Shift4 Payments at Barclays Forum: Strategic Growth Amid Economic Uncertainty

On Tuesday, 20 May 2025, Shift4 Payments (NYSE:FOUR) presented at the Barclays 15th Annual Emerging Payments and FinTech Forum. The company’s leadership outlined a robust growth strategy amid economic uncertainty, focusing on international expansion and strategic acquisitions. While addressing investor concerns, executives expressed confidence in navigating potential challenges due to a diversified business model.

Key Takeaways

• Shift4’s acquisition of Global Blue is set to close in early Q3, pending final regulatory approval.
• The company projects at least 20% organic growth in 2025, emphasizing international expansion.
• Shift4 operates in over 50 countries, a significant increase from just one country 18 months ago.
• Executives highlighted the importance of maintaining a net leverage ratio under four times.
• The company’s diversified customer base spans restaurants, lodging, and stadiums.

Financial Results

• Growth: Shift4 has grown every year for 26 years, with at least 20% organic growth projected for 2025.
• Balance Sheet: Recent financing activities have strengthened the balance sheet, with debt markets six times oversubscribed.
• Capital Flexibility: The company issued various debt instruments, including euro-denominated debt, to support international growth.
• Volume: Q1 payment volumes reached approximately $45 billion.
• Debt: The aim is to maintain a net leverage ratio under four times.
• Shares: Approximately 11 million shares will be added to the calculation.

Operational Updates

• International Expansion: Shift4 now operates in over 50 countries, expanding from just one country 18 months ago. It has a significant presence in U.S. stadiums and hotels.
• Global Blue Acquisition: Expected to close in early Q3, with only one regulatory approval pending from the Bank of Italy.
• Customer Base: The company boasts a diversified customer base across various verticals, including the addition of over a thousand restaurants a month in the UK.
• Technology: Investments have been made in the digitization of VAT refund experiences.

Future Outlook

• Growth Strategy: Focus on maintaining core strengths while adapting to international expansion and acquiring new customers.
• Market Conditions: The outlook assumes a stable consumer environment without significant macroeconomic changes.
• Revenue Opportunities: Plans to cross-sell payment processing services to Global Blue’s customers and offer dynamic currency conversion for hotels.

Q&A Highlights

• Economic Resilience: President Taylor Wobber emphasized the company’s resilience in essential discretionary spending sectors, such as dining, even during economic downturns.
• Pricing Strategy: The focus remains on payments as the primary revenue stream, with pricing adjusted based on customer size and value.
• Global Blue Integration: CFO Nancy Dissman noted a planned teach-in post-acquisition, highlighting differences between IFRS and GAAP accounting.

Readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript for more detailed insights.

Full transcript - Barclays 15th Annual Emerging Payments and FinTech Forum:

Unidentified speaker, Moderator, Barclays: Alright. Well, I welcome back. Thank you everybody for joining us. I would like to welcome for the first time, shift forward to Barclays payments conference. We’re joined today by president Taylor Wobber and CFO Nancy Dissman.

So thank you both for coming to New York and being at our conference.

Taylor Wobber, President, Shift4: Thanks for having us.

Unidentified speaker, Moderator, Barclays: Yeah. Well, Tiller, very open ended question for you to kick things off. I was wondering if what, you could say as incoming CEO, what your priorities are for the company.

Taylor Wobber, President, Shift4: Yeah. Sure. So I I the most important thing is to change as little as possible. We’re a twenty six year company that’s grown every single year. We’re highly profitable, and we’ve innovated throughout that entire time.

So as a baseline, you actually wanna change as little as possible. There’s a, you know, a fundamental algorithm that’s driven our success, and we don’t wanna disrupt that. The one thing I would say to balance that is we are a fundamentally different company than we were even just a few years ago. It’s very typical of Shift4 to kind of grow in these leaps and bounds. But just to give some examples, we’re in, you know, a majority of stadiums in the country.

