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On Wednesday, 12 March 2025, Paysafe (NYSE: PSFE) presented at the Wolfe Research FinTech Forum, outlining its fiscal year 2024 results and strategic plans for 2025. CEO Bruce Slothers highlighted the company’s accelerated growth, while CFO John Crawford detailed moves to streamline operations. Despite positive growth and income, the company faces challenges in maintaining momentum in a competitive market.
Key Takeaways
- Paysafe achieved 7% organic growth in 2024 and net income positivity for the first time.
- The company divested its direct marketing business to reduce risk and focus on core operations.
- Strategic plans for 2025 include 6.5% to 8% organic growth and margin expansion to 27% to 27.5%.
- Paysafe is targeting a net leverage ratio of 3.5 by the end of 2026.
- New products contributed 6% to revenue in 2024, with further launches planned.
Financial Results
- Revenue for 2024 reached $1.7 billion, with transaction volume exceeding $150 billion.
- Organic growth accelerated from 0% in 2022 to 4% in 2023, reaching 7% in 2024.
- The company’s net leverage ratio was reduced to 4.7x, with a target of 3.5x by 2026.
- EBITDA margin is estimated at approximately 21% for Q1 2025, with full-year guidance of 27% to 27.5%.
Operational Updates
- Paysafe expanded its salesforce by hiring 170 additional salespeople in 2024.
- The company reported over 1 million three-month active users in digital wallets for the first time in several years.
- Geographic expansion included moving beyond California, Texas, and Florida to other states.
- E-commerce experienced a 30% growth in its book.
Future Outlook
- Paysafe projects 6.5% to 8% organic revenue growth in 2025, with sustainable upper single-digit growth.
- Digital Wallet growth is targeted at mid to upper single-digit, with potential for double-digit expansion.
- The company aims for double-digit EBITDA growth and gross margin improvement throughout 2025.
Q&A Highlights
- Paysafe prioritizes debt paydown over share buybacks, unless the stock is undervalued.
- No current plans for mergers and acquisitions, with a focus on deleveraging.
- Merchant Solutions segment expects mid- to upper single-digit growth in the SMB business.
- Digital Wallets are targeting mid- to upper single-digit growth.
For a deeper understanding of Paysafe’s strategies and performance, readers can refer to the full transcript below.
Full transcript - Wolfe Research FinTech Forum:
Paul Obrecht, Fintech Team Member, Wolfe: Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us here at the Wolfe Fintech Forum. My name is Paul Obrecht, and I’m on the Fintech team here at Wolfe. And today, I’m happy to have Paysafe’s CEO, Bruce Slothers and CFO, John Crawford, with us. So Bruce and John, thanks for being here.
Before we start, there may be some in the room who are not as familiar with the Paysafe story. So just to begin, can you maybe provide a quick overview of the company?
Bruce Slothers, CEO, Paysafe: Yes. Paul, thank you, and thanks for having us here again. It’s great to be back. Just a brief overview of Paysafe, we’re a global payments company. We’ve been around for over twenty five years.
So it’s great to be here with all the other wonderful payment companies here at the conference. Our business is really broken down into two business segments. When you add those together, we’re a $1,700,000,000 company, over $150,000,000,000 in volume and do business in over 100 countries. So the two segments themselves are really merchant acquiring and our digital wallet business. Again, been in the business twenty five years plus and looking forward to continuing our growth journey, which really has started in the last couple of years.
And so delighted to be pushing on our third year of growth. And then ’twenty four is, I’m sure, we’ll talk about what was our first year of profitability. So a great year for us in ’twenty four.
Paul Obrecht, Fintech Team Member, Wolfe: Got it. That’s helpful. So yes, I’d love to start with ’twenty four. You just reported, I guess, last week it was your fiscal twenty twenty four results. Can you just describe what do you think the most important takeaways for investors to be aware of are?
