Boku, Inc. (BOKU) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

March 19, 2024

London Stock Exchange GB Financials Financial Services earnings 43 min

Earnings Call Speaker Segments

Tim Metcalfe

attendee
#1

My name is Tim McCalfe. I'm Managing Director of IFC Advisory, which is Boku's Financial PR and Investor Relations agency. With me, I've got Stuart Neal, CEO of Boku; and Keith Butcher, CFO. Stuart and Keith are going to run you through a presentation that they've been giving to investors and we'll be doing over the coming days. And then, at the end of the presentation, we'll have the opportunity for a Q&A session. [Operator Instructions]. Okay. So without further ado, I'll hand over to Stuart to start the presentation. Stuart?

Stuart Neal

executive
#2

Thanks, Tim, and good evening all wherever you're happy to be in the world. I hope you're having a good day. And thanks for joining and also thank you for your interest in Boku. So I'm going to do a quick introduction. And then I'll pass it quickly to Keith, who's going to run us through our latest set of financials. And then following that, Keith will hand it back to me, and I will do a bit of a refresh on the Boku strategy and bring you up to date with our thinking in terms of the future. So let me just flip this on. So I'm Stuart Neal. I am, as of the first of January this year, the CEO of Boku, and I would like to hand this over now to Keith Butcher, our CFO. Keith, over to you.

