Shift4 Payments at Goldman Sachs Conference: Strategic Growth Insights

On Wednesday, 10 September 2025, Shift4 Payments (NYSE:FOUR) took center stage at the Goldman Sachs Communicopia + Technology Conference 2025. The company outlined its strategic priorities and financial performance, highlighting both opportunities and challenges. New CEO Taylor Lauber emphasized continuity in strategy with a focus on growth, while addressing recent management changes and the company’s evolving global footprint.

Key Takeaways

• Shift4 Payments has seen significant growth in EBITDA and free cash flow since its IPO.
• New CEO Taylor Lauber ensures strategic continuity with a focus on international expansion.
• CFO Chris Cruz prioritizes profitability per share, reflecting an owner’s perspective.
• The company expects 20%+ organic growth, with a focus on margin expansion.
• Integration of Global Blue aims to enhance currency conversion and tax-free shopping synergies.

Financial Results

• Volume and Revenue Targets:

- Revenue aligned with expectations, though volumes were slightly lower.

- The take rate exceeded expectations, reflecting a positive financial outlook.

• Guidance Philosophy:

- Shift4 is adopting a more conservative guidance approach.

- The company is committed to meeting medium-term guidance while considering shorter-term performance insights.

Operational Updates

• Management Transition:

- Taylor Lauber succeeds Jared Isaacman as CEO, maintaining strategic consistency.

- Chris Cruz steps in as CFO, focusing on profitability and shareholder value.

• International Expansion (Vectron):

- Vectron acquisition completed, expanding access to 65,000 restaurants in Germany.

- Integration of payments into Vectron’s platform is underway, enhancing international presence.

• SkyTab and Stadiums:

- SkyTab remains the primary POS platform, with strong adoption rates.

- Shift4 holds a significant market share in U.S. stadiums, with a multi-billion dollar payment volume opportunity.

Future Outlook

• Global Blue Acquisition and Synergies:

- Focus on integrating currency conversion and tax-free shopping across the merchant base.

- Potential for increased revenue and improved consumer experiences through synergies.

• Capital Allocation:

- The company plans to reinvest approximately $200 million annually into M&A for market expansion and cross-selling opportunities.

- Emphasis on strategic acquisitions that align with growth and pricing objectives.

Conclusion

For further insights, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Goldman Sachs Communicopia + Technology Conference 2025:

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: All right. We’re going to kick off here. We’re very pleased to have Taylor Lauber, CEO of Shift4 Payments, with us today. Taylor stepped into that role as CEO, was previously President and Chief Strategy Officer. I think most people know him from his time there. He’s been integral to the company for many, many years. Taylor, congrats on being here, your first time in the role.

Taylor Lauber, CEO, Shift4 Payments: Thank you.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: I think last year, Jared was literally in space, and you guys were unable to come. We’re glad you could make it. All right. I think you have been instrumental in driving the strategy of the company for some time. As you think about how you would like to impact the company, what do you think is going to change with you as CEO, and what’s top of mind for you?

Taylor Lauber, CEO, Shift4 Payments: Yeah, it’s a great question. I think what’s important to understand is that our founder is still the largest shareholder in the business. Strategic priorities don’t change much at all. In fact, if we thought the business had to change strategic priorities, I wouldn’t be the right person to affect that anyway, because Jared and I have been really in sync with one another around what we think is the right way to grow the business and what we think our differentiation is going to be. What I will say is we’re a fundamentally different business than we were a year ago, and certainly than we were three years ago. I look back to our IPO, and we were a 600-person business with a nice presence in restaurants, this really nice ability to go win in hotels.

Fast forward to today, we’re, I think, 12 times bigger on an EBITDA basis, 25 times bigger on a free cash flow basis, and 6,000 people, 65% of which are not in the United States, with not only those same rights to win in restaurants and hotels and now stadiums and now luxury retail, among many other things. The business has evolved, and we have to evolve to be able to make sure that these 6,000 people know what’s going to move the needle. In fact, that’s been kind of the most interesting, I think, growth challenge we’ve seen in the business, is what moves the needle is a very fundamentally different thing than two or three years ago. You want to make sure every employee understands that so that they’re spending the time in the right areas.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Got it. Okay. Sticking with the topic of new management, you announced that current board member, Chris Cruz, will be taking over as CFO following Nancy’s retirement from her role and her return to the board. Can you address just the why now aspect of the question, but then bigger picture, just talk about any ongoing priorities or potential shifts with Chris coming into the role of CFO?