Bruce Slothers, CEO, Paysafe: Yes. I think when you look at ’twenty four, it was really a great validation year of growth. We had some growth in ’twenty three, but I would describe it as kind of wind aided from macroeconomic benefits. We had FX tailwinds in ’twenty three and we had rate changes on interest income that really allowed us to accelerate our growth rate in ’twenty three. We didn’t have those in ’twenty four.
So from an organic growth perspective, the takeaway was really about continuing to accelerate that organic growth. We had about 4% growth in ’twenty three, up from 0% in ’twenty two percent. We had 7% in ’twenty four percent. And as we guided or as John guided last week, we expect to continue with a 7% organic growth number for ’twenty five. So I think the growth acceleration is one continued pay down of our debt, which is such an important theme, investor theme for us, moving down to 4.7%, which was our goal for the year.
And we’ll talk a little bit about ’twenty five percent in the future. But those are really the big takeaways. And obviously, as I mentioned, being net income positive for the very first time, it was overall a very good year for us.
Paul Obrecht, Fintech Team Member, Wolfe: Got it. And in 2024, the company really leaned into investing with expanding sales capabilities, revamping consumer acquisition and the optimizing of the portfolio. Can you just touch on the progress you made there? And then as we look ahead to the rest of 2025, what your key priorities are?
Bruce Slothers, CEO, Paysafe: Yes. So when we looked at ’twenty four, as you just walked through, we had these four priorities that we said, this is what we’re going to go execute on. We talked about spending a little bit of money at the beginning of the year. We talked about spending $25,000,000 to drive really product innovation and sales expansion. We overachieved on those numbers.
We hit our 170 additional salespeople, which was fantastic. We really needed scale within the sales organization. When you look at the contributions that we received, we said for that $25,000,000 spend, we would get at least $50,000,000 of return in year in 2024, which we exceeded that number. So we felt that, that was very good. We also had an emphasis on continuing to evolve our marketing activities on consumer acquisition.
And as we announced in the call, we had our first quarter back over one million three month actives. So that was really outstanding for us. Probably the first time in three or four years where that’s happened. So overall, when we look at that and we look at the target of our debt ratio being at 4.7, it was a clean sweep for us. We hit all the major milestones that we were looking to do in ’twenty four, returning to growth, building up for scale and really trying to position ourselves to continue that growth in ’twenty five.
So as I you want to add anything, sorry, not to That’s good. Yes. So as we continue to think about ’twenty five, a lot of the transformation stuff is behind us. So we now really are just focusing on bringing more product to market, really having that sales organization mature and kind of hit their rhythm and really settle into a nice cadence that allows us to continue growth into ’twenty six. And you’ll see more partnerships.
You’ll see us doing some new creative things. We have some new things that will expand into different markets for SMB, for example. So you’ll start hearing more and more of those type of things as we move forward. But new product, and I’m sure as many people heard on the earnings call, we’re very excited about our new wallet releases and some new products within our PaySafe card catalog with our lockable card. And we’ll just continue to drive good sales cadence as we move into ’twenty five.
Paul Obrecht, Fintech Team Member, Wolfe: Got it. So before we delve into more specifics and financials, John, you’ve been at Paysafe since September, I believe. I’m just curious, can you give us a sense of what attracted you to the role in the first place? And in your time thus far, what your early learnings have been and any opportunities you see? Sure.
Thank you, Paul. I first,
John Crawford, CFO, Paysafe: it was an opportunity to be a public company CFO, and that’s an exciting new challenge for me personally, selfishly. The company is also one that I’ve been following for years. Parts of this business, I even worked with as a banker twenty years ago. And I appreciate the set of assets and where they are in their markets, in just really attractive opportunity to see those continue to come together as I’ve been watching the transformation that Bruce and a relatively new senior leadership team were putting in place. And so a lot of my focus was on how I can help.
And I think taking the company to the next level, driving free cash flow even harder and trying to narrow what I saw from outside in as a gap between where the company is priced and potential value and how people are seeing the assets, like all of those things added together to be extremely attractive.
