Flywire Corporation (FLYW) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. So thanks, everyone, for being here. Will Nance, I cover payments and fintech here at Goldman. Next up, we're pleased to have Cosmin as CFO of Flywire. I won't try to pronounce your last name. Prior to joining Flywire, earlier this year, Cosmin held senior executive positions at PayPal, most recently, SVP of Finance. Cosmin, it's really a pleasure to have you here today.

Thank you. Thanks for having me and great to meet everyone. It's a great event. It's been amazing to just meet everyone.

That's great. Well, Cosmin, you joined the company earlier this year you know and I know Mike's goal in the search, from my understanding, was to find a CFO who could help take Flywire to be a $1 billion dollar revenue company. Now that you're settled in, what have your impressions been of the business so far? And when can we pencil you in for $1 billion of revenue?

Why limit our ambition at $1 billion? So we're going to aim much higher than that.

Raising guidance, all right.

So look, I think one of the things coming in that I was excited about was just bringing that 20-year PayPal and eBay experience in terms of seeing the scale. And what's been exciting is to see, one, what the team has built. So it's the things that you've heard a lot about, which is building that global payment network, building the capabilities that are so unique around being able to -- our focus is on accounts receivable, and it's driving and using that software to build that value in payments, which is especially important for the verticals that we play in, which are -- arguably have been sort of underutilized by the legacy kind of players and have been a bit more difficult because of the nature of those verticals in travel, education, B2B and health care. So it's been great to see what the team has built, and it's been exciting for me to see the opportunities that I have to get to that scale. Obviously, as you look at it as some of the areas that I can be obviously hopeful is I come from a background, for example, data, platforms, technology and being able to build those capabilities as you think about what is it going to take to get to, not just $1 billion, but beyond that. I think asking that question and thinking sort of longer term helps enable sort of different thinking about how to build scale. And so whether that's on using data to drive scale or in terms of how we operate, there's a lot of opportunity there. And so I'm excited to help build that next stage of growth.

So coming to the seat, about 6 months now, what changes do you expect to make in terms of kind of communications with the Street, guidance philosophy, disclosures, et cetera?

Yes. So on guidance after -- obviously, it's been a year of a lot of change, managing through some of the Canada headwinds and surprises. One thing that I've come in is clarifying my own sort of guidance philosophies, which are similar today as kind of you heard me say before, which is one is forecast just accuracy in general. So focusing on the midpoint and getting the midpoint right, and then providing a range around that midpoint that kind of captures the general kind of probability for the time period, whether that's the quarter or the year. So that's a kind of principle #1. The second is around transparency and visibility. So being able to tell you, like, within those -- within that range, what are the big assumptions, whether it's Canada, where we've tried to disclose more or the FX piece, which, again, I think one of the areas that I will look at is taking that sort of FX-neutral approach to guidance as opposed to a spot rate FX. So those are some of the simple things. So that's on kind of guidance philosophy. I think in terms of disclosures, again, I'm sort of a first principles kind of person. So for me, it's the way we run the business internally should be the way we then disclose metrics for everyone to be able to measure the business. So we'll look to balance that -- balance those 2 things. And disclosures, for me, are an ability to then provide more insights. I think historically, we focused a lot on the top line and unpacking that, and I think we can continue doing more around that and especially kind of the organic NRR type of growth. But increasingly, one of the areas you've heard me talk a lot about is profitability. As we pivot to profitability next year, being able to understand, well, how do margins grow. What's driving the margins, unpacking kind of the OpEx or stock-based comp and some of the drivers of margin to be able to understand kind of why that has been such a great sort of driver of growth. I think a lot of people are surprised, one, we're able to deliver margins even above kind of expectations this year despite the headwinds. So being able to unpack that side of kind of the P&L is great, certainly, as we get into kind of profitability. So really excited about that.

Yes. So obviously very tricky timing this year. I think the company had to give guidance for the year when one of your largest markets had not yet finalized sweeping changes to its student visa program, talking about Canada, obviously. So that's led to elevated uncertainty this year, some adjustments to your guidance as you kind of learn more about that over the course of the year. As we sit here today, do you feel like the guidance is appropriately capturing the dynamics in Canada? And then second, I know it's a bit early in the tuition season, but do you have any preliminary thoughts around how the high season for the education business this quarter is shaking out?

