Shift4 at KBW Fintech Conference: Strategic Growth and Share Repurchase

On Wednesday, 12 November 2025, Shift4 Payments Inc (NYSE:FOUR) presented at the KBW Fintech Payments Conference 2025, outlining its strategic direction and financial performance. While the company highlighted positive aspects such as faster-than-expected integration of Global Blue and a significant share repurchase program, it also acknowledged challenges in certain sectors like restaurant and lodging.

Key Takeaways

• Shift4 aims for an adjusted free cash flow exit rate of $1 billion by 2027.
• A new $1 billion share repurchase program has been authorized, doubling the previous one.
• Global Blue integration is ahead of schedule, with revenue growth expected in 2026.
• The company is focusing on geographic expansion and product diversification, particularly in Europe.
• Shift4 is addressing sector challenges by reallocating capital to less affected markets.

Financial Results

• Medium-Term Guidance:

- Targeting an adjusted free cash flow exit rate of $1 billion by 2027.

• Share Repurchase Program:

- Authorized a $1 billion share repurchase program, double the previous $500 million.

• Global Blue Revenue Growth:

- Luxury retail tax-free shopping business grew by 19%.

• Free Cash Flow:

- Projected adjusted free cash flow of nearly $500 million for the year.

- Q3 adjusted free cash flow exceeded $140 million.

• Free Cash Flow Conversion:

- Aims for a 50%+ conversion rate.

• Leverage:

- Last twelve months pro forma net leverage stands at 3.2 times.

• Bambora:

- Sold gateway business with $90 billion of volume for $80 million.

Operational Updates

• Global Blue Integration:

- Integration is progressing faster than anticipated, with revenue generation expected in 2026.

• Market Expansion:

- Expanding operations to six continents, focusing on Europe.

• Product Diversification:

- Expanded offerings to include luxury retail vertical.

• SkyTab Growth:

- Installed 1,300 SkyTab products internationally in the quarter.

• Global Blue Sales:

- Asia-Pacific sales decreased by 11%, while European sales increased by 13%, resulting in a global sales growth of 5%.

Future Outlook

• Diversification and Scaling:

- Continued emphasis on business diversification and scaling.

• Cross-Selling Opportunities:

- Leveraging Global Blue acquisition for cross-selling.

• SkyTab Expansion:

- Opportunities to expand SkyTab product internationally.

• Guidance Philosophy:

- Potential revision of guidance philosophy in 2026.

• Organic Growth:

- Aiming for organic growth in the high teens, with potential for mid to high 20s through capital deployment.

• Global Blue Outlook:

- Medium-term growth outlook in the low to mid-double digits.

• Global Blue three-in-one payment experience:

- Integrating payments, dynamic currency conversion, and tax-free shopping into a single device for SMBs.

Q&A Highlights

• Restaurant/Lodging Choppiness:

- Same-store sales in these sectors range between +1% and -4%.

- Shift4 is reallocating capital to less affected markets.

• Organic Growth Decomposition:

- Growth fueled by new market entry and international expansion.

• Capital Allocation:

- Share repurchase is currently the most attractive capital allocation option.

• Free Cash Flow Drivers:

- Driven by absolute growth and deleveraging.

• Global Blue Performance:

- Temporary downturn in Asia-Pacific due to high comps in Japan.

• Global Blue Cross-Sell Opportunity:

- Targeting a $500 billion cross-sell market, with $100 billion in SMBs, displacing unintegrated bank processors.

• Macro Sensitivity:

- Global Blue is sensitive to upper-income consumer spending and FX rates.

In conclusion, for a more detailed understanding, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - KBW Fintech Payments Conference 2025:

Operator: Now we got to put it up. We’re honored that his first fireside chat as CFO, Shift4’s new CFO, Chris Cruz, is joining us. Before taking the CFO role, Chris served for nearly a decade on Shift4’s board, following his role at Searchlight Capital Partners’ majority investment in Shift4. He also brings a deep experience across financial services and fintech. So thank you for joining us.

Unidentified speaker: Yeah, thank you. Thank you for that introduction.

I must say you hit the ground running on your first inaugural earnings call. I think you did a good job of providing a foundation on how you see the path forward and how you plan to evolve the messaging process. Perhaps for the benefit of the audience, you can give a highlight of the quarter and then what your primary focus areas are for the upcoming year.

