Shift4 Payments, Inc. (NYSE:FOUR) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Taylor Lauber: The one thing I’d add on just to help contextualize it for smaller merchants on the gateway and the B2B merchants doing $1 million, $2 million, $3 million a year in volume. These decisions are typically made by the owner/operator. They happen quite quickly. They happen regular course and we get hundreds of these a month. And it’s really just a function of getting the time with that owner operator to have the conversation on the benefits and obviously, the pricing actions that Jared mentioned do like slightly nudge the conversation in our direction. Larger operators, and there are many multibillion dollar sort of companies that are using the gateway, take longer naturally to make these decisions. They happen over multiple quarters.

So, the one thing that Nancy mentioned in her script that we want to be mindful of is, we’ve had a lot more time to have these big conversations with state merchants. And so, as they agree to move over and increasingly, they are — it creates a little bit of lumpiness in sort of the volume growth in the quarter and the corresponding spread that we deliver in that quarter. So, we want to be cautious that we have a good enterprise-level conversation that can make the volume growth in this effective spread a little bit more volatile, all for very good reasons. But that’s sort of some color behind the scenes on the nature of the really big merchants and their decision-making.

William Nance: Got it. Appreciate you taking the question. Very helpful.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from Darrin Peller from Wolfe Research. Darrin, please go ahead.

Darrin Peller: Hey guys, nice results. Thanks. Listen, I wanted to touch on the international build a little more on the opportunity there. Obviously, when you closed the deal, the Finaro deal will help. But if you can give us a sense in the past — and what you see as the opportunity in terms of vertical expansion? I know you have obviously your large customer as an anchor, it’s helping. But what kind of opportunity do you really see that being both in 2023 and then maybe a little bit longer term, Jared? And then, Nancy, just a quick follow-up on the financial side. That kind of relates because you’re going to have to spend time and money building that out, I imagine. And so, when we think about the margin implications of something like that, and I guess if we back out the residual benefit you have in either last year or this year, it looks like your margins are basically stable with the expansion coming from those initiatives.

So, what’s happening under the hood in terms of investment and what you can do on the margin front as you’re building out? Thanks guys.

Jared Isaacman: Nancy, why don’t you start?

Nancy Disman: Okay. Starting on the margin side, I would say you’re right. Certainly, the in-force distribution helps the margin lift by design, of course, right? And so, I think as we’re strategically looking at where we want to invest for growth. From an international perspective, a lot of these kind of tuck-in or small technology and product deals that we’re looking at to provide us a lot of opportunity to create the investments that we need kind of outside of the US, right? So, we don’t really need to use kind of the US platform necessarily to make core investments for that expansion. And when I look at Shift4 and kind of the history of Shift4, I think there was some discipline but the opportunity here without really cutting into any kind of muscle or really, I would say we’re just at like a very first layer of fat level and just really putting better process in place that will generate a lot of that margin expansion from here forward that you’re looking at.

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