Yes. So starting with the first portion on Canada. The short answer is yes, what we've tried to do and what I've tried to do is stick into those principles that I just laid out to say, look, here's what we expect from Canada and put a couple of slides in our earnings supplement that hopefully provided significant visibility. And I feel like we can say, look, this is a reset year for Canada. And we can now start to build on top of that and say, look this is kind of the second half exit growth rate. Those are the dynamics that already are pretty well captured. And so we feel good that, that's captured in what we've provided as far as the guidance there. So as you look ahead, I think the only pieces in Canada that remains sort of as a discussion is around the post-graduate kind of study permits, but those are sort of a smaller dynamic, and it's more of a longer term and how to think about the demand side of the equation long term as to when students go into a certain country, what -- can they stay there longer term or do they go somewhere else. And that's where, for example, if you talk about the U.K., that was one of the things that they clarified immediately, that they welcome graduate students with their families. So we'll see where that plays out. But so far, Canada, I feel like we've captured it well. We feel good kind of where we are as far as kind of the range in terms of guidance for the second half. Your second question around the -- yes, Q3 is our education peak, and it's U.S. and U.K. kind of playing out mostly in August and September. Again, same guidance principles kind of going back to that. I feel like we've well captured kind of that potential. The way to think about it is the last day of the quarter happens to also be the last day of tuition. But we've gotten better and better at kind of predicting what that looks like. We'll have to see, obviously. We'll -- we have kind of the peak period coming through. And so we'll wait to play that out. But again, we feel like we've captured that within the range that we've provided.

Got it. And then there's also been a lot of headlines in other parts of the market. I feel like we had a bit of a head fake in the U.K. But as you mentioned, they clarified most of those rules. It seems like a lot of the policies are actually going to be relatively unchanged, correct me if I'm wrong. I think Australia is one that has been getting a lot of focus over the summer, has been making some noise recently about changes to their program. Could you compare the situation in Australia to the one that you faced in Canada this year? And I think at issue here is maybe around vocational schools. Any color on maybe how big that is or how important that is to Flywire in Australia?

Yes. And so for those of you who don't know, obviously, our big 4 markets for education are all the sort of English-speaking kind of markets where you have a lot of students, especially from India and China go into those markets, so U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia. And so there's always a dynamic playing out between all 4 of them, and we follow all of them very closely. This year was exceptionally sort of high as far as headlines from the government and given all the election years kind of going on. So in the U.K., at least it feels like -- Canada, I guess we can sort of put that behind us now. U.K., again, the party there, as you said, sort of came out and actually is quite positive about graduate students. So again, good to see that stability there. And Australia, basically different dynamic in Australia, a little bit than Canada. In Canada, what the government was sort of trying to solve for was inflation in real estate prices, what they -- because of what they felt was incoming sort of international students. In Australia, what they're pushing on is sort of immigration and it's especially immigration that -- from folks who are coming in through those kind of vocational and trade schools. And so what you saw last week, what they announced in their kind of new Visa proposals. So one, the focus is on kind of limiting the students coming into those more the vocational trade schools, while they're still allowing kind of the higher education kind of traditional type of opportunities. So that's -- the good news for us there is that most of our volume is from those higher education traditional schools. It's less from the vocational kind of trade schools dynamic. So that's good news #1. Good news #2 is that at least we know now, and we have the numbers as opposed to in Canada where we were all a little bit surprised when they kind of came out as news after we had given guidance. And then third, I think for us, as far as Australia, even within the higher ed component, we're sort of more in the public school space. To give you some sort of internal stats, just so you kind of have it, and, I think, we got this question a lot is sort of sizing of Australia versus Canada. Australia, is much smaller market for us, too. So kind of different dynamics. It's -- call it high single-digit revenue percent for us, and so it's a smaller market. Also keeping in mind that, that includes StudyLink and Cohort Go and other acquisitions that we've had there, which also makes that market very different than Canada and other markets where -- in Australia, a lot of these products that we have give us increasing capabilities to offset kind of some of the potential headwinds from -- again, the legislation was announced that has not yet been passed, so we'll see. So over the next few weeks, we'll find out if it gets passed and whether it goes live in 2025, or it could be later. We'll see. But again, we feel that, certainly, it's not as big of a concern. And I think it's great that we, at least, have that visibility, and we have a chance to work through the usual client-level kind of forecast that we do and provide more sort of insights over the next few weeks on that side.