We weren’t in a single one four years ago. We’re in 40% of the hotels in the country. We weren’t in a single one eight years ago. And we’re operating in over 50 countries today, and that’s even before the acquisition of Global Blue and we were operating in one country, you know, just about eighteen months ago. So we have to adapt to what’s increasingly becoming a big international business.

But one of the things that our founder always impressed on us was you have to have a point of difference. And if you don’t have a point of difference and it’s not an extreme point of difference, don’t bother coming to work. Don’t bother doing, you know, approaching business. So we’re approaching this international expansion with what we think are extreme points of difference. A very stark contrast and why you would choose Shift4 versus any of our competitors in the markets we serve.

And so hopefully adapt to this new international environment, but with the ways that have kind of made it successful for twenty six years.

Unidentified speaker, Moderator, Barclays: Alright. Great. Makes sense. So the next question I have is really for both of you. So for anybody who follows Shift4, there’s been a lot of news recently.

So in addition to your Investor Day in Q1, the announcement of the pending Global Blue acquisition, plus all the recent rounds of funding with the preferred shares and the euro denominated debt. I was wondering for both of you, what do you want investors to be most aware of when we think of Q1 earnings, the announcements at Investor Day and recent rounds of financing? And Nancy, I’ll just start with you, and then we’ll move to Taylor.

Nancy Dissman, CFO, Shift4: No. I starting off, would say this is a team that’s very focused on a very limited set of priorities. So while it seems like we have a lot going on, it’s all toward growth, global expansion, filling the funnel of an embedded opportunities. That’s kind of the shift for a way. And I think we could connect the dots pretty quickly to a very small universe of things that we’re focused on.

And while it seems like we have a lot going on, I think especially as we get through today’s conversation, it it will see that we’ve really set ourselves up for the future with the moves that we’ve made most recently.

Taylor Wobber, President, Shift4: Alright. Yeah. Sure. So I like, maybe the most important thing. We’re almost done with the eight k’s and the p r’s.

It’s like four different debt instruments of some kind. So that’s a lot of noise, and I apologize. I apologize for that noise. But it was all in the spirit of maintaining a bunch of flexibility coming into this transaction. So, I think the highlights are the transactions paid for.

We have a meaningfully, better balance sheet as a result of the financing. So we did, and we used, a debt market that, you know, we had six x oversubscription for, you know, the amount we were willing to raise across virtually every instrument we were trying to raise. We use that kind of enthusiasm to push out some near term maturities as well. So, what investors should really take away is we’re in great shape. We think the economy is, I think, a lot sounder, especially globally than people are giving it credit for.

But despite that, we’re kinda ready for whatever the world wants to throw at us with regard to our balance sheet, the certainty of the transaction, and kinda capital flexibility. The reason for as many instruments as we did was we wanted things like floating rate debt. We wanted things like prepayable debt. We wanted things like euro denominated debt to better match kind of the growing business. And we were able to achieve all of those at prices that were in terms of borrowing like as attractive as the market seen in almost the year, I think.

Unidentified speaker, Moderator, Barclays: Alright. Great. So maybe following up on some recent events. And so, Taylor, this next question is for you. When when the company IPO’d, you know, several years ago, you know, you’re I think COVID was on lockdown.

You benefited from a lot of that recovery in in dining and travel spend. And so now we’re not quite in the same situation, but there’s probably some investor concern out there that this could be we could be going to a tougher economic cycle. And you might have some potential investors who could be standing on the sidelines saying, I’m looking at Shift4, they’re exposed to a lot of discretionary spend, lodging, dining, etcetera. What would you say to those customers about who might be a little hesitant to come into Shift4 or have some doubts? What would you say to to them?

Taylor Wobber, President, Shift4: So I’ll bifurcate kind of the opinions on the economy versus our ability to operate. I think the opinions on consumer discretionary spending are a little too primitive and myopic in the views of investors. You really have to cut up consumer discretionary spending across all of the categories to get a sense as to what’s gonna be impacted the most during times of uncertainty. And our analysis, having done this for twenty six years, is, the things that get the most impacted are the things that you take the longest to make a decision to spend on. So it starts with houses and then with cars and then consumer electronics, furniture, etcetera.