Taylor Lauber, CEO, Shift4 Payments: Yeah, sure. Nancy joined us just over three years ago, stepped down from the board to join us as CFO. She was pretty adamant that it was going to be a three-year stint and that we gave her this really ambitious list of objectives to achieve. To her credit, she achieved every one of them. The only ounce of ambiguity in it was Jared’s potential departure from the business. To her credit, she said, "I can give you as much time as you need." I said, "We’re about to embark on the biggest M&A transaction we’ve done in our history. Can I get another three years?" Nancy said, "What have you done for me lately? You can get a lot of my time. I do not want to part ways with this company.

I want to be actively involved, but I want to be actively involved as a board member." We obviously had to respect that. Chris, to his credit, he’s like twice as smart as me because I told Jared no 18 years in a row when he asked me to join the business. Chris only told him no like 10 years in a row. I think Jared and the team have proved both of us wrong in the amount of growth and opportunity they’ve been able to create. What we get in Chris is somewhat unique. He used to own 60% of the business. As a private equity owner in the business, he has been with us that entire past decade and quite frankly stayed on the board long after they divested their share. He brings, I think, among many other things, a really unique appreciation for the hustle.

There’s a lot of hustle involved in kind of what we’re about to accomplish. We’re thrilled to have him and quite frankly, incredibly thrilled to have kind of Nancy’s tutelage through not just the transition. She’s a full-time employee through year-end, but also the next several years as a board member.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Got it. Okay. I wanted to go into one of the topics that came up a lot post-earnings. I guess one thing that I think you have signaled quite clearly, starting at the Investor Day, is a change in the guidance philosophy and kind of seeking to, you know, under-promise and over-deliver. Given all the moving pieces this year, right? An Investor Day in the middle of 1Q, a trade war throughout 2Q, and a transformational deal, it’s been tough to actually test the guidance philosophy. What is the message to shareholders who are wondering if the approach to guidance and the conservatism that you’re looking to achieve has actually changed?

Taylor Lauber, CEO, Shift4 Payments: It’s an awesome question. I’d say I’d root it in what we have the most conviction in, which is when we set kind of our medium-term guidance, we feel really strongly about our ability to achieve that. I think we tried to dimensionalize that in our Investor Day, which is, you know, we’ll tell you what we think the business would do if we never reinvested another dollar. We’ll tell you what we think the inclusion of Global Blue will be. Then we’ll tell you this most likely case, which is that historically, we’ve been able to reinvest our free cash flow and sustain higher levels of growth as a result of that. We feel incredibly highly convicted in that. With that being said, as we think about guidance, we have typically volume that we guide towards for the full year.

We have gross revenue, less network fees, and then we have EBITDA. The thing we have most control over is generally the profitability of the business. Also, revenue is something we have a pretty good line of sight into. Volume can be tricky. We have this interesting mix of SMB and enterprise that’s hitting at the same time. I don’t know that we’ve done ourselves a huge favor to not guide volume quarter to quarter because we certainly have a good insight into a quarter’s worth of volume. I think that’s where some of the disconnect has happened, a quarter like last quarter where we fell right within the range of what we felt comfortable would be or where our volumes would be, and yet the street was slightly off from that.

I think we could do certainly a better job at dimensionalizing the level of control and also giving shorter-term insights into what we think is going on.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Yeah, no, that makes sense. I would just tie in the last two questions together. I think the last couple of years, the company, starting from the top, is very focused on the volume and revenue targets that you laid out in 2021. The company achieved those. I think Nancy, to her credit, did a great job steering items like EBITDA and free cash flow. As you think about kind of new CFO incoming, how do you think about the construction of the guide? Who sets the guide internally? Who’s kind of involved?

Taylor Lauber, CEO, Shift4 Payments: Yeah, ultimately, this is going to be a lot of Chris’s responsibility, which is that he’s the closest to the financial picture of the business, the forecast of the business. It’s our job to make sure that we’re setting up, meaning my job to make sure we’re setting up the business for growth, not in the next quarter or two, but three to five years from now, and that we’re planting seeds because those seeds are what drive that needle-moving performance in the outer years. Chris is going to have a really loud voice in the guidance philosophy of the company. We’re somewhat constrained by the fact that we’ve been public for five years, and there’s expectations that our existing shareholders have about, you know, what we’re going to do. Ultimately, this sits with Chris, and I want to give him time to, you know, approach it.