Paul Obrecht, Fintech Team Member, Wolfe: Right. That’s helpful. So speaking of assets, last month, you announced the sale of the direct marketing business. Can you describe the rationale for this and how it better positions the company to succeed moving forward?
John Crawford, CFO, Paysafe: Sure. So I think Bruce has been talking for a while about derisking the business. And even in the calls earlier in 2024, was talking about pruning in the portfolio. And I think as we got into got into the fourth quarter, it became clear there was an opportunity to, number one, really accelerate that process, and it was going to be better for the company overall. And then we realized we might have an opportunity to move the assets.
And that was really that was partly driven by the fact that it was a good answer for the employees and the customers versus us just continuing to exit on our own. So I think we viewed it as one that really is addition by subtraction, sort of thinking about investing in the terminal value of the company by removing a distraction, for lack of a better word. And it was a unique opportunity where we had a counterparty that was very familiar with the business and can move very quickly. It’s not often you can do a transaction like that as fast as we got it done. And it was sort of critical, as you could imagine, to get it done very quickly for the employees and the customers and the banking partners involved.
Paul Obrecht, Fintech Team Member, Wolfe: Got it. That’s helpful. So
Bruce Slothers, CEO, Paysafe: I think just to add to, right, so the as John talked about, right, we were very focused on trying to get some of the businesses that didn’t meet our ideal customer profile out of the business to create value from a long term perspective. We were growing faster than anticipated as we were coming into the Q3. We took the opportunity to start really accelerating the client removal that we thought were outside of our parameters. But at the end of the day, this was a business that historically didn’t grow. We couldn’t allow it to grow.
It was very volatile, and it was dilutive to overall multiples on the business. So it just really plus with the regulatory framework changing and really clamping down on these higher risk merchants, it just made sense for us to divest and shut down that business.
Paul Obrecht, Fintech Team Member, Wolfe: Right. That makes sense. So if we look to 2025, as you alluded to, your guidance is calling for 6.5% to 8% to top line organic growth excluding the disposed business, which implies a slight acceleration from the 7% in 2024. Just curious, what gives you confidence in accelerating revenue growth this year? And I guess if we look within Merchant Solutions and Digital Wallets, what the building blocks for growth are in each segment?
John Crawford, CFO, Paysafe: Sure. So I’d say, first, I think we as we were building into that model, we looked at the individual pieces and kind of tested our confidence level in each. And I think what you see is a baked in kind of attrition view that is a modest improvement over 2024. We think that is largely driven by improvements on the wallet side actually, which I think some people find surprising. There were some regulatory and risk related more voluntary attrition for us in 2024 on the wallet side.
And then the building blocks from a same store sales and a new sales perspective are largely in line. We’ll kind of look at it at midpoint of the guide, largely in line with what we achieved in 2024, maybe a little more conservative. And that’s built up from on the same store side, annualization of things that we sold in 2024 that weren’t achieved in year, as well as the actual, I think, same store cohort growth. And then on the new sales piece is a combination of new logos, new products and functionality and those sorts of things.
Paul Obrecht, Fintech Team Member, Wolfe: Got it. So we did four, seven, slightly above seven this year. What do you see as a sustainable top line growth for this company?
Bruce Slothers, CEO, Paysafe: I think it’s going to be upper single digit kind of growth profile for the organization. I think we’ll see continued double digit growth in our e comm business. We feel very good about that part of our business. We continue to see that growing in Q1 at that same level, very consistent candidly to January of last year. We look at the SMB business as a mid single digit, maybe slightly upper single digit business on a year in and year out basis.
So we feel very good about the merchant side of the business. When we look at the digital wallet side of the business, again, we think that’s probably a mid to upper single digit growth profile. I think if we can really get some of these products to market, as I mentioned, we’re launching our Pargo Effectiva wallet in Peru. It’s actually already launched, but it will be launched generally really in Q2. But the soft launch that we’ve done in Q1 is going very well.
We’re very excited about that, really pouring a lot of energy. If we can get a couple of these to hit, we could see the digital wallet side of the business be a double digit growing business. So right now, I think upper single digits is probably the right growth profile for the next couple of years as we get everything kind of moving and getting that product function really performing at a high level.