Perfect. Yes. So 2025, I know, is forever away right now. One of the things that's been really striking to me are some of the NRR statistics that you shared at earnings about how the business is performing, excluding the kind of disruption in Canada. I think very consistent, remaining in excess of 120%. You just talked about another wrinkle that -- just, at least, we have in the back of our minds, although it sounds like the exposure is much more manageable and the -- but I guess, putting that aside, just can you talk broadly, the sustainability of the NRRs in that 120% plus range? How are you thinking about that as you lap some of the impacts that you face this year?

Yes. I mean what's been amazing coming into the business and learning more about it is, kind of as you've said, the sustainability of that NRR over the many, many years, and that's been great to see. And it's because there are more just one lever behind it. So I think the diversity of the business is one of the things that I talk about quite a bit, and it's the diversity and the levers behind that NRR, which is for those of you that may not know, NRR is basically similar to sort of same-store sales. And so one of those growth kind of drivers has been, obviously, just the growth of international students, growth in tuition, and then in addition, we have very, very high retention. So our clients tend to love us. They stay with us. We have 95-plus percent retention and then multiple levers there. So as you break that down and as you look into next year, I think the starting point is looking at exit rates this year. So for me it's kind of watching, getting through peak season, getting into Q4. We've given guidance. And so assuming those kind of numbers right now, as you look at next year, that feels like a good -- we're in a good path to continue in terms of where we see the second half kind of land. So we'll be watching the second half to see that as the starting point. And then you kind of build from there, obviously. NRR, separating Canada, it was, as you said, 120%. You have to look at Australia a little bit separate. We're watching -- seeing where that is. Australia was up 50% this year. With caps in place, obviously, that will be slower growth than that. But unpacking that, but we see good opportunity to continue to grow with U.S. domestic. And then all the other markets, again, when students can go somewhere else, they're going to end up going elsewhere. So I feel good about our ability to continue to cross-sell products into those existing clients, which drives the -- a good portion of the NRR. And then the U.S. domestic, which we talk a lot with folks around the opportunity there which, I think, is sometimes underestimated how much we can do with just cross-selling our existing product in the U.S. domestic market.

Yes. That makes a lot of sense. So it's the exit run rate. What do you think happens to Australia? What do you think happens to NRR? That's kind of a good framework?

Yes. And it's, again, Canada, you have a chart that is pretty detailed in our presentation that helps you kind of start there and you have, obviously, the -- we're going to be lapping that Q2 drop -- that Q1 drop of last year in Canada. So all of those things are sort of somewhat predictable going into second -- into next year.

Understood. Okay. All right. Maybe we can dig into the segments a little bit. So starting with education, largest vertical. Could you walk through how the competitive environment has evolved over time? How do you frame Flywire strategy to gain share of foreign students at your university? And then how do you retain those students as they continue to study over a number of years?

Yes. So the competitive environment has been actually relatively unchanged over many years. As you can imagine, educational institutions are not places where you're going to see a lot of change over time. And so it's kind of the same legacy systems, the same 2 or 3 incumbents that we've been competing against for, basically, over a decade. So feel quite comfortable that our capabilities compete well with those. We've shown that we can grow not just in the legacy cross-border product, but also now more increasing into the domestic area. And that was born out of our clients coming to us and saying, "Wow, you're doing such a great job with the cross-border product. Can you help me with the domestic side?" And that's where we sort of built this capability. And so the way to think about the retention there is if you -- the more we're able to combine the cross-border piece with the domestic kind of capability, the more then you basically can follow that student along their entire sort of journey. And college as opposed to just the more upfront sort of international student coming in, which then -- who may tend to have then kind of local sort of bank account and other things over time. We can replace that with now a domestic capability where maybe they're using -- maybe they use our kind of payment plan product where you can split up the tuition into payments, and we get a fee for that or other domestic products that then allows us to kind of have that higher retention for that student over time. And in general, that's kind of what our clients are telling us to the -- one of the reasons why I have such higher retention on the client side, for sure.

