that set of circumstances that I laid out. I think you should look at the dollars we deployed as kind of our conviction in the theme, and you should look at the expectations we set financially as even a really modest to poor execution against our game plan yields a pretty damn good result.

Andrew Jeffrey (Equity Analyst)

Okay. Just specifically on the revenue synergies, any implications for sort of the percent of Global Blue volume that you're convertin or how do you come to that number, I guess, might be the question?

Taylor Lauber (CEO)

Yeah, sure. We segmented their customer base, and we basically took the largest customers and said, "assume we win less than 10% across that merchant population," and in some cases, less than 4% or 3%. In other cases, we said, "like their SMB population, we think we can do, I don't know, a third very, very comfortably." That's still a modest expectation. Hopefully you're calibrating. We've traditionally done a really good job of cross-selling into these businesses. We're not trying to set an expectation for ourselves inside of this. We're simply saying below average execution against the Shift4 playbook, against this world-class base of customers, yields a result like $80 million.

That could even account for some softness in luxury retail, which we have no reason to believe. We just like to be conservative in that regard. Again, very modest conversion expectations across that base set to the street. I think the dollars deployed means that we think we can do better than that.

Andrew Jeffrey (Equity Analyst)

Okay. Thanks.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Andrew Bosch with Wells Fargo. Please proceed with your question.

Andrew Bosch (Analyst)

Hey, thanks for taking the question. Nice set of results here. Just wanted to double-click on the software and other revenue line. It downticked slightly in the first quarter relative to the fourth quarter. I'd assume some of that is attributable to deleting the parts. If you can give us a sense on where that line kind of trends through the remainder of this year, it would be super helpful.

Nancy Disman (CFO)

Sure. You really hit on it in your question. When you look at kind of that decel, it is from blowing up the legacy models. From a guidance perspective, to give you some idea, we will still see growth as the year goes on, but it will be decelerating if our plans kind of hold with blowing up the legacy models. We're definitely going in on some of these new deals with a little bit more of the stick approach than it took us on the gateway. I would say that's what you should expect over the course of this year if everything trends the way that we anticipate.

Andrew Bosch (Analyst)

Got it. My follow-up would be on the EBITDA side.

Getting some questions this morning, is it the right idea to tick up the guidance amid the macro, albeit your ability to navigate the macros is obviously better than most. Maybe if you can just give us a sense on what manifested in the quarter to kind of give you that added confidence.

Taylor Lauber (CEO)

Yeah, sure. I would say the quarter played out largely within our own expectations. Despite kind of the ton of noise we're hearing on a macroeconomic basis, we're seeing very little impact to consumer spending. It would seem imprudent not to kind of continue to forecast the business on the pace that we have. That's not to say we haven't kind of thought through the impact of tariffs, and we haven't thought through the impact of kind of tariffs within our merchant base on a merchant-by-merchant analytical point of view.

We spent a lot of time on this. We're just not seeing it in the data. I understand that that can be confusing because there's lots of different data points that we see out there. Generally speaking, day-to-day spending across our merchant population and throughout kind of spring break and everything else looks exactly as we would have expected it.

Nancy Disman (CFO)

Yeah. I would just add to that. We continue to be incredibly focused on expense management. Our state-flat kind of culture within the company is still going very strong. We have a really detailed line of sight to the synergies that are left to be realized within the acquisitions we completed last year. That certainly informs EBITDA as we look ahead for the rest of the year.

Andrew Bosch (Analyst)

Great. Thanks, Nancy.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Dominic Ball with Redburn Atlantic. Please proceed with your questions.

Dominic Ball (Analyst)

Hello, Taylor, Nancy, Tom. As Shift4 expands internationally, is there any material difference in take rate versus U.S. merchants? We're just trying to understand the path to sort of reaching your 60 basis points net take rate or blended spread target by year-end. As you also expanded to US enterprise merchants for a little bit lower take rate. A quick second one there for international growth. Has there been any challenges in terms of educating the local sales partners in international markets that maybe are not used to selling integrated software and payments? Thank you.

