Flywire Corporation (FLYW) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary
May 25, 2022
Earnings Call Speaker Segments
Tien-Tsin Huang
analystAll right. Great. Let's get started. My name is Tien-Tsin Huang. I cover the payments and IT services sector. And really excited to have Flywire back with us. Flywire was always kind enough to be a part of this conference even before they were public. So here we are as a public conversation, so Mike is stuck with me. So Michael Massaro, CEO of Flywire, welcome. Thanks for being here.
Michael Massaro
executiveYes, I appreciate you having me in real life.
Tien-Tsin Huang
analystYou look at -- in real life, in the flesh, shaking hands. You guys just had your Analyst Day. So this is all second nature for you now in terms of these things. But for those that weren't there, just to go back to basics, I thought just starting from the top. And when I think of Flywire, you guys do really, really, really complex payments, really tough payments, not just cross-border, but also domestic. So I was thinking like elevator pitch: Describe what makes you guys so special in terms of what you've built and how hard it is and the moat, et cetera.
Michael Massaro
executiveSure. So for those who don't know Flywire, we digitize payments that we often say have been neglected for decades. So if you think of e-commerce and retail, they've digitized quite well over the last 2 decades. If you think of other major parts of the global economy, things like tuition payments, health care payments, certain types of travel or B2B payments, they're kind of still in the dark ages when it comes to digitization. And what Flywire brings to the table around those industries is a combination, we call it the Flywire Advantage, it's a shared set of platform services that are leveraged across industry. It's our own proprietary global payment network. Think of it as 50-plus bank accounts, credit card processing relationships, third-party wallet relationships and verticalized software. And that software is really tailored to deliver payment experiences for our customers so that our clients, payers, pay through Flywire software, and we're interfacing to the back-end system of record. And so our belief is that you need that combination, you need software to do a little more in these industries to help them digitize over time. And these industries also have an aspect of local, domestic and cross-border payments in them. And so that's really where we sit is a combination of transactional revenue and platform and usage SaaS-based revenue and helping digitize these industries. Been going for about 10, 12 years.
Tien-Tsin Huang
analystJust quickly on the moat, Mike, just thinking about the moat -- the network, the endpoints, the integrations, how would you quickly describe that?
Michael Massaro
executiveOftentimes, we like to say we have multiple moats, right? So if you think of what we actually do with the software, it's deeply embedded verticalized software. So it's tailored for the use cases and the industries that we serve. It will sit in between our client system of record. It could be their student information system in education at a major university; hospital systems' EHR like an Epic, Meditech, Cerner type platform; could be a bookings platform in travel; an ERP system in B2B payments. And we're sitting between that system of record and their customers. So that's kind of the first moat that you have to jump over, right? That deeply embedded software that we get deployed, these multiyear relationships with customers. We then have a payment network, and that payment network truly moves all the money. So if you think of how things used to work for our clients, they used to have to find software that met their requirements, connect in a whole bunch of payment relationships and then manage it ongoing. We've not only deployed software to handle it, we're actually bringing all our payment relationships. So they're not signing paper with a card processor. They're not having to organize third-party relationships, negotiate pricing. We're taking all that complexity away from them again. So again, it's almost a second moat that if you're going to displace us, you have to solve the software, you have to have the way to actually move all the money, not just card, but all the payment volume, which is complex. And then we often say our third moat is our people. So the way we go to market is quite unique, and we go to market with verticalized teams that are focused on education, health care, travel, business payments and they're experts in those domains. And so oftentimes, where you see competition try and be generic across industry or focus geographically, we see a ton of value of having experts that understand these industries. So we often say we have these multiple moats that someone has to jump over to displace us. And that's evident in the net revenue retention number or client retention stats. Super fortunate.
Tien-Tsin Huang
analystYes, that was great. Thank you for going through that. So in your verticals, there's -- everyone's asking about the macro environment, how recession ready are these businesses. It feels like a lot of yours is going to be recession ready. But talk to us about that. What are you seeing on the ground?
