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

June 11, 2024

New York Stock Exchange US Financials Financial Services conference_presentation 30 min

Earnings Call Speaker Segments

Matthew Roswell

analyst
#1

Matt Roswell, I'm part of the fintech research team here at RBC. Thank you all for coming in. Joining me is Jim Eglseder. I know I mispronounced that big time.

James Eglseder

executive
#2

[indiscernible]

Matthew Roswell

analyst
#3

Eglseder.

James Eglseder

executive
#4

[ I answered that even ].

Matthew Roswell

analyst
#5

A Senior Vice President, Investor Relations of Corpay, used to be known as FLEETCOR.

Matthew Roswell

analyst
#6

And I think it's actually my first question. Why did they change?

James Eglseder

executive
#7

Yes, let's start.

Matthew Roswell

analyst
#8

Yes, exactly.

James Eglseder

executive
#9

I think a big part of it is fleet- or fuel-related business is only about 1/3 of the revenue today. When we went public in 2010 as the global fleet card company, fuel card revenues were 90%-plus of the revenue. So it was very representative of what the company did. Over the years, over the decade, call it, a decade plus, the mix of businesses due to acquisitions and just growth rates of the underlying businesses are such that Corporate Payments with the inclusion of the Paymerang deal that we announced last month, Corporate Payments is now going to be almost 1/3, 30% of the business and fuel itself is going to be just over 1/3. So when you include the businesses that we're in today, we're in Vehicle Payments, we're in Lodging Payments, we're in Corporate Payments, we thought that Corpay, the corporate payments company, was much more representative of the suite of products and services that we offer today. Secondarily, we've been working on this for a couple of years. If you follow the company for any meaningful part of time, I think 3 years ago, we consolidated the branding in the Corporate Payments business as Corpay. We had 5 separate brands there that we had bought over the years and made a challenge from a go-to-market perspective when you were talking to customers, "Hey, who wants to talk to my friend who works for a different name company?" Why would I talk to them? But we did see a meaningful uplift in just name recognition, return on marketing investment with the consolidated brand. And we thought that now is the right time to change the whole company as a little bit of skating where the puck is going. I use the hockey reference versus where we've been historically.

Matthew Roswell

analyst
#10

Yes. And moving the Brazilian toll business in the Vehicle Payments?

James Eglseder

executive
#11

We think -- I mean, it is a Vehicle Payments business. While Brazil is geographically disparate, we think that what we've done in Brazil, where we basically developed a vehicle payments -- a vehicle-centric payments ecosystem, I can never get it right, around a toll tag or now more of the app is really where we think the rest of the businesses can go, right? So when you think about what Brazil was back when we bought it in 2016, we've been talking about -- I've been here since 2018, they were talking about beyond toll and what that could be since before I got here. Well, today, what we would consider beyond toll is now 30% of the revenue of that business, monetizing an extended network of over 6,000 different locations where you can use that tag or app to buy other things, whether it's just the toll, it's buying fuel, it's paying for parking, it's purchasing insurance, that's using the car wash, going to McDonald's. So it is a vehicle-centric ecosystem that centers really around the app, right? Because we have -- of the 7 million tags down there, we have over 3 million monthly active users that are on our app, the Sem Parar app down there, which is one of the most downloaded mobility brands in the entire country behind only Uber, Lyft and one other company. So it's top 5 downloaded app for managing your vehicle. So we looked at that and said, hey -- frankly, McDonald's came to us, the insurance company came to us and said, "Hey, we'd like access to your 7 million clients." And over time, we recognize what that is, and we looked at what we had in the U.K. today, again, big networks of EV acceptance, the largest universal fueling network across 9,000 gas stations. We bought a company last fall called PayByPhone with 2 million-plus active users in the business. And by the way, we have coverage over almost all of the vehicle maintenance garages in the country with advantage of economics. So we said, "Wow, we have really great assets in this country. So what if we expose them to a bigger set of eyeballs like we have in Brazil?" The thing I did mention about Brazil is of these 7 million tags, 5.5 million to 6 million of them are consumers, right, because it's not all businesses. So it really was a B2B, B2C part of the business that we've never really talked about. But we built and collected all these assets in the U.K. and including the EV network, well, how do we monetize those assets in a different way: a, to provide better leverage to the assets we have today; and b, well, we bought all these EV assets, but we don't have any customers with EVs on the B2B side. So how do we bridge that transition in? And it was kind of a bit of an aha moment, we looked at Brazil and said, "Wow, I think we can do the same thing in the U.K. We just need more eyeballs." So that was really the idea behind the PayByPhone, is to create another vehicle-centered payments ecosystem there, where we can monetize the assets over a bigger collection of customers and just go from there. And at some point, do we think we can do it in the U.S.? Sure. The EV transition in the U.S. is very far behind where it is in the U.K. You can't even see it in the U.S. So we've got some time, but we think the idea works. We have to prove that we can do it in the U.K. We're working really hard on that. Hopefully, by the end of the year, we have some breadcrumbs or proof points to demonstrate that it is working, and it gives us another growth leg in that vehicle.

