PayPoint plc (PAY) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the PayPoint preliminary results conference call. I'm Valentina, the Chorus Call operator. [Operator Instructions] The conference is being recorded. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Nick Wiles, CEO. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Valentina. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our full year results presentation for the 12 months to March of 2025. In terms of our agenda this morning, I'll give a brief overview of our results and our updated financial targets for the business for the 3 years out to March '28. Rob will then cover the group financials in more detail, followed by an update on strategy and where our focus is in the current year, our business review and then finally, our outlook for the current year before we open up for Q&A. Turning to our full year highlights. A resilient financial performance for the year as a whole, building on our strong first half and really despite a more challenging trading environment in the second half and a rather stalled recovery in consumer confidence. I think delivering for the year as a whole, a double-digit increase in EBITDA and underlying PBT, I think, does reflect the resilience of our business, some good operational management, the continued momentum in the growth areas of our business and I think continued strong cost disciplines. Our increase in net debt reflects the impact of our investments over the year in addition to our ongoing share buyback. And we've increased our second interim dividend by 2.1% to 19.6p, making a total dividend for the year of 39p per share. In terms of divisional highlights, we've delivered net revenue growth in each of our 4 operating businesses, and I will go into more detail in terms of the underlying changes in mix within each business in the business review section later in the presentation. Turning to our new targets for the 3 years out to FY '28. We are establishing today new targets for the business for the next 3 years, which we believe reflect our ambition, our confidence in our growing capabilities and our continued commitment to delivering enhanced returns for our shareholders. These targets are clearly in addition to our EBITDA target of GBP 100 million for the current year. Firstly, we set ourselves the target of achieving net revenue growth in the range of 5% to 8% per annum. The target in our view, which brings to life the strategy we've implemented over the past 5 years to transform the business and our capabilities from our cash legacy bill payments routes to create a more robust and higher-growth organic platform and a mix of business and growth building blocks that together support consistent and attractive growth. Secondly, to support the delivery of our growth plans, establish a modern organizational framework designed to deliver better and lower cost operational performance and a higher level of customer service and experience. To achieve this, we've needed outside expertise to support us such that we can develop and execute on a plan to deliver greater automation, simpler business processes and agility in the way we do our business. This step and the need for the business to modernize is critical in our view to the delivery of our longer-term plans, and we will continue to update shareholders further on these plans as they take shape in the coming months. And our final target is to accelerate our share buyback program with a clear objective of reducing our issued share capital by at least 20% over the next 3 years within a prudent capital structure of 1.2 to 1.5x leverage. As I said already, we believe these new targets are ambitious, clear and provide a pathway for the business over the next 3 years. And with that, I'll now hand to Rob, who will take you through the financials in more detail.

Thank you, Nick, and good morning, everybody. If I start with the income statement. Net revenue of GBP 187.7 million is up 3.7% on the prior year of GBP 181 million. Total costs are broadly flat year-on-year at GBP 119.7 million. So this combination drives double-digit increase to our underlying profit before tax from GBP 61.7 million to GBP 68 million or up 10.2%. I'll cover the key revenue and cost deltas in the slides to follow, but you can see from this slide the breakdown of profits into our 2 segments with PayPoint profits up 5.7% to GBP 53.4 million and Love2shop profits up 30.4% to GBP 14.6 million. Further down this page in terms of adjusting items, the key drivers of the GBP 41.7 million are GBP 20.6 million in respect of legal costs, which includes a provision of GBP 14.2 million for the settlement reached with the utility in May '25. GBP 9.6 million net movements on our convertible loan notes and other instruments and GBP 8.7 million in respect of amortization of acquired intangibles. Deducting these items gives profits on a statutory basis of GBP 26.3 million. Our underlying profit growth supports underlying EBITDA growth of 10.7% to GBP 90 million and diluted underlying earnings per share up 10.4% to 69.1p. Finally, on