Really, the last thing that individuals pull back on is that night out. It’s grabbing a beer after work. It’s the burger. And the businesses that we serve, especially in the former restaurants, are pretty highly resilient to shocks. You can go back and look at Visa card data throughout a lot of different, significant times of economic turmoil, and, they know that when the hundred dollar steak is no longer selling, they swap it with a burger, and they can do that the day of they can do that the day after.

So, in times of extreme, economic duress, and we are not seeing that, just to be clear, we see modest pullbacks across our categories. Obviously, things like international travel will be more sensitive to as a result of the Global Loop transaction, but hedged nicely because we’re talking about 50 different countries we’re operating in and a lot of consumers that we’re serving. So we feel like generally okay about the overall state of the economy. With that being said, we grow like the best in terms of payment volume across our competition. We grow like the stripes and the add ins of the world, and yet we don’t really serve a lot of ecommerce customers.

Our customers have never grown for us. And that’s been kind of the other side of the coin. We have very stable customers in terms of economic resiliency, yet we need to add customers if we wanna grow. Sure. And that’s been an ethos the entire time.

So just to give you a sense for what it looks like in extreme circumstances, we’ve always had this philosophy, at least for the last ten years, M and A can give us this really, really good stable ability to cross sell customers in the best and worst of times. And when does that pay the best dividends? Actually in those troubled times. To give you a sense for what it looked like, back in April of twenty twenty, our customers were down about 60% to 80% on a year over year basis. And it’s no surprise they were effectively regulated out of business.

People weren’t allowed to go into restaurants, weren’t allowed to travel to hotels. Within two months of that, we were growing payment volume 20% year over year. And that is not because in July of twenty twenty, everyone was feeling great and suddenly eating out at restaurants and hotels. That’s because we added so many damn customers Mhmm. During that three months that it literally offset it.

Now how are we able to do that? We’re able to do it because we have this massive cross sell funnel of MerchantLink and Shift4 and a bunch of software companies that we’d acquired in the previous years. These customers, ironically, in the best of times, they’re not seeking to hyper optimize their their operations. They’re just selling more product. But when times get tough, they say, wait a minute, I can consolidate this payment stack of five or six different vendors with one and save a bunch of money.

They’re actually willing to have that conversation during the slow time. So, we kinda made a promise to ourselves that we would always position the business with this cross sell funnel, if you will, that can help us double, triple, quadruple in the best and worst of times. And I think that serves us well. We kind of in that in that way, we welcome a little bit of uncertainty because it certainly compels more conversations from our merchants.

Unidentified speaker, Moderator, Barclays: All right, great. And so following up on that topic of growth, have a question for you, Nancy. So when we look at the 2025 guidance, I think you mentioned that you expect at least 20% plus organic growth. Can you tell us a little bit more about what considerations go into that? And when you think about consumer health or any trends you see in in lodging and dining, any of the verticals you serve, what gives you confidence in that number?

Nancy Dissman, CFO, Shift4: Sure. I mean, Taylor touched on this. But when we approach the guide, we are looking especially with consumer spending, which is what everybody is so focused on. We look at what we saw this past year, and and really what we saw exiting this year has held for what we’ve seen year to date. So our guidance really assumes a a fairly stable consumer, does not consider any material change either to the positive or negative to the macro.

And so when we look again, this a high confidence guide. And when we say that, it’s because of what Taylor said. We don’t rely on same store sales of the consumer for growth. We rely on winning new customers and, installing and annualizing the customers that are already in our backlog. So for us, the guide considerations are really based on history and what we’ve seen and and that mix of verticals.