Michael Massaro
executiveYes. I mean, that's exactly right. If you look at the sectors that we focus on, they're typically quite defensive in nature, right? Education, health care, even the areas of travel are traditionally luxury travel, right? We're not in mass consumer. We're focused on things like luxury accommodations or destination trips where you're bringing a whole family to a specific destination or excursion around the world. These are typically things you're saving up for and that don't kind of change massively even if you're facing some macroeconomic climate. So people are going to invest in education, it's our core thesis. They're going to continue to invest in good health care. And having been pent up for 2 years, they're going to go and see the world and have amazing experiences. So obviously, B2B is also quite resilient, right? Companies are going to sell products and need to be invoicing all around the world for those. So we feel like we're in a very good defensive sectors. And we've seen our business for 11, 12 years through other downturns, it's been quite resilient.
Tien-Tsin Huang
analystGood. Yes. Well, high on travel. We've heard it from a lot of the players. I mean, it's been very, very strong -- probably an understatement. So NRR, you mentioned it, I'll throw the number out, I wrote that 123% from the event you all hosted over the last 3 years. So build up that NRR for us. Of course, there's a lot of elements of it. People talk about same-store growth, pricing, churn, retention. How does it build up?
Michael Massaro
executiveYes. So coming out of our Analyst Day just last week, pricing is not a lever we traditionally move. So we're not driving NRR historically through pricing leverage. What we're really driving is 2 combinations. One is clients doing more with Flywire, meaning deploying more products. For instance, we could have started with cross-border product with them. And then now, they're a major institution like Stanford, who we talked about publicly, who's now leveraging us to process all their tuition payments, right? And so that's a huge grower of NRR. Even within our existing client base, there's a 5 to 7x revenue potential within that existing signed client base just by geographic expansion and just by product expansion. And frankly, some of that is also time. If you think of our clients' ability to implement -- new clients have a very small ability to impact the current year. Again, it's invoice-based volume. So when we get live in a given year, we get whatever volume is left for that year. But that next year, you get almost a guaranteed uplift as well on the full annualized invoice volume. So you've got a bit of product, you get a bit of that full year effect and you get geographic expansion. So to give you an example of that, could be our relationship that we've made public with Hilton around their Grand Vacations business, where we could start with 1 geographic region. And after digitizing that series of invoices in a certain geography, we get asked to do more. And that's a very consistent theme across our business as you could get the undergrad program and then get the grad school. You could get 1 hospital group or 1 series of states associated to a hospital system, and then get added to another series of states within that same umbrella. And so that's part of this land and expand strategy we talked about. It's what's driving an awesome base for growth, which is our NRR number.
Tien-Tsin Huang
analystGot it. So let's do education real quick, right? I think when I got to know Flywire, I always thought about it as cross-border, foreign students coming in, and you help solve that pain point. But you mentioned Stanford. I think UConn you guys talked about publicly, you won both the international piece as well as the domestic. So what's happening? What's -- is there a pivot there? Was there some kind of a-ha moment that, yes, domestic is a good place for Flywire to be in?
Michael Massaro
executiveYes. So as we saw our clients try and digitize and improve, right, they were dealing with manual back-office processes. They're trying to stay modern with technology, right? And so they were looking for innovation. And we first started the company, we spent 6, 7 years, having 1 product in 1 country. So we had just the cross-border tuition product. So we were just in education, and we were just focused on higher ed universities in the United States. And that was really the first 6 years of our evolution. As we started listening to more customers in that first segment of education, they said, "Hey, why don't you do more for us? Why don't you do more than just cross-border? I like you better than who's delivering my domestic solution right now. And can you add that capability?" So we initially looked at that as, "Hey, is that something that's already done? Is it already solved?" And when you looked at the technology that was being used, the integration of all -- processing all the tuition dollars with 1 platform and doing more of the modern level of engagement that we do, the more configurability that we have in our software, modern tech stack, it just seemed obvious for us to add that value to customers. And then in addition to that, we kind of went global with the solution, right? We went to -- now we've got clients in over 32 countries. So we've kind of proven our ability to go after the global total addressable market, not just in education, but now in these other industries as well. So what we see clients struggle with is that they're not experts in payments. And as much as we all think payments are maybe fun or exciting, our clients don't see that, right? They see them as complex, confusing. They're not experts. They want to run their hospital. They want to run their educational institution, run their business. And so by having that combination of software and payments in a domestic and cross-border solution together, you can really take away a huge burden from them and let them focus on what they do best, which is not worrying about payments.
