Repay at Canaccord Conference: Strategic Growth Insights

On Wednesday, 13 August 2025, Repay Holdings Corp (NASDAQ:RPAY) presented at Canaccord Genuity’s 45th Annual Growth Conference. CEO John Morris outlined the company’s strategic goals, focusing on reaccelerating growth and capitalizing on the rising demand for electronic B2B payments. While the tone was optimistic, challenges such as client losses due to M&A and the need for strategic investments were acknowledged.

Key Takeaways

• Repay is focusing on growth through integrated payment technology and strategic investments.
• The company aims to achieve high single-digit to low double-digit growth rates.
• A strong cash position supports plans for stock buybacks and potential M&A opportunities.
• Emphasis on B2B payments, especially in accounts payable, is a key growth area.
• Strategic partnerships with card networks aim to expand into emerging markets.

Financial Results

Repay reported a sequential increase in revenue, contributing to its growth acceleration efforts. Key financial highlights include:

• Normalized Gross Profit: Adjusted for political media revenue impacts.
• Free Cash Flow: 71% in Q2, with a target to return to over 60% by year-end.
• Adjusted EBITDA Margin: Recorded at 42% for Q2.
• Cash Balance: Over $160 million at quarter-end.
• Stock Buybacks: $38 million repurchased year-to-date, representing 7-8% of the company.
• Convert: Plans to manage the $220 million convert due in February 2026 with cash and a revolver.

Operational Updates

Repay is sharpening its operational focus through strategic initiatives:

• B2B Payments: Accounts payable identified as a significant growth opportunity.
• Vendor Network: Expanded to 440,000 vendors, with ongoing monthly additions.
• Total Pay Solution: Enhances payable processes with automation and fraud protection.
• Sales and Product Development: Investments in sales support and product solutions to accelerate growth.
• Enterprise Sales: Successful new client acquisitions, including Mercedes in the automotive sector.

Future Outlook

The company is poised for future growth with several strategic initiatives:

• Growth Trajectory: Aiming for high single-digit to low double-digit growth, with a positive outlook for 2026.
• Emerging Markets: Targeting mortgage payments and collaborating with Visa and MasterCard.
• Capital Allocation: Focus on organic growth, convert management, and potential M&A opportunities.

Q&A Highlights

During the Q&A, key insights were shared:

• Strategic Review: Increased market confidence and areas for additional investment identified.
• Competitive Advantage: Ownership of clearing and settlement engine offers cost benefits.
• Client Losses: Impact from Q1 client losses due to M&A expected to dissipate, aiding future growth.
• Emerging Areas: Mortgage payments seen as a key growth target with strategic card network partnerships.
• Capital Allocation: Emphasis on organic growth, convert management, and strategic stock buybacks.

In conclusion, Repay Holdings Corp’s presentation at the Canaccord Genuity Conference highlighted a strategic approach to growth, with a focus on technological integration and market expansion. Readers interested in further details are encouraged to refer to the full transcript.

Full transcript - Canaccord Genuity’s 45th Annual Growth Conference:

Joe Vaffy, Equity Research Analyst, Canaccord: All right, everyone. We’re going to continue here at the Canaccord Growth Conference. I’m Joe Vaffy, Equity Research Analyst here focused on FinTech. And we are pleased to have with us the management team from Repay and in particular John Morris, CEO of the company. Repay provides integrated payment processing solutions across a lot of what we would call some of the faster currents in electronic payments both in consumer and B2B payments.

Company just reported its Q2 results showing some solid progress in reaccelerating the business. And so, we’ll talk a little bit about our Q2 results. And so, with

John Morris, CEO, Repay: that, welcome, John. Thank you, Joe.

Joe Vaffy, Equity Research Analyst, Canaccord: Great to be here. Yes. So, maybe we’ll just start at a high level. Maybe just for those that may not know your story, just introduce Repay to us in your own words real quickly.