this page, net debt of GBP 97.4 million lands within market expectations of below GBP 100 million, and I'll cover this in more detail shortly. Moving on to net revenue analysis. This slide breaks revenue down by segment and business area. Starting with Shopping, revenues rose 1.2% to GBP 65.2 million with double-digit growth in service fee income. E-commerce revenues grew 39% to GBP 16.4 million off the back of strong transaction growth of 33.3%. Payments and Banking revenue rose 1.7%, driven by double-digit growth in digital, which includes GBP 1.8 million in-year contribution from OBConnect. These 3 areas drive 4.9% revenue growth for the PayPoint segment. Love2shop revenues of GBP 51.7 million were marginally up year-on-year with overall billings up 2.3%. So combined, these 2 segments give overall group revenue of GBP 187.7 million. This slide gives an underlying profit progression view from the GBP 61.7 million in FY '24 to the GBP 68 million for FY '25. The first 4 blocks are revenue related, which I've covered already, GBP 0.8 million revenue growth from Shopping, GBP 4.6 million from Parcels, GBP 0.9 million from Payments and Banking and GBP 0.4 million from Love2shop. The last column is costs, and you can see that costs only grew by GBP 400,000 year-on-year with PayPoint segment cost growth of 4.3% and Love2shop's costs actually falling by 7.5%. So this gives overall profits of GBP 68 million. This slide gives the main drivers of the GBP 400,000 delta in terms of costs year-on-year and how we managed to maintain this broadly flat. The first block you can see is inflationary cost pressures of GBP 2.8 million. The next block is OBConnect costs, including those is GBP 1.5 million for the year. We then have GBP 2.1 million more depreciation and amortization. That's primarily from our cards business. And lastly, we can see the impact of streamlining our organizational structure, which we commented on last year's results. The impact of this being a GBP 6 million reduction to our costs with the majority of this benefiting the Love2shop segment. In terms of cash generation and net debt, overall, you can see midway down this slide that cash generation of GBP 69 million for the year is up GBP 11.1 million on FY '24 after various add-backs of adjusting items, D&A, share-based payments and a working capital outflow of GBP 10.3 million. The working capital outflow is a combination of inventory build, which is largely in our cards and Love2shop business and also receivables growth to support parcels growth and other revenue initiatives. Further down, we have outflows from tax, capital expenditure of GBP 19.7 million, acquisitions and investments of GBP 25.1 million, which was in respect of Yodel, Aperidata and OBConnect. The share buyback of GBP 14.9 million, which is the 9/12 of the year, GBP 120 million we commenced in July of last year and GBP 27.8 million in respect of dividends. This gives an overall cash outflow for the year of GBP 29.9 million and a closing net debt of GBP 97.4 million. In terms of the balance sheet, the key movements year-on-year are goodwill increasing by GBP 12.3 million and intangibles by GBP 4.8 million, and that's really driven by the inclusion of OBConnect following our majority stake in year. Corporate cash and cash equivalents are covered in the cash flow slide. Cash is down GBP 21.5 million and loans are up GBP 8.4 million, and that gives the overall outflow of GBP 29.9 million that we saw on the previous slide. Noncorporate cash, cash equivalents is down GBP 32.1 million as we shifted our cash to restricted funds, which are up GBP 33.3 million, and that's really to give the group access to higher interest income. Further down the balance sheet, the main swing is working capital, where you see the outflow of GBP 13.9 million, and that's driven by the inventories and receivables that I covered previously. And at the bottom of this slide, overall assets of GBP 97.3 million at year-end. Finally, before I pass back to Nick, on capital allocation, we are targeting leverage of 1.2 to 1.5x. And with nominal increase in dividends of circa 2%, we expect to see dividend cover to move from current range of 1.5 to 2x to above [ 2 ] over the next 3 years. On the share buyback, returning at least GBP 30 million per year for the next 3 years targets a reduction of over 20% in our equity base. And this level of buyback will be based on business performance, market conditions and the overall capital needs of the business. To the right of this slide, our future cash requirements are similar to the prior year. We'll have an outflow in respect of dividends, the share buyback and CapEx as well, which normalizes around about GBP 20 million. Finally, on our facility, we exercised a plus 1-year extension to this, so it now ends in June of 2029. As part of this extension, we've added MUFG and Mitsubishi to our banking group, and the facility is now a GBP 75 million non-amortizing loan and GBP 90 million RCF, and this fully supports our capital allocation policy and the future needs of our business. I'll now pass you back to Nick.