Taylor Lauber (CEO)

Yeah, it's a great question. I'll say spreads vary sort of very much country by country.

We would expect in international markets, and this will kind of allude to the second part of your question, that you kind of have to ascribe value to multiple pieces of the chain all at once because merchants have traditionally had to buy each one of these things individually. Said differently, you might have a little bit more on software, a little bit less on payment volume. The reality is you're selling a bundled product, so you don't care as the delivery of that product. Merchants are kind of more attuned to look at one line versus another. To your point, yes, you have to educate the market.

You have to educate the market on at the enterprise level, by the way, when we were first doing this in hotels six years ago, it was, "this isn't just the conversation with the CFO about payment spreads. It's also a conversation with the CTO about the gateway and the implementation costs of connecting all this software in your environment and the hardware implementation," etc. Yeah, there's certainly education that has to be done, although the value prop is screaming very loudly to these salespeople that they can win a heck of a lot more when they're delivering these types of solutions. This is a little bit before both your and my time with Shift4.

Twenty years ago, Jared was introducing the payments ISO community to this software called HarborTouch and explaining that, "we'll take care of the technical aspects of the sale, but if you can introduce this product to a merchant, you're going to attract higher quality merchants. They're going to stick around with you longer. They're going to ascribe a heck of a lot more value to it than they would a payment terminal alone." Education is a part of it, but I think the early kind of green shoots of that are 1,000-plus merchants a month in particular geographies very, very quickly. It is something that we're used to, and it's something that we predicted the markets would embrace.

Dominic Ball (Analyst)

Awesome. That's great to hear. If I can maybe just ask a quick one on this SkyTab Air, which sounds super interesting for restaurants.

I mean, how do you guys see this position versus maybe other major competitors out there? Do you see this as a material sort of driver in terms of new restaurant wins? Will it help in maybe less churn? Is it going to be charged directly or bundled within payments?

Taylor Lauber (CEO)

Yeah, sure. We consider this an extension or kind of the next evolution of everything we've been doing in restaurants for a very long time. Keep in mind, these HarborTouch examples I've cited a few times on this call, they go back to the mid-2000s. That is really when our presence in restaurant technology began. We are very proud of SkyTab Air. We think restaurant operators are going to love it. It is by no means the first wireless handheld we've introduced into the restaurant environment. It's a new form factor. It's sleeker. It's easier.

Its battery lasts longer. It charges faster. It's got more POS functionality inside of the device than previous versions. It's got a lot more cellular redundancy than previous versions. We are incredibly excited about it. We think it'll keep us winning at the pace that we're winning at. I will say, though, international markets tend to favor the handheld more so than the workstation. It's just the nature of it. It'll traditionally be priced as per software device per month, and it does cost less than the workstation, generally speaking. We expect it to have a lot of receptivity, but international is probably, my guess would be, the international restaurants picking more wireless and fewer workstations in their implementation than in the U.S.

Dominic Ball (Analyst)

Great. Thank you, everyone.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. Our next questions come from the line of Matt O'Neill with FT Partners. Please proceed with your questions.

Matt O'Neill (Managing Director)

Yeah. Hi. Thanks for taking the questions. Just curious, I recognize the Global Blue deal is by no means closed yet nor contemplated in the guide. Given some of the changes or eliminations of guidance from the airlines and some other macro dynamics, wondering if you could just give us a view on kind of how the Global Blue business is faring in Q1 and maybe into April.

Taylor Lauber (CEO)

Yeah, sure. Keep in mind, it is a business dependent on international travel, but it's pretty well-diversified inside of that. Meaning that when travel from one country weakens, it tends to favor another country that fills the gap. Not huge changes in the way they're thinking about the business inside of Global Blue. I think there's some international travel trends that look reasonably promising through the summer. I will say FX rates play a quicker impact on their business.