John Morris, CEO, Repay: Sounds good. And great intro there on that So a little bit as good morning everyone. Thank you for your time this morning. So Repay, we’re an integrated payment technology company. We integrate into the various different software platforms that manage the workflows of our specific clients.

And we have about two eighty six of those different software integrations. We embed our technology in there that help them move the money to pay or get paid. Specifically about 80% of our company surrounds consumer bill pay where we are allowing that particular vertical software provider to and client to integrate that and get paid on a particular consumer invoice. Those invoices particularly could be around an automotive loan, they could be around a credit card receivable, they could be around a mortgage payment, they could be around a personal loan, even a buy now pay later concept. So a revenue stream that’s tied to that.

And then on the business payment side, it’s about 20% of our business. We are integrated in the various different accounting ERP systems that actually drive that what we call bill pay for businesses. So we have two sides of that business where it’s accounts payable, is a very large go get market there. We’re helping our clients execute on paying their payables. And we have a total pay solution there.

So it allows we allow them to pay and get paid. We pay all their invoices either with a virtual card or with an ACH or even with a check. We allow them to execute on their payables and we help them execute on that. We help them move the money. We own our own technology stack.

We own our own gateways. We own our own clearing and settlement engines. We clear and settle with the various different networks. We have an omni channel approach for on the consumer payment side as well. And then on the business payment side, we actually have an omni modality piece of that.

We integrate and embed into these various platforms. That’s kind of really our value add and our moat. We fully embed into that solution. So it’s easy, takes the friction out of the payment process of that, we help them reconcile it back into their core systems.

Joe Vaffy, Equity Research Analyst, Canaccord: That’s great. You know, there’s been a lot that’s gone on in payments over the last few years. People are adopting the technology, it does feel like still some of that B2B payments volume is still not electronic, right? And so it’s fair to say that, I mean, B2B is still a smaller part of your business, but it’s a faster growing part of your business?

John Morris, CEO, Repay: It is, yes. So two sides of that, there’s the AR side and then there’s the AP side and we mentioned just recently on our call where we’re investing and putting even more attention to the AP side of that. We said we think that there’s just a giant go get part of that. And we’re vertically focused there as you know, automotive, healthcare, hospitality, property management, even non profits, education, municipalities there. We like that vertical focus there because it allows us to really build our vendor network.

We have about 440,000 vendors now in our network. And as we add a net new, obviously our ability to gain synergies off that is great. But the go get there, we still, obviously we don’t report total payment volume, TPV, but what we still, what we’re seeing is really growth in our TPV, which you’ve heard us talk about our ability to monetize that. So we really think we’re great at helping our clients execute on that. The total pay value proposition in itself has value, right?

Because we’re going to help automate, we’re going to help execute on something that has to be paid. And then the fraud part of that has that what we’ve seen is our and we mentioned this on our call, the fraud part of that, the ability with the cyber world really increasing fraud piece of this piece, our ability to actually offer the fraud protection around making sure payables are properly executed, making sure it’s secure. So we see great value proposition in that piece as well. But the go get is we think it’s really there. It’s if you think about, we call it the second frontier payables.

Yep. The first frontier we call, if you think about that as, we thought, we call, I would call that payroll.

Joe Vaffy, Equity Research Analyst, Canaccord: Okay, sure.

John Morris, CEO, Repay: And if you think about payroll today, it’s almost always, it’s all outsourced and automated in a lot of ways today. This is the kind of the second frontier and we still see tons of checks. Our net new clients are still, we’re really bringing people into this piece of it and then business back office is going to automate. It has to.

Joe Vaffy, Equity Research Analyst, Canaccord: Sure, absolutely. And it might be just interesting for people in the audience to know,

John Morris, CEO, Repay: part business payables is that vendor network, right? And how does a company like Repay get 440,000 vendors on your platform? As you can see, we were in the this time last year probably three thirty or so. So that’s the growth. On a net new basis, kind of our kind of our secret sauce is what we do on vendor enablement.