I will say, as a private equity investor, he is very focused on profitability per share. I mean, that is just the nature of how they think about the world. As we talked with Jared about his potential departure from the business, profitability per share is obviously what he cared the most about as an owner. I want to give Chris some latitude because he’s new in the seat. That is at the end of the day what an owner in the business cares the most about. We want to give good insight because that’s been an incredible KPI that we quite frankly haven’t talked about.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Got it. Yeah, no, it makes sense. All right. Sticking with the topic of the most recent quarter, I think, as you mentioned, revenue came in roughly in line, and then the moving pieces above that were take rate a little bit higher, volumes a little bit lower, at least than what the street had been expecting. You called out some timing shifts on the enterprise volume side, offset by strength on the SMB side. Can you maybe just talk about some of the moving pieces and then how you’re feeling about visibility on kind of go-lives for some of the larger, chunkier clients in the pipeline?

Taylor Lauber, CEO, Shift4 Payments: Yeah, I want to try to demystify this as best I can, and I can’t say we’ve gotten it perfect. What I will say is we had a 17-year history of boarding a pretty ubiquitous type of customer. I jokingly refer to that as the bar and grill in Boise, Idaho. We had a singular product. We had a singular go-to-market, and the average customer looked pretty consistent. From our IPO forward, we were presented with really interesting opportunities. I mentioned that in hotels, stadiums, and a handful of other kind of emerging verticals where the average customer was meaningfully bigger than that bar and grill in Boise, Idaho. I remember back in, I think it was Q3 of 2022, we surprised investors with meaningfully higher volume growth at lower spread because this enterprise opportunity began to manifest itself.

Where we find ourselves today is the book is much more balanced than that. I actually don’t, you know, subscribe to the idea that enterprise has slowed down in a meaningful way. There are always go-lives that maybe are supposed to go this month or went next month or something like that. In reality, we have a robust SMB opportunity. Outside the U.S., the majority of what’s boarding today is an SMB. We’ve got an enterprise opportunity that’s just a little more mature than it was three years ago. It’s the combination of these things that I think we can do a better job of illustrating, you know, the contribution because we started the year with high conviction in spreads, which kind of definitionally means we feel pretty comfortable about the way the book’s going to manifest itself, and that’s played out.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Yeah, got it. All right. On the SMB side, it’s very clear from the quarter that the SMB onboarding seemed to be outperforming. The commentary on spreads for the remainder of the year was pretty upbeat. It seems like in particular, you’ve seen some traction on the international front. Maybe just update us on what you’re seeing on the SMB footprint today and particularly on the international trajectory.

Taylor Lauber, CEO, Shift4 Payments: Yeah, sure. I’ll start with the premise that whether it’s a recent M&A transaction where we see a lot of cross-sell opportunity or it’s a new market that we’re entering for the first time, SMBs are always the first to adopt the value proposition. It’s not uniquely valuable to SMBs. It’s the reality that if you’re a single decision-maker in a small business, you can sign a piece of paper today, and we can implement you tomorrow. If you’re signing up in the U.K., your payment device shows up the next day by way of example. SMBs are the quickest to adopt the value proposition, whether it’s in a new country or as a result of a recent M&A transaction. As time goes by, you have the ability to go win medium-sized merchants.

I think if the gateway acquisitions of years past are any indication, after a handful of years, you can win the largest of the enterprise opportunities inside of them. In a year where we’ve just completed a lot of M&A, we’ve seen good traction within the SMBs. In a year where we’ve started to hit stride internationally, you’re seeing a lot of SMB activity. I don’t think it’s a commentary on our ability to win enterprise. I think it’s the relative maturity of a handful of different strategies that are going on right now.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Got it. Okay. Sticking with the international footprint, I was wanting to give you a talk specifically about Vectron. I know it was an extended closing process. I think you now have full control over that asset. What are the day-one changes that you’re making to the organization? You know, any updated thoughts on rough timelines for bringing a SkyTab to that market?

Taylor Lauber, CEO, Shift4 Payments: Yeah, sure. Just to level set, Vectron was a restaurant point-of-sale business we really got to know well in Germany. They had about 65,000 restaurants using their point-of-sale platform, very few of which had ever adopted payments as an integrated solution, most of them using a bank terminal off to the side. Really interestingly, they had this awesome reseller network of about 300 value-added resellers that found the customers, installed the customers, and serviced them. Why is that valuable to us? I don’t speak German. If we want to be in these markets, an embedded and trusted reseller network who knows where the customers are is going to be our fastest time to market. We agreed to pursue Vectron. We ended up acquiring about 75% of the shares and then went through a procedural process to gain operational control of the business.