For sure. Makes sense. And I guess, what's the story been on domestic payments? You mentioned it's underappreciated by investors. Where are you today? And kind of what is the process like in kind of getting that additional piece of the puzzle?

Yes. I mean if you look at the U.S. kind of landscape in particular, it's a bit different than international, but in the U.S., you have basically around 44,000 or so educational institutions, of which we have about close to 1,000 of them, maybe just under that, that have our legacy cross-border product. And within that, we have sort of less than 10% penetration with the domestic product, which is -- so the opportunity is obviously then to cross-sell that through the rest of that existing client base. And that's where you've heard us talk about the fact that we can probably not add another client and triple or more, then, the business. So as we talk about getting to $1 billion, that's -- one of the ways to get there is to just cross-sell that domestic product. But it is -- obviously, it's a lot of legacy kind of incumbents and legacy product and it's sort of an integration and implementation process. But the desire for having a modern solution is there, and we know the demand is there. Also, at the same time, us being integrated, so one of the things that is also underappreciated is the fact that we are integrated with a lot of the existing software. So it's not as heavy of a lift as you would think. It's not an entire sort of necessarily a huge lift if you are better integrated with their existing. And that's one of the unique aspects of our kind of software, that we are working very closely with those partners. So the opportunity is there to do that, and that's, again, in the U.S. International is a bit of a different aspect because there, you just kind of go in with the full cross-border and domestic and there's not a this, like -- sort of a little bit less of that sort of 2-step process.

Right. Makes sense. Can you talk about share dynamics in education? How much share is left to go in the U.S. specifically? You talked about kind of having roughly 25% of universities. But when you think about share opportunity within the universities that you have, what does that look like from a competitive perspective?

Yes. I mean it's that and then it's the domestic, and it's the domestic within the existing kind of schools. So actually, it's quite a long, long runway that we can continue going. And it's -- again, it's the same competitive dynamic. There's not like some new sort of capability or somebody who's come in, who's new in the space. It's the same folks that all of you kind of use if you've ever had to pay tuition, you're very familiar with, yes.

Got it. Okay. So the strength in customer acquisition across the business has continued to be impressive. Education has remained a big part of the client signing story. And I know you've also often talked about healthy competition between the different verticals, so it's been great to see. What are you seeing from a go-to-market perspective and then universities' willingness to implement new processes this year?

Yes. So go-to-market has -- even this year, as we've looked at being very disciplined about investing given -- seeing the Canada pressures, and we've adjusted a little bit of the hiring ramps. But education and go-to-market has been one area that you've heard us talk a lot about investing in a targeted way where we see the ROI. And the way to think about our kind of sales team is a very specialized kind of vertical-focused sales team who are experts that have 10, 20, 30 years in education. So that helps a lot when you're trying to convince the person sitting across from you. Again, this is why, because sort of best practices, you kind of go in and say, this is how -- here's an example of other schools that have done it this way and the kind of the efficiencies that they gain. It's not a difficult kind of story to tell, especially if you're in the office of the CFO and you're explaining that and you come in with sort of decades of experience. And so we focused on bringing those types of kind of sales leaders in and especially in the sort of U.S. kind of domestic EDU, but sort of in those areas. And that's been one of the drivers of our ability to then make that conversion and sort of in a believable way, say, look, you make these changes. The same is for me, if somebody was to come to me and say, as the CFO of Flywire, I think it's -- you can combine these 2 or 3 systems and be more efficient and save a bunch of back office on your accounts receivable process. It's -- you believe that person is there, somebody who's done that already, understands the -- so that part of the way kind of the go-to-market. Of course, the other part of go-to-market for us, for those who may not know, is using channel partners, and that's the other way that we scale quite fast in that side.

Right. Maybe on that note, a couple of years ago, the company highlighted several opportunities kind of outside of the more schools, higher student retention, more domestic payments, more share of the university. I think agents was a big part of that, nonclient receivables, payer services. How would you kind of frame these initiatives? What inning are we in? And how do you think about these as sort of ways to augment the growth in education?