Sure. First off, thank you for having me. Like you said, it’s always nice to get this, the first of my fireside chats, under the belt. Thank you. I’d say that the highlights for the quarter from our perspective was that we were able to deliver in line, kind of the idea that we’ll continue to do what we say and have always said that we will do. It was a quarter where we actually pulled forward our update about our medium-term guidance and helped highlight for people that we are in line with the medium-term guidance and that our medium-term guidance outlook remains intact, of which there are many metrics within that medium-term guidance. One that’s very near and dear to my heart is the potential ability to get to being ahead around the adjusted free cash flow exit rate of $1 billion by 2027.

That at the end, I’m a cash is king kind of guy, and I’m intrinsics in that way. But I think that the idea that we were able to affirm around those things and that we continue to do what we say and have said we will do, that’s highlight number one. We gave an outlook that I think also was in a narrow range, a guidance that’s in line with what we said we would do from a full-year guide perspective. And that number two is, I think, something that we’re proud of. I think the third thing that we’re really proud of is that the integration around Global Blue and acquisition that I’m sure we’ll talk about, and that is a really exciting one for us, is ahead of schedule around a number of the integration fronts.

That 2026 for us with Global Blue should be a really exciting one where we finally start to realize some of the value creation on the revenue side of that business. Those are three things that come to mind for me as far as important takeaways. I would be remiss if I did not say that we also in this quarter announced that our board had authorized a $1 billion share repurchase program, which is about double the size of our prior share repurchase program. $1 billion relative to what was $500 million expiring at the end of this year. As capital allocation-minded people, we are eager to kind of execute against that authorization because right now we are seeing our shares sort of trade lower on a multiple basis than the lowest we have ever procured them in the past.

It’s a good balance to the overall equation of what we see organically, of what we see inorganically, and then also just how we think about capital allocation in the overall picture of our framework. Those were a few of the highlights.

Wonderful. As we think about the primary focus areas for this upcoming year, what are they?

Yeah, the primary focus area for us is continue this exercise of diversifying and scaling. I think one of the things that we’re really proud of is that without subjecting anyone to a J curve or an investment curve that might manifest itself through EBITDA margin degradation, we have been able to expand to now covering six continents. We’re in many geographic new markets, namely in Europe. The underlying product set that we have, we were already leaders in restaurant, lodging, stadiums, entertainment, but to add this luxury retail vertical to it and now have four market-leading products, that kind of diversification to us is something we’re really proud of. It’s going to remain a focus is really being able to continue fortifying around that diversification. That’s one.

Two, I alluded to it, but the opportunity to cross-sell and really start to harvest the value creation from the Global Blue acquisition, that’s a really critical and huge value driver this coming year. I would say number three within that is we look at our market-leading position within restaurants, and there is a lot of opportunity with our SkyTab product set. Not only domestically, but we’re seeing a huge growth internationally where the demand for integrated payments, especially for that SMB, remains unsatiated. The opportunity set there is really exciting.

Those are a couple of the kind of focus areas, but I don’t think we’re going to stay away from our core knitting as well of continuing to find really attractive opportunities to deploy capital on either capabilities enhancements or what we call funnel toppers as a nomenclature that had been used in the past, but ways with which we can be really efficient at growing the customer acquisition opportunity in our way.

Okay. Just taking your products into new markets, could you just talk about sort of what that entails and the message you want investors to walk away regarding this theme?

Yeah. I would say that what we view as an efficient and also disciplined approach to new market entry, and let’s use Europe as an example where we have new markets that are opening for us, take a market like Germany. What we have there is a place where off of our payment processing capabilities across Europe as a licensed direct member of the card networks and the card schemes, we have the ability to process payments baseline. From there, we then added the layer of using our market-leading position in restaurants to enter that market with product number one. What do not we have in a market like Germany? We do not yet have the market position on lodging that we benefit from in the U.S. market.

We certainly do not yet have Bayern Munich as a football club, soccer, American soccer club, and that stadium where our stadiums and entertainment software and solutions, which you would find in almost three quarters of the stadiums in America, that is not there. Happily, our luxury shopping, luxury retail experience from Global Blue, it is there, but it is not yet in the format of cross-sold with DCC solutions and integrated with our payment product. What I would take away is when you look at any of the markets we are expanding into, how many of our market-leading products are present? When those market-leading products become present, can they get to the levels that we experience from a market share standpoint in one of the most competitive markets in the world in the United States?