Keith Butcher

executive
#3

Thanks, Stuart. [indiscernible] Sorry, and good evening, everybody. Thanks for joining. Yes, let me just quickly go through -- got 3 or 4 slides on the results for the year. So let me just quickly put out a few highlights. So 2023 is a very successful year for Boku from a revenue perspective. Revenues up 30% and almost $90 million up to $82.7 million, up from just over $63 million last year. That's a long way ahead of where we had expected to be. And in fact, where the market expected to be, I think the market consensus at the start of this year was around about $70 million. So we've come in significantly over that. That 30% is actually 33% growth, if you actually took out the slightly negative impact of FX on our results. So a great result, and I'll come on to the drivers of that shortly. The second line talks to you about the revenues that are coming from our newer forms of payment. For those of you who don't know, we grew our original business -- was carried -- sorry, direct carry billing is where the bulk of our revenues come from, but we launched into these newer payment types a few -- a couple of years ago, and we've seen very, very strong growth and the main driver of our business is connecting our global merchants to these other payment types globally, and Stuart will talk to those. As you can see, revenues up to $16.9 million from these newer payment types, up from $6.7 million last year. And then we're now runrating about 25% of our monthly revenues are coming from these newer payment types, up from virtually nothing a couple of years ago. And this will be the primary driver of our business growth as we look out to sort of the next few years. For those of you, we calculate our take rate as the percentage of our total value process that we take in as revenues. And that's part of our business is growing or sort of that take rate on average is growing. And the primary reason for that is as we've launched into these newer areas, particularly the [indiscernible] from digital wallet connections is higher than the average we've been making across the rest of the business. That's primarily because we touch the cash, and we make some FX revenues on the way through. And so on average, our take rate is going up as we charge slightly higher amounts for these newer wallets. And the growth -- I'll come on to it. The growth of our business is really driven by the number of connections we make. So what does Boku do? We connect global giants like the list there below Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft, Sony, all those kind of guys are our primary merchants. And -- we grow our business by connecting them to payment types around the world and taking 0.79%. And so we grow our business by continuing to plug those merchants into more and more payment types globally, and that's how we grow our business. If we just move on to the next slide. So how are we looking at the profitability, the headline says revenue growth translates into increased profitability, and that's true of both the EBITDA level and the PBT level. So EBITDA are up 27% to $25.8 million. And it's worth just flagging a couple of things. That number is sort of suppressed by a couple of things. One is we [indiscernible] -- because we have such a good year, we chose to pay all of our staff a one-off bonus this year. In that case, that costs about $900,000. Otherwise, our EBITDA would have been higher. We won't pay that again this year and as we see a similar level of performance, which is unlikely. So that's a kind of one-off nonrecurring amount. And it's also worth flagging that there's sort of contractual bonuses to some of the senior management, which also dampen that EBITDA number down again because we overperformed. And again, they won't recur next year. So as we head into 2024, there's probably about $2 million of bonuses that we paid in '23 that won't recur in 2024. I won't go into it as a small, so we changed auditors in the PwC required us to sort of change the accounting for a small number, so that actually dampens our EBITDA down by another $0.3 million. But again, the number itself is a good growth year-over-year at the EBITDA level. And it's worth just saying that we have been over the last 2 or 3 years building out a new business under the covers. We were a carrier billing business connecting to carriers all around the world, which is a highly profitable business that we dominate sort of globally. But we moved into these newer payment types. And we've really been building out this new business under the covers over the last 2 or 3 years. And so if you like, these results are this jump in EBITDA and the growth in our revenues is despite that continued investment in our network, which is growing all the time. So I think these numbers need to be viewed in that light. You can see at the bottom line -- at the bottom, profit before tax tripled as we see sort of the performance of the business dropped through to the bottom line. And this is excluding our identity business that we had, which we sold last year. If [indiscernible] to the next slide, please. I remind you that one of the beauties of Boku is the fact that we have got very strong cash balances and no debt. Just to remind you, so the year-end, we had about just under $151 million in the bank. Some of that is cash in transit. So we have 160 bank accounts. We're collecting cash on behalf of our merchants from wallets from carriers around the world, passing it through our bank accounts, and passing on to those merchants. In some cases, as I said before, we convert those funds into a single currency, so the merchant gets paid in, say, dollars or euros, and we make some money there. But -- of that $150 million, if we were to stop the business tomorrow, about $70 million is our own cash. The rest is, if you like, merchant cash in transit. So we have very strong own cash balances and the working capital benefit of those balances passing through. During the year, we spent about almost $10 million in buying our own shares back. For those of you who know the business, we issue shares RSUs to all staff on a 3-year rolling cycle. If you're still here, 3 years later, you get these shares. And so -- in 2023, that was about 3.2 million shares were due to be issued to staff to reward them for staying around for 3 years. And instead of sort of issuing new shares, we bought 3.2 million shares back in the market. That cost us about $10 million. And the idea of that is to not dilute shareholders down as we continue to reward our staff with those shares. And of course, we're debt free. One of the things that's sort of coming up -- as a sort of benefit of having these large cash balances as interest rates go up, we're starting to make increased interest income from those balances. It's up to $1.9 million in 2023, up from virtually nothing in the year before. And we're now run rating actually something like $3.5 million of interest income. But neither of those numbers is in our revenue or EBITDA numbers, but this is a benefit of running our business. And then finally on to the last slide. Ultimately, what drives our business? What has driven the growth in our business? And ultimately, it's the number of users or consumers that use Boku to purchase goods and services from our global giants like Apple, Sony, Spotify, Netflix, Google. As you can see in December, this is the December number, 67.4 million consumers made a purchase by Boku in the month. That's 29% up year-over-year. And those monthly active users obviously spend money. And that -- so as the users grow, they spend more money. That's what we call our TPV, our total payment volume process -- or excuse me, the light has gone out. And that's jumped up to -- that TPV jumped up and in turn, the revenues are jumped up. You'll see at the bottom that those the real growth is coming from these newer payment types. So a big jump in these monthly actually views just of the local payment, the newer local payment methods and a big jump in new users sees a sort of 150% jump in revenues from these newer payment types. And just before I hand back to Stuart, we presented the Capital Markets Day back in February last year where we said we thought we could double the business in the medium term being 3, 4, 5 years. And that -- if we could do that once the investment phase was over, we thought that, that would see our EBITDA margins jump from the current level of 32% heading towards 40% and 50% over the next few years. I guess with -- back then, we just come off a year where we grew our revenues at 14%. So we'd imagine that it would take us 4 or 5 years to double the business. Obviously, with a 30% EBITDA growth this year, we should get to that doubling of revenues much quicker than we thought. And we sort of maintain the idea that that's both achievable and that as we get there, our EBITDA should both grow and EBITDA margin should grow. So let me hand back to Stuart, who's going to talk you through the sort of strategy of how we plan to take Boku forward over the next few years.