I think this is one area, if we’re being self-critical, the timing around international acquisitions is something that has taken longer than we would have anticipated. It took until about June of this past year to gain operational control of Vectron. What does it mean? It means all the employees are part of our system. They were never part of our system before that. They look at all the same screens we look at. The value proposition can be clearly pushed around what this means. It was important to us and important, procedurally, that Vectron ran the way it kind of always had up until we were able to get control of the business. Today, several hundred merchants a month are joining our payments value proposition. We don’t have an urgency to push SkyTab in a market where there’s 65,000 customers already using a piece of software that they like.

We’ll make sure SkyTab is ready for any of those customers that want to migrate to an Android-based solution over the years. Right now, it’s really about making sure their existing customers have an integrated payments experience and that they’re really happy with it. Over time, we’ll just make sure they’ve got the right product for the next evolution.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: What about the opportunity with the resellers? Do you think net new business in Germany could start to be deployed on SkyTab over some period of time?

Taylor Lauber, CEO, Shift4 Payments: You know, this is such a fascinating thing with resellers because the immediate opportunity is all of their existing customers. They’ve never run their business that way. They run their business by adding new customers all the time. It’s actually an interesting mix of new customers they add where they attach payments and software right at the start of the value proposition, right at the start, and then existing customers where they add on payments to them. We would expect just instinctually it’s easier to go after your existing customer, but that’s not what salespeople do for a living. Right now, it’s a healthy mix of both, and that’s great because it keeps the cross-sell funnel full for a long period of time.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Got it. All right. Sticking with SkyTab, this is the company’s primary POS platform. How should we be measuring your progress on growing the SkyTab footprint both here and abroad?

Taylor Lauber, CEO, Shift4 Payments: I’ll tell you how we measure it. We measure it at two different levels. We look at the penetration rate of the product, and then we look at the KPIs within the merchants that they’re installing in. By that measure, everything looks great, meaning, you know, the existing customer using it is bigger on average than it was a year ago. The retention rate is higher than it was a year ago. The satisfaction rate is higher than it was a year ago. One misconception I think investors could have is that we mandate that every one of our customers be on SkyTab, and we simply don’t. To this day, more restaurants are using another product than are using SkyTab because we only started to say SkyTab is the product you’re going to sell just three years ago. We’re very happy with the customer-level adoption of it.

We are not insistent that a restaurant switch to it. Quite frankly, it doesn’t change our economics much if they switch to it. If they’re happy, we’re happy. In the case where they become unhappy with, you know, an older piece of software or they want to upgrade the hardware technology in their ecosystem, we offer SkyTab there. It’s a very small percentage of the customers that use SkyTab are upgrades. We still push it as our net new product offering. I think Vectron, which you highlighted, is a good example of that. There’s no reason to disrupt 65,000 restaurants because we want them on a different software suite. It’s capital intensive, and it creates friction. We’ll make sure it’s available for them should they want to use it.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Got it. Yeah, just to be clear on that, on the Vectron side, are you allowing those resellers to continue to sell the legacy Vectron product for net new purposes?

Taylor Lauber, CEO, Shift4 Payments: 100%.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Okay. Yeah. Got it. All right. You also, I mean, to stick with this topic of the backlog, it sounds like there hasn’t historically been a lot of conversions from HarborTouch, Focus POS, POSitouch. You know, how do you think about this idea of kind of mining the backlog over time versus kind of, you know, continuing to cash flow what I assume is a pretty profitable customer base?

Taylor Lauber, CEO, Shift4 Payments: Yeah, it’s all about what’s satisfaction of the customer and what do they think is going to drive the best guest experience for them. We certainly are there to the extent they say, "I’m looking at, I want to upgrade," or, "I want something that’s Android-based," or, you know, "I want a better integration to, I don’t know, DoorDash or Uber Eats or something like that." We offer SkyTab on those terms. In reality, I think SkyTab is much more about making sure our salesforce can win the incremental customer today. It’s a tough debate because there’s a lot of operational efficiency in having every customer on a common piece of software. There are some capital trade-offs to doing that in a rushed fashion. We look every day and we say, "What’s the likelihood that this customer is going to continue to be happy on that product?