If you can answer that question and believe in that as an underlying pillar of growth, you’ll be able to understand why we’re so excited about this. It’s not just about one trick pony of restaurants or lodging. We’re looking at expanding. We’ve been able to expand to create market-leading positions in verticals, and we don’t intend to stop. We’re really judicious about tearing down an industry structure within a vertical, trying to find the most important component that might influence the payment processing cross-sell within that industry, and then going after the assets, either organically or inorganically, that are going to make that vertical make sense for us. Notably, we didn’t buy a retail POS company. That was not what our industry research told us was the tear-down way to approach retail.

To have a business that represents an 80 share of tax-free shopping to the most incredible global luxury retail brands in the world, and then from that position of strength serve tens of thousands of other SMBs to facilitate a luxury retail tax-free shopping experience, that’s unique. That’s interesting. That is embedded deeply within the POS integrated flow and within the payments integrated flow. For us, when we did our industry tear-down work as it related to specialty retail, we tore it down from specialty to luxury to find that very specific area that was going to be unique, non-commoditized. That is what I mean. That is what I would like people to take away from is think about these market entries and think about our market-leading products in these markets and put that equation together as our organic right to win from a growth standpoint.

Do you think that there’s been going to be more of such deals? Do you have to spend money to sort of now grow that business organically? How should we think about the path forward in terms of that?

I would say right now the funnel is obviously a north of trillion dollar funnel for us in terms of payment conversion opportunity. It’s the largest it’s ever been. Global Blue alone is a $500 billion opportunity, sorry, $500 billion opportunity, of which 20% of it is SMB. And that $100 billion relative to where we sit today from a volume opportunity is massive in and of itself. I would say right now execution is really at the forefront of mind. Embedded within that question is, do you still see an interesting set of opportunities inorganically to deploy capital? I would look no further than the announcement we made in the quarter.

The ability to carve out a business of a gateway that has $90 billion of volume that we refer to as Bambora, that is right down the fairway of what we do and only deploying $80 million of capital against other capital allocation announcements we’ve made, such as our $1 billion share repurchase authorization. I hope that you take away from it that we’re approaching this with our playbook, but we’re also not losing sight of what is the most efficient way to deploy the capital. Yes, I think there will always be these opportunistic places to make inorganic investments and continue to expand our funnel, but we have plenty to get through with our north of trillion dollar opportunity.

Perfect. I want to touch on something you talked about during earnings. Obviously, as you spoke to, you guys have a pretty diverse platform now across many different industry verticals, but a big one is restaurant hospitality. You did talk about choppiness in that market. Could you just talk a little bit more about what’s driving that? It seems like it’s gone up and down even over the course of the last month or so. Maybe you could just unpack that a little bit and maybe pinpoint sort of what you think is driving that.

Sure. We’ll start with the context. What we talked about in the quarter was as a company that has the benefit of very large data assets, we get to see how spending is moving through huge parts of the economy and with very interesting cohorts of consumers. We get to see the Best Western off the highway, and we get to see the affluent American that can travel to Europe and buy luxury goods. That concept of seeing the bifurcation is a very unique position to be in. When we married what we were seeing in our data, which was a slightly downward skewed set of same-store sales numbers, I think on the call we talked about it within restaurant and lodging as being a +1% same-store sales to a -4%.

That is relative to historically we tend to see things a little more stable at a plus minus 1-2% within these same-store sales end markets. When that started to show itself, we then married it with the appended third-party data that we were seeing from other sources and then triangulating it with the qualitative that we were hearing from everyone from Chipotle to JetBlue to the Fed. This narrative of there is a bifurcated consumer, it would seem like the consumer at the low and middle end is starting to pull back. We are seeing elements of that within our own data sets, and it created a cautious tone. At the same time, I do not think that should surprise anyone. In terms of the variables that we can control, we will act on those.