Stuart Neal

executive
#4

Thanks, Keith. I'm going to switch your lines back on now. So I appreciate not quite knowing who you are as listeners to this. So I'm going to pitch this on the basis that many of you are not as familiar with the company, even though some of you may be. So apologies but anybody that's heard this before. But the way I would think about Boku is as a kind of global alternative to Visa and Mastercard. A rail that binds together some of the world's most popular local payment methods and serves it up to some of the world's largest customers. And let me just kind of put a little bit more color on to that. We very much see ourselves as a global network of localized payment solutions. We're around about 450 people now. We are spread across 29 countries. So although we're not big as an organization, we are truly global, and we can justify the call ourselves. So Keith is talking you through the numbers already. We cover a multitude of countries and we connect together almost 300 local payment methods for our customers who, as Keith pointed out, are some of the world's largest digital technology companies. So let me just peel back from that a second and just explain where this opportunity comes from and why we are confident that our strategy is the right one. So if you think about the global payments landscape, as we know it. Certainly, if you're sitting where I am in the U.K., you'll be very familiar with the left-hand side of this chart. The global giants that are Visa and Mastercard, rolling out debit and credit cards for the last 50 years, help the world go from kind of a cash society to an electronic payment society, and that's become the dominant form of payment worldwide. What's kind of changed is, first and foremost, e-commerce has really opened up the globe and the world of cross-border commerce. And also candidly, the ecosystems that have evolved around the mobile phone have really changed the way that we live our lives. And so in many parts of the world, people are living their lives through their wallets. And their wallets is not just a payment vehicle, it's actually a way of life. I order my taxi, I order my dry cleaning, I order my takeout food. I earn my loyalty points. I communicate with users. And actually, I want to pay while I'm in that ecosystem -- with the same -- within the same wallet. And that doesn't mean routing around fishing for my plastic credit card with my 16-digit pin on it. So the wallet has become a very rapid growing and popular payment mechanism. And it's not just a developing market sort of an Asia Pacific thing. If you think about where we are in Europe, there are a growing number of very, very popular wallets that are emerging in Europe. The one we put here is satisfied, but there are others. There's BLIK in Poland, there is Bizum in Spain, TWINT in Switzerland, Swish in Sweden, the emergence of the wallet is now a global trend. The next global trend is the move of the banks to try and come back into the payment space. We refer to it as account-to-account. And it's a way of describing what you might know of as sort of open banking initiated payments in Europe. But essentially, it is people sending money from their bank directly to the merchant's bank. And this is becoming a very prevalent payment method in many big markets, and I'll come back on to this point later in the presentation. And then finally, but by no means least, you have direct carrier billing, DCB. This is Boku's heritage, and this is where most of our revenues still come from and it's still a growing product Essentially, it's the original buy now pay later, consumers in various countries around the world on postpaid phone accounts are able to make purchases of digital goods and services to their phone bill, and then they will settle with their carrier at the end of the billing period. It's the original credit product, and it does very, very well for the business. So group together, the right side of this chart, is the local payment methods that we talk about in our strategy. Why is that interesting? Well, when you look at this chart, you can see what is being predicted. As we sit here today, Visa debit and credit cards make up around about 30% of global e-commerce. Project that forward to 2028, that actually drops to 20%. So Boku is now firmly placed in a market that is growing, and it is predicted to form 80% of global e-commerce. That is the local payment methods. I'm going to skip through this. And so why is this happening? I guess, is the question? For the consumer, I've already kind of mentioned some of the kind of benefits of living your life through your app. The rewards, the security of being able to authenticate yourself through your device, the sheer convenience of living your life on your phone. But there are other reasons. For governments, they candidly handed the responsibility and the ownership of delivering global payments over to Visa or Mastercard when they were membership organizations. Fast forward to today, they're both U.S. publicly listed companies driving in a rather impressive financial results. But actually, now the move is -- for the -- the central banks have certain large economies around the world to kind of take some of that ownership back. So the sovereignty of the payment network is becoming increasingly important. And when you layer on top of this kind of economic argument, there's actually a real social demographic reason for governments to want to own the payment system. And if you think about Pix in Brazil, 140 million subscribers are