Matthew Roswell

analyst
#12

Okay. So in the U.K. right now, that's commercial, those client base?

James Eglseder

executive
#13

It's completely business client base. But we looked at PayByPhone, it was, "Hey, guess what, all of our B2B clients need to pay for parking in London or wherever they are," right? So it makes sense just on a stand-alone basis to offer the incremental service, if you will. But at the same time, if we can make it a twofer, it's all about...

Matthew Roswell

analyst
#14

You mentioned electronic vehicles. I was going to get into it later, but might as well jump on now.

James Eglseder

executive
#15

It's a hot topic. Obviously, we spent a lot of time and energy talking about it over the last, call it, 3 or 4 years. I think the EV hysteria has largely died down over the last 12 to 18 months. The markets move towards us. We've spent a tremendous amount of time and effort demonstrating what that solution looks like, primarily in the U.K. because that's where the transition is for this law. In the U.K., I think we go to market now as a Chargepass, the Allstar Chargepass product, which is a 3-in-1 product, where you can use the same app to manage your charging of your company vehicle at home, EV on the road or use that same app to get your vehicle discounts and management if you're driving a gas or diesel vehicle tomorrow, all in one place, right? The 3-in-1 solution is the winning solution in the marketplace. We're actually finding that we can win just pure internal combustion fleets in the U.K. that we couldn't touch before because they were happy to stay with the major oils, because they don't have EVs today but they know they will tomorrow, and we can handle all of that. Those solution works. And I think the real differentiator in the U.K. is with our at-home charging solution. And we bought a company a few years ago, whereby that integrates directly with the electric utilities. We put a piece of software on the charger in your garage. You authenticate the vehicle, when you plug it in, it measures it. It knows exactly what it costs, and it pays the utility directly. And we bill our customer, which is your employer. So you as the employee never come out of pocket. There's a tremendous amount of value in that just because, hey, what are you going to do? Turn in your gas and electric bill and circle and say, "I estimate that I spent 27% of my gas and electrical charge in the work track." That's terrible. That's the whole point of a fuel card in the first place is to eliminate the pay-and-reclaim process, right? So the ability to manage that on behalf of our customers, they told us, is of significant value to them. And frankly, as we look at it, if you -- look at what we do in the vehicle business, what we -- that's the most fundamental level. We minimize the administrative burden of a fleet manager managing their fleet. Just in the internal combustion world, you've got 50 trucks, you get 50 cards. You set the control, you set the reporting in autopilot. Managers don't have to work that hard. And a mixed leader in EV world has a whole different ball game. So the value of weight that we deliver in that go-forward environment is actually higher than what we deliver in just a pure internal combustion environment. So we feel very good about what we've bought, what we've built, what we've demonstrated and what we've rolled out into the customer base today. And you can see the -- on the economic standpoint, we get a lot of questions on relative economics.

Matthew Roswell

analyst
#16

Next question.

James Eglseder

executive
#17

EV -- fuel cards company in the EV world, well, certainly, your economics would be disadvantaged. And it's actually not the case because, believe it or not, we discovered over the last few years that electricity is not free, right? And even on the road, there's a markup there. We can charge a subscription fee to manage the at-home charging on your behalf. Then in every quarter, we give you the relative economics that in a mixed fleet world, we're actually better off than just in the pure internal combustion world. So we feel very good about where we are competitively economically. And the outlook for the business, we've always believed was bright and that it was an opportunity, not a risk. And we think we've demonstrated the fact that it is an opportunity, and we can take advantage of that versus the risk that I think a person who hasn't spent as much time looking at or studying it might fear.