We don’t just go and say, hey, we only want a process for your clients that will take virtual card. We say give us your whole give us all of your payables. We don’t and we will help you execute on all of that and fundamentally we’ll let we will pay every one of those and we you can track and trace every payable invoice through its payment lifecycle. Treasury management today and most companies cannot do that. Yep.

It’s just a pay and if you think about a check, a check is paid until it doesn’t get cleared. Or it doesn’t so that’s we give them full visibility and on that piece of it, that in itself is a great value proposition to that. But as we push on that vendor network, we’re adding net new every month. There is a great synergy to that. And there’s a network effect.

There’s a network Some of those vendors could then turn around and higher repay for their own payables. Yes. Then that cycle continues. Every payable client is a potential client.

Joe Vaffy, Equity Research Analyst, Canaccord: Right, exactly. And slightly switching gears, you went through a strategic review, was it early this year or late last year?

John Morris, CEO, Repay: Yes, early this year.

Joe Vaffy, Equity Research Analyst, Canaccord: Early this year. Came out of strategic review with I think a sharpened pencil on your go to market strategy. I think that Repay has got a great platform that could be bigger, I mean, you’ve got your own processing back end, got a B2B business that’s growing, you have a big consumer business, some of which is with large enterprises. So I think your TAM is pretty big but maybe share with people what kind of, what the and I think you hired a strategic consulting firm to help you.

John Morris, CEO, Repay: That’s correct.

Joe Vaffy, Equity Research Analyst, Canaccord: Look from the outside in a little bit and so, you know, what were some of the things that came out of that?

John Morris, CEO, Repay: Yeah. So, so great great point. So we used a very reputable third party firm. I’ve been doing this, I’ve been in payments since ’97. So I always think it’s important to check yourself and see, I see the opportunity there and it’s really great but I wanted to validate some of that a fantastic firm that we has those specific individuals had some fantastic insight and knowledge because of some other relationships and And things have we came out of that knowing that the opportunity actually is there.

And we pinpointed those additional incremental investments that we should be making that we could really do. Kind of our story right now is sequential reacceleration. We want to return back to growth. In the history of Repay, we’ve never had a negative growth reported growth quarter in the history of Repay, unfortunate for that. But so we’re making those, we’re pinpointing on those, some of those specifically is around our go to market, is around optimizing our sales force, adding additional resources on the sales support side, adding some additional resources what we call SDRs.

Engagement activities on our client side, so we can do up sells. Just overall investing in our some of our product and pipeline solutions specifically as well, we’re investing in how do we drive more out faster through our implementation pipeline.

Joe Vaffy, Equity Research Analyst, Canaccord: Got it. And so I always wanted to ask and I’ve actually never asked how since you have your own processor, you’ve got maybe a cost advantage versus others in the market. If you could maybe kind of drill down on that idea a little bit comments?

John Morris, CEO, Repay: Yes. So most people may not realize that we own our own clearing and settlement engine. Very few people actually do. Most of the most there’s a handful of the bigger processors that do, most everybody else uses one of them. And so we actually have that strength of ours.

So where I stay with that Joe is, if we want to win, we can win. Okay. Now we like to be profitable winning. Sure. But so that gives us the ability to do that.

And some of our direct competitors, they don’t always have that full suite of solutions where we truly clear and settle with all the networks. So we understand the cost side, we understand interchange, we understand all the banking costs that go into how you move money out there. We also think that drives a high quality solution from a customer service perspective. You don’t get lost in the never never land, we understand that land. Right.

So competitive advantage for us, I think what we and we’ve touched on this before is with all the consolidation happening, we’re actually seeing opportunities arise because as consolidation happens, disruption happens to people who are processing with other people.

Joe Vaffy, Equity Research Analyst, Canaccord: Sure, absolutely. And would you say

John Morris, CEO, Repay: that there’s more of an advantage on the consumer or the B2B side given your kind of full stack? The full stack piece of that, we actually have I say advantages on both. On the consumer side, they’re a little bit different. We definitely on the disruption side, the consumer side is definitely there. On the B2B side because of our full stack piece, our ability to embed with the enterprise software partners is substantial.