using Pix in Brazil. It's now a significant portion of commerce in the country. And it's been pushed out by the Central Bank of Brazil. Merchants above a certain size are obliged to accept the payment method. There's a significant amount, and this was launched during COVID primarily to make sure that people did not get dropped from the payment network during times of lockdown. So look, there are a multitude of, I guess, pull factors as to why this macro trend is happening. And people don't change payment habits because payment companies tell them to, but payment companies such as Boku are now taking advantage of these trends. However, there's always a but. If I'm a global merchant, it's actually quite easy for me to plug into any number of card processing organizations around the world. It gives me standardization that gives me the ability to reach a whole bunch of places. But hang on a minute. So how does that get me reach to the 80% of online commerce is going to be taking place on local payments? It doesn't. The issue with local payment methods is -- its spaghetti. There's hundreds of them. They're disaggregated. They have no standards for technology. They have no standards for settling funds or processing refunds or reporting. And so put incredibly simply, our mission and the whole purpose of the global network that Boku has created is to simplify the acceptance of all of these LPMs for some of the world's largest merchants. We're helping and enabling cross-border commerce for some of the world's biggest merchants by offering them access to all of these great local payment methods. But it goes beyond that. It's not as simple as a plug in to Boku and then Boku can just walk away. We actually do quite a lot of lifting for these customers as well. Global e-commerce is actually quite complicated. So the first role that we do, if you start at [ 0.0 ] at 12:00 is we help our customers to acquire new subscribers. It may not seem like it, but there's still a war going out there, the war for subscribers. Whether that's as a streaming media player or an online advertiser or just for general e-commerce, people are looking to win share and recruit users. And Boku helps in a number of ways, either overtly because we run marketing programs with our payment of the network. And that takes the form of either a carrier bundling type activity, subscribed to Vodafone and you get 3 months free of Netflix or Disney or other product supply. Or more subtly in terms of -- the fact is more payment choice drives more commerce. And we are saying to our merchants, we can get you more users within a given market by offering payment choice through the Boku network. On point one, you can see just how well distributed that is. We now have local payment methods in 77 countries. We have almost 300 different connections, and that's growing all the time. Payment choice means more customers can buy from you and put simply, that drives more commerce. On point two, the transaction processing. This again is a very important subtle difference about how Boku approaches these problems. Because we work with the world's largest merchants, we're able to take a far more tailored approach in how we build connectivity. So we don't just do a plug and play like you would if you were connecting to a card network. We actually spend quite a lot of time making sure that the APIs that we design with our customers are effective that they have a good user experience, that they convert well, that they deal with exceptions. And so transaction processing and the focus around how we build that connectivity to the merchant is very important to us. And then finally, and by no means least, Doing business cross-border around the world is actually quite complicated. And moving the money part is really hard in certain areas. You have to have licenses to move money in a whole bunch of markets. And that requires you to set up legal entities. It requires you to have sophisticated network of banks to help you move that cash. It does create an enormous amount of opportunity. And so Boku is already, at this point, accumulated licenses to move money in 56 countries. We have 34 legal entities and over 150 bank accounts, and we are going to continue to invest in this area, and I'll talk about that a bit later on in the presentation. And then finally, above all of that, this is not a static thing. We do not just build it and then walk away. It's like -- our network is kind of a living and breathing thing. We spend a lot of time optimizing it, studying the data, looking for ways that we can optimize each connection and purely for the benefit of driving more successful transactions through the network to our customers. The more transactions that they see, the better it is for Boku. So our goals are entirely aligned with our customers. So how big could this be? The cross-border e-comm market is a $2 trillion market and growing at 12% CAGR, so we're playing in an enormous global marketplace, one that's growing, and we have a slither of that market today. So all the progress that we made to get to this point, 30% growth is a phenomenal set of results this year, but look how much more there is to go for. And how do we tap into that? These are the 5 kind of underpinning areas that we're going to focus on in order to grow our share of that $2 billion pie. So the first bit is around continuing to build out the network. That may look like 300 LPMs to 400 LPMs. We'll figure that out. But ultimately, there are a bunch of new connections that we need to make in order to grow