Meaning that if one FX rate pair changes meaningfully, it does change the way the consumer in the store thinks about how much they're willing to spend, typically to the benefit of another FX pair somewhere inside the business. There are some offsetting effects given the fact that they've got their own dynamic currency conversion product that operates somewhat differently vis-à-vis those. This is evidenced, by the way, by the fact that they've had kind of a multi-year history of some reasonably large shocks to the business, whether it was the U.K. leaving, whether it was the Russian traveler kind of sidelined, or whether it was the Chinese traveler not spending as much as they would in historic periods. Global Blue kind of grew throughout all of that.

We feel good about the business, but these are certainly trends we're trying to get our arms around as we prepare to take ownership of the business. It will largely manifest itself in, will the U.S. traveler spend less time traveling abroad and therefore more time traveling domestic, and how does that play through and/or will the Asian traveler kind of fill that gap or not? These are kind of the questions we're asking ourselves. Jacques and the team have run that business exceptionally well through much bigger shocks than what we're seeing today. We feel really good about it.

Matt O'Neill (Managing Director)

Thanks, Taylor. Maybe a quick follow-up for Nancy. I believe you had alluded to this at recent conferences, but the timing of interest expense on the billion-plus new notes. We saw that in Q1 here, and I believe that's a semi-annual.

Now it's a one-Q, three-Q dynamic. Is that right, Nancy?

Nancy Disman (CFO)

Yes, that's exactly right.

Matt O'Neill (Managing Director)

Great. Thanks so much. Appreciate it.

Operator (participant)

Our next questions are from the line of Jamie Friedman with Susquehanna International Group. Please proceed with your questions.

Jamie Friedman (Financial Analyst)

Hi. Good morning. You look smart in retrospect the way you structured the guidance. I think that needs to be said. I had two questions. I'll just ask them upfront. Taylor, I realize you said in your earlier response that you don't have a scale in the back room to weigh the contribution of the funnel. Looking at page 15, though, when you look at the $900 billion between the $1.4 trillion of total funnel and the $500 billion of cross-sell, I'm just wondering, can you help share how you think about that layering into the three-year guide?

Was there anything contemplated about the conversion funnel in the three years? And then my second one just asked upfront, any callouts about Canada? Because a couple of your competitors and peers are discussing Canada macro. Thank you both.

Taylor Lauber (CEO)

Yeah, sure. Canada seems to be a controversial place these days, although I'm not sure why. It's been a solid contributor for us. Keep in mind, you had us first developing our payments capabilities in Canada at the beginning of last year, and then we acquired GiveX and Eigen, both with meaningful merchant populations up there. It's been a good contributor for us. Obviously, the contribution of Canada is accelerating, but I think that's a byproduct of us not really being in the market. We don't spend any time thinking about kind of average merchant locations, spend, or spreads, or anything else.

We're simply trying to sign up the customers that are trying to give us the business. In terms of thinking about the contribution, the $80 million of revenue synergies that we called out at the announcement of Global Blue, that is explicitly within our three-year expectations. Although it also contemplates, and not because we're smart about this, we just think it's prudent, it contemplates some slowdown in their standalone business as a result of us just not being good enough to predict it. Yes, we contemplate the $80 million of revenue synergies from the business. I will say I think that's conservative, although I think it also assumes some volatility in their end markets, which is just prudent. We're a new steward of this business, and I think it's important to set that expectation.

In terms of the rest, I mean this very sincerely, we do not think about them on an individual basis. What we do when we acquire one of these businesses now is we simply say, "Restaurant, okay, what is the value proposition we can deliver to a restaurant?" And I do not really care whether that restaurant came from Eigen or GiveX or Revel, etc. Similarly with hotels, now with luxury retail and e-commerce, I think the investment community, quite frankly, just gets itself too wrapped up in predicting an individual success rate against every single deal versus looking at the big picture and saying, "wow, even something like Shift4 that they acquired back in 2017 is still contributing gateway wins." That means the strategy works.