Tien-Tsin Huang
analystIs there a way to frame, Mike, your education clients, which ones take you for both? What's the potential upsell if you get the domestic piece? I know you mentioned 5 to 7x is the broader figure, but is that a good...
Michael Massaro
executiveYes. I mean it's an exponential effect to revenue on an account level if we kind of get all the volume, if you will. And I would say we're going to market now looking to win the volume. Obviously, in the United States, where we started with the cross-border solution, there's a lot more opportunity to upsell, right? We still -- we shared it at Analyst Day, still single-digit penetrated when it comes to our customer base of upselling them to domestic in the U.S. And that opportunity outside the U.S. for us to start from day 1 with many of these global universities moving all the volume is kind of where we're starting. So we're not having that same upsell strategy globally -- where we're not yet deployed, we're going in and going for all the business.
Tien-Tsin Huang
analystAnd one more on this subject, if you don't mind, on the payer side, right, it's not just about the payment, right? You're also doing plans and you're helping design some of these things and you're working with the [indiscernible] office, I assume, with the design front. Is that a big part of it as well?
Michael Massaro
executiveYes. I mean, that's the cornerstone of when we often say software drives value in payments. It's more than just being a pay button, right? So if you're, for instance, processing within a university, you may be dealing with payment plans, which anybody that's paid a tuition bill, you may have installments throughout a semester. Different schools configure those differently. During the pandemic, their rules all changed. Their due dates all changed. Oftentimes, they saw the inflexibility of legacy systems that they have adapt to a changing time. And so those are things that are critical to us. Another thing we've talked about a lot is 529s, anybody that has saved in a 529 plan for years and then you've gotten to the point after 20 years of actually then trying to use the money, you may realize the experience has been relatively poor, right? It may take 7 to 10 to 14 days for it to actually credit an account at a university. There's a FedEx or UPS envelope involved. There's a check that gets mailed. And so that's another example where we're using software to solve the problem inside the higher education that's existed for quite some time and using our digital infrastructure to move the money to our clients as a way to solve it. So we're really good at identifying those pain points that exist, but using software to -- really around the financial transaction to really drive the value for the customer.
Tien-Tsin Huang
analystYes. I'm counting on you guys to solve that 529 piece. You got a few more years to go.
Michael Massaro
executiveI've got 4 kids, me too. I'm counting on it.
Tien-Tsin Huang
analystSo hopefully get to go to a place to go and spend it. One more, the agent community, which I know does a lot of work placing students, foreign students into schools. I think you've hinted at that as an opportunity to expand the TAM, but you've elaborated on that at the event. So can you share with us?
Michael Massaro
executiveYes. Yes, it's a great example. I mean, by focusing on these industries, we really do understand the whole ecosystem that exists. And at Analyst Day, we talked a lot about not just helping our clients get paid, but looking at the entire ecosystem in which they operate and how money is moving around that ecosystem. And educational agents, frankly, travel agents are very similar in the model where you have folks that are helping students either identify and apply to school abroad; in travel, you have people that obviously are helping book trips -- and elaborate trips. And they are influential stakeholders in these critical transactions. And to give you a stat in education, 75% of the students that go to Australian universities go through an educational agent to help source and apply to school. That's a huge number, obviously. The way that universities then have to interact with these agents is also important. They're involved in the application process, they're involved in even the communication of invoicing and information upon acceptance. In some markets, there's even commission owed back to the educational agent based on the tuition similar to travel, where if you use a travel agent to book a family vacation, there's often a commission coming back to that travel agent. And so that's a good example of the ecosystem aspect of what's going on and how just helping the university and the student or the travel company and the traveler doesn't solve the full problem. And so there's a whole series of capabilities that we continue to invest in to help that whole agent community in education, in travel. But it's a massive opportunity and excited. We're just at the beginning of rolling that capability out.
Tien-Tsin Huang
analystGood. So let's shift gears to health care, if you don't mind.
Michael Massaro
executiveSure.
Tien-Tsin Huang
analystSo when I first started, I covered this company called [ MDC. ] They did health care payments, and my head was spinning because all of the different players, the EHRs, the system providers, hospitals, processors, banks, now you have Chase buying InstaMed, getting involved. You have a lot of dedicated players focusing on health care, you do it as well. So why do you win in health care versus these dedicated providers?