Paul Obrecht, Fintech Team Member, Wolfe: Thanks, Bruce. That’s helpful. And John, if we shift gears back to you for the guide in ’twenty five, the margin guide is calling for 27% to 27.5%, roughly, equating to 150 to 200 basis points of expansion, excluding the disposed business. Just what are the puts and takes here for margin expansion as we look at ’twenty five?
John Crawford, CFO, Paysafe: Sure. Thank you. I think, first of all, I think from a puts and takes standpoint, I think about the shape of the year from our point of view being one where we are building through the first half of the year to that kind of range of where we’ve guided for the full year in the sense of Q1, we got a lot of noise from the deal, severance, stranded costs, a number of things that are going to impact Q1 from an EBITDA standpoint, as well as just some noise. As you saw us coming out of Q4, gross margin in the merchant side, 42 ish. We think that margin is going to improve throughout the year, but it’s not going to be a step function Q1.
So we’d expect, even though over the year, 27%, twenty seven point five % ish, Q1 is probably more like a 21% margin. And then building very quickly through Q2 and into the second half with margins that are going to be well above the guided range so that the math kind of works through the year. Driven by multiple factors, not just the noise in Q1, but also think the noise that, that part of the business sat in our SMB segment, pulling that distraction out, I think, we believe is going to help that business perform better going into the year. We’ve got a number of initiatives, as Bruce just mentioned, Pago Wallet, a number of others that are launching now that are going to really, as we think about it, drive more revenue later in the year even though they’re in market today.
Bruce Slothers, CEO, Paysafe: And they’re high margin.
John Crawford, CFO, Paysafe: And they’re high margin, so they tend to drive they’re going to tend to drive margin acceleration through the year.
Paul Obrecht, Fintech Team Member, Wolfe: Right. So it sounds like we’ll be exiting the year in the high 20s, is that right, for the margins?
John Crawford, CFO, Paysafe: I think we’ll be exiting in the year potentially higher than that
Paul Obrecht, Fintech Team Member, Wolfe: in
John Crawford, CFO, Paysafe: the second half. Okay.
Paul Obrecht, Fintech Team Member, Wolfe: And I think the last Investor Day, the medium term guide for margins was around that range, kind of high 20s, low 30s. Is that still the right way to think about long term margin profile?
John Crawford, CFO, Paysafe: I think it’s fair. And in fact, we’re seeing as we look at our leverage down through the SG and A line, we think we can take margins to that area. Right. And that’s another piece I should have mentioned in the puts and takes. When I said noise, like some of that a good deal of that noise, call it, $8,000,000 to $10,000,000 ish is going to be kind of in the SG and A side, just to be clear as you’re thinking about modeling.
Paul Obrecht, Fintech Team Member, Wolfe: Got it.
Bruce Slothers, CEO, Paysafe: Yes. Keep in mind, too, we had one of the puts and takes was in ’twenty four, I said we were going to invest that $25,000,000 and that actually ended up being closer to $29,000,000 20 8 million dollars 20 9 million dollars And so that’s not a recurring cost as we’re doing those puts and takes as well.
John Crawford, CFO, Paysafe: Very good point. So maybe just simple blocking math here. Half of that $29,000,000 from $2,024,000,000 dollars is literally one time. The other I think of it as one time ish only because you’re not adding 170,000,000 or 170 salespeople every year. But the other piece is the credit losses that we had in 2024.
So if you’re whether you’re looking at an as reported basis or an ex divestiture basis, if it’s on an as reported basis, you’re going to see acceleration of margin with $25,000,000 of outsized credit losses being removed.
Paul Obrecht, Fintech Team Member, Wolfe: Right, right. That’s helpful. And then if we turn to the segment level, within Merchant Solutions, a core focus over the last year has been really driving growth in the direct SMB book. In fact, I think it was discussed at last year’s FinTech Forum. Yes.