Yes. I mean, agents is one of the -- it's actually one of the areas that differentiates Australia from the rest of the world. So the way to think about educational agents if you're not familiar with them, is basically, it's universities work with agents to help them place international students. So they view the agents as their kind of boots on the ground, if you will, to help them place international students and also diversify their sources of international students when needed. So the agent network, for us, especially in a country like Australia is actually quite critical. There's something like 20,000 plus agents out there who help place a lot of these international students. I think something, like, 3/4 of international students in Australia are placed through an agent. And the opportunity for us is bringing in the acquisition of StudyLink, for example, is to kind of really follow the entire international sort of student journey, if you will, from application to admissions, to maybe paying for their insurance, we have the Cohort Go and other acquisitions, all the way to kind of managing -- kind of once they're in the school, managing their kind of day-to-day. So that entire kind of journey is enabled by having this relationship with the agent network. So for us it's a key capability, which, again, for Australia, a huge deal. Like it's -- obviously it's an important kind of capability. But increasingly, we're seeing it even in other markets. Even in Canada, we're starting to talk to Canada and think about, like, how do you bring StudyLink, especially almost taking advantage of the fact that people -- the universities need help and what better way to help place international students than using -- leveraging some of the capabilities that were built there. So it's been a great driver of growth kind of to the point and it's been a great investment of ours, and it's one of the areas that creates a bit of a 2-sided capability in terms of being able to even have visibility to say what's going on with kind of the demand side and the student side and trying to connect that with where the students end up eventually. Being able to have that -- the 2-sided visibility has been very helpful for us.

Great. So education is a great story. It's not the only story. And I think travel, in particular, has been a clear area of strength over the past couple of years. Could you help the audience understand how Flywire differentiates itself in this market? And you're coming off some years of really, really strong growth here. What do you think the growth outlook looks like from here?

Yes. So for us -- so to define travel for us, it's basically luxury travel is kind of our area of focus and partially because it looks like the rest of the -- or the original kind of -- or the origin story of the business, which is large cross-border payments with a complex dynamic. And you can see if you're traveling internationally and you're trying to pay for your vacation and you have maybe a group of people combining together to pay for something, what that means usually for the travel operator or for the -- we have a number of different kind of subverticals within that travel kind of luxury area. They would struggle to basically reconcile all those payments. And so the value prop is really from the travel operator point of view, is being able to automate and sort of get to a level of operational efficiency where we've seen things like 50% reduction in payment processing costs or hundreds of thousands of dollars saved just in terms of back office kind of costs because they can -- and software, because they're able to now -- instead of using either very manual process or other kind of homegrown type of solutions, they're able to now automate and track this payment from international travelers. And it's been a great vertical for us. It's been one of the sort of early winning stars coming out of sort of the B2B kind of view. B2B is kind of a big view, sort of big name that sort of means a lot of things to a lot of people. But it's been one of those verticals that is kind of -- it looks a lot like the early cohorts of education where you can kind of see, you start with one part of one of these kind of travel providers and you kind of expand to the other parts. And so it's been a great story. And so examples are things, like, for us, the subvertical this year is ocean experience is where you may go on a vacation with your friends and you're renting a yacht or you have a different kind of experience like that and you're trying to solve by sort of splitting a very complex FX kind of payment, and we're able to solve that problem for both sides. So it's a great, great business. 55-plus percent revenue growth so far this year, our second-biggest vertical and very excited about the capabilities there in the future.

Sure. Health care is another business. I think Canada has had some challenges over the last couple of years, certainly had a bit of a hangover post COVID and some of the fallout from that. You've mentioned some churn or client restructurings that have occurred. You have sounded a little bit more positive on that business and at the prospect of returning to growth in the second half of this year and about continued progress on client signing. So how are you thinking about what that can contribute to the overall growth algorithm?

Yes. So I think you hit most of the items there in terms of turning around the business. It was flat to -- it was actually down last year, it was somewhat similar this year. What's captured in the second half guidance is assuming that we return to growth. And so we'll know we'll be able to share with you. But we've seen good client growth. We've added the third-party financing as a new product. We've gone down market as far as going after smaller surgical centers. So a lot of different levers, feel good about the progress so far exiting this year in terms of growth. Long term it may not grow business at the same rate as the total company. We've talked about maybe mid-teens plus in terms of long-term growth, but it's a very high gross margin business because it is all software. And so health care is truly sort of that software driving value and payments kind of model for us. It's like the example -- the poster child of that.