What mechanisms do we have to make sure that to the extent they want to look at something new, SkyTab is the first product that they look at?" We’re very happy with, I think, the relative mix of that strategy today.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Got it. Okay. Let’s talk about Global Blue, transformatively large acquisition, largest in the company’s history. Can you just level set on, you know, what are you expecting for the business? I think you said high single digits previously. I know there’s been a little bit of focus on some of the disclosures they put out prior to the deal, seeing some very strong growth in kind of local currency terms. Maybe just talk through your expectations and, you know, maybe talk through some of the puts and takes from kind of gyrations in the macro year to date.

Taylor Lauber, CEO, Shift4 Payments: Yeah, sure. First of all, it’s an amazing business. I think ignore kind of the niche of commerce that they serve, which is, you know, they help a traveler abroad get a tax refund for purchasing, you know, which is generally a luxury good. They have a really strong market share in that. They’ve grown it quite steadily vis-à-vis their competition. They are embedded and a critical component of the European and Asian locations for the best retailers in the world. This is a door opener for us to talk to these awesome customers about the rest of their commerce ecosystem. What we liked about the business is they had a demonstrated track record of gaining share against, you know, a relatively limited field of competition.

We actually got to witness, because we’ve spent over five years looking at it, we got to witness how the business would behave in pretty existentially scary scenarios, whether that’s a pandemic, whether it’s, you know, a large shopper base encountering economic duress, whether it’s the U.K., which I think was their largest country at the time, simply saying, "We don’t allow this anymore." I mean, we got to watch the business and the resiliency of that business through some pretty interesting shocks. What did you see? You saw they steadily won share. They had far more control over their own destiny than we expected.

They have an ability to grow inside of their customers that is incredibly unique, which is that if I can make this process easier and I can make it more digital, more refunds occur, and therefore my merchants make more money, we make more money, and the consumer gets a better experience. All of that attracted us to the business in an undeniable way. To your point, kind of attracted us to the business to the conviction level of, "We will do the largest transaction in our history by an order of magnitude." Isolating them as a standalone business, I am short term, you know, certainly they benefit from currency fluctuation, and they get detrimented by it. There’s, you know, there’s ebbs and flows.

They would tell you over the medium term that they thought they could grow the business kind of 12% to 14% pretty consistently over, you know, several years. They would do that through a combination of luxury market growth, countries that are net adding this as a benefit, and customers. Lastly, that digitization concept. We felt really convicted in kind of three of those, the ones that were in our control. What we felt a little uneasy about was how do we know what luxury markets’ growth is going to do? Yet, when you sort of say, "We can bring a lot of synergies to this business. Their currency conversion product, we can instantly enable all of our customers for once the work’s done.

You know, we can actually cross-sell a lot of their customers on payments." You could get conviction that the luxury market doesn’t have to grow for it to be an awesome grower. If the luxury market does grow, it’s an even better grower than that.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Yeah. No, that makes sense. Okay. I guess getting to the exciting part on the synergies, I think you outlined the fairly conservative approach you took to deriving the synergies that you expect from the deal. I think it’d be helpful to just go through them again. You know, what’s going to be your approach to realizing those synergies, having those conversations with merchants, and kind of where do you expect the synergies to come from initially?

Taylor Lauber, CEO, Shift4 Payments: Yeah. It’s a great question. Keep in mind the secondary of the two products, but they are a category leader in currency conversion, offering that to the consumer at the point of sale. We’ve never offered to any of our customers ever before, yet we support 40% of the hotels in the country. We support a lot of these environments where it’s a pretty common product. In that regard, it was obvious to us that if we own this business, we can kill five birds in our product development pipeline by enabling that inside of our own merchant base. It’s table stakes if you’re going to Europe. Merchants demand it at the point you’re installing. In America, it’s a real nice-to-have. We now get to enable all of our merchants with it.

On the currency conversion side, we get to take what would have been a partnership, and suddenly we own a best-in-class provider in that regard. On the tax-free side, these are merchants that every one of them is hobbling together a payment solution. Some work better than others. We can now deliver all of that under one roof. In the best circumstances, that means we can offer immediate eligibility detection. The retailer is not guessing that you’re eligible for this. You’ve paid, and the software recognizes you as eligible for this refund, and it drives the cashier through the experience. Business owners love it because that cashier might not otherwise know to do this. Now that you’ve integrated the products really, really tightly, the consumer is going to get money back that they didn’t realize they could get back.

