Paysafe Limited Q1 2023 Earnings Call
Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to the PaySafe Q1 2023 earnings conference call and webcast. If anyone should require operator assistance please press star zero on your telephone keypad. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. You may press star one at any time if you place into question Q.
Speaker 1: As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It's not my pleasure to turn the clover to Kyrsten Yilson, head of the Investor Relations. Please go ahead, Kyrsten.
Speaker 2: Thank you and welcome to PaySafe's earnings conference call for the first quarter of 2023. Joining me today are Bruce Lothar's Chief Executive Officer and Alex Gersh Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, a reminder that this call will contain forward-looking statements.
Speaker 2: and should be considered in conjunction with cautionary statements contained in our earnings release and the company's most recent SEC reports. These statements reflect management's current assumptions and expectations and are subject to factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those forward-looking statements.
Speaker 2: You should not place undue reliance on these statements. For looking statements during this call, speak only as of the date of this call, and we undertake no obligation to update them. Today's presentation also contains non- GAAP financial measures. You can find additional information about these non- GAAP measures and reconciliation to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures.
Speaker 2: in today's press release and in the appendix of this presentation, which are available in the Investor Relations section of our website. With that, I'll turn the call over to Bruce.
Speaker 3: Thanks, Kirsten, and thank you everyone for joining us today. If you're following along our webcast, let's begin on slide three.
Speaker 3: After returning to growth in the back half of 22, we kicked off 2023 by delivering our strongest quarter revenue since the IPO. First quarter revenue of 388 million exceeded our guidance range, and increased 7% year over year on a constant currency basis.
Speaker 3: We recorded 8% growth in the merchant solution statement, including double digit e-commerce growth.
Speaker 3: In digital wallets, revenue increased 6% on a constant currency basis, including strong performance from our classic digital wallets.
Speaker 3: In first quarter, a just a divida of 108 million was at the high end of our guidance and increased 5% year-over-year on a constant currency basis.
Speaker 3: excluding one off personnel expenses related to executive severance, adjusted Ibitah would have increased to approximately 7% in line with our constant currency revenue growth.
Speaker 3: Throughout the turbulence in the banking market, PACEF has been unaffected by the failures of SBB, signature, silver gate, or first republic, and we have no direct relationships with these institutions.
Speaker 3: We operate a network of roughly a hundred banks globally and always look to build resilience into our payment flows so that we can root payments through other partners as needed.
Speaker 3: We have robust safeguarding in place to ensure the ring fencing of customer funds, and we operate our acquiring business in the US through FBO accounts to further manage any risk of our customers.
Speaker 3: Our US customer balances are supported by pass-through FDIC insurance.
Speaker 3: Turning to a few business highlights.
Speaker 3: In April , we welcome Nicole Carroll, who joins us from experience, to lead our strategy and innovation for peace-afe.
Speaker 3: where she will support a key strategic vision that links our extensive set of APMs with our wallet technology across our core geographies and verticals.
Speaker 3: As I mentioned in our recent investor day, PASAVE was recently ranked third and well above the industry standard on the JD Powers Merchant Services satisfaction survey, a testament to the team's focus on the customer experience.
Speaker 3: We continue to see strong activity in regulated North American high gaming, including the launch of three states in Q1, expanding our payments partnerships with several major brands, including draft kings, scissors and points bet among others.
Speaker 3: Paysafe now powers payments for 27 states, which is up from 22 states at the end of Q1 last year.
Outside of regulated eye gaming, we're seeing strong growth in other sub verticals such as fantasy sports, social and skill gaming.
In Ontario, we launched three new merchants who are leveraging both our card acquiring and interactive e-transfer capabilities.
We also activated eCache for several existing clients and are excited about our Q2 launch of our Skrill Digital Wallet in Ontario.
We also continue to make progress on our sales transformation to reinvigorate growth with a focus on building out our enterprise sales function, maintaining our plan to double the teams headcount in 2023.
In the first quarter, we closed 30 enterprise deals with more than 100,000 each in annual contract value and 20 deals that included multiple pay safe products.