Matthew Roswell

analyst
#18

And why do you think EV is kind of being delayed here in the U.S.?

James Eglseder

executive
#19

I think it's a big country. Consumers in America, I don't know. I spent a lot of time thinking about the card business in general. I think folks want the flexibility and the freedom to go wherever they want, whenever they want. And it's a big country. So the made-up example I always use is, "Hey, your plumber has an electric truck. They drive some model, I've never seen it, but let's assume your plumber drives an LX. And now you're the 4:00 call on a Tuesday afternoon because you're told it's clogged. "Hey, I can't make it there tonight. Can I come first thing in the morning because my car ran out of charge?" You're never using that plumber again, right? "No, I need you here today. It's already 4:00, it's too late," right? So just the uncertainty around that, there's a lot of value in knowing when you guys will say, "They already give you a 2- or 4-hour window," which is ridiculous in the first place, right? But if they don't show up the next day, then you've just been massively inconvenienced. So I do think that: a, there's no commercially viable electric vehicle that scale today, in general, you got some vans, the Mercedes Sprinter van or whatnot; b, the businesses is managed everything via total cost of ownership over the entire life of the vehicle. Electric vehicle is much more expensive than internal combustion vehicles today. And while the ongoing maintenance can be lower, if there is a problem, it's much more expensive. And at the end of that vehicle's life and you have to turn to back in to the leasing company, if that battery has not been optimized over the life of the vehicle, now you've got a big cost coming your way. So I think it's the complexity. It's just the -- how it's managed, the availability of vehicles today. And I mean if you think about it, a decent chunk of our business, 30% of our business is over-the-road, Class 7, Class 8 trucks. I don't know if they're ever going electric because the batteries of that are, notwithstanding the Tesla Semi truck, have been massively heavy. Those trucks are only used to move things from the port inland. They're not used for anything else or a cement truck or our CEO calls weirdo trucks, the cherry pickers, the big trucks with the boxes on the sides that are out doing heavy machinery work and things like that. It's not near term. Rivian is not making something like that. There's really no manufacturer that's chasing that piece of the pie today. They're all chasing the consumer: the Rivians, the Teslas, the you name it, the F-150 Lightnings or whatnot. The consumer is transitioning first, and that's where everybody is trying to make it go, by the economic model and work on their cost infrastructure. So I think it's just going to take a lot of time. And like I said, it's a big country, and I drive a Tesla. They say you can get 300-plus miles out of it. They can't. I get 200 miles road trip in that thing, and I have to stop every 2 hours to charge. As a consumer, I knew that going in. I'm willing to deal with that. Took 10 hours to go pick up my daughter at school instead of 8. I forgot how long it took to go pick her up, but it was super annoying. My wife was going to go on vacation last week, it was a 4-hour drive. She wasn't going to take the Tesla. She's worried about charging. I said there's just enough. The Tesla infrastructure is fantastic, but there's enough uncertainty there. I said like, "Well, if I don't have to worry about it, why would I?

Matthew Roswell

analyst
#20

Yes. Since we're talking about the U.S. business, the U.S. combustion business, can you talk about the pivoted SMB and then what you're seeing at the enterprise level?