The obsession over, "was this a net new or was this a gateway win?" I think it's a little just overdone given the fact that our cross-sell funnel is so big that if there were never a net new win, we'd do just fine and vice versa, if it were nothing but net new wins, we would be doing just fine.

Jamie Friedman (Financial Analyst)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Our next questions are from the line of Jeff Cantwell with Seaport Research. Please proceed with your questions.

Jeff Cantwell (Senior Equity Analyst)

Hey, thanks for squeezing me in. Yeah, my other couple of follow-ups. First quick question on your guidance for gross revenue less network fees using the midpoint, you raised the full year to 25% to 26%. My question is, what's changed in terms of how you guys are thinking about growth for the full year by vertical amongst restaurants, hotels, and entertainment, etc.?

Because the guidance rates for the full year implies you're staying confident despite the macro uncertainty here. What are the guess sense of where you're seeing more strength amongst the different verticals as you think about how you see your revenue playing out over the course of the year? Just hoping you can maybe underline that for us. Thanks.

Taylor Lauber (CEO)

Yeah, sure. I'll hit this. We're not predicting any real change in the economic health of our subverticals that we serve. We obviously have increasing confidence on the international contribution of the business. We're just signing up lots of customers there. I will say where I think kind of the street has it wrong is a disruption to international travel or international travel becoming more expensive is not a bad thing for the Shift4 business. We saw this, by the way, in the pandemic where international travel was basically prohibited.

What happened? Everyone traveled more domestically. The imbalance of foreign travelers coming in was ballasted by domestic travelers not leaving the country. I think it's certainly too early to tell what the medium and long-term impacts of some of the tariff commentary and implementation is going to be, but we do not see any immediate trends across our business that we have not seen over the past 18 months. There is no one vertical that is incredibly robust and/or impacted by what has been going on.

Jeff Cantwell (Senior Equity Analyst)

Got it. Got it. Another follow-up, this is on Global Blue on Matt's question. Maybe could you elaborate a little bit about the level of confidence you have in terms of the outlook for Global Blue-related revenue? Just given all the macro uncertainty, is there anything about Global Blue you are feeling more cautious on?

Maybe on the flip side, you feel yourself becoming more positive about versus back when you gave us your initial thoughts on Global Blue back at the end of yesterday? Thinking about certain corridors for travel, like China into Europe, even maybe inbound into China, there could be potential upside there. Just curious if you could walk us through how you view Global Blue and the puts and takes there, given obviously much has changed with respect to macro since you last spoke with us. Thanks.

Taylor Lauber (CEO)

Yeah. The more time we spend with the team, there's a ton of cultural alignment between how the team at Global Blue thinks about running their business and how we've traditionally run Shift4, which is there are things within their control and there are things outside of their control. We can't control how many diners visit a restaurant.

We can certainly control how many restaurants we sign up. They feel, by the way, the same way about international travel versus enhancing the product experience. The emphasis on their business over the past kind of five years has been an incredible focus on digitizing the consumer experience so that more refunds happen because it is easier to affect a refund. The results of that strategic approach have been that the business has ballasted some of the largest shocks you could contemplate, whether it was the U.K. leaving the VAT or the Russian travelers being sidelined or the Chinese travelers spending less and traveling less that I mentioned earlier. Very much like ourselves, Global Blue is really, really good at knowing what they control and focusing exclusively on that.

The results of that are that in really tough times, they do a heck of a lot better than expected. I think we tried to give evidence in our earnings materials here that in really tough times, we thrive because signing up merchants is something we do really well. Predicting the day-in, day-out volume in a merchant is not something we actually spend a lot of time on in that respect. Culturally, I think they're very aligned to kind of how we think about winning. You're going to win on customer signups and product competitiveness. I will say, and this is kind of what compelled us to pursue acquiring the business very recently, is that there's a heck of a lot more ballast inside of the business than anyone would guess looking from the outside in.