I think another key point that’s always important to mention when we’re talking about consumer spend and resiliency is we are a very different company than we were at the IPO. You know, through the global financial crisis, through COVID, our verticals now are just significantly more diversified when we were initially just restaurants and restaurant and lodging. And now, you know, when we talk about whether it’s statement, stadiums and entertainment or, unified commerce, The company is just so well diversified. So that’s a big component Mhmm. That I know is getting a lot of interest in the guide.

But it’s it’s really informed by annualization of the business that we’ve already won. And so anytime I’m asked about the guide, I really wanna reiterate that we have such a good line of sight into this year’s growth. We know exactly where it’s coming from. And really to continue to highlight that many of our customers never even hit our backlog of embedded opportunities because their SMB is or or they’re smaller, mid market customers that immediately activate upon signing. So there’s just a high confidence because of where that growth is coming from.

It’s it’s usually already somewhere in our backlog. It’s business that’s already started that hasn’t annualized, and it gives us the ability across all the verticals from that perspective. Right.

Unidentified speaker, Moderator, Barclays: I think you once said that the backlog is always enterprise or almost always. Is that

Nancy Dissman, CFO, Shift4: Yeah. I mean, I think, look, it’s there it’s a large portion. Right? Because, something like Ultera that we just announced hasn’t even begun to install. Right?

So you’re not you you’re gonna see a % of that sitting in a backlog, and it will likely you’ll you’ll see probably six to nine months of that, hopefully, in this year. If that gets pushed out, then that’ll start informing next year’s guide from that volume Okay. Back as an example.

Unidentified speaker, Moderator, Barclays: Going back to February, it seems like a long time ago, but you had your Investor Day, you had a very big announcement about your proposed acquisition of Global Blue. And so I think in your slide deck, know, your full investor deck, and then you had another slide just for Global Blue. You highlighted a couple different revenue opportunities. There’s, the VAT refund, which I’m sure extends beyond that in Europe, but other countries as well. You have potential, new revenues coming in from dynamic currency conversion.

But one thing that wasn’t entirely clear to me is if any of the revenues you’re anticipating could be potentially from cross sell and your payment processing services to all the different logos we saw in those slides, a lot of you know, very expensive European brands. So I was wondering if you could clarify that a little bit or maybe just generally speak of the different revenue opportunities that Global Blue can bring to Shift4.

Taylor Wobber, President, Shift4: Yeah. Sure. So it’s a phenomenal business. I’ll start with that. And it’s really the hallmark of kinda how we look at what will be our point of difference if we’re gonna go after a vertical.

And we spent half a decade looking at retail and saying, what is our point of difference gonna be in this? Great competitors in our space, approaching it with good solutions. And, you know, we knew that if we wanted to approach retail, we needed a product suite that was like hands down the best and had, you know, one or fewer great competitors. And with their TFS product, they have that. So for any of you that have traveled abroad, this is the idea of buying a Louis Vuitton handbag in Paris.

And inside of that sticker price is 20% VAT. You’re ineligible to get a refund of that to the extent you’re leaving the country. So it’s meaningful. You’re talking about a few thousand dollars back on an expensive product. Yet logistically, it’s pretty hard to coordinate all this.

You need to prove that they’re a foreigner. You need to prove that they’ve left the country. There really been only two companies that have served this space. And if you’re like me and remember kind of, I don’t know, sixteen years ago, standing in line at the airport in your honeymoon with a few luxury items in this longer seat and a nightmare of a process. That is largely what had to happen across all these countries around the world up until COVID hit.

And and of these two companies, Global Blue and their competitor, Global Blue used that opportunity of literally negative sales to invest heavily in the digitization of that experience. So now I would encourage you all, go into Louis Vuitton in Paris, go buy your spouse, something really nice. And what they will do is they will capture your email at the point of sale. By the way, the salesperson will know you’re a foreigner, not from your accent or anything else. They will simply know based on the card that you presented that this is somebody eligible for this process.

So highly digitized. They recognize you immediately, and they say, wow, you know, this purchase of €10,000, you’re actually gonna get €1,500 back. And just give me your email and we’ll start you on the journey. You can fulfill it via app. You can fill it via kiosk.

