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

Andrew Jeffrey: Good morning and thanks for taking my question. Very nice quarter. Congratulations. Melissa, in health care, in particular, the custodial revenue is sort of a nice maybe — I don’t want to say surprise, but maybe it feels like a little bit of a surprise a market. SaaS account growth looked a bit above trend. Can you just elaborate a little bit? Are we seeing — is that a function of signing more employers? Or is it a function of more employees adopting to self-directed health care? Or is it a combination? I’m just wondering how much of a sort of secular tailwind you might be seeing in that business today?

Melissa Smith: Yes. We do think that the market has a secular tailwind. But in 2022, the growth actually largely came from new accounts. So just really strong sales, so we brought into the marketplace. And as I said, at the end of the year, we actually did a little bit better than we had anticipated going into 2023, which is part of what we’re reflecting in the forward guide. So each of the channels that we have when we go into the marketplace, we’ve got our direct channel, which we go through brokers and then our partner channel. If you take a look across the business in 2023, we really had strengths in each of those, and that really led to the strong account growth.

Andrew Jeffrey: And is there anything to think about if indeed we get a significant change in the employment environment. If unemployment were to go up in a meaningful way, does that sort of inform your growth expectations in that business?

Melissa Smith: If you have a good counterbalance in the fact that we provide COBRA products also and so, what we have seen historically is you might have a migration from one account type to another, which gives us a bit of a buffer even if you did see something happen in the marketplace. It’s not what we’re seeing in our data. But again, we think we actually have a pretty good buffer if that does happen.

Operator: And next, we’ll go to Ken Suchoski with Autonomous Research. Your line is open.

Ken Suchoski: Good morning everyone. Thanks for taking my question. Melissa, you mentioned the two percentage points of growth from new products and cross-selling taking a more prominent role in 2023. Can you just talk about where you see the low-hanging fruit? And can you provide a little more detail on how that cross-sell works? And how you’re positioning the sales force for that? Thank you.

Melissa Smith: Yes, sure. So we’ve got growth in our long-term model of 4% to 5% that comes from our existing customer base. We had 14% in ’22. So we had a really strong number in ’22. A piece of that, we think, will come from just market growth, different markets that are growing. And then on top of that, both pricing actions and cross-selling. From a cross-sell perspective, I’d say it’s really early. And our focus, and as I said in the last call, has been setting up the right infrastructure across the business so that we can make that much more seamless. Right now, we’re doing it based on inherent relationships and luckily have really strong relationships across the portfolio. So we’re bringing those relationships from one segment to another to offer different products.