We're also expanded our pipe line of cross-selling and geographic expansion opportunities from the prior quarter.
I'll also highlight that we've improved our deal integration process, resulting in a 50% reduction in the average time to integrate a new merchant from the point of contract signing. Turning to slide four for a few examples of recent wins.
At our investor day, we outline three key focus areas as part of our sales transformation. First,
Cross-selling new PASAVE products to existing merchants.
Second, expanding our existing merchant base into new geographies, and third, pursuing new merchants in our key verticals.
While these specific examples are not material in size, they provide some color around the momentum we're seeing and why we're winning.
Merchants are coming to pay save for the extensive set of payment options across our global footprint available through a single API along with our ability to manage risk and deliver better customer experience.
With our European gaming merchant base, we closed three smaller deals to add card acquiring to existing digital wallet clients, highlighting our progress in upselling into our large customer base, leveraging our long-standing relationships and brand recognition across the region. In the financial trading vertical, we expanded our relationship
with ATFX and existing digital wallet client and leading Forex Merchant in the UK to support their growth aspirations in Latin America.
As a final example, we recently entered into a partnership with Pruto Orange to provide an entire suite of pay safe products, including our digital wallet as their main pay-in, pay-out infrastructure, as well as our key payment methods, including credit card processing.
and eat cash across the entire geographical footprint.
These wins were supported by our new go-to-market structure, which organizes the sales function by our core verticals and has improved our ability to sell Paysafe as a strategic payments offering while also improving deal execution and increasing the average deal size by a
global pipeline and wind rates. Moving to slide 5, consistent with the update we provided last quarter, this view is focused on our classic digital wallets. One of the repeated questions I was asked a year ago was could we get our classic wallet to grow again.
Well, in Q1, not only did we see continued stabilization in our underlying active user base.
while we recorded constant currency revenue growth of 10% from classic wallets.
Supported by stronger engagement, including double-digit growth in transactions per active user and average revenue per user.
following a more pronounced seasonal uptick in Q4.
Consumer deposits in classic digital wallets were also up double digits again compared to Q1 of last year excluding the Russian-Ukraine war and FX.
As we mentioned on the prior call, drivers of improvement include ongoing initiatives to enhance the user experience and reduce friction, such as improvements related to onboarding, KYC, personalization and customer service, as well as deposit success rates.
and merchant check out conversion rates. We are also piloting new features that are resonating well with consumers, including new loyalty and rewards enhancements to support adoption and retention.
Looking ahead, we will leverage our progress in user experience and product enhancements, broadening the appeal and the use cases of our wallet platform to adjacent markets, which may temper growth across our TPA and average revenue user metrics while driving growth.
With that, I'll ask Alex to review the financial results.
I'll ask Alex to review the financial results. Thank you, Bruce.
Let's move to slide seven. We are pleased with our financial performance for the first quarter, with revenue above our guidance range and adjusted a bit at the top of the guidance range.
excluding approximately $2 million of non-recurring personnel costs, adjusted EBITDA would have exceeded the top of our guidance as well. Moving to slide 8 for the summary of our financial results.
Volume was 33.8 billion, an increase of 8% year over year, reflecting continued strength in the Americas, where the merchant solution business saw strong growth in e-commerce and continued resiliency in US consumer spend.
In digital wallet, we saw continued improvement with underlying growth from iGaming and digital assets offset by FX. Volume mix for the quarter was 84% from merchant solution and 16% from digital wallets, reflecting a slight mix shift in the overall volume.
to the merchant segment compared to Q1 of last year, or roughly flat sequentially, not adjusted for FX movement.
Total revenue for the first quarter increased 5% to $387.8 million on reported basis.
excluding the impact from changes in foreign exchange rate, revenue increased 7% reflecting growth from both segments.
Adjusted IBDAA for the first quarter was 107.8 million, resulted in adjusted IBDAA margin of 27.8%.
excluding one of personnel costs related to executive severance, the margin would have been at 28.3% or flat year on year.