And you’ve certainly seen some progress there throughout the last year. That obviously comes with a healthier margin profile versus the ISO book. Can you just discuss what the company is doing internally to drive this growth? What progress you’re seeing? And what the trajectory looks like going forward?
Bruce Slothers, CEO, Paysafe: Yes, Paul, great question. So if you remember to last year’s discussion, we talked about that within the S and B, our sales are predominantly in three states historically, right? We were California, Texas and Florida. One of the things we were going to try and do and partly why we were hiring all these extra salespeople was that we were going to kind of expand our geographic footprint and try to drive into some of the other states. We’ve obviously done that, hiring people, having success with that.
I think the second component was we were really kind of refocusing on the merchants themselves, the size of the merchant. The verticals that we were in, we’re really trying to focus on the things that played well with our product stack. Clover plays very well in certain verticals, restaurant, retail. And so we were trying to adjust the merchants that we were going after and trying to get up. So if you look at historically our SMB book, it was almost more of a micro merchant that we were competing with, more competing with Square versus kind of the other players in market.
And so what we’ve been able to do in ’twenty four is we’ve been able to move up a little bit. So you saw in our revenue per S and P merchant, upper single digit growth profile in that revenue per month category. So we feel very good about the continued progress. We would expect to see that continue into ’twenty five. There’s a lot that goes into that, right?
We had to rechange the verticals that we were going after, rechange the marketing structure on how we were sourcing leads and driving leads. But I think overall, it’s been moving on a very positive trajectory.
Paul Obrecht, Fintech Team Member, Wolfe: All right. I think with the positive trajectory in SMB and obviously all the improvements, it’s sometimes easy to lose sight of what’s going on in enterprise where the company is seeing very strong trends and meaningfully higher wins relative to years past. I would just ask you what Paysafe’s positioning is relative to competitors and what’s really driving that go to market approach?
Bruce Slothers, CEO, Paysafe: So what I would say is we have really accelerated in the gambling space on the ecom side, right? So when you go back and look at Paysafe, that’s the lineage side of our business. It was predominantly European and with our wallet and Paysafe cards. As we built up this ecom functionality in The U. S, it allowed us to go after a market.
So we got licensed in the respective states or in every state that has a license. That’s allowed us to really build a stronghold within that particular vertical. And that has grown quite a bit, right? We see really solid growth, 30% for the year, growth with our ecom book. And then what we started doing as we built out our team in ’twenty four, we started kind of going to adjacent verticals.
So we started hitting some more hospitality and travel and those type of verticals that play very well in what we do. We have a very strong foundation in risk and AML management. And so we stayed kind of central to what we call as the experiential economy. So we continue to really focus in on those type of businesses. And we’re seeing nice growth, better than nice growth, but 30% growth with our ecom book.
We expect that to continue as we move into ’twenty five and ’twenty six. So we see a lot of upside with that business, and we’ll just get better and better at that as we’re moving along.
Paul Obrecht, Fintech Team Member, Wolfe: It’s great to hear. So if we look at digital wallets now, obviously, it continues to show healthy growth even when factoring in the lack of float tailwinds that there were the prior year. And you can clearly see that engagement is improving with the transactions per active user and the ARPU continuing to see healthy growth. Just what’s driving this engagement? What are the key drivers there?
And then if I look at the actual user base, does PaySafe still have a goal of bringing in new users or is it focused more so on just driving engagement among the existing quite vast user base?
Bruce Slothers, CEO, Paysafe: Paul, that’s a great question and one we don’t get a lot of. So what I would say is what we tried to do initially as we started going into ’twenty three, as you probably recall, those businesses were declining. They were really kind of struggling coming out of ’twenty two. We had some artificial tailwinds kind of propping up those businesses. But what we focused in on was, let’s just stabilize the users, but really focus in on the experience that the users have.
And so what you started to see was our transactions per account starting to go up. And so you can see a nice growth profile over the last couple of years of transactions per user, which is fantastic because the benefit of that, the byproduct of that was that our ARPU started going up. People were using it more. ARPU started clicking up, so we really started having positive growth. And you can see that returned us to growth as we were going forward.