The cashier is going to drive revenue back to your business and incremental spend that they didn’t have before. We think by owning all these value, these components of the commerce chain, we can actually just create a better experience. That’s been evidenced by the likes of LVMH and their best, largest, most global customers that demanded a lot of this efficiency. We can bring it all the way down to the SMB, who quite frankly has a pretty disjointed experience today and can get a lot better through a single vendor.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Makes a lot of sense. All right. One minor modeling point, I made a note to ask this. Could you just remind us on the geography of Global Blue, how should we expect those revenues to show up in the income statement?

Taylor Lauber, CEO, Shift4 Payments: Yeah, sure. I’ll start by saying the next few quarters are pretty easy. We have a regulatory obligation to report them as a standalone business for the next few quarters, so no mysteries there. Outside of that, they are denominated in U.S. dollars, with about two-thirds of their revenue coming from euro-denominated activity and a third coming from Asia activity. It is a business that is more susceptible to currency fluctuation than others we’ve had in the past. Ultimately, translated back to U.S. dollars, it is a little bit more susceptible to geopolitical events. Obviously, people have to want to travel for this to be a product that has adoption through it. In terms of the contribution, I would think about a third of our total business is in geographies we haven’t been in before, which is really exciting.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Got it. Okay. Great. All right. In the absence of disclosing kind of quarterly organic growth, how would you encourage investors to gauge the organic growth of the business? How are you thinking about organic growth disclosures over time?

Taylor Lauber, CEO, Shift4 Payments: I’m going to channel my predecessor and get a little cynical for a second because there’s this debate. Are we phenomenal capital allocators who find excellent businesses and pay really low prices for them? Or do we buy really old-aging businesses and extract a ton of synergies out of them? The reality is we’re pretty good at both of those things. The way it manifests itself is we have a sales funnel that is always incredibly large, meaning we could double, triple, quadruple the business without finding a new customer. Global Blue obviously makes sure that funnel is incredibly full. Separately, we have go-to-markets that are pretty unique in the verticals that we aim to serve. The combination of those things represents itself in, you know, times like this, 20%+ organic growth, but also a really interesting opportunity to synergize businesses.

I think this is not as manifested as I think investors love to focus on the revenue growth as the metric that they want to look at. The reality is our margins, despite having done a lot of M&A, even in very recent terms, our margins have expanded the whole time. That’s where you get the, that’s where you can notice the benefit of delivering a really good synergized product in the face of M&A because we don’t buy 50% margin businesses. Yet, even though you’re getting this low margin business, the synergies are realized pretty quickly.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Yeah, makes sense. All right. Just on the stadium side, you’ve obviously made a lot of progress in the vertical. Where do you stand now in terms of market share? Bigger picture, when we think about the payment flows at stadiums, how do you measure market share? How do you measure wallet share? If you could just update us, how much of the ticketing opportunity have we actually seen come through the numbers?

Taylor Lauber, CEO, Shift4 Payments: Yeah, sure. I’ll start by saying I won’t comment on our market share. That’s for good reasons. We have a lot of it, and we have a lot of it across every league in the United States. We’ve found adoption across MLS, NHL, NBA, NFL, and most recently, a lot of adoption in Major League Baseball. We’ve also found the product has tons of applicability in the broader theme of entertainment. You’ll find us in most theme parks and increasingly in the stadiums, zoos, and everything else. The TAM is a bit larger than we would have anticipated for the product itself. What we would have said is that we thought the U.S. stadium opportunity, meaning in-venue commerce, is probably a high single-digit billions payment volume opportunity. When you can attach ticketing, it’s like three to five times that.

Today, if I were to look at a month’s worth of volume today, ticketing and in-venue are about the same.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Got it.

Taylor Lauber, CEO, Shift4 Payments: What is the opportunity? The opportunity is that ticketing shouldn’t be three to five times what it is. We can still win, we can still win more stadiums.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Got it. All right. I’m going to try to speed run through the last vertical here on hospitality. I think the hospitality of the footprint is sort of a hidden gem of the company, really strong competitive dynamics. You’re one of the biggest providers in the industry. I think one flip side of that is, you know, high market share, digitized in market. You know, the growth tailwinds are naturally a bit lower or so you would think. Is that right? Do you feel like there’s more to go get in the U.S. hospitality space? Then you could talk about the opportunity to take your U.S. footprint abroad.