Thanks, Rob. And in the next few slides, I will give an update on the delivery of our strategy before covering the divisional business review and outlook. Our core building blocks for growth remain in place and our progress across these will be the key drivers to us achieving our financial targets over the next 3 years. Rather than an update on each as it did at the interim stage, the main focus today will be on the 3 or 4 levers, which will have the greatest impact in the current year, parcels, open banking and digital payments, access to cash and local banking and the next phase in our engagement with our retailers and their customers in the delivery of our services. Firstly, building on another strong year, our focus in the current year for Parcels remains on continuing to build and optimize our Collect+ network to meet the needs of our carrier partners and their customers and to grow the network in areas such as the university locations, large format supermarkets and some additional niche areas, which enhance the network, its out-of-home convenience for consumers. Following the combination of InPost and Yodel as businesses to support the harmonization of locations across our network to support further parcel growth from this key and enlarged carrier partner. And to accelerate the network and growth and parcel services for our Royal Mail partnership and their customers with a view to establishing a network of over 10,000 locations and to continue to work in partnership with the key online marketplaces, including the Chinese to provide an out-of-home network for collection and returns, and we continue to make good progress in this regard. Provided we get these key building blocks for our Parcel business flight, there remains significant opportunity for further growth in this business from a growing market new parcel channels and the continued consumer adoption of out-of-home, while also, of course, delivering strong commissions and additional consumer footfall into our retailer network. Secondly, in open banking and digital payments, our investment in recent years has ensured we now have through a combination of MultiPay and OBConnect, a comprehensive multichannel payment proposition in which to do more with our existing clients and expand into new sectors with our payment services. Our strategy in open banking and division of responsibility between the OBConnect and PayPoint teams is clear. The PayPoint team are focused on winning business with new and existing clients, leveraging the OBConnect open banking platform and its capabilities and evidence of success is in the addition of a further 28 clients in year. In the meantime, the OBConnect team are focused on major and longer-term opportunities around the world and providing support and expertise to deliver data sharing ecosystems for major banks and jurisdictions, very much building on their success in New Zealand with the New Zealand Banking Association. In addition, the OBConnect team are focused on the next generation of open banking technology and capabilities to drive our future pipeline. In our MultiPay business, our focus is on cross and upselling our enhanced payment capabilities to our existing clients from a strong relationship base while continuing to grow in new areas such as the housing associations, charities, local and central government, where we're looking to bring innovation, technology to improve customer experiences, increase choice and reduce cost. In both OBConnect and MultiPay, our new business pipelines are strong with a growing number of important tenders now live and some early year wins already secured. It's clear across these 2 businesses, we have significant further opportunity for growth. Turning now to access to cash and local banking. Look, for those of us in the business, this opportunity has been major project for a considerable time as we've developed and worked in collaboration with a number of high street banks to build both an app and a card-enabled consumer cash deposit solution. And we're now finally ready to roll this out across our retailer network. This service very much builds on our success today with a number of the neobanks who use our network to enable consumer deposits, and we're now at a stage where over the next few months, we'll be rolling out our first 2 major high street banks for the consumer deposit service via our network, supported by a strong marketing campaign in collaboration with these banking clients to increase both retailer and bank customer awareness and the adoption of this key community service. Our experience with the neobanks tells us that this will be an attractive service to bank customers, giving them an extensive network of over 30,000 locations with long and flexible opening hours for both deposits and withdrawal of cash. Our next stage in local banking will be the rollout of our SME deposit service for the High Street banks for our network early in 2026. And finally, turning to Community Services, how we continue to encourage better adoption of our range of services by both our retailer partners and their customers. As I indicated at our interims, engagement with our retailers is more important than ever as we continue to roll out our new services through the network. And a key tool in this challenge is the use of data and analytics to drive better support to our retailers. In getting this right, there is clearly a major price, high level of commissions for our retailers and greater value from being a PayPoint retailer and of course, increased revenue for ourselves from better optimizing our retailer network and service adoption. In addition to the work we've been doing in terms of improving our retailer communications, early life training and support, we are now in the early stages of rolling out a new support team, our store growth specialists, dedicated to supporting our retailer estate, through store visits driven by targeted data and support. Armed with tailored dashboards, leveraging over 11 million data points from across our retailer estate, this team has the necessary tools and experience to support our retailers to drive better adoption and revenue growth. While it's still early in the rollout of this initiative, the signs are good, and it's clear this team is having an impact on the performance of the stores already visited, and it very much lays the foundation for achieving higher adoption and community service delivery. Naturally, we intend to monitor the service performance closely and the consistency of the impact they are delivering from the retailer sites that have been targeted. It's clear, encouraging retailer adoption of both new and existing PayPoint services is a challenging process. But as I've said already, there is a major opportunity in getting this right. Turning now to the business review. In Shopping, we've continued the positive momentum established in the first half with the stake growth in the majority of our products and services continuing. In Retail Services, we've delivered overall net revenue growth of 3.5%, with our service fee net revenue increasing by over 10%. And in FMCG, we've continued to build presence with 18 campaigns delivered in the year for a number of major consumer brands with a strong and growing pipeline and prospects for the current year. Progress in our ATM business continues to be frustrating. Although as we indicated at our interims, we remain convinced we are taking the