Michael Massaro
executiveYes. I mean, one of the things we saw across many of these industries, and frankly, there's even more industries, if you think of large transactions, complex money movements, global-type payments, money crossing borders, there's lots of industries that have been poorly digitized, right? And so the commonality inside Flywire, those are the industries we focus on, right? And so we're expected to deploy in enterprise-grade solutions deeply embedded into a system of record. And it may vary between a student information system and an EHR like an Epic, Meditech or Cerner, but they are complex environments, right? And oftentimes, the back office infrastructure isn't really great at providing modern ways to engage a consumer or a payer. And that's really where Flywire excels, right? It's a combination of the software that's deeply embedded, plus the ability to take all the money movement complexity away from the client. And again, functionality like payment plans is being rolled out now in hospitals where Flywire doesn't deal with any of the insurance-based payments. We're all post-claims, post-adjudication, right? So when you think about that, we're in the patient pay aspect of it. So if you go to a hospital or, like me, I have 4 kids, a lot of hospital trips, and you get lots of bills. And those bills show up. And oftentimes, you can't understand, is your insurance applied? Is it not? Is this a bill? Is it just a statement? Do you actually have to pay something? Do you not? So that process is extremely legacy. And what hospitals have realized is instead of single-digit percentages of their revenue being tied to a patient on a pocket spend, now it's actually 20%, 30%. It's grown quite significantly. So it's not something they can ignore anymore. And they didn't have the infrastructure to really engage patients and make it easy for them to pay -- modern, easy. The other thing going on inside health care is just a massive affordability crisis. So it's one of the few things that is truly an unexpected kind of necessity, right? If you happen to have a medical procedure that was unexpected, you may end up with a $500,000 medical expense that you were not expected to pay. And so one of the things our software does and helps us win is really focus on around affordability and say, "Hey, if a person can't pay that $1,000 but could pay $100 a month on a payment plan over 12 months, 10-month period." We leave all that configuration up to our client. So it's a noninterest-bearing product. There's no risk Flywire is taking. It's effectively our client who is using our software to configure different payment rules. And that's really powerful, because you can imagine, another medical procedure happens, you can rebalance that payment plan, you can offer an additional payment plan, but you're providing affordability as opposed to sending someone a $1,000 bill they can't afford, they didn't expect and getting 0 of it right? Over time, you can show someone that they can make payments against that, and again, not do so in trying to finance it in any way, just really extending more flexible payment terms through software. So the deeply embedded part is how we win, the vertical expertise is how we win and then just innovating around things like affordability differently than how other providers in the print and mail side of the world have done it historically.
Tien-Tsin Huang
analystSo the game is really to just penetrate hospitals if you believe they're going to get more engaged with the patient pay side of the equation, that's the motivation to make a change.
Michael Massaro
executiveYes. And I mean, if you think of just the experience we saw a change over COVID, right? I mean, anybody that registered to go into a doctor's office you realized, you had to pre-certify certain things, you had to answer the COVID survey, you may have even gotten prompted with a, do you realize you had an outstanding balance that you owed from your last visit or you can pay your co-pay now instead of go pay it standing there at the point of service. So those are all ways in which software is being embedded inside health care to make it better. And that's -- those are areas where Flywire software is getting deployed across the hospital systems. The other thing going on inside health care is just consolidation, right? No matter where you live in the country, you've probably seen it, the big health systems expanding to the suburbs, adding specialty practices under their care umbrella, hospitals buying other hospitals. That dynamic makes it even a better environment for Flywire, right? Because we're used to sitting -- integrated into complex systems. It can be even 1 system for 1 series of states, 1 series of hospitals. Another back-end instance of Cerner or Epic for a different state, we can actually string together those different data sources into what looks like to the consumer, 1 consistent experience. And so that's another thing that is very different than a lot of folks that are just focused on 1 EHR-type solution.
Tien-Tsin Huang
analystOkay. No, that's great. I appreciate you going through that. So on travel, let's do that quickly. Pandemic recovery has been really, really strong. We've heard that from all the group that's been around last couple of days. How do you disaggregate what's been pent-up demand versus penetration of what you've been doing well?