If we know that there’s a slightly defensive posture within our same-store sales in some of our end markets, it just means you’re allocating capital to the end markets that are less affected. It means that you’re going to emphasize customer acquisition discipline in the places that have more certainty. What does that translate into? It translates into us having a really high conviction around adjusted EBITDA and certainly around free cash flow conversion. That’s a little bit of what we’re seeing and what we’re responding to.

Okay. You affirmed your full-year guidance with the narrowed range and pointed to the volatility as the basis for the wider range on volumes versus the other guidance KPIs. Does the updated guidance entirely reflect this tempered expectation?

Yes. Our view is that I would have loved to have, I and we would have loved to have had a narrower range in terms of the low to high on the volume. I think as we looked at the data and we were looking at some of the volatility of that data, we just thought it was the right message to send that there’s a real intentionality to the shape of this and that there is more volatility.

Okay. Good to hear. I think that investors appreciate the disclosures around organic growth, especially the ones in the third quarter. You talked about that it was tracking to sort of the 18% organic growth. Could you maybe decompose the organic growth into the core building blocks such as market growth, share gains in core verticals, and then international exposure?

Sure. I’ll say directionally, we don’t really deconstruct the building blocks, but I think it’s fair to say that right now in terms of the same-store number that we have disclosed, we talk a bit about what are the trends we’re seeing and how that in markets like domestic lodging and domestic restaurant, that has been more muted. Where we’re seeing huge growth is this new market entry, the bearing the benefits of the new market entry and expansion into international markets. That’s where we’re seeing a massive amount of growth. I think there’s a few data points that all the way down to how many of our SkyTab products are we installing within international markets. Those numbers to us are real pride points. 1,300 in the quarter as it relates to our SkyTab counts in terms of new wins is something we talk about.

When you deconstruct these two parts of domestic volumes versus international volumes, I think it’s fair to say that we are seeing a really pronounced growth within the international markets. That said, we’re also seeing it when you deconstruct some of the underlying verticals. Our luxury retail tax-free shopping business on its own grew 19%. Those are examples where when you kind of look at the component parts, you’d be hard-pressed to find something in our business that is not growing at double-digit rates, even when you sort of break out the sum of the parts.

Got it. I want to move to guidance philosophy because it’s something you talked about. You mentioned that there’s no change to the guidance philosophy at this point, but you left the door open for there to be a change. Maybe you could talk about how this guidance philosophy could evolve as we move into 2026.

It’s a great question. It’s one that as somebody that’s been sitting on what I call a bit of a listening tour with investors, with analysts, I clearly appreciate at this point in time why it’s such an important topic. I want to say two things within that topic. One, totally reinforce what you said. There’s no intended change in the quarter that we just had, no intended change to anything philosophical. It was a very specific and intentional approach not to change that philosophy.

In 2026, especially now as I enter my twelfth week in the seat and we are deep and steep into developing what is a 2026 plan that has a lot of interesting value creation levers within it, I think the idea of trying to be more, we will say, of a guide philosophy that needs to be acknowledging that there could be a revisit to that guidance philosophy, I think that is important. I say that though, and I also acknowledge that having had a ten-year front-row seat to this business alongside a really incredible management team that has benefited from a philosophy that manages the business by setting bold expectations.

Even if it means that when you shoot for the moon, you land on a star, or maybe the better terminology now, you shoot for Mars and you land on the moon, if that philosophy has led to a massive amount of growth from a basement startup to where we are today, you do not want to dramatically change and hurt the culture that approaches things with bold, ambitious targets. There is this balancing act of a company and its culture and how it sets its targets and how it tries to hit those bold and ambitious targets, and then also acknowledging that there are market dynamics that might favor a different approach to guidance. In the listening that I am doing, acknowledging those two bookends, it would not shock me if we find ourselves somewhere in between.

That makes sense. I won’t push you on that more because I know you don’t want to give guidance.

There’s plenty of time to talk more about this between now and February.

No, I could, but I won’t. Okay. Maybe you could talk about capital priorities going forward post the Global Blue acquisition. Obviously, you guys announced a big share buyback program. There’s deleveraging, organic growth, inorganic growth. Maybe you just prioritize sort of how you guys are looking at it right now.