In Q1, we generated $70 million in free cash flow, reflecting 65% conversion, which is 8 percentage points higher than Q1 last year.
Free cash flow was $308 million on the LTM basis, reflecting conversion of 74%. Adjusted net income for the first quarter was $33.1 million, or $0.54 per share, compared to $37.3 million, or $0.62 per share in prior period, mainly reflecting the increase in interest expense.
Let's move to slide 9 to discuss the segment results.
Merchant solutions delivered another quarter of strong growth. First quarter volume was 28.6 billion, an increase of 10% year over year. And revenue for the first quarter was 208.5 million, an increase of 8% reflected continued strings in our US SMB space, along with strong growth in e-commerce.
led by eye gaming, including a launch of five new states over the same period last year, as well as the onboarding of new merchants.
Adjusted EBITDA increased 8% to $52.3 million, reflecting a 25.1% margin, largely consistent with the first quarter of last year.
Turning to digital wallet segment on slide 10.
First quarter volume was 5.4 billion flat year over year, which is not adjusted for FX headwinds.
Digital wallet revenue for the first quarter was 181.4 million, an increase of 6% on a constant currency basis.
Adjusted EBIDA in the digital law of segment was 79.2 million, an increase of 12% constant currency, and reflecting a 43.7% margin, up 180 basis points.
As Bruce highlighted, we are seeing continued progress led by our growth initiatives focused on user experience, product innovation, and sale transformation. Growth was also supported by interest revenue on deposit, which partly offset the headwinds from FX and the Russia-Ukraine war.
Turning to slide 11 for the summary of debt and leverage. At the end of the first quarter, total debt was 2.6 billion, reflecting debt repayment and reproachuses over roughly 50 million in Q1. Movement in FX increased our debt balance by approximately 15 million.
Our net debt to LTM adjusted EBITDA ratio was 5.8 times at quarter end, and we remain highly focused on reducing leverage through further debt repayment and EBITDA growth in 2023. We continue to believe we will be in the range of 5.1 times to 5.3 times by year end.
Moving to the outlook of slide number 12.
Based on our Q1 results, we feel confident in maintaining our 2023 outlook.
We continue to expect reported revenue in a range of 1.58 billion to 1.6 billion, reflecting growth above 6% at the midpoint.
We continue to expect adjusted EBITDA in a range of 452 million to 462 million, reflecting at least 100 basis point of margin improvement.
Starting this quarter, we will be moving away from providing explicit quarterly guidance ranges and focusing on our full year guidance.
That being said, our current view on the cadence of the year is broadly consistent with what we discussed on our last earnings call, which was that our full year guidance reflected low single digit revenue growth in the first half.
and a high single digit growth in the second half.
driven by the ramp up of our sales transformation and other strategic initiatives.
of our sales transformation and other strategic initiatives. And now I will turn the call back to Bruce.
Thank you, Alex.
In closing, I want to thank our team for their hard work and reiterate that paid safe is well positioned to to re-accelerate growth and improve margins.
We maintain strong positions in large attractive markets.
We are fortunate to serve a premier global client base with about 70% of our revenue coming from online. And when we see significant cross-selling opportunities across our core products and geographies.
By continuing to prioritize client experience, product innovation, and our sales transformation, we believe that we can unlock meaningful opportunities and stakeholder value for years to come.
Lastly, with the acceleration of AI technologies, PASAFE has been actively engaged the last two years in the development partnership of a range of AI tools to enhance our customer experience, manage risk, support sales growth, and deliver company-wide efficiencies. Today, we have over 50 active machine learning modules.
developed by our in-house data science team. We're seeing benefits of our risk models that analyze spending habits to provide a defense against money wandering and fight fraud as well as improved onboarding decision making.
AI is also playing an important role in our customer servicing department, where we have virtual assistants that use AI capabilities of machine learning and natural language processing to understand around 150,000 user inquiries and emails per month and respond appropriately. Thank you.
Our virtual assistants learn, adapt, and improve over time to deliver advanced personalized service.