You can go to a booth at an airport if you’re so inclined. They will capture all these details. And then when you leave, you get an instant refund on your credit card. Their nearest competitor has, like, 15% market share. They have 85.

Clearly, this is like a a product that is demanded by the best retailers in the world for obvious reasons. This drives a lot of commerce into their store. And when the product is that differentiated vis a vis their competitor, no one’s kicking that product out for one reason or another. They really, have to have more pieces of those one transfer retail. We’re gonna own this technology.

And the merchants that have traditionally used that plus, I don’t know, three or four other things to make a sale work, don’t have to anymore. We can actually deliver the entirety of the commerce stack to, you know, that hypothetical Swiss watch boutique, you know, in Switzerland. And I will say it’s been pretty resounding. So the investor feedback has been what the heck is this business? Is this the duty free shops at the airport?

Well, you know, explain this to me. Yet the reaction from the payments industry and from, quite frankly, Global Blue’s largest customers are we wanna learn more. I was with, you know, one of their largest customers yesterday here in New York. They were traveling from Paris, and it was a reverse inquiry. It was, you’re right.

It is a tough payment situation. We’re kind of excited by this transaction. So we know we’ve got something great in this. We know we’ve got a really strong point of difference in a vertical, that’s gonna matter a lot with it. By the way, an incredibly resilient shopper, this is not somebody traveling abroad for the first time.

This is somebody flying to a foreign country and then spending thousands of dollars on a luxury item while they’re there. That’s really, like, well insulated from economic shock, which is great. And then separately, you know, I mentioned this concept that we’re we’re in 50 countries now. We’re in one, you know, twenty months ago or so. You know, it’s no surprise that we’re catching up to, you know, what are called table stakes capabilities around the rest of the world.

And currency conversion is one of them. And while in The US, it’s less common, if you’re traveling in Switzerland, you need currency conversion as an option for your guests. There’s three different currencies, three different languages, lots of complexity in it. They run one of the largest businesses in the world in currency conversion. Mhmm.

So the, example I would give is we’re supporting 40% of the hotels in the and we’ve never offered currency conversion for foreign travelers. We now own one of the largest businesses in the world to that effect. That synergy is, like, plainly obvious. So we’ll have a new vertical in the stack with a very clear point of difference just like we do restaurants and hotels and stadiums. And then we’ll have a product suite that when you start to look at the Harvey balls, we check a lot of boxes that virtually no one else in the world can.

Unidentified speaker, Moderator, Barclays: All right. Great. Well, we’ve talked about the upsides of acquisition. Want to ask Nance about how you’re going to pay for it. The the roughly a billion dollars of mandatory convertible preferred shares.

Why did you choose that vehicle instead of, like, another round of debt? And I’ll ask you the follow-up question right now. How should people remodeling this out think about the impact to diluted shares?

Nancy Dissman, CFO, Shift4: Sure. We were very committed to staying under four times net leverage, and so the mandatory convertible allowed us to do that. So simply stated. And I think when you look at the rest of the stack, Taylor briefly mentioned this, we wanted to take, a euro note component to just better match, you know, not only with Global Blue closing, but our own expansion globally. We’re gonna have more revenue and expense denominated, in euro currency and tied to the euro market.

So we wanted to have some portion of debt stack to provide a natural hedge with with that business. And to your so I guess the third component maybe just to mention was we also wanted some flexibility in the debt stack with some of the prepayable debt component from the TLB. So really that was the mix of the approach to how we were gonna pay for it, why did we do it the way that we did. And then in terms of how to model it, we will present our non GAAP EPS on a fully diluted basis. So we I think it’d be approximately 11,000,000 shares with that will add into the calc.

So you will see kind of the what if, you know, modeled out pro form a as if the preferred came due and fully converted. And we’ll keep the dividend associated then with that preferred out of the calc. So it’ll be as as if, you know, we had a full exchange on the convert when we come out with a non GAAP EPS calc.