Michael Massaro
executiveYes. So when the pandemic hit, we were relatively early into our travel business. And so for us, first, just seeing the resilience of a health care-education-travel payments company in a global pandemic was quite encouraging. Our business even grew in 2020 organically, which was quite impressive. And as you looked at travel, we really saw our travel customers and across 3 segments is where we focus in travel. So everything from accommodation providers like Hilton, I mentioned, or luxury rentals, those kind of things -- you may go on a trip, African safari, you may go on a heli-skiing trip, high-ticket purposeful trips, typically tour operator types. And then the third is destination management companies. So these are companies that focus specifically on a given region or country. And again, typically, multi-day tours, multi-day travel, complex trips to configure. Those are all areas in which we focus inside travel. And so when the pandemic hit, we focused on how can we help our customers that we had in travel and how do we make sure they can actually navigate what is an extremely challenging time. For almost every client in travel, they went from dealing almost exclusively with cross-border payments to having to shift to more regionalized, localized payments. Borders were shut. So if you were a tour operator in Canada, you marketed to Canadians, right, as opposed to what your normal demographic may have been for that excursion. And so for us, it fit really well into that land and expand strategy of getting everybody all the capabilities we have when it came to invoicing, when it came to domestic payments and cross-border and continue to focus on the industry and the pain points that they had in the back office. Most of these companies, again, they're not in their business to process payments. They're in their business because they love travel. They love providing great solutions to travelers. They love the places and the experiences they offer. And they want to get back to that. And oftentimes, the owner, the most senior people in these companies, are dealing with the most complex things like payments. And so for us, that's really where our focus went. And so when you think of what's happening now, you're seeing a combination of clients that never ramped because of the pandemic that are getting back to their levels. You're hearing lots of great stories of people that are at levels they've never been at before because of the resurgence. But for us, it's all net new benefit. And we even said that it kind of graduated out of that emerging category for us last year, and I think will continue to be just a great vertical that will grow quite well.
Tien-Tsin Huang
analystYes. No, it sounds that way. It feels like you're in a good spot. So let me do 1 more, and then we'll open it up. B2B. Same question I asked you on health care. We've got a lot of B2B pure play companies come in to this event, 3 of which will follow you. What's your sweet spot?
Michael Massaro
executiveYes, B2B payments is massive. You will hear people talk about mid-$20 trillion, $24 trillion, $25 trillion...
Tien-Tsin Huang
analyst$24 million is the number.
Michael Massaro
executiveThat's the number, right?
Tien-Tsin Huang
analystYes.
Michael Massaro
executiveWe've put out $10 trillion that we think is directly addressable by us. And we're focused on subsectors of B2B payments, things like tech companies, software companies, manufacturing companies, professional services companies, all good examples of subsectors in B2B that we have clients. The network helps differentiate us, right? This isn't about processing card payments, B2B payments, large transactions, complex in nature. The vast majority of that volume goes over the wire network, like the international bank wire network. And extremely manual, poorly digitized, modern in that industry is a PDF attached to an e-mail with an account number and a routing number at the bottom of it, right? That's not a great experience if you're a business trying to grow globally, if you're trying to streamline your operations. So heavily manual. You see a lot of B2B payments companies because there's innovation happening on the accounts receivable side where Flywire is attached to the invoice. And then there's also companies going after the accounts payable side of B2B payments. And frankly, there's going to be success in both sides, right? There's going to be folks that can digitize accounts payable and help companies improve how they make payments. And there's going to be companies like us that help digitize the accounts receivable. And I think that's the real opportunity is who can be, in a way, focused on the sectors, who has the assets, and we obviously think we do around software and the network. And then we're also really just good at these industries, right? Diving in, filling a team with experts in those industries and spending time and effort understanding the pain points. And I think that's what we've proven as we've gone from education, added health care, added travel and now adding B2B in various subsectors. So we feel really good about it. We're not in it for the short term. We think this is a decade-long digitization that happens, and we think we're in the right spot for it.
Tien-Tsin Huang
analystVery good. Questions from the audience? We're happy to take them. I think we're webcasting, am I right? So let's do the mic, please.
Unknown Analyst
analystCan you just talk about the revenue model? Is it a take rate and a software license fee? Or is it more -- everything is in the take rate? And what are the take rates for the various industries?