that network. An important ones, doing more with Pix in Brazil, getting our license in India are up and running and moving traffic across that, very, very important. And that plays into the next opportunity. As I said right at the beginning of this presentation, the banks are repatriating ownership of the payment landscape within their given countries. And so the A2A schemes are going to become more and more prevalent around the world. Banks will go direct to merchants and direct to consumers. And so it's incumbent on us to have a credible proposition in the A2A space. It's a high volume, low take rate, more complicated sort of part of the landscape. But actually, with some investment in our back end around automation, treasury management, et cetera, we will be ready to go on A2A. And we're driving quite a substantial part of our growth will come from that particular product. I've talked about marketing via LPMs. Let me just reiterate that point. If you look at the Boku network and through our supply chain, our funding sources give us access to over 7 billion individual accounts, whether that's a mobile phone account, a wallet account or a bank account, 7 billion. Now that's not 7 billion consumers, but it's a big chunk of 7 billion consumers. That's quite a powerful marketing channel. And so there's already a kind of growing interest from around our existing merchants and beyond. So how can we use that incredible network and access to consumers [indiscernible] drive awareness of our products. And that's going to be increasingly about owning property within the super app ecosystem. How can I advertise my products within a wallet in Indonesia, for example. So marketing by LPMs is going to be increasing way to make ourselves more and more useful to our customers. Banking and settlement capabilities is absolutely key. As we grow our TPV, so we did 10 billion of TPV last year. Our ambition is to do way, way more than that, which means we're going to be flowing considerable amounts of funds through our platform. And that's going to take some sophisticated treasury and banking capabilities, not only to move the money, but to find opportunities to drive margin by converting currencies and doing settlement lifting that our -- even our biggest customers don't really want to have to do themselves. And then finally, a lot of our strategy and Keith talked about the capital markets commitment around growth, that comes from our existing customer base pretty much. So we are already thinking beyond that. And we're starting to look out sort of on the 5-year time horizon and say, what else can we do with this phenomenal network that we're creating. So we're starting to make exploratory moves kind of slow and steady here. We don't want to completely distract our teams. But we are starting to look at new verticals. We did, as an interesting sign, put our first online travel company live at the beginning of this month. So just one market, but one global travel company. It's a great proof point. We'll see how that goes. But I firmly believe that we will find multiple new verticals and use cases to use our incredible network with. So let me just summarize before I open it up for questions. We're sitting in this incredible tailwind. The consumer adoption of local payment methods in every continent, frankly, around the world, is a massive tailwind for this business. Within that tailwind, there's this growth in cross-border e-commerce, that's our sweet spot. We're working with predominantly -- West Coast U.S. mega tech giants who want to expand around the world into markets where, frankly, credit and debit cards will not get them what they want. So we've added for that specific reason. We've added to our network of DCB connections. We've added digital wallets, and we've started to add A2A connections. We have a pipeline, frankly, to die for. I don't have to worry about product market fit for our existing company -- for our existing customers. We have an awful lot to get done, and we are predominantly focused on executing deals that we have already signed. But there is an opportunity, as I just said, for us to expand beyond that. And we will make some -- sort of cautious moves to expand the reach of the business over the coming year or two. Margins, I think take rates will vary depending on the product, and that's okay because in a given market, we just want to be covering the most popular payment methods. And we don't necessarily know what they will be because it will vary from market to market. The ultimate aim is to be relatively agnostic and then to look for ways to add value on top of the payment processing to drive margin. One such way that we believe firmly we can do that already is with more sophisticated money movement capabilities. And we've made some -- already made some good investments in that space. The finances are strong. I couldn't have inherited a better company in terms of the financial position and the customer base. We do have cash of our own, as Keith said, so I don't need to worry about kind of cash runway. And so from a financial point of view, I feel very confident we can do all we need to do. And then finally, our restated ambition to double this business as Keith says, the mid -- we don't want to be specific -- why be a hostage to fortune. But just to state that the ambition is significant, and we're feeling pretty confident about it. So thank you for your time. Thanks for listening. There's quite a lot of slides in there. But I'd like to hand it over to you, Tim, to forward any questions.

