Corpay, Inc. (CPAY) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. I think we're going to get started here. My name is John Davis. I'm the payments and fintech analyst here at Ray J. We're excited to have FLEETCOR CFO, Charles Freund, with us this morning to talk a little bit the FLEETCOR story. He's going to give a short presentation, and then we'll open up for Q&A. So with that, Charles?

Thanks, John. Thank you all for being here. As John mentioned, I'm Charles, CFO, since September 2020. I've been with the company for 21 years. So I'm going to tell you a little bit about our story. In case anyone wants to read that, dial in another time. At our core, FLEETCOR is a spend management company. All we're trying to do is help companies reduce their spend. We do it in 2 ways. One is by enabling and controlling what's purchased. So think of this as expense management, right? Before purchase is made, it goes through an authorization cycle. Do I want to allow this to go through, yes or no? I'm sure many of you have T&E cards in your pockets, similar to that kind of a program. The second is what gets paid? So now I have an invoice. Is it an appropriate invoice? Is it authorized? Will I get materials of the services that I wanted? When, how do I want to pay it, et cetera? We call that corporate payments. That's, at essence, what FLEETCOR does. When it comes to expense management, it's kind of like T&E, but it's better. So we have proprietary software where we develop user interfaces, where our company can enter in all the different control parameters, either there'll be a certain profile or an individual cardholder, set up all the rules by which your program will operate. And then we give all the employees payment tools, it could be a card, a [ FAB ], an RFID sticker or just use a mobile app. Those are then accepted in various payment networks. We have about 15 proprietary networks where we deploy software at the point of sale and negotiate merchant terms directly with the merchants, where, in some cases, we'll use an open loop network like Mastercard in the U.S. or Visa overseas. We process all of that purchasing and then report it out to clients, so they can better manage their businesses. Now these products can be generic, kind of probably like the one that's in your wallet where you can buy just about anything you want, but maybe not, maybe not the TV at Best Buy or they can be highly specialized. You dial things down to fuel, it could be just fuel types in certain cases, geography, time of day, et cetera, et cetera. One of the key differentiators for us though is our proprietary technology, where we control our own destiny end to end as well as our proprietary networks, where by negotiating directly with merchants, we can get better economics on the transaction. Always spending money to develop new UIs and modernize our technology and so we'd stack it up against anyone else's products. When it comes to corporate payments, though, it's all about bill pay. And so here, you want to capture an invoice, get it into a system and then decide, yes, do I want to pay it? It goes through all the approval cycles, could be multi-tiering, different layers or levels of approval depending on the amount or the type of invoice it is. Then when do I pay it? Do I pay it early and maximize my discounts? Do I pay it -- try to pay it later because there's not a penalty for doing so, all these things to manage -- maximize my cash flow. And then what we do is basically execute the payment. So however the merchant needs to get paid, whether it's -- check, sorry, ACH, a wire or preferably my virtual card products or my cross-border FX payment system, we'll do any -- all of it, and we guarantee the payment. So it's a way to basically just outsource your AP department to us. Now we can offer this on a full AP bundled basis. Or if you're not ready for that magnitude of change, like I really like my AP clerks, so I want to keep them employed, we can offer it separately. And so you can use just a virtual card to replace your checks or you can use just for cross-border type payments. We think some of the magic is really in the combination of the 2. And so we've now developed a platform for small businesses where you can combine both your bill pay and your expense management in one single UI and platform. This will allow you to see all of your non-payroll spend in one place and also lets you access a layer of credit that you can apply to any expense management or bill as you see fit. And so again, the ability to maximize your cash flow and maintain control of non-payroll spend. We're a leader in the space. We manage about $250 billion in spend annually, $2.8 billion in revenue last year. Our products are at work in about 100 countries or so. I mean about 37% of our revenue comes from outside the United States. We have over 800,000 business clients. And then settled