Michael Massaro
executiveYes, happy to. So 2 revenue streams, a transactional revenue stream and a platform and usage revenue stream, about 75-25 roughly in that split. And the comment, think of the software coming more in, obviously, when there's more software being deployed, more enterprise-level deployments driving that software-based revenue, often more correlated to moving all the money or doing domestic and cross-border together. If you look at the transactional side, you will have obviously, foreign exchange aspect of cross-border payments. You will have a little bit of domestic payment interchange and things in that bucket. In general, when you think about payment volume, which we report out and revenue in those 2 buckets, the one thing we encourage people to look at is when they think about monetization, not to get tripped up in 2 areas with us. One, we don't force anyone to pay any given method. So you'll see all types of payment methods. You'll see bank payments, you'll see card payments, third-party payment methods like Alipay or PayPal, Venmo, all within our platform. Ultimately the user, the payer, whether a consumer or business, makes the choice on how they want to pay. And that will drive, in either instance, great unit economics for Flywire, but could drive differences in adjusted gross margin at a payment mix level. And so things that drive that are like transaction size. So for us, if we see transaction size go up, because in Q3 of the year it's our biggest revenue year, it's when most U.S. education bills are due, so there's still a seasonality to the business that then will drive user behavior to pick a certain method, right? Very few people will put a $50,000, $60,000 transaction on a Black or Platinum American Express card, most people are going to do a bank payment. And so those things will drive the business. All great economics for us. But as you hear some of our calls, see some of our numbers, you will see adjusted gross margin move within a range that we've been very clear about. But that's natural payment mix and seasonality, right? That's not being driven by pricing or pricing pressure or those types of things. So that's a really important part around it. We often say that monetization rates are derived value. It's not something we solve for inside the business for that factor.
Tien-Tsin Huang
analystThank you for that. Yes, we'll take another one here.
Unknown Analyst
analystYou provided a pretty helpful pie chart in the deck the other day with the revenue mix by vertical. If we just think about that 5 years from now, which of those smaller slices are going to be a lot bigger? And what's kind of critical to driving the business plan?
Michael Massaro
executiveYes. So that's probably been the most interested topic as you well know, of how do you take our business and share more data about where it's coming from. And the split out, even of our education business in that pie chart, was to show the transition from 2016 to 2022. And also to show people that the education business isn't a monolith either, right? It actually has split of domestic and foreign universities and educational institutions. There's even -- there's a whole bunch of different cuts you could put in it, not just higher ed. You could put in language programs, boarding schools, vocational programs. And so it's actually a very diverse business unit in itself. The problem is it keeps growing quite fast, right, which is kind of a good problem. At the same time, we've said over the long term, expect us to get education less than 50% of our total business. But I would say we're also not going to artificially try and kind of move that needle, right? It's great business. Business we get across all industries is really good for Flywire, but what would really happen is the travel business, the B2B business, I think those will continue to grow quite well. And I think you'll see that help with diversification. But important for people to realize the education business, quite diverse geographically across products and across subsectors, even though it is large and growing quite rapidly.
Tien-Tsin Huang
analystGreat. Good question. Anyone else? So maybe building to that to grow and invest and really spur growth across all these different verticals. You've got a tough job. Both Mikes have tough jobs allocating budget, right, to push the growth. So what is the thinking on that, sort of building on that last question?
Michael Massaro
executiveYes. So anybody that looked at us or if you didn't, I think it was 12% EBITDA margins last year. So there was great flow-through in the business, right? Again, underscoring great unit economics, great business model. At the same time, when you look at lifetime value, cost of acquisition it's pretty evident we should keep investing in growth. And so we shared at Analyst Day a whole series of metrics, not only in the growth profile of people thinking of us as a long-term compounding grower north of 30%. In addition to that, this year, we've given guidance to profitable EBITDA again. And we expect to continue to work that up and show that we can continually grow but do so in a profitable EBITDA perspective. So when we balance investments, part of what makes my job easy is that you have these amazing teams that are dedicated to their industries. And so they really do spend time and effort identifying the opportunities and knowing what to go accomplish. And there aren't a lot of like big bets you have to make. You can actually bet with very targeted investments, whether it's a new country you're going to expand into and you haven't sold yet, universities or travel companies in that country, but you've sold around those countries, and you've seen it just happen over and over and over again. And so it becomes more about finding the right team and getting the marketing message tailored for that geographic region or even if we're going after a new product capability, and we talked about agents, you could see the applicability of something like that helping our travel business and helping our education business. And again, those investments don't have to be massive. We don't make these massive investments and then kind of hope and pray. We often start just like we have building out regions and building out our products and industries. We start with lighthouse accounts, we start listening to the customers. And again, those teams are dedicated. So they're really good, sometimes too good, at even advocating for what their customers want, what enhancements they want for the product. And then those payback periods are oftentimes extremely rapid for us. We'll often say that our payback period, even from a new client acquisition, could be in the first billing cycle, if not the first year, the first billing cycle. And so again, multiyear relationships, really good unit economics. And so it puts us in a great position to make investments for growth. But I'm never -- 4 kids and 4 verticals, I'm never kind of picking a favorite and saying we're going to put all our chips in this one. There's opportunity everywhere across those sectors and relatively low-risk bets for us that we've proven to be able to do over the last decade.