Tim Metcalfe

attendee
#5

[Operator Instructions]. Questions that people are asking the first, cash. Obviously, there's a large and growing cash balance in the business. Would you consider dividend payments in the future?

Keith Butcher

executive
#6

Should I take that one? Or do you want to take it?

Stuart Neal

executive
#7

Well, I think the short answer is certainly not now. What does that cash bring us? It brings us a huge amount of optionality to move quickly. And that might take a various number of forms that might mean we need to spin up an entity in a specific market to be able to get a license, to be able to tap into an opportunity. That might mean some tactical acquisitions, buying a license in a market or buying some kind of capability, but that will be sort of relatively tactical. So at this point in time, no to the dividend. Keith, do you want to talk to the buyback?

Keith Butcher

executive
#8

Yes, I was going to say that we contemplated all this year or so ago or 2 years ago. When we decided rather than pay a dividend, we would use our cash to buy back our own shares. And just for those of you who don't know, the rationale is we award our staff shares in Boku, they're called RSUs. On a sort of 3-year rolling cycle, so employees get them if they're still in the business in 3 years' time, senior management like Stuart and myself have to hit sort of various targets to get them. But if you take in 2023 -- in March 2023, we had about 3.2 million shares that would have had to have been issued to staff and that would have added effectively increased our share count by 3.2 million and effectively diluted our shareholders down by about 1% because we have about 300 million shares. So what we did was we bought those 3.2 million shares in the market. And then effectively, we gave them to staff. So that has the effect of not diluting our shareholders. And we're doing that for all staff awards. And we -- for those of you who know, we also have a sort of deal with Amazon where they can earn warrants in the business, and we're also buying shares to cover those too. So that's about $10 million in 2023 in total. And I think we think on balance, we took quite a lot of advice at the time that this is a better use of our cash. As Stuart says, we've got optically -- I think it's better than paying a dividend, which can be interpreted that we've run out of ideas and as Stuart says, there may be tactical things we need this cash to use. Also of the $150 million, $70 million -- only $70 million is ours. We have 160, 180 bank accounts and something like that. And you cannot run these bank accounts on 0 float. So you have -- we don't move the dollar that comes into one bank account in Japan that say it's not the same dollar I payout. So there's an element of a cash flow. So what it looks like more -- like a lot of cash, $70 million is actually quite a little less. So -- but nevertheless, we're obviously in a very healthy cash position. Thanks, Tim.

Tim Metcalfe

attendee
#9

And that leads me on to the next question, which was concerning growth and particularly the Boku platform and how much capacity there is for growth and whether we're going to need significant CapEx to satisfy the growth that we're expecting in coming years?

Stuart Neal

executive
#10

I think the I mean the answer is relatively no. We've got a platform that's been tested to over 500 transactions per second. I guess there are bottlenecks of different points in the platform. And when I talk about investing in the back end of the business. What I mean in that is we grew up in carrier billing where everything was cyclical. So you would rack up transactions in the month and at the end of the month, the carrier would send you a statement and you would run your processes from that sort of a cycle. And we're moving into the world of A2A where we're receiving consumer payments into our bank account real time throughout the day, every day. So there's just a kind of step-up that's needed to be able to do that. It is, however, if you've seen any analyst reports, I'm not sure everyone on the call would have done that. But we're saying this year, that our OpEx is going to grow. So we'll maintain EBITDA margins relatively flat at around 30-odd%. And therefore, that gives us some more OpEx room to be able to get this work done without relying on a big CapEx expenditure. So we might bring in some software to run a treasury management system and that's kind of a SaaS model where it gets expensed anyway. So there is no sort of hidden $10 million kind of requirement to go buy hardware somewhere, but that does not exist. We will slowly be adding automation and kind of upscaling our capabilities through OpEx, and so everyone will see it.

Tim Metcalfe

attendee
#11

Excellent. Talk about take rates, the margin on each transaction and some growth in the year. But are you expecting pressure on that going forward? Or is there sort of an industry standard level as there is with cards?

Stuart Neal

executive
#12

Keith, do you want to take that?

Keith Butcher

executive
#13

Yes, sure. Stuart, I think my Internet maybe is slightly dodgy. So apologies if you can't hear me. I mean, the take rate -- look it's very simple. Our take rate across carrier billing was blended at around about 0.7% until about a year ago. As we've added wallets, almost all of those are a much higher take rate. And so actually, our take rate has gone up in the year. We're now into the year 0.79% as a take rate and in the second half, 0.81%. So these may not sound huge numbers when you attach them to 10.5 billion of TPV, then it's a material amount. It's a significant increase. And the rest -- just to give you a clue, something like [indiscernible] who's a massive car processor that we'll be making about 15 -- 0.15%, 15 basis points, we're making about 5x that. And the take rate is going up. And mainly because of these digital wallets where because we touch the cash, we receive the funds, we charge a slightly higher fee for that, but also we make an FX turn on the way through. So many of our merchants, we might collect in 20 or 30 currencies for them. They don't want it in 20 or 30 currencies, they want it converted into dollars or euros. So that's how we make our money. I'll let Stuart talk to it. I mean upcoming is a different form of payment throughout this account to account is a different kind of beast where it will be huge volumes at a much lower take rate, but all incremental -- all incremental revenue and profit for us. So although that will take our take rate down, I don't think we should read that as a negative. We don't run our business on a take rate basis. But I do think for those of you who do watch it, the reason it's going up is because we are making more money out of the wallet.