Sure. Our capital allocation framework, we’ve talked about it many times, four big component parts. Number one, invest in customer acquisition. Number two, invest in product and capabilities enhancements. Number three, inorganic growth. Number four, more of the share repurchase approach to capital allocation. Unambiguously, share repurchase right now, I think, is the most compelling on a relative value basis to things we see. Nothing’s ever absolute. You don’t ever approach this four-part capital allocation model and say, "Hey, if there’s a great opportunity to tuck in a gateway conversion at a really attractive value, you don’t say no to that." The market gives you that opportunity when it wants to give you that opportunity.

Expanding into international markets, which really is an investment in customer acquisition by another name, going into these new places in order to be able to bring market-leading solutions, you do not stop doing that because you think the valuation in your shares is interesting. I would say right now we are firing on all four cylinders where we did make an announcement in the third quarter about Bambora, where we continue to invest. If you looked at our CapEx software to revenue, it has only risen over time. We do not underinvest in technology. We do not underinvest in platform. We do not have catch-up CapEx dynamics. If you look at customer acquisition, we approach things with a mentality that our funnel is the widest it has ever been. We are in the most markets we have ever been, and we need to bring these market-leading solutions into those geographic regions.

We are going to do all four, but it is really hard for me not, it’s really hard for me right now to ignore where we sit within our repurchase opportunity.

Could we just talk about how quickly you could expend the $1 billion? What’s the timeline?

I think of it as investing as opposed to spending, just to kind of put that finer point on it.

And deploy.

Deploying. That might be another good term. I would say, look, we do not want to guide to a pace. We do not want to guide around exactly what we are doing within it. I think the easy way to describe it right now is since the valuation is below the lowest we have ever acquired the stock, and I hope all of the ways with which we have been conveying it would suggest that we want to be actively executing against this. When you think about a couple of the other things that I said on the call, we today are sitting at an LTM pro forma net leverage of 3.2 times. Generally, as a general matter, as a guidance matter, we do not want to have leverage be sustainably above 3 and three-quarters times.

If you thought about a half turn, if you thought about what that means, that alone, that’s $500,000,000. You sort of have a few things out there that could give some visibility into what is in our capacity. At the same time, too, we are going to be looking at the continued valuation and be opportunistic there. We are going to look at not necessarily wanting to always have a bit of a measured approach within this. Because historically, we’ve repurchased shares almost every quarter. It’s really important to us as having an owner’s mentality to be as absolutely dilution neutral as we can be. Dilution neutral to SPC, dilution neutral to other areas.

I mean, we are looking at EPS and free cash flow per share as important metrics for any one of us that is thinking within a long-term owner’s mentality.

Great. I want to touch on free cash flow. You’ve guided to 50%+ adjusted free cash flow conversion. What are the primary levers that drive this metric higher towards your long-term goal of $1 billion?

Sure. I would say absolute growth is going to be the number one biggest driver for us. We have a business that this year will do almost $500,000,000 of adjusted free cash flow. In the quarter we just announced, obviously sitting north of $140,000,000 and quite proud of our ability to continue free cash flow conversion, even at a high 40% rate at a time when our interest expense is really still coming, is at the highest level it has been, right? From the perspective that our capital structure today is the capital structure that accommodated the closure of the Global Blue transaction on July 3. When you think about where we sit from an interest expense standpoint, we are, and thinking about the seasonality of interest expense, Q3 of this year might be the highest interest expense you would expect to see.

When you think about how many points of free cash flow conversion that impacts, if you go year over year, we had like an eight-point swing in free cash flow conversion on simply interest expense alone. You look at our pace of deleveraging or you look at our growth outlook, and I imagine that by the time we get to exit rate 2027, one of the biggest step function changes within free cash flow conversion would simply be the mathematical reduction in interest. If we find ourselves with interesting opportunities to deploy that capital, let’s say inorganically, we’re certainly only going to do it with free cash flow accretion. We’re going to have an eye towards free cash flow accretion in mind. What does that mean? Again, hold us to the standard of what you’ve just seen.

Q3 was the closure of a large acquisition and taking on capital structure that now had a higher cash interest expense. On a year-over-year basis, we still grew adjusted free cash flow dollars. I think we are disciplined in how we think about cash flow accretion. I think whether you want to assume we are deleveraging and put that into the model, or whether you want to look at our historical track record of having deployed capital and still being able to be accretive to free cash flow generation, I think both of those things kind of fit within the model.