We’re adding those enterprise plays specifically on the payable side. And even on the enterprise software side, we can do the payables and receivables fully an integrated play. We see our ability to really execute on that kind of a multi year process. Those software partners, those enterprise software partners, they can see the volume of payables there. Yes.

And those are big numbers.

Joe Vaffy, Equity Research Analyst, Canaccord: Right.

John Morris, CEO, Repay: Now our ability to help them execute and monetize that is our goal.

Joe Vaffy, Equity Research Analyst, Canaccord: Sure. That’s great. Maybe we switch gears a little bit and kind of talk about some of the numbers you just recently reported your Q2? Q2. Right.

So maybe kind of some of the key takeaways from the quarter just in terms of revenue, profitability, free cash flow?

John Morris, CEO, Repay: Yes. So on we our revenue was up. Again, we were sequentially our thought pattern here is obviously sequential quarterly growth reaccelerating back to our high single digit, low double digit growth. We were able to do that in the second quarter. We sequentially grew from the previous quarter and gross profit is our metric for overall growth.

And then specifically and we call it normalized gross profit because we have a political media piece that comes every other year. Yes, last year was obviously a big political media year in a really good way for us. And so that was true. We returned, so our free cash flow was 71%, a little bit of working capital in that, so that’s a little bit higher than normal. And then ultimately our goal is to return back to 60% plus as we exit the year as well.

So we’re executing on that sequential growth piece that we talked about. Cash flow, we’ve been profitable. Obviously, we’ve been profitable for a long time way before we were public. Our margins in Q2 were 42%.

Joe Vaffy, Equity Research Analyst, Canaccord: On a EBITDA basis, adjusted EBITDA, Yes.

John Morris, CEO, Repay: EBITDA basis, 42%. Cash flow generation is there. We ended the quarter about 160,000,000 plus in cash on the balance sheet. We bought back thirty year to date, we bought back $38,000,000 in stock. Okay.

So 7% to 8% of the company in the last since the last quarter, since May.

Joe Vaffy, Equity Research Analyst, Canaccord: Right. That’s great. Yes, kind of rule of 40 with, you know, just on the margin side alone almost. So what about, I know there’s a convert that is coming I due 2020 mean, you’ve got a lot of cash, good cash flow, refinance that or pay it down or what’s the idea?

John Morris, CEO, Repay: Yes, great question. We talked about this list on our investor call Specifically, have $220,000,000 in convert coming due in February ’26. That’s at 0%. So we kind of like the rate on that considering we’re also making money on our cash today. So we would look to ride that out unless we can opportunistically buy some of that.

That would cost benefit there. Specifically, we have cash, we’d like to retire some portion of that with as much cash as we wanted to use that on our balance sheet at that time. And then the remainder we have a $220,000,000 revolver, so we could just pay it off at our revolver today if we wanted to. But we would look to retire a good slug of that with cash and then the remainder with our revolver. Got it.

And once we get that’s next year, right? It’s February next year.

Joe Vaffy, Equity Research Analyst, Canaccord: Right. So it’s after we get to that point, do you think capital allocation changes? I know you’ve historically done M and A and I know in some of our recent discussions pricing in the private market wasn’t like super rational at least for your taste. So how is that you did a lot of inorganic growth and built a big business. And so you kind of know how to do that.

Would you think about capital allocation back to M and A a little bit more?

John Morris, CEO, Repay: Yes. We have the ability and the horsepower platform, we own our own most parts of that and we’ve proven our ability to get synergies out of that. I think the biggest reason for us, if you want to look at we don’t buy things for the sake of buying and as my shareholder, our discipline of capital allocation there. We’ve seen a lot of things. We look at a lot of things.

We get invited to see a lot of things. I do believe there’s some really great assets out there. We desire we think it could be multiple times bigger than we are. Yes. And inorganically is going to be part of that formula.