with over 1 million merchants around the world and all that's powered by about 9,700 employees globally. We started off, when I joined the business 21 years ago, it was a little regional fuel card company. We were in the U.S. and had little bit in Canada and basically provided fuel with a little bit of maintenance at the time. Just around the time of our IPO, we decided, hey, let's go global and be in more places, so we expanded to Europe. And then we bought a little business that did lodging, just like fuel, which is another expense management product, specifically for workforce lodging. We continue to expand geographically and in the spend categories that we managed, where we got into some tolls, got a gift card business in conjunction with another acquisition. And then we were focused on cardable AP. Charles, what does that mean? And so when you take a company's AP file, a certain number or percentage of merchants will accept a virtual card or a purchasing card for payment. They don't all do it, but some portion will. Generally, we find, depending on the vertical, it can be somewhere between 20% to 30%, depending on how many vendors I have enrolled in my network. That would be called cardable AP. What if the merchant doesn't accept one of those card products? What do you do? Well, they go to their bank and still use checks or an ACH or wire. We weren't in that business, but we are now. And so as of today, we are in full AP -- sorry, spend management and handle all domestic AP and all cross-border AP. And so this has dramatically increased our addressable market. Okay. So all of this expansion has led to a pretty interesting revenue mix. So 21% is in that corporate payments unit and then 40% in fuel, which is where we started; 11% tolls, lodging, you can see the mix there. And then geographically, 60-some-odd percent in the U.S., exposure in Brazil and the U.K. and then a few other countries. So since our IPO in 2010, our fuel business has gone from 91% of our revenue to 42%. And during that time, the business has tripled in size. So a growing business continuing to diversify. Key component of our growth is organic growth. We've done a lot of acquisitions, but organic growth is, first and foremost, what we're focused on, and that's driven by sales and retention. I sell a customer and, in my recurring revenue model, they stay with me for 8, 10 years. As long as I can retain and continue to sell more customers, I grow organically. So our sales performance, you can see we've grown sales, took a little bit of a snoozer in COVID times as we cut back on credit and the world was a bit distracted. You see a massive rebound on a 2-year stack basis. Very, very strong sales performance, which will lead to stronger organic growth. Our retention has also been running at record levels. Again, people stay with us for a long time, and therefore, it turns into circa 10-plus percent organic revenue growth. We were impacted by COVID. A lot of our products do require people to move around, come to conferences like this and such. So we were affected, but again, a good rebound, and we're outlooking at 10% organic growth this year. We have a long track record of performance. Been in this thing a long time, kind of know what we are doing. So between organic and inorganic M&A growth, if we hit this year, it will be an 18% CAGR since our IPO at a 20% cash EPS grower. So we think we've delivered good results, and hopefully, that turns into good returns. We are and have been called ruthless capital allocators. So it's a high-margin business. We generate a lot of cash, adjusted net income, as we call it. And we do a lot with that. We buy companies, and then we also buy back shares. You can see we've deployed $6 billion in the last 5 years, which means we had borrowed some. And about 1/3 of it has been in acquisitions, 2/3 in share buybacks. We have been quite active year-to-date as we've disclosed a few different methods. And so we think between organic growth and ruthless capital allocation, we can generate 15% to 20% cash EPS growth over the midterm. And all of this with some super low leverage. Even though I borrow -- continue to borrow more money, we're staying well below our 3x kind of operating target, I can go 3.5x and no issue. I can go up to 4x if I have to for a deal. Right now, we're operating at around 2.7x. So in summary, here's the takeaways. We grow the thing organically, pretty stable, pretty ratable unless there's a global pandemic, but – sorry. Operating leverage is pretty good, good margins continue to expand, powerful capital deployment. We know how to do deals. We know how to integrate deals and share buybacks, low risk, and particularly at my valuation today, I'm interested. And that just turns into good, solid compound annual growth from a cash EPS perspective. We think it is a pretty compelling investment case. I invite you all to join.