Taylor Wobber, President, Shift4: Alright. I think it’s important to realize, you know, we spent we spent a bunch of time deciding the right path here. We had every option available to us from a debt perspective. This was a decision driven by, you know, ourselves and, by way, our largest shareholder who had a loud voice in this. He still owns 25% of the company, and dilution is not something he takes, you know, mildly.

But the reality is we have a ton of economic flexibility. Should the market environment provide so, we’ll simply buy back stock. Just to give people a snapshot of what the last four and a half years have looked like as a public company, there’s been about 15% dilution since we’ve gone public, and we’ve grown EBITDA 10 x during that time. And we bought back, you know, a healthy amount of stock. We do often have this exercise of whether it’s issuing stock in an m and a transaction while we’re buying back in the open market simply to put our shares in the hands of people who we wanna influence and we want really aligned to the stock or issuing, you know, equity linked instruments to keep our leverage ratios low.

It seems like the prudent thing to do. If there is uncertainty, we’ll be glad we did it. And if there’s euphoria, we can buy our stock.

Unidentified speaker, Moderator, Barclays: Alright. So continuing on the global global blue topic, given you and that the deck you had, all the different luxury logos, does this bring you potentially more competition with Adyen who I think

Taylor Wobber, President, Shift4: is often said to be very penetrated in that space? They’re a phenomenal company, I I would challenge. They’re one of the few payments companies that their customers say they like, which is, really interesting. I think they’re they’re, like, a company to be admired, very much so. It puts us inside of retail for sure.

Where Adient doesn’t really have a great solution, and we kinda grew up, it was our DNA, is this SMB retailer. So, you know, you can imagine, and I think any of you that have traveled around the world have seen this. There’s, four payment terminals Yep. Behind the screen. And then Nevada is a completely different process.

So we see a ton of opportunity in cross sell inside of that, SMB population where the savings are dramatic. You’re simplifying the world for the owner and the operator and the decision maker all at once. We expect to have a lot of success there. The Adyen partnership has been great for Global Blue. That’s the Louis Vuitton example I gave, by the way, of it working incredibly seamlessly.

So I don’t expect near term disruption to that. But we have a solution now that puts us on par with the Adients of the world and in a lot more countries as a result of it. Right?

Unidentified speaker, Moderator, Barclays: And what remains this is my last Global Blue question. What remains until the deal closes? Are there any more

Taylor Wobber, President, Shift4: hurdles yet to get through or approvals? There’s one approval left from a regulatory standpoint. It is with the Bank of Italy. That’s their money transfer license. Expect it will be done.

I think we set the expectations of kind of early Q3 is what we’re anticipating. There’s no change to that.

Unidentified speaker, Moderator, Barclays: All right. Great. Well, we’ve actually gone through quite a bit of time. So I’m going to maybe jump ahead on a few questions. Nancy, I know you’ve gotten this question about a billion times in the past, but I’m just thinking about some of your guidance for payment volumes.

So in Q1, I think you had about $45,000,000,000 of payment volumes. You can annualize that. You get about to a 80. You add in the backlog. You can get pretty close, I think, to your annual guidance.

So, again, I know you’ve gotten this math question before. Any other puts and takes or any anything, any nuance you’d wanna give to some of the people in the room saying, keep this in mind that this could be, you know, add or detract from that. So maybe it’s not quite so straightforward as I just find Sure.

Nancy Dissman, CFO, Shift4: I do get this question a lot. I would say, first of all, I would point everyone back to Investor Day. I think that was the best presentation of the bridge for 2025 and how we expect to get there. And it it largely has two components. One is the volume that will annualize.

So business that already started in 2024 and is annualizing into ’25. And then, new wins that will come from either our embedded backlog or from, just winning on the street, as a kind of the second component. It is fair that annualizing a quarter is always, you know, the gorilla math that that makes sense. What you miss in doing that potentially is seasonality. And then the the impact of maybe one large or or or a couple large enterprise deals that certainly move quarter to quarter at the the timing.