But you can see we’ve been disciplined with that. I do think there’s some unique assets strategically that are going to come to market that could be very interesting for us that would be in our swim lanes, allow us to drive scale. So we will be paying attention to that piece of it. But net net capital allocation as I just told investors is we’re obviously organic growth is the top of the list. We think incrementally we’re making those investments.

They’re not large numbers in general and we’re going to continue to execute well on those adding enterprise sales, driving that additional piece. The second one is the convert, it’s right in front We of will absolutely address that. The third one would be obviously we’re managing our CapEx as part of And cash then the third one would be opportunistically if the market continues to decouple us from our intrinsic value, we think we’re Yes, think buying some of that we’re important from that perspective. But we do think there’s some tuck in M and A opportunities out there

Joe Vaffy, Equity Research Analyst, Canaccord: that will And be very attractive to would that be give us a hint, would that be B2B or consumer?

John Morris, CEO, Repay: Could be either side, but we do see some opportunities coming in the B2B world. Yes. It’s not specifically to us, just potentially coming in the market.

Joe Vaffy, Equity Research Analyst, Canaccord: All right. Fair enough. So it sounds like you may have your eye on a few particular assets that might be a nice fit for you. Good. That’s great.

I know you announced a new CFO recently. Yes. So maybe we kind of talk about Mr. Rob Hauser a

John Morris, CEO, Repay: little Yes. So Rob will be joining us on September 8. Rob Hauser, you can see his press release. He’s got tremendous amount of history in the payment space overall and I’m really excited to have him on board as partner for us and what we can partner together. We think that his knowledge in the overall bill payment space, we think there’s a fantastic opportunity for us to join hands together.

He’s excited to join us as well and we’re looking forward to introducing That’s to great. I want

Joe Vaffy, Equity Research Analyst, Canaccord: to circle back around to the Q2 results, I think you talked about some sequential acceleration in the business. Maybe we drill down on that sequential acceleration and kind of define where it came from, new logos, higher volumes with existing seasonality, what those things might have been?

John Morris, CEO, Repay: So it’s kind of step back a little, we were coming out of the first quarter, we had negative growth, specifically for those of you who may not know this, we had a couple of large client losses and that’s a large part of that. Specifically in the first quarter it was about eight points of growth that cost us. So we got to lap that. So some portion of this is obviously the lapping of those things just to be upfront That about that was about five points in the second quarter. And in the political media piece of that, if you normalize these particular things, normal political media is about one point.

Yes. So that gets us back to positive sequential growth. We want to continue to add to that in the third quarter, which we think we will. And then fourth quarter, we will have lapped most of those client losses. Right.

And on a normalized basis, that’s where we think we’ll get back to the high single digit, low double digit. Right. And I think

Joe Vaffy, Equity Research Analyst, Canaccord: for everyone’s benefit, wasn’t there some M and A or something or was there some of the client losses was that?

John Morris, CEO, Repay: Yeah, we had two large clients for us, been with us a long time, two were purchased. Many times we benefit from that, but in this particular case, we had a client that was purchased that actually did their own processing. Right. So really can’t do processing for free. So Sure.

We would have done the same thing if we were on the opposite side. And then we had a client that got purchased and had ten, fifteen year relationship with the larger relationship piece. So difficult for us to win that. We do win many times though. Many of our because we’re vertically focused, generally have some of the larger clients and we’re generally a winner in that.

Joe Vaffy, Equity Research Analyst, Canaccord: Right, That’s right. Maybe talk about a couple of the emerging areas I know, I mean auto is having its ups and downs, but you have signed some big logos in auto and I think you disclosed Mercedes? Mercedes, yes. Does that pipeline look And then maybe we’ll touch on some other markets.

John Morris, CEO, Repay: Yes. So we have so from a year to date perspective, we’ve had very positive bookings. That’s just a that’s the health of your pipeline coming into that. Our pipelines is healthy as we’ve seen them, which is very positive and bookings as good as we’ve seen. Okay.