Stuart Neal

executive
#14

I think [indiscernible] right. You wouldn't -- it's like saying we don't want to do debit cards because credit cards has a higher interchange rate. It's that the logic doesn't hold. And so A2A, the beauty of A2A is we expect it will drive our unit cost efficiency to the point where our marginal cost goes to 0. And so even though it's low take rate, as Keith says, it all drops through to the bottom line.

Tim Metcalfe

attendee
#15

Excellent. Just a small clarification question that came through. Obviously, list customers on some of the slides, are there names that are missing there? Maybe people who don't want their name publicly disclosed?

Stuart Neal

executive
#16

Yes. We haven't provided an exhaustive list of customers. It's just [indiscernible]

Tim Metcalfe

attendee
#17

These names that have been talked about in the past, that are no longer on there? I mean the question I was asking.

Stuart Neal

executive
#18

Nor confirm nor deny .

Keith Butcher

executive
#19

I think the truth is one of our major merchants asked us not to use their name, but they're still a major merchant. So if that's what people are asking, I won't say on this call, but that's -- it's -- one of the challenges of being -- working with the global giants is truthfully, they don't let you use their name very much. So most businesses [indiscernible] they say we -- [indiscernible] we use -- we work with all the world's largest digital entertainment companies. And they will basically not allow us to announce anything. The only reason we announced the Amazon deal, which we did a couple of years ago, was because they had this warrant thing that forced them to. So apologies for my Internet, it's not working. But it's one of the downsides that we're not allowed to publicly expose those.

Tim Metcalfe

attendee
#20

Yes. No, thank you, Keith, we just -- clarify that there haven't been any customers that have been lost. I'm conscious that we're coming up on the 45 minutes and keep your Internet is slightly unstable. But just to finish off, '24 is going to be another exciting year for Boku. What -- each of you, what do you think the biggest areas of growth and excitement are for you and changes that we're going to see in the next 12 months?

Stuart Neal

executive
#21

You wanna go, Keith, while you've got connectivity?

Keith Butcher

executive
#22

I don't want to take your thunder. I mean, I think -- look, we've talked about it continuing -- what the beauty is of Boku, we're very, very sticky with our merchants. Once you're plugged in, it's very hard to remove us. We're seeing increasing take rates from wallets. And that will continue to grow. We've got plenty of growth to make connections from our existing merchants into these wallets and we will see higher take rates and higher revenues. What's interesting is that the big change will be as we start to launch into accounts. Accounts where we'll see huge volumes. And I think -- the future is very bright for Boku. I think we are becoming a major player in the noncard space. So -- and I think that puts us both in terms of valuation and profile into a different kind of league. Over to you, Stuart.

Stuart Neal

executive
#23

Yes, I think that's exactly right. Look, we have programs up and running that are going to take a couple of years to work through, and they're going to be, I believe, quite transformative. We have been very careful in terms of numbers or indications we want to put out there for the coming year because I want to make sure my team has the ability to do the right things rather than chase the short-term things. And for that reason, I think what the market is now playing back as a sort of consensus view on '24, looks a relatively kind of [indiscernible] or conservative set of numbers. And I'm quite happy about that, frankly, because I think the things that we're doing this year are going to drive significant value for the business in '25 and beyond. And actually, what we'll deliver -- most of what we will deliver this year will be stuff that we built last year. And so it is I'm really excited. I just think we've only begun to sort of tap the potential of what this network we've created can deliver.

Tim Metcalfe

attendee
#24

Okay. Well, thank you, Stuart. Thank you, Keith. I think that's a good point to end on. I'd like to thank everybody for joining us this evening and staying with us. Enjoy the rest of your evening. If you've got any further questions, please don't hesitate to get in touch. [email protected] is often the best way. That's on the announcement. And we look forward to seeing you again soon. Thank you.

Stuart Neal

executive
#25

Thanks, Tim. Thanks, everybody.

This call discussed

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