We continue to be excited about the future developments which will further enhance the areas as payment acceptance, optimization, pricing, sales, and overall risk management.
Now, let's begin with the Q&A. Thank you, Bruce. We'll take a couple questions from the Say Technologies platform which allow shareholders to submit and up the questions. After that, we'll turn to questions from our research analyst community.
Our first question is from Ivan, who asked about the possibility of selling the company. Bruce, would you like to address this one? Sure, Kirsten. So what I'll say right now is we are very focused on returning the company to start us to a stronger growth profile.
while expanding margins, building on the progress that we had in the back-f, last year in IntiQ1. We achieved our strongest quarterly revenues since the IPO in Q1. We continue to be actively involved with our strategic priorities.
and the board remains excited about the opportunities across base.
Thanks, Bruce. Our next question is from Joshua, who asks, what can we expect in 2023 versus 2022? Bruce, can you take this question as well? Sure, I'm happy to do it. So Joshua, thanks for the question. I want to be clear that I believe that we're in a stronger position today than we were a year ago.
We can't control the macro environment, but we aren't seeing anything today that impacts our confidence in achieving the full year outlook to deliver a six to seven percent revenue growth in 23, which is a strong improvement from effectively a flat growth rate in 22.
We also lapped some of the market headwinds that we saw last year, like the Russian Ukraine War, along with a couple of regulatory reforms in Europe .
at headwinds that we saw last year, like the Russian Ukraine War, along with a couple of regulatory reforms in Europe . So what's different?
One important change that you heard about is our sales transformation. While it's early days, we have a pipeline that's much larger than it was last year. And the deals that we've already won and the opportunities we're targeting, we're seeing multiple product wins and cross-selling geographically within our existing merchant base.
And that's going to ramp up more in the second half, but we like the early results that we're seeing. And then on the product side, we have key initiatives around global APM optimization, improving our authorization rates, leveraging our wallet platform to adjacent markets. So again,
We really believe that we're positioned this year to re-excelerate growth and improve our margins.
Okay, we also have a couple questions asking about the potential to redeem the warrants or potential for shared bybacks. Bruce, do you wanna address this topic?
Sure, I'll take that and so as you probably know we've talked about this a lot We do not have a shared buyback program in place our focus is reducing our debt level And it's a higher priority at this time our leverage ratio is higher than we wanted to be so we're focused on reducing that
I'm sure we'll continue to look at this as we renew or review our capital allocation priorities on a regular basis, but I would not expect this to put a buyback program in place. As we said repeatedly from last fall,
Dead Reduction is a primary focus for us, organic growth, and dead reduction. All right, thanks Bruce.
With that, let's turn the call back over to the operator to open up the lines to take questions from the analyst. Operator.
Thank you. Now, I'll be conducting a question and answer session. If you'd like to be placed into Question Q, please press star one at this time. One moment, please. While we pull for questions. If you're on speaker equipment, maybe necessary to pick up your handset before pressing star one. If you'd like to remove your question from the Q, please press star two.
Our first question is coming from Jamie Friedman, from Suspohana, your line is that line? Hi, good morning in, because congratulations, good results here. Bruce, I wanted to ask you,
So part of the strategy articulated early on and at the analyst day in March, and I'm repeated today is the sales acceleration and the product innovation. And I was hoping you could kind of unpack those two. In terms of the sales acceleration, for example, it was what you said at the time, new sales engine aligned by target verticals.
How much of the growth is coming from those verticals? Is it still as...
Broad-based as it was, or as it really concentrated in the verticals that you articulated at that time.
Yeah, Jamie. Thank you for joining us this morning. Thanks for the question. So look, starting with the sales question, you know, very excited about what Rob and the team have been doing. I think the team building out the team, getting the right talent on the team.
That has made great inroads here early on in our turn around. I think when you look at the success that they're having, the pipeline is really built up considerably. As I said a couple of quarters ago, when we were really starting to talk about this.