All right. Thanks, Charles. So I'm going to start with a couple of questions, and then we'll open it up if there's any in the audience. First, Charles, unfortunately, we have to talk about Russia and Ukraine, many awful things happening there. But maybe just quickly high-level impact on your business, both from a currency perspective, a percent of revenue, but then maybe some of the offsets from a fuel price perspective?

Sure. So we do operate a fuel card business in Russia. It's the only kind of business really of any materiality that we have there. It was about 3% of our guidance for this year. To give you a sense of how that business operates, it has its own fuel card network. That extends a little bit into Ukraine, Lithuania and Poland, does not go any further than that. It operates on its own fuel card processing system. It has its own separate ERP system, has its own separate human capital management system. It is 600 employees operating fairly autonomously in that regard. We set it up purposefully in that way because of data privacy laws, which are very, very strict in Russia. So it is continuing to operate. Obviously, the devaluation of the ruble is going to have an impact on revenue. That will be somewhat offset on the expense side. And so as they do have, obviously, their people costs are all local, but they do have vendor costs that can be denominated in other currencies, think of like a salesforce.com type of license. The other thing that's offsetting this revenue decline is that we have customer deposits and retained cash to the tune of $80 million to $90 million in market. And because of the devaluation of the ruble, we're seeing interest rates spike there. And so it's circa 20% annual interest, which I would see in my interest expense line as an offset. Now unfortunately, the conflict has had other ramifications with the price of oil going up. And so in our guidance, we assumed $3.40 for the retail price of fuel in the U.S. prior to the Russian invasion, that had crept up to $3.70. And then with the recent oil spikes, it will take about a week or so for that to flow through to the retail market, but that should be yet another pretty big jump. For every $0.10 movement in the retail price of fuel, we see an annualized revenue benefit about $6 million.

Okay. Great. And then I want to touch a little bit on new sales. You highlighted that 46%, obviously, a really strong rebound year in '21. Guidance this year implies, I think, roughly 20% new sales growth. So talk about some of the drivers there and maybe touch on the digital marketing initiatives that you guys have undertaken in the last couple of years?

Sure. And so big driver is investment. So I'm investing about 17% to 18% more in sales and marketing, it comes in different forms. I'm hiring more teams, developing new channels and scaling things that work. We are pushing out digital to other businesses. We predominantly focused it on fuel, but are now pushing it more into lodging and even using digital demand generation for our corporate payments products. Specifically in the digital marketing space, we've been on this for a while, as you can imagine, but we've really perfected the science of it just in the last 1.5 years or so. And what we've done is tied our back-end customer profiling system to the front-end bidding engine. So let me explain. I have hundreds and hundreds of thousands of customers, and they all have different attributes, size, years in business, credit scoring, industry vertical, geographic location, all these different factors. And I can look and see how do they perform through time? What was retention rates? What were bad debt rates? How much revenue per transaction was I making based on these different attributes? We then create these profiles that basically based on attractiveness to our company. All of that is then tied to a dynamic bidding engine. So whether you're on Google and you're doing a search or whether you're on a social media platform and, through your IP address, we identify you and grab your profile. Depending on what you look like, we'll determine how much I bid to grab your eyeballs. And so what I'm doing is optimizing. If you're a very attractive prospect, I bid a lot, $50. If you're not an attractive prospect, I'll still bid $10. But if my competitor wants to pay more, let them have your business because I'm not going to generate the right return for me. And so we're always constantly optimizing. And as we sell more and our customer base grows, it's a learning machine. The profiles are dynamically trade-changing all the time. Even economic factors, you might be an attractive prospect last year, but because of something that's happening in your vertical, maybe you're not going to be attractive this time. And I'm learning that as I go and it will change my dynamic bidding. And so it's just a smarter way to do it.

Okay. And then you showed on the slide that attrition has improved 100, 200 basis points. Just talk a little bit about what you're doing there to kind of keep the clients on the back end after getting in the front end on the top of the funnel?

Sure. And so one of the things we're always working on is system enhancement and whether it's features that the clients want, it's making sure things are staying up time, which has been tremendous in the last 2 years, our uptimes and continue to improve meaningfully. And so just minimizing customer disruption, but also making sure they're happy with the products. So we're never standing still. We're constantly evolving. You saw one of the newer UIs that I put up on the screen. Those things are going all the time. So between that, maintaining obviously service people that are better satisfied and such and at the right levels, all kind of key contributors. We also do benefit a little bit from mix. And so in our lodging business and particularly in our corporate payments business, retention rates are higher by nature. Some of that is just the size of the client that we're serving. Midsized clients [ don't want to trade with us ] as much as small clients because they stay in business longer and that the cost of switching is higher. And so as the mix has shifted in our business, we're also getting some of that benefit.