James Eglseder

executive
#21

Yes. I've spent a little bit of time talking about both of those. We'll take the enterprise level first. Frankly, that enterprise, that large fleet side of the business is fine. You hear a lot of anxiety, folks talk about, "Hey, there's a freight recession. What happens at freight?" It doesn't inflect what kind of impact does that have on you. And like I said earlier, it's about 30% of the business. And it's not really overly dependent on volumes and oil prices, right? It tends to be fairly stable. That business is working fine today. We did see a bit of a negative mix shift a couple of years ago when the small independent driver went back to work for one of the big contract carriers. We obviously make a lot more money on Matt's trucking company than I do on one of the contract carriers. So we did see that on spot rates greater, but it really hasn't gotten any worse. So it's been okay. That business isn't a big growth business for us because, frankly, the economics of those large fleet customers isn't that great relative to Matt's towing company. A lot comes down to it. So we'd much rather go sign up 50 Matt's towing companies versus 1 larger carrier, if you will, just because the economics, penetration rates are better, economics are better. Before the pandemic, we had a very good field-based sales force, traditional selling, knocking on doors, [ banging phones ], trying to stir up new business, if you will. Into the pandemic, everybody was leaning digital, right, and we lean digital after them. And coming out of the pandemic, nobody wanted to talk to anybody as we press the digital accelerator even harder, and that digital customer acquisition tools largely pointed towards what we call a micro client, a customer with 5 trucks or less. You can imagine what that means from a customer perspective on what type of customer that is, maybe running the business out of his basement, and they were perfectly happy to buy online or shop online, buy online and serve themselves online. But when times got tough, they're also perfectly happy not to pay. So we saw a pretty meaningful uplift in bad debt about this time last -- 2 years ago. And it turns out when we did the analysis, it was all 80% or 90% of the losses were with fleets with 5 cards or less. So we stopped out. Ron, our CEO, said, "Nope, turn it off." I don't know what's going on here, but it's not good and the return profile of that customer given the loss content is not very good. And that's not a very good place to spend any sales investment dollars. So we spent 6 months kind of chasing those folks around the bar and getting them out of the house, making sure that we manage our loss content. And well, when you don't sell anything for a period of time and you're a company that is all completely driven growth from new sales, it hurts. It's a bit of a reverse pig-through-the-python as we look at it, and that's kind of what we're dealing with today. So it took time. We shut the sales channel down. We repointed that digital customer acquisition to a like kind of characteristic, a digital customer attention-getting tool now because what we found out is that a slightly larger customer and it's not a large customer, I think fleets with 5, 10, 15 trucks, right? Not large but bigger than under 5 were perfectly happy to shop online. They just didn't want to buy online. And we didn't have a sales force left to go talk to them and get them to buy. So not only did we have to change the -- what customer profile that acquisition tool or interest tool was pointed at, we had to rebuild the sales force, the sales managers, the salespeople, the process, everything. So that's just taken longer than we thought. And more recently, we're suffering from lower late fees, right? Well, who pays all the late fees? It's the smallest customer. Well, when you chase them out, then you have to account for those late fees. So all of that is coming together here in the back half of the year, where all these drags go away. The -- and you had later on all of the new sales that continue to work. I think I can't remember what new sales were in the first quarter for North American fleet, but it's well over 16%. So sales are just fine. So once you get rid of the drags that are holding out performance, you get the account benefit and you get the new sales benefit. So we think -- Ron, our CEO, said that, that should be reaccelerating to high single digits as we exit the year and turning around in the second half. So that's what we're looking forward to.

Matthew Roswell

analyst
#22

Is it a competitor that's picking it up, those micro guys? Or are they going back to oils?

James Eglseder

executive
#23

No. Mostly, what we compete against are just general-purpose credit cards. Every fleet has a way to buy fuel today. In down-market, a lot of them are still using the corporate card. "Hey, yes, here's the card. Bring the receipt back and log at the end of every day." Or "Hey, I'm going to give you your own card and some other way to control the fuel purchases." So I think that's mostly what it was. And again, the fleets that we're chasing today, I kind of described may not believe their fleet. "Well, I don't use a fleet card. Well, because I have a flower delivery company. I have 10 vans, I'm not a fleet." But you can benefit from what we do with the control and the reporting aspects of it. So it's really causing those folks to think about themselves a little different, frankly, having our sales motion sell a little bit different to go after a different profile of clients.

Matthew Roswell

analyst
#24

Moving over to Corporate Payments. You mentioned earlier about how you had 5 brands in Corporate Payments, and you all came down to Corpay.

James Eglseder

executive
#25

Right.

Matthew Roswell

analyst
#26

Can you help kind of unpack what's in there?

James Eglseder

executive
#27

Sure.

Matthew Roswell

analyst
#28

Because sitting from the outside, it seems a bit like a black box.