In ’twenty four, though, we also had some great product expansion. So we had launched our accountant card, which was really a graduation program to our Paysafe card customers, where it gave them access to basically a DDA account that they could do other things with and leverage, in essence, a new wallet for them. And so that really took off and it was growing very nicely. We added also a bunch of LPMs that allowed us to leverage more cross border payments, which was fantastic. We also, on the Paysafe card, as probably everybody knows, most of the way that works is in person.
We launched a ePIN product towards the end of ’twenty four that allowed people to top off their cards online, and that was a big hit. And we’ll continue to see growth expansion from that as we move into ’twenty five and ’twenty six. We have a series of other products that we are very excited about. I talked about the Pago Wallet. Briefly, lockable card is one that will allow video gamers and streamers to navigate and manage their subscription services.
And so this makes it very easy for them to control their budgeting and how they’re being billed. And so we think just in the tests that we’ve done so far, we’ve seen really good response from consumers on this. So I think we’re very optimistic about some of the new product launches that we’ve had. We’ve also launched some of our white label wallets. So we’re starting to see the Exala wallet in market now.
We’re starting to see we have a scrap metal wallet that we haven’t really talked much about, but that’s launching and doing very well. And what we’ve done there is really leveraged our AML capabilities and our regulatory capabilities that bring more structure to that industry and really creates a safer environment in that vertical. So we feel very good about the products that we’re starting to bring to market, and we think those will really drive continued growth. With all that, we have revamped our consumer acquisition model. So I think the consumer acquisition model will benefit, one, from the new products and functionality that we’re driving to market.
But we’re also changed really the team and it’s led a wonderful lady, Alisa Barber, drives this for us now. But I think what we’ve done to change the way we’re going to market is going to be very interesting to watch as we continue to spend more money. We’ve got a discipline around it. We have a good understanding of what our long term value is, what our CAC is, our cost of acquisition. So we feel very good about the mechanics of the go to market motion in that segment.
Paul Obrecht, Fintech Team Member, Wolfe: Great. I want to focus in on one of the investment goals for 2024, and that’s the VAS capabilities, which you obviously added chargeback production, backup terminals, loan offerings for your merchant base. I’m just curious what the adoption has been like over the past, I think, six months or so is probably a good time frame once those are really out in the market?
Bruce Slothers, CEO, Paysafe: Yes. So I would say mixed bag. What I would say is the chargeback has gone very well. Probably north of 40% of our consumer base our merchant base has adopted that product. So that’s gone exceptionally well.
I think some of the others like the capital lending is just really launching now. We’ve kind of done it in small increments. So we’re going to continue to offer more and more product to our merchant base, and we expect that we’ll have some of them hit pretty well and others probably won’t get that much lift. But it’s really about trying to offer more and more services to those merchants to allow them to run their business as effectively as they can. And we feel good that we’re starting to get that motion, that go to market motion, bringing products to market, and you’ll see a lot more activity in that space.
But it’s not much different really than the way we look at it is revenue per merchant or ARPU right on the two different businesses, but we’re trying to figure out how do we raise that up with each merchant in this case. We feel that there’s a lot of good products that we still are yet to offer that are 250,000, three hundred thousand merchants in The U. S. Alone. We’ve got close to 1,000,000 in Europe.
We think there’s a big opportunity to leverage that.
Paul Obrecht, Fintech Team Member, Wolfe: Great. That’s helpful. And then if we look at the macro, obviously, it continues to evolve and be quite volatile. If we think about what you’ve seen quarter to date, I think what you’ve heard from other people, other companies presenting at the conference is despite trends maybe related to weather or leap day comps, there actually have been fairly stable expense trends quarter to date, and that includes both general and ecom. Would you say you’re seeing fairly similar trends?
Bruce Slothers, CEO, Paysafe: Do you have any?