So those are obviously very positive indicator for if I’m talking about accelerating growth. And so ultimately those will have to float bookings will have to flow through implementations which is why we’re investing in implementations to drive that through. And then so on a logo perspective, we’re seeing it in both sides of the business. The payable side is of the B2B side of our world. We’ve had some really nice hospital wins.

Again the back office is automating. Right. So things that you probably don’t think about the back office of automotive dealerships automating. So that’s a really positive part for us. On the consumer side, Lars, we’ve invested, started investing more last year in enterprise sales.

Those wins are starting to come through. We’re investing even more in enterprise sales. So some of the investments we’re making right now are 26 outcomes and so all the indicators look positive for where we’re heading into ’26. We do think we’re setting ourselves up for a positive growth story for ’26. Right.

Yes, I

Joe Vaffy, Equity Research Analyst, Canaccord: mean it sounds like it, I mean you’re going to lap some clients lost, it wasn’t your fault and political media spend comes and goes every two years, rest of the business is doing pretty well and so and you’re also investing in growth. We’re investing in growth.

John Morris, CEO, Repay: Right. We have a strong balance sheet. Yes. We have cash. We’ve been profitable.

So we think we’re in a really good spot. Obviously, desire to grow faster and we think we’re making the right investments to do that.

Joe Vaffy, Equity Research Analyst, Canaccord: Right. I always ask you this question, John, but one of the areas of broader electronic payments that’s not super electronic today or isn’t card friendly is mortgage payments, right? I mean, it makes sense, right, because the lenders don’t want to pay 2% on a mortgage that’s 3.5%, right, and they can’t make money. But I believe some of the large card networks are waking up and smelling the coffee and thinking about different interchange rates to open that market up, right? And I know you’ve been involved in that.

And so maybe at a high level, it would be interesting to see where progress is being made there and how you might participate over the medium term. Yeah. Right?

John Morris, CEO, Repay: I think that’s a great question and so we’ve talked about this before. So on our consumer bill pay side, that’s predominantly all debit or ACH types of payments. There’s really no credit. Yeah. Occasionally you have some credit and some couple of things but it’s predominantly a debit transaction when it’s in itself is the cheapest card payment.

And then we are in what we consider to be emerging markets when you look, you talk to the card brands. If you go look at Visa, MasterCard’s, some of their Investor Relations information, you’ll see what they call new payment flows. So if you ask them where is organic coming growth going to come from them in The U. S, it’s where we, if you look at our business, it’s where a lot of those things are coming from. It’s going to come from the consumer debt repayment type transactions like mortgage, where they realize they’re not touching that world.

They don’t really, it’s a very broad large volume world that very little is done from that perspective. We’re partnering with them to do a lot of different things in those various, these emerging markets both on the consumer and the business payment side. We’re going to use that to drive to the extent possible. We have to make it cost effective to be able to get people to use those different modalities and they’re partnering with us to help drive that acceptance. So we’re excited about some things we’re going to be able to do there.

It’s a slow moving market, but we the one thing we know is the consumer actually wants to be able to pay the way they want to pay. It’s got to be cost effective. We think we can address that. That’s a big it’s a lot

Joe Vaffy, Equity Research Analyst, Canaccord: of payment volume that’s still greenfield like a little bit. Yes. So if

John Morris, CEO, Repay: you think about it and people talk about maybe RTP or FedNow and as a real time transaction or many of you may use Zelle or some type of you know, Venmo or something that may be more real time for you. A debit card is instant real time 20 fourseven. And it’s been around a long time. It’s very effective. Probably the only things the business side of it doesn’t like is maybe the cost.

So so the consumer side loves it. Most of them have that number memorized. Most of the time it’s all the other wallets are driven off of that. So we think there’s an opportunity for us to address this large go get on the consumer side of that specifically.

Joe Vaffy, Equity Research Analyst, Canaccord: Very good. I think we’re out of time John, but thanks for being with us and look for repay, some nice acceleration coming hopefully at an attractive valuation.

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