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

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So, it’s not hitting the pace of progress inside of our business. And the international acquisition of the PSP that we mentioned last quarter is just another example. So, we’re kind of operating strategically with this full speed ahead mentality. The opportunity of owning a bank in Europe is really quite high, that the opportunity cost of that is the fact that these regulatory approvals can take up to 18 months, as I mentioned in my comments. So, we’re pleased with the progress that we’ve made thus far. We do expect that we report is a slightly opaque nature, which is I’d say nothing more than mildly frustrating. I don’t think it has a significant impact on performance one quarter to the next.

Andrew Bauch: That’s good to hear. And then I wanted to get a little bit more color around the investment philosophy here. And what are the key kind of macro indicators that you guys are looking for to give you more confidence of, say, stepping down the gas regarding investments. I mean I really appreciate the commentary in the shareholder letter that said focusing on upgrading talent versus outright adding heads. So, maybe if you could just kind of give a sense of the investment versus the macro and maybe how — what areas of the upgrading talent you’re really focused on?

Taylor Lauber: Stepping on the gas is an interesting way to phrase it because I think we kind of always feel like our it’s pretty heavy down on the gas. The reality is we think about kind of capital deployment or M&A, if you will, through the lens — through a couple lens, number one, is there a capability that we need that we don’t have that an acquisition accelerates our base into and I would say that’s been a portion of our M&A, but not the entirety of it. Another portion is just, is this a customer acquisition cost funnel that is substantially lower than finding them. And I think if you look at things like the acquisition of Merchant Link gateway, like the acquisition of the restaurant ISP brands that we have before that, that was always to accumulate really, really nice groups of captive customers at a very attractive customer acquisition costs.

We monitor for that all the time. I don’t think market valuations have a huge bearing on that and we execute when and where it’s appropriate. I think the tougher one is the first thing I mentioned there, which is capability enhancements, you do typically have to pay more for or you might not get the instant margin accretion from a transaction like that, and you have to be very disciplined on what you’re willing to pay for it. We’ve seen the opportunity to continually progress throughout this cycle. I mean you’ve seen multiples in our industry get pretty battered and you see good opportunity for expansion, but we also want to be really disciplined. We don’t just want to buy a capability to answer. We want to make sure we’re buying what was inherently a good company before we approach it, it needs to be able to operate at a reasonable profit on its own right before we can get confidence that plugging it into our business is the right thing to do.

Jared, anything else you

Jared Isaacman: Yes, I think I’d just say this is an area that maybe look a little bit towards our past. Prior to the IPO, going back to really 2015 timeframe, we had a key sponsoring that kept us in at a comfortable six times leverage predominantly to support periodic dividend recaps. And throughout that time period, we were reasonably active with M&A, which meant a lot of the acquisitions had to be on a synergized basis, essentially deleveraging virtually instantly. Fortunately, our current leverage profile, we don’t necessarily have to find those gems, but what I will say right now is that we are looking at deals that essentially on a fully synergized basis would be deleveraging inside of 12 to 18 months, which Taylor referenced in his prepared remarks.

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