So I I don’t think it’s bad math. It’s just not perfect math. So I always like to point back to the seasonal nature of some of our verticals, especially restaurants and hospitality. I would say other than that, we feel good about the guide. Right?

You know, I think the guide we put out for this year, we’ve said we’ve got high confidence in. We have high confidence in the in the midterm outlook as well. And I would just contextualize, I guess, one more time the backlog because I think that’s the second question that always comes up as it relates back to the volume. And they’re not meant to be one for one. The backlog was always meant to drive confidence in the bridge that we put out, especially if you go back to investor day to say, yeah.

This should pass the smell test pretty quickly. And, again, reminding everyone what’s in that backlog it’s business that either has not fully ramped and annualized or business that we’ve signed that hasn’t we haven’t even gotten the first dollar of volume yet from that client, but we’ve already signed it, and it has a date as to when it will start. But the reminder to that is that most of our SMB business and even as we move up mid market, we’ll never hit that backlog because it it it typically we sign and board within a few days. So it’s just those are metrics really to give confidence into the bridge that we gave for guide this year.

Taylor Wobber, President, Shift4: Alright. Great. You know, the one thing I just wanna kinda add because I don’t think investors always have an appreciation for is we have a myriad of options in front of us as a company. So we grew up serving predominantly SMBs entirely in The United States. Now we’re talking yesterday, I was with, know, one of the largest luxury retailers in the world.

That’s an option for us now, I think. And what we don’t always know is what this mix is gonna look like. So I’m looking around the room, I see some faces that followed us through shocks to the business. And and I mean that perceived negatively, but it was we added so much enterprise business that no one saw coming that it brought drew spreads down a little bit. We are not myopically focused on a single category of customer.

We have these real right to win in different verticals, and we are happy to serve the largest customers in the world. And we are only now getting the opportunity to be on that stage. So when you think about our volume guidance, it’s probably the least we we’ve got really good line of sight, as Nancy mentioned, into kind of the effects of annualization and the backlog we have and everything else. But but what the average customer is gonna look like, we’re very flexible about two, three, four years from now. So we try to give as much visibility as we can.

Hey. We just signed a whale, and here’s what it’s gonna look like. And, you know, Nancy has been awesome at kind of steadying the ship on giving spread guidance around these things. But we as a company don’t operate that way. What we do is we say we’ll go after every customer in the verticals that we wanna serve and the biggest, to the smallest.

We’re adding over a thousand restaurants a month in

Unidentified speaker, Moderator, Barclays: The UK. By way of

Taylor Wobber, President, Shift4: example, we’re very happy to keep doing that. That relative mix over time is something we’re gonna have to keep educating investors because we love this diversity, but investors obviously struggle to model it.

Unidentified speaker, Moderator, Barclays: Alright. We’ll continue on the topic of investor education. I wanna talk a little bit about revenues. And as we we talked about volumes, but now as we as we move to revenues, I’d to understand how your thoughts a little bit on pricing or just how it works at Shift4. When you’re talking to a new merchant, is it here’s your price.

Is the pricing truly a la carte? They use one kind of service, another merchant does, and they use something else. How should we think about it in general and how it works? And also, how much do you use as a lever to, you know, say, hey. This is the appropriate time to increase price or perhaps decrease price?

Taylor Wobber, President, Shift4: Yeah. I’ll start with philosophy, and then Nancy can give kind of the mechanics of how it works day to day. Philosophy is that payments is our North Star. That’s the revenue stream we’re going after within our merchants. There is a natural curve that every one of our merchants will be on.

Meaning, the $500,000 girl in Boise, Idaho will pay a higher spread than the multi billion dollar international merchant, and we have all of them. And we’ve increasingly been winning in that large segment of the market. So spreads have trended down over time. The Bar and Grill in Boise, Idaho is paying the same thing they always have. So we’re not compromising on price, where we have the strong product differentiation, but we’re certainly willing to win new categories of customers that pay a lower spread on average.