Evidenced by their performance through some of these idiosyncratic shocks that they tend to just plow through and do a good job and produce a good financial result despite that. We are incredibly excited. We hope that in early Q3, we will have a closing and we can march towards a combined offering and a combined team, but we have to let the regulators do their thing.

Jeff Cantwell (Senior Equity Analyst)

Great. Thanks very much. Congrats.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. Our final question is from the line of Andrew Schmidt with Citi. Please proceed with your questions.

Andrew Schmidt (Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Hi, Taylor. Hey, Nancy. Thanks for squeezing me in. Hopped on a little late here, sorry if these have already been asked. First one, just on pricing. Maybe just give us an update in terms of just the pricing environment where you are seeing across the segments.

The corollary to that question is, if we do see obviously there's more economic uncertainty out there, what's your expectation on the enterprise side? Sometimes you see some belt tightening when these contracts come up for renewal and things like that. I'm just curious to get your thoughts on that front. Thanks so much.

Taylor Lauber (CEO)

Yeah, sure. I'll put enterprise aside because I think they're very consistent in how they operate. They demand a heck of a lot of value from their vendors, and we endeavor to deliver that. When we engage with an enterprise merchant, it's typically on a new basis, it's like, no, don't look at your payments invoice.

Look at the six or seven other invoices that are involved in facilitating the experience, and that will all come to you in the form of a take rate we think is attractive and one throat to choke via our delivery model, and you're going to eliminate a heck of a lot of administration and expense as a result of that. Putting enterprise aside where I think we're priced competitively for what we're delivering, but we're delivering something that is of more value than most of our peers. In the SMB segment of the marketplace, keep in mind we do try to have a more variable cost model for our merchants than a fixed cost model. Our SaaS is very, very low compared to others in the industry. Our spreads are generally the same, if not a little bit above that.

That is the trend we have lived with for 20 years. There is nothing new with regard to how we are approaching the environment. I will say, and I think some competitors of ours made headlines a year or two ago with their pricing moves, that when times get tough, pricing is something merchants focus on a lot. Our model, I think, serves us well in that regard. I will not say that merchants are paying, merchants are focused on price in a prudent way that they have been for the last few years, but I would not say it has been an overwhelming portion of any of our discussions with merchants.

Andrew Schmidt (Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Got it. Super helpful. Thank you for that, Taylor. Maybe just the question on capital allocation. Taylor, coming to the seat, obviously you worked with Jared for some time. You have had a pretty successful M&A strategy.

Any tweaks to that in terms of cadence, intensity? Just curious how you think about just balancing capital allocation here. Thanks.

Taylor Lauber (CEO)

Yeah. No. Nancy alluded to buybacks. I think we could not ignore the price of our equity in the past few months. Buybacks became a larger portion of how we think about capital allocation. Ideally, we love to deploy capital into R&D and into M&A targets that give us both capabilities that would otherwise take R&D and/or customers to cross-sell into and sometimes geographies. Global Blue is a large transaction, so we are focused on getting that one done. That is not to say we have taken our eye off the ball on opportunities. I think everyone should expect that when you have something like Global Blue, suddenly it gives you a couple dozen more countries within which to think about M&A inside of.

We're focused on getting Global Blue done, and outside of that, no meaningful changes to our capital allocation strategy.

Andrew Schmidt (Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Perfect. Thanks so much.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. At this time, I'd like to turn the floor back to Taylor Lauber for closing remarks.

Taylor Lauber (CEO)

Thank you all for joining the call. Look forward to catching up with you all in the coming days and weeks to go into the details of our quarter, which we're very happy with. Bye.

Operator (participant)

This will conclude today's conference. We disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation. Have a wonderful day.