Tien-Tsin Huang
analystGood. I know the market is a lot more focused on profitability, and you gave a couple of hops on time to get to the 25% that you laid out from the beginning. So -- which was helpful for us to see. What conditions might there be out there that would change your thinking on that timing? Could inorganic M&A, for example, cause you to think, okay, we're going to maybe change that timetable?
Michael Massaro
executiveYes. I mean, I think, we've always kind of said, "Hey, this is what we expect to do organically and anything inorganic is kind of an accelerant, right?" So I wouldn't say any M&A is needed to kind of go down what we shared in the Analyst Day. At the same time, I would say it's probably growth is probably the biggest one, right? We've kind of pegged this 30-plus percent growth. Anybody can look at our business and see we have a pretty good track record being public a year and kind of delivering and executing. And so for me, I often say it's up to us. It's up to us to execute. We've executed for the last decade. We're going to go execute for another decade. And we've got great financial economics, a great team and are super early penetrated. So again, it will mostly come down to growth. Again, we talked about macro conditions. I don't think that's going to impact us. If anything, it's a bit of a tailwind for us. So it's about execution.
Tien-Tsin Huang
analystAnd are there levers to pull? And like you said, you're pretty -- look, if God forbid, another 2 standard deviation event or pandemic or something happens, but do you have levers to pull to maybe give a little bit more energy into the margin? I know pricing always comes up, and that hasn't been a lever, but it does seem like it is available to you.
Michael Massaro
executiveYes. No, and we shared some great data that shows kind of consistency when it comes to monetization and pricing over time. And again, it isn't a lever we've used. At the same time, it is something that is probably able to be used by us. I'd also say we own our payment network, and that's an important aspect of it. Think of it. We own all the costs associated to that network. So when you think of our great partnerships with the card schemes, the acquirers, the banks, third-party payment providers, by owning that volume, you'd imagine this is high-value, low-risk payment volume that all those parties want going through their infrastructure, right? And ultimately, Flywire controls the train track, right, and can decide how we want to route that volume, right, through the software that we deploy. So it puts us in a great position as well to manage cost as we scale. And I think that's another great lever we have more from the cost side, more than the revenue side.
Tien-Tsin Huang
analystIs crypto blockchain on the road map -- product road map anyway?
Michael Massaro
executiveWell, the more volatility, the less that question comes up. But I would say, in general, I'm a big believer that at some point, there will be digitization, and there will be certain types of currency, stablecoins, that will exist. We've always looked at them as nodes in our network. The problem is just the risk mitigation that exists, right? Anonymity and large cross-border funds flow don't overly go well together, right? So one of the things we do for our clients is, of course, make sure the money being delivered is -- the originations of those funds and everything is fully compliant from a regulatory perspective. So I think over time, you're going to see those things improve when it comes to crypto. And stable coins may emerge, and ultimately, they're payment methods for us and nodes in our network that we can add. And again, just like all the other methods, we don't really govern which one someone should use, it should be up to them to make the payment in whatever method they want.
Tien-Tsin Huang
analystGreat. I think we're out of time. Thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule to do this. I know you guys put a lot of effort into the Investor Day as well. And it was great. So thank you for that.
Michael Massaro
executiveThe team did a great job.
Tien-Tsin Huang
analystThank you. Thank you. Thanks.
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