Okay. Great. And then we'll just touch on EVs for a minute here. Obviously, I think getting more and more focused. You guys started to roll out some products in the U.K., but maybe talk a little bit about how you see the vision for FLEETCOR and kind of this eventual shift from fuel to EVs?

Yes. So we want to be ahead of it. It's super early days. We're trying a few different models in different places, Netherlands is a little different than the U.K., which is a little bit different than the U.S. Here in the U.S., we asked our hundreds of thousands of clients who is interested in EV, what are you doing? Would you participate in a pilot? We had a handful -- literally 2 handfuls of people who said, "Yes, I have an EV and we'd like to try it with you." And the approach we're taking here is more of a connected car strategy. And so I don't know if you know today, but all new cars, EV or not, are transmitting data back to the OEMs. They want to know where you are, how you're driving, how your engine is behaving. And it's somewhere embedded in your purchase contract, you've agreed to give them this data. The reason they want that is, obviously, they can then improve their manufacturing techniques and such and make better products based on all the feedback that we're all unknowingly providing them. Well, that data, that connected car data, we partnered with a company that takes it from all those folks, normalizes it. And so what we said is that's great, let's do that for EVs. So regardless of where you charge, when you charge at the office or your house or in some charge point network, we're going to grab that charge information. Where was it? When was it? How did you charge? How long did it take? Was it a supercharger that kills your battery? Help me understand. And so we're bringing all that back to the fleet managers. This allows them to compare energy efficiency across vehicles. And so most people of any kind of fleet size aren't going to convert all their vehicles at once. They'll do bits and bits. And so are they making the right choice? It's an easy decision to trade out an executive's sedan. It's a harder decision if you're going to trade out a van that transports heavy appliances around during the winter, where battery life or range, you might say, can be degraded, 20%, 30%, 40%, depending on the model of vehicle you're at. And so the use cases, people have to be mindful of this as a fleet manager. And what we can do by managing mixed fleets through the transition is help them make those smart trade-offs and provide them consolidated data on a miles per gallon equivalent basis, so you can manage all of your fleet costs and operate it in the most efficient and effective way.

So how do you have to transition the monetization model? Maybe talk about a couple of things you're trying as you do this test.

Sure. Well, the good news is, in our fleet business, our fuel business, our revenue model is not solely dependent on the value of the transaction. I already have models where I have card fees, transaction fees, reporting fees, credit-related fees. And so I've already had mechanisms that aren't tied to the purchase value. So even if it doesn't cost anything for the energy, the data is what's still important. And so I can charge subscription fees for that data, which is what we've been doing in the U.K. and it's working out just fine.

Okay. Great. Maybe moving over to corporate payments. You guys have made a lot of investments in that business over the last 5 years, kind of shifting from what was largely a virtual card business to more full AP. So maybe just if we think about your revenue mix today, where is it full AP versus virtual card versus your FX business you've acquired? Where is it today versus where it was 2, 3 years ago and kind of where you see it going over the next 2 to 3 years?

Sure. So corporate payments, which, as you saw, was about 20-some-odd percent of our revenue last quarter. The cross-border FX portion of that is about half of the revenue. We bought a business 3 years ago called Cambridge. And we recently, just last year, acquired a business called AFEX. We've now combined those 2 businesses onto the Cambridge -- legacy Cambridge systems. And so all of that is now running, and we're just going to start recognizing those synergies in the latter half of this year. The other half is more domestic, a mix of full AP and virtual card and what we call our channel business. The channel business is where we partner with folks like Bill.com, AvidXchange, other software providers where they leverage us for our virtual card network or our FX network allows them all of us to monetize, spend on the back end of these purchases or transactions. That is less than 15% of our corporate payments activity. Most of what we do is go direct to clients, either with a full AP solution. Or if you're not ready for that, use my virtual card to replace your check writing, and I can give you a rebate for that. That thing is really what we're going to market with. And what I'd tell you is the go-to-market motion has really shifted where we're leading with full AP. Why? Because I get to see all of your spend, you get to see all of our spend. I get to see all of your spend. And then I monetize whatever I can on the back end through virtual cards and FX that's embedded in the product. And then I can also identify where my point solutions might makes sense. Are you spending a lot in lodging? Are you spending a lot on fuel or other vehicle-related expenses? Did you know I have yet another product that might serve your needs? So having full visibility to spend will create more opportunities for me going forward.