For simple math, if you model it out and just say, "I’m going to run the business out from here, I’m not going to assume deployments," what you will see in your model is that you’re going to see a large step function change in free cash flow conversion points simply from deleveraging. Then you add the growth on top of that, and you’ll end up with a conversion metric that I think is very achievable.

Okay, great. I want to kind of summarize all of these lines of questioning into the stock.

Okay.

Right? Which is, I think the game plan for you to get the stock, for the firm to get the stock back on track is number one, obviously refining the messaging and ensuring that the targets are aligned with sort of how the street’s thinking about it. You want the street to sort of understand what you guys are doing in terms of expanding and growing the business, especially internationally, where there’s been a lot of movement, especially with Global Blue and sort of questioning of what that acquisition brings and how that, and I have a line of questioning on Global Blue, but I want to make sure this point is hit. Then obviously capital management, putting your money where your mouth is and buying back stock. Is there anything I’m missing?

Those are your statements, but I would say that I think those are all important value drivers for sure. I think we do believe, though, that a big thing that’s missed about our business is just fundamental durability of growth. I genuinely believe that we have demonstrated our ability to consistently grow the business at high rates. This idea that we put out a medium-term guidance that has, and I do not necessarily love the terminology, but sit on our hands case of high teens with Global Blue mid-20s, and then north of that, if we continue to deploy capital and do what we have historically done, find attractive ways to generate returns on capital deployed. If we do all of that, we should be a business that can grow in the mid to high 20s according to those medium-term guides.

Even if you said, "Okay, all you’re going to do is your organic case of being a high teens growing business," I struggle with the model folks are building that would somehow suggest there’s any data points that would suggest we’re doing something less. If we are that, then I would say this question mark around durability of growth, which from my investor lens should manifest itself in a growth adjusted multiple greater than one because it has durability and it has visibility, would tell you that our underlying valuation multiple is either wrong or that there’s huge question marks that we really have to help close the gap on around durability of growth. Between those two, that’s probably the only other one I’d add.

Yeah. Good. That’s very clear. Maybe we can just dig a little bit deeper into Global Blue. Because I do think Global Blue is a really instrumental part of the story on a go-forward basis, as you indicated. Maybe you could just talk about sort of the early read on Global Blue. You’ve had some choppiness in Asia-Pacific, for example. Was that sort of unforeseen, or is that just normal course of business?

I would say it was foreseeable, but modeling it was difficult because of the absolute magnitude of the numbers. For the context point around this, Global Blue has measures there, we will call it GMV or volume metric in what is called sales in store. That sales in store metric within Asia-Pacific, so within the Asia-Pacific region, was a -11% for the quarter. The European region, which is the majority of the business, was a +13%. That translated into a global sales in store of a +5%. Let’s unpack the -11%. Within Asia-Pacific, you are talking about the Japan market. Within the Japan market, what you are really talking about is an issue where Japan was anniversarying a comp that was north of 100%. It is less about, was it foreseeable that it was going to be off that 100% comp? Yes.

Modeling that was really, really difficult. When we were starting to see certain weeks that were performing off plan, we got a little bit nervous and started to think about, well, what about this is understood? What about this should be understood more transparently to our constituents? I think that’s where the Asia-Pacific story really narrows. Now, everything is normalized, and now we are back to, we’ve anniversaryed that heightened level of comp set, and now we’re at a place where we’re seeing a very stable business, but isolated. Let’s bring it back, though. Where does that fit within the larger scheme of things in terms of what we’re trying to drive value creation around to us? Yes, that was an event that happened, but the biggest value creation for us is about the payment cross-sell. The business still grew 19% revenues year over year.

The business still grew global sales at a 5% variable. Yes, it has its anomalies within its portfolio, but it’s still a good business. Our biggest opportunity is to go and tackle a $500 billion cross-sell, $100 billion of which is SMB, where in the end, we are displacing an unintegrated bank processor. That is something we’ve had a great deal of success doing in the markets where we’re already leaders.

Perfect. That 19% that you mentioned, how do you think it sort of tracks into 2026 and long term?

