WEX Inc. (NYSE:WEX) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Ramsey El-Assal: Good morning and thank you so much for taking my question. Could you flesh out a little bit the $100 million of operating cost reduction, I think, by the end of ’24 is what you said? Just curious, where do you see — where are you going to get those savings? What types of sort of lower-hanging fruit is now in the organization that you can kind of economize on in order to get there?

Jagtar Narula: Yes. So let me start with it and Melissa will chime in if needed. So the cost reduction is primarily coming in several areas. So first, we’ve looked at our organizational structure and we’ve looked at the number of management layers and how we better optimize the structure. So we see some of that coming out of that. And you may have seen in our release, some restructuring charges related to that. That reflects what we’re doing there. The second piece of it is operating efficiencies. We have a large operating infrastructure, call centers, processing centers, et cetera. And we’re making technology enhancements, better optimizing efficiency of those centers that we expect to reduce the cost to be able to process more in those centers.

We’re doing some areas in our technology development, where we expect to economize where we do development that will lead to cost savings. And then the last area, is better purchasing, right? We’ve invested in our procurement function. We expect to get better spend out of our existing vendors. And so, those four items are really where we’re expecting the bulk of what will happen this year into ’24.

Melissa Smith: Yes. And the thing I would add is the headcount changes he’s talked about, we announced those a while ago. So we wanted to get ahead of this and did this really proactively. And then the second part I’d say is a lot of the changes that we’re making are using more modern technology. So anything from what we would call it super robotics, automation, up to machine learning to AI. And so, as we deploy those tools into our infrastructure, that’s creating synergies. And again, it’s allowing us to create a more intuitive customer experience. So the combination of the data that we’re sitting on, which is just a massive amount of data, with that technology combined is leading to the savings that we’re talking about.

Ramsey El-Assal: That’s very helpful. One quick follow-up for me. I was wondering if you could comment on your credit loss expectations in 2023. It looks like you’re guiding for a decrease relative to the 4Q ’22 exit rate. But at the same time, it seems like your guidance implies that sort of a deteriorating macro situation, even though that’s not what you’re seeing today. I’m just trying to square that in terms of whether you’re maybe more aggressively underwriting or you’re lying in some additional strategies to control for credit losses. Does that make sense?

Jagtar Narula: Yes, Ramsey, let me address those. So we’ve got some puts and takes there in our guidance. One, from what we’re doing with our current book and adjudication of new customers, and the second from what we’re just projecting from an economic standpoint, right? So starting with what we’re doing in our — with our current book of customers. We’ve been taking action. You heard me talk about the elevated credit losses we saw in Q4. As I’ve said, it’s predominantly a small segment of our customers. It’s our over-the-road segment, which is a smaller subset of our total loan balances. And within that, it’s really the smaller trucking fleets, I think that is like one to two truck fleets that were largely the customers that are new on book for the last couple of years.