And then you're clearly doing a lot in your 4 primary verticals. If you look outside of the key verticals today, how do you view the opportunity to provide AR solutions in other verticals?

I technically look at the B2B vertical as almost like our innovation lab, where we look for examples there, whether it's the insurance sub-vertical or international global manufacturers and find things that look like the other 3 or 4 and kind of pull them out. And now that we've got the Invoiced acquisition, where you're combining software with payments, we have an opportunity to go even faster after those new areas or new verticals.

Makes sense. So let's turn over to the financial side. Despite all the issues going on in Canada and the high incremental and decremental margins in the business, you're still delivering really solid operating leverage this year. You took that up this quarter, despite some of the movements from the top line. Could you talk about the scalability of the cost base from here? How you're thinking about balancing investing in the business versus delivering on margin expansion?

Yes. Look, I think as you look at whether it's sales and marketing, product or G&A, there's -- you're getting to that tipping point where there's scale across all of them. You don't need to add another person for every kind of dollar of growth. So that's been great. In addition, I think -- as I talked about, I think there's an opportunity, certainly in G&A, but almost every function, to use data automation systems to be even more efficient and grow that scalability. So we feel good about sort of 16% EBITDA margins growing and sort of continuing to add that 300 to 600 bps even at the low end of that because we see these drivers, and it's one of the areas where I said -- I've said before, I want to start providing a lot more detail around kind of how to think about the scalable pieces because there are components of that, that are certainly scalable, and we see that sort of long-term trajectory. We're going into profitability next year and then free cash flow that looks a lot like that EBITDA margin overall. So we feel good about that kind of longer term.

Yes. And just like -- I think for the avoidance of doubt, we get the question a little bit. You took out the margin expansion despite kind of taking down the expectations around Canada and kind of like the incremental margin on those revenues or -- I would guess, it's probably pretty high. So the question is, were the levers that were pulled to kind of sustain the trajectory of EBITDA this year, is that a pull-forward of kind of future margin expansion? Or do you think that you could still remain in the targets that you've set out on margin expansion from here?

Yes, I'd say we still feel that we can stay -- It's a pretty wide range between 300 and 600, so still a lot of room for us to continue investing within that range. And like we've seen even this year, we're still growing OpEx. So not really -- don't have to hurt too much to get to the numbers, yes.

Got it. That's really great. Okay. Prior to joining the company, the company did a capital raise for growth-related M&A. Since then, you've done a couple of deals, StudyLink, Invoiced. This past quarter, you also instituted a $150 million share repurchase authorization as well. So how are you thinking about the balance between M&A and capital return?

So in terms of priorities, organic M&A and buyback are sort of -- it's the order and we know organic is relatively -- we're investing and continuing on investing. On M&A, look, we're always going to look for great opportunities to add capabilities, whether it's geographic or product within the existing geographies. And so that's kind of the way we look at it. But if we don't find opportunities that meet kind of the financial profile and kind of the tech platform and culture and the things that we normally look at, which is kind of a high bar, if you will, we're pretty disciplined, then buyback is a great way for us to then return shareholder capital, especially at these levels where we feel it's been dislocated. So I look at it on an IRR versus the cost of capital basis as an opportunistic kind of buyback. At the same time, long term, that -- it's an opportunity for me to use that as an offset of stock-based comp dilution also over time.

Well, I think that's just about as much time as we had. Any final thoughts that you'd kind of leave us with before we end it?

Look, I think this year, putting all this noise aside, I think we have a greatly diversified business. We have a ton of opportunity even with a lot of our existing clients. And I think the margins and the cash flow profile long term and the stability of those cash flows and consistency, I think are things that are perhaps a little bit underappreciated, and I hope to kind of bring a lot more visibility to that.

Sure. Awesome. Well, I think with that, we're out of time. Cosmin, thanks for joining us today. I really enjoyed the conversation.

Thank you.