That’s led to volume growth, higher than revenue growth, which we’re quite content with. We also charge for SaaS within our products that offer that, whether that’s our stadium product or our restaurant product. But we try to keep the SaaS, like, meaningfully lower than our nearest competitor. The payments revenue stream has been appropriate for us to monetize. We see the challenges of trying to raise SaaS price over time.

And quite frankly, in environments like this, merchants really care about fixed costs, and they really laser focus on fixed costs. And if the fixed cost of our product is a third of our nearest competitor, that helps us differentiate. That’s kind of the philosophy. We will also have a consequence inside of our business of acquired revenue streams that we are fiddling with for the sake of winning the payments volume inside of those customers. Right.

And I say fiddling with because we’ll do a bunch of different things. We’ll raise price with the intent of just making the phone ring, and then we’ll immediately make that price go away in exchange for shifting the payment processing. We’ll just offer it for free as a carrot. A lot of our invoices, believe it or not, say stop paying this invoice. Just call this number and you don’t have to pay it anymore.

And in some cases, we actually just don’t have to do that. Right? Because we’re adding on payments to a SaaS offering they they historically had or something like that. So we have all of these tools in our toolkit. Nancy, I don’t know if you wanna elaborate on kinda.

Nancy Dissman, CFO, Shift4: Yeah. I think you said you really said it well. I mean, payment space operates kind of around the card brands. Right? So anyone that follows this space understands that the largest component of any bill that we’re giving to one of our customers is actually a pass through, right, of fees from Mastercard and Visa and and and so on.

So we’re certainly very cognizant. I would say we’ve been doing this a long time, so we understand the price sensitivity to our merchants. And we’re super careful. We’ve talked a lot about carrot and stick when it relates to cross sell, but it’s it’s kind of our philosophy even with our existing merchants. Right?

Like, we, you know, I think people believe there’s more price sensitivity and price competition in the space. But Shiftware’s model is very integrated. So we are bringing a value to our customers that’s typically tied to some software or some product that is embedded in their entire, operating system. And so we’re not really competing on price. We just have to deliver the best in class service delivery and be mindful of really how to pass on fees from Mastercard and Visa and and be competitively sensitive to the environment that we operate in.

But again, it it’s not something that we have to compete on once that merchant’s in the door. You know, we’re winning based on the product that we’ve delivered and and the service model.

Unidentified speaker, Moderator, Barclays: Alright. Perfect. Well, we’re almost out of time, but I’m gonna ask close out with one final question. It’ll be for you, Nancy. And it’s something that may have befuddled many Excel modelers.

If we do assume that, you know, you do acquire Global Blue, how should we think about the blended take rate for the company? And it’s confusing for us. It might be confusing for you as well. But, you know, is it just a matter of we layer in the Global Blue income statement on the shift fours and kind of project out, or are there other more complicated dynamics?

Nancy Dissman, CFO, Shift4: So here’s what I’ll say, which is an answer, but not a specific answer to to what you asked, which is one, we owe everyone a teach in with the close of Global Blue. So we appreciate that, you know, that that will need to happen. Also, we have two public companies with all of their data out there. There will be a couple of IFRS to gap differences that we wanna point out right away that will bring down the blend of the two. It won’t be one plus one.

There are some takeaways that don’t translate for gap that are, in their financials. And in terms of spread specifically, we are still working through segmentation, in terms of how we will manage the business and how we will model the business because obviously a big focus for us is that cross sell. So while GB has an amazing business today, what they’ll be focused on going forward will look different because they’ll be very similar to the deals that we’ve done. We will be focused on a blended offering and and focusing on cross sell. So you’ll see more of a commingled presentation of our existing business versus how they present theirs today.

But I would just say for now more to come. Great. And we’ll be back to you.

Unidentified speaker, Moderator, Barclays: Great. Well, thank you very much. I think we’re out of time. So thank you, Taylor, and thank you, Nancy, joining us. Thanks.

Thanks for

Nancy Dissman, CFO, Shift4: having us.

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