James Eglseder

executive
#29

Understood, but it's really pretty straightforward and simple. When you look at Corporate Payments overall, it's about 2/3 cross-border. We're the largest nonbank cross-border provider in the world. And the other, call it, 1/3 of the business is going to be domestic payables, right? And domestic payables can take on a variety of different flavors, whether it's corporate card or pure virtual card or full-stack AP, depending on how you look at it. Most folks will think about it as the full-stack AP, which is a business we bought back in 2018 that have added to it over time. But when we look at it, the cross-border business is mostly FX spread for international payments, right? Now 60% of that cross-border business is spot payments. Hey, I've got a warehouse in Brazil. I have to make a rent payment on every month, but I'm a U.S.-based company. Or I have 200 international salespeople that want to get paid in local currency every 2 weeks, we can do that for you instead of using your bank. The other 40% is going to be structured risk management or hedging, right? I'm going to buy a business in Brazil 6 months down the road, I want to lock in my currency today to make sure that I don't find myself overpaying for it relative to what I thought I was going to pay 6 months down the road. We can structure that for you, and there will be a risk premium, a time premium and a currency [ involved ] that goes along with that. So relatively as straightforward as cross-border gets, it's not pure plain vanilla. We do have very good capabilities that can go up against most of the large banks because most of the regional banks that we really compete against don't have any capabilities when it comes to cross-border. And if you can find somebody that can talk cross-border, if they don't have the depth of expertise that, that middle market customer wants, it's hard for them. I think that's the other big thing in Corporate Payments is our customer there is a middle market customer. I think revenues with $50 million to $500 million, on average, $200 million to $300 million. So they're real companies with real needs that are underserved by the largest banks because the largest banks want companies like Corpay, not companies like there's $200 million import-export company, right? And so that's where we compete very well: better people, better service, better products, better UIs down there. And the network that we've built, we deliver payments in 180 countries around the world. And we have in-country banking relationships in over 60 of them. So we can move a lot of the payment volumes in an on us transaction. We don't have to ride the SWIFT rails, if you will. On the domestic side, we've got the largest merchant network in the business. We have over 1 million merchants that have agreed to take our virtual card for payment. And that's where the interchange payment is driven from, whether it be in a full AP environment, we're up paying some percentage of your merchants with a virtual card or just in a direct virtual card environment where I'm only paying some of your invoices. I don't see them all down to our corporate cards. We've got you all covered, but it is an interchange-driven model. So I do think that most of what folks think about when they hear payables or accounts payable is the full-stack AP. That business has been growing for us north of 40% since we bought it in 2019, continues to grow very well. Frankly, that's what we go to market as. Hey, I want your entire AP file because then I can see here you're paying. I can see who's in my network. I can see who stopped paying this month that I need to go try to sign up for my network next month, and it's just a better value. And in exchange for doing that, I can help you save up to 70% of the cost of running your AP department, right, because you don't need other people, I do all the work. We don't cut checks. We don't make ACH payments. We partner for those. But ultimately, in a very automation advantage -- fashion, we can digitize your AP file and give you an automated reconciliation on the back end. That's ultimately what we do. So we help businesses pay bills domestic, and we help businesses pay bills internationally.

Matthew Roswell

analyst
#30

What about on the other side? Anything on the accounts receivable side?

James Eglseder

executive
#31

Yes. I think we're much more interested in the accounts payable side. We have network advantages there. We have a merchant network. We've got a lot of advantages on that side. Receivables is not really on the drawing board today because there's so much opportunity on the payable side.

Matthew Roswell

analyst
#32

Okay. You know I have to bring it up, the Lodging business...

James Eglseder

executive
#33

The Lodging business.

Matthew Roswell

analyst
#34

Struggled a couple of quarters.

James Eglseder

executive
#35

It has.

Matthew Roswell

analyst
#36

What's going on?