We're really going to go back to our existing customers and start focusing on how do we cross sell into those customers. I think we talked a little bit in the prepare of remarks about expansion from multi-product sales and cross sells into our existing customers. So the vast majority,
of the stuff that we've been selling have been in our existing client base. So really very targeted. If you remember, Jamie, going back to when we did investor day and even last fall, we talked a little bit about being in those five verticals.
and 80% of our revenue coming from those fly verticals and us being focused on maximizing the wallet share that we get from the customers that we have by going back and cross-selling and the team's been very successful with that. So overall, I think...
The team is doing very well. We'll continue to focus on and continue to expand, but we wanna be tight in those five articles. As far as the product, yeah, I was gonna ask about the presentation. Thank you.
Yeah, I was just wondering, like, is there a killer app on the innovation side? Anything that you'd call out, the engagement?
Statistics were really interesting But so what's going on in the innovations that you have the I know it's an evolution, but do you have the
hand now that you need in the market on the product side. But I think there's a couple of things that are happening, right? So we went back and we talked about this a couple of quarters ago. What I, it's all everyone is we were going to focus on a user experience on the wallet side.
We're going to focus on authorizations, APMs. We're going to focus on our e-commerce site. And what you can see, even though it's early, you can see results coming from that. We're having great results with a core digital wallet product.
You see double digit growth out of that here in the first quarter. Really nice job focusing on Megan and Kim doing great things around user experience. And so through that it's driving transaction growth with that group and it's also driving our group as well.
So overall, it feels very good about what we're doing from a product perspective there. Still more to come. We're very excited as we talked about it in an investor day, wallet is a platform. We really believe we've got a nice pipeline there. We believe that that wallet is a platform is gonna allow us to do both branded and unbranded type of.
releases here. We talked about the merchant wallet that we're targeting towards the end of the year, beginning of the year of 24 to be delivered. We're still on pace with that and we're very excited about the opportunity that's going to bring for our wallet business as we move forward. So we have a lot of things that are in the pipe from an innovation standpoint and product.
standpoint, we see strength building in our wallet, we see strength building in our e-commerce site, and feel good about the progress we're making on product and innovation throughout the organization, again, early on.
Thank you. I'll drop back into queue.
Thank you, Jim. Thank you. Next question is coming from Timothy Chiotto from Credit Suisse. Your line is now live.
Great, thank you. Good morning, everyone. I have first an industry question and then a quick clarifier on the guidance. So at your investor day, you had a great slide. It was slide 45. You might remember it was the one that had the pie chart that had all the various payment methods that are used in eye gaming today. I think a lot of people found that really helpful ourselves included.
I wanted to touch on the card acquiring portion of that. It was on that pie chart. It was about 40% or so of eye gaming lolliams going through card from an industry perspective. Are you seeing any changes at all in terms of issuers and their, I guess, ability or willingness or listening of more comfort, I guess, with.
approving some of those transactions. In other words, do you expect card to become a bigger portion of that pie chart if we were to look at that pie chart in a few years?
to expect CARD to become a bigger portion of that pie chart if we were to look at that pie chart in a few years. We decided to replace a data card.
Yeah, Tim, good morning and thanks for the questions. So, you know, as the payment rail options continue to emerge and evolve, I do think you'll see some movement from card being that 40% number. What I would say is...
What you're going to see as things move forward in our industry is really around experiences. And so you're going to see the importance of data and personalization really driving more things versus just using a debit card or credit card. And so I believe.
that you will see some movement with that. I think you'll see the opportunities for wallets to really emerge over the coming years. And I think we're positioned very well for all payment types at this point. So feel good about where we sit as the crossroads of.
New payment types emerge. Okay, great. Thank you so much for that. The follow-up is around the revenue guidance.
Q1 came in a little bit stronger, but you're talking about the EGO single digits for the first half.
Maybe there's other moving parts, but it seems to imply a little bit of a slowdown in Q2 ahead of every acceleration in the second half. Is the second quarter without giving us specific guide? Is it sort of as you thought about it earlier in the year where there's some changes? And maybe you could just give some more context on that implied deceleration in Q2. Oh, yeah, hi, sorry. Yeah, look, I think what I can tell.
some of these initiatives and sales for the second half of the year.