Yeah. Again, I do not want to give guidance around how we view any one subcomponent of the business, or especially for the Global Blue business. I would say that the idea of Global Blue having been a public company before and having had medium-term outlook in the past is something that I think is a relevant data point. I think in the past, as a public company, they have provided medium-term outlooks themselves that were kind of in the low to mid double digits of growth. I think that is relevant. I think structurally the business has that ability. I think what is fundamentally missing from all of that is the Shift4 component of delivering on a conversion opportunity that is led through a real product point of difference.

When I say that, I mean we’re talking about today a tax-free shopping experience that for the most part is not as deeply integrated into a point of sale system and certainly is not integrated into the payment processing flow in a way that one would expect. You go into the enterprise of a Louis Vuitton, you will feel and see an experience that’s totally integrated, but in the vast majority of the business, the tens of thousands of SMBs in Europe, that’s not the version of the experience you see. That is a complex payment checkout with a bad sales associate experience and a bad consumer experience. This is our jam. I mean, simplify payment complexity. That is what we do.

That’s the part of the business that I think is missing from that guidance that would have been missing from that historical standalone Global Blue public company guidance.

As we think about the next 12 months, what can we expect in terms of progression against those goals?

I think the big thing you’re going to hear a lot about from us is the underlying progress of first getting out of beta and actually being live and starting to have real wins of customers that are using what we’re going to refer to as this three-in-one payment experience where you can do payments, dynamic currency conversion, and tax-free shopping all in a single device, even at an SMB. That’s a really important milestone. Once you get out of that milestone, it’s about the go-lives and it’s about the progress that we’re making with, for lack of a better term, the logo wins, the cover pages, the things that we have done to demonstrate our continued momentum in all of our other verticals. That’s what you should start to see. Baltimore Ravens gets now supplemented by a luxury retail page that starts to show those wins.

It should manifest itself in our gross revenue less network fees numbers, all of the KPIs. It should manifest itself there. As it comes through in 2026, all of it then becomes really important anniversarying and building blocks as it becomes full year affected for 2027.

Got it. How macro-sensitive is Global Blue’s business?

I would say as a standalone business that is exposed to, we’ll say, an upper-income individual that has the means to travel for luxury goods, it has certainly its sensitivities. Those sensitivities seem to be quite durable right now and are a very interesting portfolio balance to other sensitivities that we at Shift4 have. That’s statement one. I’d say statement two, the elasticity of demand for that consumer is affected by things like the relative FX. This is something that we tried to talk about within our shareholder materials because I think it was lost on some people. A soft US dollar relative to the euro might have a positive effect on financial translation within our statements, but we are not rooting for that by any stretch of the imagination.

Strong US dollar to power the demand of that consumer to go abroad and purchase those goods and transact in those tax-free shopping ways, that far outweighs any financial translation benefit that we have. Even though there were questions in the quarter about what was the benefit of financial translation, we looked at it more as it was a detriment because it chilled and cooled demand. We’re now seeing the reversion of that, or we’re seeing actually an improvement of that right now. I would say that that’s the other variable that we pay attention to. If we thought we were a big data business, Global Blue’s data assets are insane. I mean, the ability to understand ticket-level POS integrations to consumers across cohorts, I mean, they are excellent at it. They’re so good at their data set, data analysis, data assets, regressing impacts of FX.

They actually are a really important constituent to the luxury brands themselves. The brands pay for the data.

All right. I have one more before I see if anyone in the audience has questions. You know that 5% same-store sales number that you gave?

The sales in store, yeah.

In store. What’s a good growth rate for that business in terms of same-store sales on a go-forward basis?

I’m not a luxury retail expert yet, but when you look at the underlying driver of luxury retail and the inflationary model that’s baked into it, it’s pretty enviable what they are allowed to do in terms of embedded inflation into core average selling prices. It’s well north of a mid-single digit. That variable is structural within luxury. What I don’t have as an offset, which is more going to move not as a durable movement, but rather it’ll move in a cycle, is that that demand that I just talked about can be affected by both FX, and it can be affected by, we’ll say, the perceptions of wealth effect that the high net worth is feeling. I think of take the luxury retail number of structural inflation and sales, and then we’ll say offset it by some of these other, we’ll say, macro drivers.

I think you’re probably a little bit north of where they delivered this quarter.

Perfect. I’m sorry we’ve run out of time, audience, but thank you, Chris. Really appreciate it.

All right. Thank you.

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