James Eglseder

executive
#37

There's a few things. One, I never thought I'd talk about weather, while I do like talking about weather. We had some pretty tough weather-driven comps from the fourth quarter of '22 and the first quarter of '23. You can see that in the organic growth of Lodging at 26% in 1Q '23. There were some decent weather-driven events in there. And why that matters is 25% of Lodging is the airline business and 25% of that is distressed passengers. So when your flight gets canceled on your way home today and the airline has to put you up overnight, they might use our room if they're a customer. And just the revenue from those incremental rooms is much higher than the room -- what I get for a pilot and flight attendant 4, 5x, type of thing. So all of those rooms come on at a pretty high contribution rate. And in '23, there was a lot of flight cancellations and they used a lot of rooms. In '24, they were not. I thought there were some, but it was just -- the amount of flight cancellations was super low. So there was a big drag from not having those high-rate rooms coming in. That was one. Two, we have seen some softness, macro-driven softness, we think, in the segment of our customer base. We call it the managed business, starting back in 2Q of last year, call it a year ago from now, right? Customers were just using less rooms. And we called the customers, why are you using less rooms? And like, well, we just have less business or we're being smarter. Instead of putting folks in the field 5 days a week, we're bringing them back on Wednesday night just try to tighten our belts a little bit. Inflation is high, cost of employees is high, debt cost is high. It's just time to tighten our belts a little bit. As we've been dealing with that, hasn't gotten worse. Since Q3, it's stabilized. But then towards the end of last year, we were working on some behind-the-scenes IT changes, some database management tools, if you will, to write some better rules to show you all of the rooms that we have in our handful of networks that we have versus just some of the rooms, right? The customer is never supposed to see it. But when we flipped the switch to turn that on, it took so long to get through the algorithm that it was slowing down the user experience on the front end. So you'd open the app, try to get a hotel for wherever you're staying. We just spent 4, 15, 30, sometimes seconds longer, right? That doesn't work. I'm tired. I just finished cutting trees and chasing tornadoes through everywhere and I got to go and do it again tomorrow. I got to sleep some place. So they walk in and buy at the hotel directly. So that's all fixed. We're behind that or that's behind us. And now we just have to go get those customers to bring that volume back that they were using directly. The customers haven't left. They're just using less rooms than were before, and we have an active campaign to go back and: a, say, "Yes, we had some issues. We apologize for that. It's fixed. It's even better than it was before. And by the way, we actually have a new offering for you, CLC Choice that our CEO talked about back on the May call, which is a bit of a kinder, gentler, more employee-focused option if you think that would be more interesting to your employees and if you're willing to do that. So the product suite is better. The functionality, it's all better. We just need to firm up that softness that we saw in the back half of last year.

Matthew Roswell

analyst
#38

If airlines are 25%, what's the other kind of major verticals?

James Eglseder

executive
#39

Workforce is going to be about half, going back to Lodging. We're for it. Well, I guess we're still in Lodging. Workforce is about half, maybe a little bit more, call it, 55%, and then insurance is going to be the other 20%, right? And then the insurance, we have medium- and long-term stay properties that we put displaced homeowners in. So in Atlanta, when it gets really cold for 48 straight hours, it's not supposed to be below freezing there and all the pipes in the apartment's building flood, they have to put you up someplace else. You don't want to stay in a hotel for 60 or 90 days while they fix your apartment or your house, will put you up in kind of a condo or something else. So we have a network property that does that as well.

Matthew Roswell

analyst
#40

Final question on the Lodging side. Do you have a risk with rooms, meaning you can end it with expense?

James Eglseder

executive
#41

We do not. We actually don't buy the room until it's demanded of us, so we carry no inventory. So I think if you look at some of the OTAs or some of the other players tangentially in the space, they'll buy a big chunk of rooms and then turn around and try to sell them, so they are risk where that's not the business that we're in and we're more of network business. We're not an inventory management to our resale business.

Matthew Roswell

analyst
#42

So the pressure is all revenue solely?

James Eglseder

executive
#43

Correct. That's right.

Matthew Roswell

analyst
#44

Okay. Good. I just want to confirm that. I want to open up for any questions in the room or I can keep going. Please.

Unknown Analyst

analyst
#45

[indiscernible] some market from the [indiscernible].