Excellent, thank you for that. Thank you. As a reminder, it's Star 1 to be placed into question Q.
Our next question today is from the Detea, Buddha Vrappu from Bank of America. Your line is now live.
Thanks, Dr. McQuestions. Could you maybe touch on a bit more on the growth in the different verticals and change in seeing there in the early part of QQ?
compared to what you might have seen in one queue. And then just again, touching upon the early question on the outlook. So I guess you're sticking to what he said previously. But if it is common on, you know, given the fact that you do have some of the...
Russia had winds overlapping, sorry, not being there anymore, you don't have any more than regulatory headwinds. I mean, is there any particular reason why we should think you shouldn't be able to continue some sort of similar momentum in 2Q? I think that's what you've seen so far.
Yeah, thank you and appreciate the question. So if I understand the first question really was around the product mix and growth mix. So when you look at the growth mix from Q.
Q1, what you saw really within the merchant segment was an acceleration of our e-commerce business to double digits. So strong growth in e-commerce, what we told you that was going to be a focus for us to improve that platform with done some great things operation with that platform and feel good.
about what is happening there as we're moving forward. So a little bit of shift there from the SMB vertical to the econ vertical. And then on the wall at side, within that segment, you see a nice recovery there. I think we had...
Probably a little stronger growth in the classic wallet than we anticipated, but very good growth there coming out of Q1. I think in the back half of your question, I think it was really around geographies. If I interpreted that correctly, you know, we see still,
solid growth in North America.
really no real shift, I would say from a geographical standpoint. You know, upper single digits in North America, you've got a low double digit growth in Latin, and the rest of the world, kind of where we thought it was gonna be.
Solid in the Americas, consistent to how we saw the year starting off. So very much the way we saw the beginning of the first half of the year kind of unfolding.
I think my second question was more just on the outlook itself. Given you don't have some of the headwinds you still had in 1Q from last year, let's say Russia, I'm just wondering is there anything else which might cause that deceleration in 2Q apart from that just because you maintain that...
outlook for losing a little bit of growth? Yeah, Alex, go ahead. I think if you, again, I think we talked a lot about in Q1, for instance, about growth in our iGaming, right? So as we get into more and more states, right, a Super Bowl and March Madness mean a lot to us in Q1 of this year versus say last year because we get into a lot more states. I think if you look at Easter and you look at the fact that you may have an extra year there are areas of changes that may not only increase growth but may reduce growth in lots of different areas such as AT & proletarian nations. I think a huge difference in growth around that because historically we've had a year of higher projects ejecting off the internet while we're still...
weekend, which is generally not the best time for digital wallet in April , right? So I think while you're absolutely right in saying that there are certain headwinds that go away in Kitu, there are also some things that we would that that would be highlighted.
where the growth of Q1 may not repeat itself. Which is why, again, we just want to reiterate, now we planned for all of this, we know this is how it's going to happen. And so, again, I just want to make sure that everybody understands that our Q2 started exactly on our expectations and the guidance that we've given, we just reiterate.
Good to see you. Thank you. Thank you. As a reminder, that star 1 to be placed in the question Q. One moment, please. But we pull for further questions.
If there are no further questions at this time, I'd like to turn the floor back over for any further or closing comments. Yeah, great. Thank you very much. Look, just a couple of comments here to wrap it up. We recognize that successful turnaround requires...
really a relentless focus on execution. It's not achieved in a quarter or two, but through sustainable growth, and that's really what we're focused on. Our plan is beginning to bear positive results, and then we'll remain optimistic that we're on the right path. Our management team appreciates the hard work. we're going to take its best-selling relationship with our other partners.
of our employees and the patience and support of our customers and shareholders as we navigate through this transformative journey. So with that, thank you really appreciate everybody's attention this morning and.
the patience and support of our customers and shareholders as we navigate through this transformative journey. So with that, thank you, really appreciate everybody's attention this morning, and have a great day.