John Crawford, CFO, Paysafe: I think, yes. We don’t you can occasionally on the gaming side, you can have big sporting event in a different month or something like that can cause some movements, but it doesn’t tend to be cyclically macroeconomically driven activity. And our merchant base still is so small relative to the overall economy.
Paul Obrecht, Fintech Team Member, Wolfe: That you’re still gaining shares either way. Yes. Got it. Got it. John, if we can spend a few minutes discussing capital allocation, I think that’d be helpful.
I know the goal has the the company has the goal to reach 3.5 times by the end of twenty twenty six, I think 4.4, I want to say, for this year. Can you just discuss balancing that with perhaps share buybacks this year
John Crawford, CFO, Paysafe: and
Paul Obrecht, Fintech Team Member, Wolfe: any plans for M and A in the future?
John Crawford, CFO, Paysafe: Thank you. I think I’ll address the M and A piece first and say no plans. If something were perfect, Bruce sometimes uses the term unicorn deal coming through. But our focus really is to your point on delevering, getting to 3.5% in twenty twenty six percent, getting under 4.4% this year. And not necessarily because we think there’s any magic to those leverage levels, but because we just think very simply about converting enterprise value to equity value and giving ourselves more optionality down the road in terms of then pivoting to being able to use some capital for M and A or accelerated investments in marketing, sales, other areas.
With respect to the buybacks, we don’t think of them as a traditional return of capital in the sense that we’re looking to deploy X dollars every year to get to our shareholders. But we are thinking about them opportunistically when the stock is well below what we think of intrinsic value. And so at those points, we will lean in, even at times probably to the detriment of our near term acceleration of debt pay down because our debt is trading at yields that are very attractive and close to par in most instances and our equity at times looks relatively cheap to us.
Paul Obrecht, Fintech Team Member, Wolfe: Right. I think that makes sense. So we’re coming up on time. Before we take a question or two from the audience, can can we just talk about your key goals for 2025? And if we look ahead to the end of the year or maybe next FinTech Forum when we’re recapping 2025, what would you say would be the key signs of success that you accomplished what you wanted to this year?
Bruce Slothers, CEO, Paysafe: You want me to go first? Sure. So look, I think for us, we’ve put out targets for ourselves. We’d like to see us add that third year of upper single digit growth and continue the momentum that we’re building. So that’s really important for us.
We really feel strongly about really displaying the leverage of the business and seeing double digit EBITDA growth. So that’s important. Obviously, the financial metric around the net leverage ratio, we’ve already kind of cut it to halfway, right? So from where we were, we’re about halfway to our target. By the end of this year, we’ll be have a very clear path to 3.5% or a little bit better as we go into ’twenty six percent.
So those key milestones will be really important. I think for probably sub milestones to see really how the wind is blowing, it will be really around did we get some products launched, a couple of products launched, seeing some value come out of those products and seeing really that organization of 170 people kind of stabilizing and maturing and delivering at a level that we anticipate. So I think those will be kind of the subcomponents that we look at and say, okay, if we’re hitting these financial milestones and our sales team is coming along and we’ve launched a couple of products, we call it MPI, but we have goals on the product contribution. Again, the longer term view on the product is we really want that to be a double digit contributor to our revenue profile as we’re going forward. So products that we’ve released in the prior three years, we want that to be in the double digits in that 10% to 12% range contribution on an annual basis.
So we’re building to that. We had about 6% in 2024. We’d like to continue to build those metrics and have ourselves in a good position for 2026.
Paul Obrecht, Fintech Team Member, Wolfe: Great. Well, John, do you have anything
John Crawford, CFO, Paysafe: Very simply, since we’re at time, I’d say, proving our the operating leverage in our business model
Bruce Slothers, CEO, Paysafe: this year. Right.
Paul Obrecht, Fintech Team Member, Wolfe: Perfect. Well, that’s all the time we have today. I want to thank you both for joining us today. This has been really, really helpful and great color on all the questions. So thank you for that.
And next up, we have the real time payments panel in the other room after a short break. Thank you.
Bruce Slothers, CEO, Paysafe: Thank you, Paul.
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