Taylor Lauber, CEO, Shift4 Payments: Yeah, sure. I’ll start by saying we believe we have about 40% of the hotels in the United States on our platform. We’ve got, you know, one and a half more to go for every one that we have. The opportunity inside the United States is tremendous. Recent examples of kind of how far that can go, Altera Mountain Resorts, where we’re doing all of their resorts, plus a really strong opportunity in their e-commerce volume where they sell their season tickets to their mountains. The Wynn Casino Resort in Las Vegas is an example of how far this can go. That was a win, no pun intended, off the street, like a new customer joining us for the first time. The opportunity inside the United States is still quite robust. The maturity of the market outside the United States is very, very, very far behind.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Yeah.

Taylor Lauber, CEO, Shift4 Payments: Your average hotel is still using a bank terminal. Our value proposition should resonate incredibly nicely. To the extent it’s the same software company selling into those hotels and some of the same brands that exist inside the United States, our value prop is already well known. It is a big area of focus for us. We actually don’t need to distract ourselves with either one to win. These are completely independent teams pursuing the opportunities, all with the payment platform that we have, which is we’re integrated to the 1,200 most popularly used pieces of software for a hotel.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Got it. All right. I have here a question 15. What is Jared up to? I think we can see in the Form 4s what his thoughts are on the stock, but maybe if you could talk a little bit about his involvement in the company and, you know, what his focuses are on a day-to-day basis.

Taylor Lauber, CEO, Shift4 Payments: Yeah, sure. It’s fun. We have several hours a week where we work with Jared on different initiatives. He’s talked about things being really important to him or the capital allocation philosophy of the business. Where is the next dollar spent and why is something he’s just really passionate about. The success of SkyTab as a product and then international expansion and making sure that we don’t repeat the same mistakes that we made over the last 20 years building this in the United States. Taking those early days lessons learned and applying them to new markets is something that he’s been really instrumental with. We talk regularly, every few days around these big topics. He’s my largest shareholder. I need him thrilled and happy and low stress. I like to use him very sparingly. Interestingly, he’s still on all of our distribution lists.

If you do something stupid, you still see the missile on occasion from Jared hit the inbox. Like, what are you talking about? I think this opportunity that he had with government forced us to really focus on the priorities and what’s he great at and make sure he gets to do just that and just what he enjoys and what’s all the other stuff that comes with a 6,000-person company that quite frankly can distract Jared from what he wants to do. You’re right, largest shareholder, very much our North Star in terms of how we think about driving value for him and can certainly help us from repeating mistakes that he’s learned over the last 26 years running the business, but also deserves the opportunity to be on a bigger stage.

I don’t know when he’s in the White House, that feels like an appropriate setting for kind of the ambition he’s taken on and the amount of and then the level of problems I think he can be applied to. I think we’ve found a decent mix for today.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Got it. Last minute here, just wanted to hit on capital allocation. You’ve been very clear more M&A is likely to continue in the near term. Are we expecting a digestion period post-Global Blue? Is it full steam ahead? Maybe just a more tactical question. In your long-term targets around the most likely case, what’s a reasonable amount to include from year to year?

Taylor Lauber, CEO, Shift4 Payments: That’s a great question. It’s easier to answer that question, which is that over a sustained period of time, what do we think you could reliably reinvest into the business and maintain, you know, really nice growth rates as a % of that? We, you know, when we laid out our most likely case, we contemplated about $200 million a year in redeployment into M&A opportunities that either give us access to new markets or give us cross-sell or something like that. The reason I say it’s the easy question is because it’s not up to us when we buy things. I know that sounds strange, but we have an incredibly rigid philosophy in what we’re willing to pay and the demands we expect and what, quite frankly, synergies we can bring to a business.

This manifests itself very cleanly in the fact that we bought six businesses over the last 18 months, many of which we have looked at for five plus years. We’ve got some of our best investment banking advisors in the room here at Goldman, and they know how picky we are in working through these philosophies. What I would tell you is when a deal meets our growth objectives and our price objectives, you kind of have to do it. You’d sooner integrate slower and know you’ve got it than move faster. All this to say, I think the last couple of years we saw a really robust opportunity. Who’s to say what the next few years look like, but we’re in 50 new countries that we weren’t in before. The opportunity is certainly not shrinking.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Great. I think with that, we’re out of time. Taylor, thanks for doing this. Really great to see you and appreciate the conversation.

Taylor Lauber, CEO, Shift4 Payments: Thank you.

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