Okay. And then it's been a while since we've been on inflationary environment. So maybe talk a little bit about the puts and takes? How much of your business is kind of purchase value-denominated basis points versus maybe a fixed transaction and, then on the flip side, obviously, credit losses likely go up that environment. So maybe just touch on that for a minute?

Sure. And so the spend in our corporate payments unit, which is where you're going to get a whole lot of spend, but at fairly low basis points in terms of what our keep rate is, that's going to be highly dependent on the price of the transaction. What I'd tell you is in our 2022 guide, we have not assumed the impact -- any impact of inflation. You may say, Charles, why would you do that? The reason is that we, as a country, haven't seen this kind of inflation in a long time. And we're not quite sure how companies are going to respond. Are they going to spend less, tighten up their belts? It might be hard for a manufacturing company, right, that has cost of goods, it's an input and then just going to have to take it and pass it through to the end customer. Well, we don't know. And so what we didn't want to do is make an assumption and be wrong. So we just left that alone. In other places where inflation -- places like Brazil, which is running pretty hot inflation last year, at least, there are safeguards in all of our contracts. It's a standard practice there, where our customers, we pass on inflation to them, like why is vendors who we work with, pass on inflation to us. But given the margin profile that we have, we still make out pretty well.

Okay. Great. And then I want to talk a little bit about the balance sheet. You mentioned kind of leverage at 2.7x. You guys have been very aggressive capital allocators over the years and create tremendous value. So obviously, the stock is fairly depressed today. So maybe talk a little bit about how you guys think about M&A versus buying your own stock here at these levels? And kind of if you go to the M&A route, what's most intriguing these days? I assume mostly around corporate payments, but any color there would be helpful.

So it's a good assumption. So our pipeline does skew more towards corporate payments, albeit we do have things in other product categories that we are interested in. M&A continues to be my favorite protocol for capital because if we do it right, it can one be short-term accretive or it can generate a platform for growth over time. So what I mean by that is it can be a capability builder where I might offer a different type of service or value proposition to an existing client or it can take me into maybe a different segment where I can leverage my networks and things to a different category. So that's how we think about it, either super accretive transactions or capability building transactions. I tend to pay more for accretive ones because I know what's coming. And for the capability ones, I tend to pay a little bit less because it's more of a bet on the future. But the Roger acquisition, which was our down-market bill pay acquisition we did last year, it was a perfect example. It wasn't that expensive, but it's now brought us to a category with enormous TAM that can leverage our back-end virtual card and FX networks in a very effective way. So always M&A first. But at this price, we're active in the market.

Okay. And then just curious if you've seen any rationalization and expectations in the M&A market, given kind of what's happened in the public markets and a lot of recent IPOs facing down 50%, 60%, 70%?

Yes, certainly, we had a number of corporate payments deals, a couple of them that were very, very close to the end and in line there. I mean, within days of wiring money, we were getting the wires ready, and we paused. So when we saw the valuation start to fall of some of the publicly traded corporate payments entities, we took a 2- to 3-month pause. We since reengaged. We didn't lose the deals, but we've reengaged and the sellers are still talking to us. So we believe their expectations have rationalized versus where we were 3 months ago.

Okay. Interesting. Any questions in the audience? All right. So I'll wrap with one final one. And we did touch on the stock price here a minute ago, but obviously, you guys -- Ron owns a lot of stock. If the value were to stay here, are there sort of strategic actions that you guys could take, potentially go private, do anything -- how do you guys think about creating value with the stock down at these levels?

Yes, I'd say that we're patient to a point. But my CEO, who is a major, major shareholder, has said that at some point, if the market doesn't respect what we do, we will go a different route and generate a return.

Okay. All right. Well, we'll wrap it there. Thanks, Charles.