James Eglseder

executive
#46

Busy. We announced the Paymerang deal background earnings. It's a full-stack AP company that we bought that we expect to close at the end of this month, beginning of next month. We think that we generate a tremendous amount of cash in any given year, call it $1.4 billion at current levels in free cash, and we expect to put preferably in accretive M&A. And if not, then buybacks. We've got a team of 6, 8, 10 M&A guys. That's all they do is shake bushes and due diligence companies. And we're interested in everything until we're not. But ultimately, their plate is full. We think the market continues to move towards us, especially in the Corporate Payments space, where we're mostly focused today. High valuations coming down, investments in portfolios you get long in the tooth. And we got a lot of money to spend. So we've got billions and billions of dollars to spend over the next, call it, 3 or 4 years over the medium term, and we'd love to be able to put that to work. So ultimately, it takes two to tango. So companies are sold, not necessarily bought. And we do think that time is our friend and on our side, and then we'll get more [ add-backs ] and more opportunities along with this higher and straight environment, capital scarcity drags on.

Unknown Analyst

analyst
#47

So in the [indiscernible] business, we've seen some issues with micro customers. Are there any patterns in the other segments, what you see?

James Eglseder

executive
#48

No. Everything in the rest of the segments are just fine, right? That's -- and again, it's very concentrated just in that micro client space. And unfortunately, those micro clients tend to be pretty profitable. So like I said earlier, when you don't sell, a lot of those clients for a period of time, it hurts for a longer period of time as you get through that. Sales are good. And the beauty of a recurring revenue environment is that, hey, when you sell to a customer in the first quarter, you get all the revenue through the second, the third and the fourth quarter. Then you sell to a customer in the second quarter, you get all the revenue for the second, the third and the fourth quarter. So it snowballs on itself throughout the year. And that's part of the driver of the inflection in the back half of the year. It's easier comps than just the snowball effect of the sales that we sell throughout the year.

Matthew Roswell

analyst
#49

Circling back to the strategic review you went through last year. What did you learn? And what was kind of the conclusion?

James Eglseder

executive
#50

Yes. It was actually very good for Ron and the Board and the company to go through that. We're -- Ron is probably the most -- one of the most strategic CEOs in the business today. Wakes up every day trying to figure out how to make the company and the stock go. But for us to spend that time looking internally, looking at every possible combination, sales spin, permutation scenario, it just frankly reinforced our belief that the businesses that we're in today are the businesses that we should be in today. What I think it did do is that historically, we might have looked for incremental growth verticals to add to the mix. I think you heard Ron say very clearly that we're very focusing on the businesses that we're in today. It's Lodging Payments, it's Vehicle Payments and it's Corporate Payments, with most of the incremental M&A appetite in the Corporate Payments space. So we've never -- Ron and the Board have never been more convinced that we're in the right businesses, that were on the right things today, and we just need to go sell more and build bigger positions that we're in today. So I think it really was the ability to look around, look at every possible outcome and go, "No, we're in the right place. We just need to double down and work harder to build bigger businesses that went to that."

Matthew Roswell

analyst
#51

How much overlap is there in terms of either clients or technology platforms between the 3 major businesses?

James Eglseder

executive
#52

Not much in either. When you look at it, obviously, Brazil is geographically disparate, it's hard. Even the vehicle business is mostly either a very small business or a very large enterprise business. The Corporate Payments business is middle market, right? So they tend to focus on different things. And we actually did the work at the start of the strategic review, roughly 10% of the customers overlapped use 2 or more products. They may not have known they did because we have 3 or 4 or 5 different brands, go-to-market brands. But when you look at it, 60% to 80% of the prospects overlapped. So there's tremendous amount of opportunity. There's a lot of relatedness of the businesses today, which is why we think that makes sense together since that we've largely gone to market independently and there's some incremental upside to be had over time. But we still think, hey, we want to make sure that we continue to grow the individual businesses at the rates we think we can grow in that while we still figure out, okay, how do we capture some incremental customer revenue opportunity by introducing additional products and services that we have?

Matthew Roswell

analyst
#53

Okay. Well, thank you very much.

James Eglseder

executive
#54

Of course. Thanks for having us. Appreciate the great conference.

This call discussed

For developers and AI pipelines

Programmatic access to Corpay, Inc. earnings transcripts and 32,000+ others is available through the EarningsCalls.dev REST API. Plans from $24.99/month — full transcripts, speaker segments, full-text search, and the recently-added /api/v1/transcripts/recent polling endpoint for ETL pipelines.