But when I think about the embedded opportunity on transaction growth, do you guys have a lot there, do you expect that to be strong and embedded or is that really not built in?
Michael Brown : Well, first of all, we just saw — when you look at the — when the transactions occur in a given quarter like Q3, the bulk of them come in July and August and well less of them come in September and then less in October. And we saw that kick up in September. So it’s just too early to see that make its way through the entire quarter. So that’s why you don’t see so much this quarter. It’s just a timing kind of thing. And so I think that was your first question. I’m trying to remember what your second question was. Rick, do you remember?
Darrin Peller : I’m just trying to think about next year, you guys are giving us a 10% to 15% guide on EPS. I would think there should be a lot of levers to get there without even transactions….
Michael Brown : And we think we’re even taking the negative FX headwinds plus the share repurchases, plus what everybody else has on their page right now, looks like we’re at the upper end of that range. But I want to tell you, that’s our range. And that’s all we’ll say. But our goal will be, do better than that. I mean, everybody in our company is focused. We really love the fact that from 2010 to 2019, for 10 years in a row, we never grew at less than a 20% growth rate over prior year. Those were the good times. We’d love to have those back, but we’re just giving everybody a guidance now of 10% to 15%. And when we beat it, then we’ll all be happy.
Operator: And our next question is going to come from the line of Andrew Jeffrey with Truist Securities.
Andrew Jeffrey : Appreciate the attempt to simplify everything. I think that makes a ton of sense. Mike, I want to shift gears a little bit and ask you about Money Transfer. You’ve done a really nice job building out the agent network and you mentioned the growth in deposits into connected accounts. Can you talk a little bit about the slowdown we’ve seen in the last 12 months in your digital transaction growth and whether that’s just sort of law of large numbers or normalization? And how you position yourself versus some of the digital-only competition in the market that has maintained significantly faster digital growth and kind of just how you think about the competitive positioning of the business overall, I guess?
Michael Brown : I think we’ve done a pretty good job, but it has slowed a little bit, and we’re taking a harder look at that on the ways that we might be able to accelerate that. But we’ve also heard through — and you’ll probably see this start to bear out over the next quarter or two, there is some slowdown everywhere. I mean the reality is of the $800 billion family remittance market, only about 35% of it is done digitally. So that’s it. Most people come to a new country and they’re kind of cash-based citizens or workers just like they were in their old country. So that’s one of the assets that we have as we’re both bricks and mortar and digital. And so if you’ve got 35% of the market is digital, at some point in time after all this market share gets acquired, you start to bang up against the ceiling. And I think you’ll see us and others probably do that. But we’ve got some new tricks up our sleeve that we hope will reaccelerate that as we go forward.
Operator: Our next question is going to come from the line of Mike Grondahl with Northland Securities.
Mike Grondahl : Thanks for all the data on the ATM business. You talked about redeploying some of that ATM fleet and $20 million of cost saves next year. Roughly, are you talking 1,500 ATMs that need to be moved, 3,000? Just trying to get a feel for how many you’ve identified or what you think you need to move.
Michael Brown : Well, there’s over 1,000, but we’ll just have to see what the final numbers are. And we need to take into consideration there are some other changes in the works, Mike. For example, some countries are considering raising their domestic interchange fees. Other countries are thinking about doing surcharge. So you don’t want to be — you don’t want to pull an ATM that’s making a little bit of money, that could make a lot of money with those changes. So we’re going to be careful, but we have already identified some ATM. I think at the end of the day, we just want EFT’s profits to grow. And I think that’s more important to you than how many ATMs we have out there.
Operator: Our next question is going to come from the line of Ken Suchoski with Autonomous Research.
Ken Suchoski : The high-value transactions obviously had a nice rebound in September, and it sounds like some of this is just European travelers delaying their summer vacation from June, July to a less costly September. So I guess, is the expectation that you had this kind of jump this pop and that from here, you have a slower recovery because I’m not sure if people are taking their summer trip in the fourth quarter. And then I guess, more broadly, like what gives you the confidence that this isn’t just another headshake and that you’re going to track your own control trends more closely going forward?
Michael Brown : Well, I think the most obvious thing is you look at people other than Europeans, and we beat the number every month this year. So anybody traveling to Europe from outside is using ATMs more than they ever have. You’re right. Our challenge right now is the economics within Europe. And so the question is, how do you beat it? I think you beat it by continuing to expand into virgin territory. Certainly, these new markets outside of Europe are just killer markets. I mean, they just make lots of money, where we’ll continue to do that. And that gives us — and then we will find any of those ATMs that we believe are not profitable enough, we’ll take those out and use them instead of buying new CapEx machines and put them into the spots that we have.
We have several markets in Europe, for instance, that we’re opening up or starting to expand within, for example, France and Belgium and Albania that are three — France is not a new market for us. The other two are but it’s well underserved. We mentioned that we got that contract in France for 150 ATM. There are more tourists that come to France than to any other country in the world. So there are still spots that we believe that we can make money, and that’s where we’re going to redeploy these ATMs that we pull out.
Operator: And our last question is going to come from the line of Charles Nabhan with Stephens.
Charles Nabhan : Most of my questions have been asked already, but I wanted to get your perspective on capital allocation. You got about $1 billion in cash on hand and you’ve been pretty active buying back shares, but M&A has also been a small part of the strategy, and I think you did the Philippines deal last year. So I’m curious how you’re thinking about that balance going forward if the redeployment of ATM strategy changes anything with respect to going out and acquiring ATMs like you’ve done in the past?