right actions, but need time to see these reflected in the performance of our estate. The financial performance of our cards business reflects the impact of a tougher second half with both our net revenue and processed volumes suffering from subdued consumer spending and confidence for the year as a whole. Operationally, we have further strengthened the foundations of the Cards business with enhanced proposition, improved merchant experience and setting live our full partnership with Lloyds. In terms of future growth, we continue to develop our sales channels, making changes and enhancements where necessary with a particularly strong performance from our telesales team in the year. We are targeting a further reduction in our merchant churn rates in the current year and adding further to our merchant proposition through our mobile app, reward scheme, expansion to our business finance offer, the launch of adoption of additional EPoS integrations and the relaunch of our e-com product. In Parcels, another strong year with net revenue from parcel transactions increasing by more than 30%. We've continued to grow the Collect+ estate in locations where we can add value for our carrier partners. And in support of InPost, Yodel, we're now harmonizing their network locations to support further growth. We continue to build volume in our expanding Royal Mail network, and we're now seeing the first parcels through our network from the Chinese marketplaces, all of which we create a strong platform, as I described earlier, for further growth in the current year. In Payments and Banking, we continue to make progress in the repositioning of this business towards MultiPay, our digital payments platform and our open banking proposition, as I described earlier. In Digital Payments, our net revenue increased by over 12% with 50 new client services going live across a range of sectors. And in open banking, again, as I said earlier, we added a further 28 clients. You will see we've given greater detail in the cash through to Digital segment of the business, which shows continued strong growth in the cash banking services we provide for a number of the neobanks, a flat performance from our gifting activities and a decline in the net revenue from online gaming, principally with Paysafe. As we look forward, in addition to continued transaction growth with our neobanking clients, we see significant potential consumer demand for our brand products in store. These are products such as Roblox, PlayStation and Netflix. And currently, we have underway a project to merchandise a combined Love2shop physical card and e-code card top-up display unit to over 5,000 locations within the PayPoint estate. We believe with the right support from our field sales team and positioning in store, this initiative will both drive revenue and footfall. We expect these units to be fully rolled out and live during the second quarter of the current year. Our Cash Payments revenue was down 2.7% for the year as a whole, consistent with our expectations with energy being the key driver to this. Finally, turning to Love2shop. Another strong performance for the year with a modest increase in revenue and a 30% increase in net profit. The Love2shop business delivered a more than 5% increase in billings for the year with a strong performance from both existing clients and new business. Park Christmas Savings delivered another solid performance, and MBL has continued to grow strongly in terms of process value. Highstreetvouchers.com delivered a strong performance and well ahead of plan, and our InComm partnership launched just ahead of Peach bought a new channel for our Love2shop physical card into a number of high street brands and major grocers has had a terrific start with over GBP 2.9 million of billings in year, and that number has now grown to over GBP 4 million up towards the end of May. Building on this excellent year, plans are already underway for further growth and expansion. In Love2shop business, we expect to deliver further billings growth in year with higher client retention rates and improved new business pipelines. In MBL, revenue opportunities continue to grow as we provide gift card management services to a growing number of clients. And we're seeing a growing number of cross-group opportunities, particularly from procurement frameworks and selling into the PayPoint client base. In our prepaid payment platform, we had an encouraging start to the Park Christmas Savings 2025 Christmas savings season. With improved customer acquisition, better client retention and the launch of a number of new digital tools, including our agent app to support savers through the year. We also have a number of new initiatives underway to support the white label expansion of our prepayment savings platform and the launch through the year of a new sales channel and enhanced product. As I said already, after a strong start to the InComm partnership, we expect to see further expansion and presence within the major retail gift card malls ahead of the peak sales period. Overall, this business continues to offer significant growth opportunities from a strengthened technology platform, a broadening range of physical and digital products and a growing number of channels to the market. Finally, turning to our outlook for the current year. We've established new targets for the business for the next 3 years, which we believe are challenging and will deliver enhanced shareholder value and returns. We've had an encouraging start to the current year and are clear on the key actions needed across our growth building blocks to deliver our objectives for the year. We've committed to an increase in extended share buyback program alongside a continued growth in the dividend, all within a prudent capital structure, and we remain confident in delivering further progress in the current year, meeting expectations and achieving our financial goals over the next 3 years. And with that, I'm very happy to open up to any questions.

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from Michael Donnelly from Investec.

Just 2 straightforward ones for me, please. Firstly, given the sales success that you've had with organizations like DWP and DVLA and the focus on efficiency in yesterday's spending review, do you think you've got enough sales focus on growing the government business? And might you consider partnering with any providers who already have strong links into big spending expanding government departments to maybe complement their services? And then secondly, on Parcels, it seems that pricing grew about 6% there, just simplistically comparing net revenues to volumes. Am I reading that right as a reversal of perhaps lower pricing in recent years to support volume growth. And how much more scope is there for pricing increases as your strong growth in that estate continues?

Yes, look, 2 great questions. Thank you. In terms of central government, I mean, you're absolutely right. I mean there's a very sort of formal way in which actually government departments procure services. And certainly, we're increasingly focused on how we best engage with those procurement frameworks. We have been investing more resource in the team, and we've got one or 2 things in the pipeline at the moment to strengthen further that team because I think you're right, I think it almost goes hand-in-hand with the growing capabilities that we've got, particularly around Open Banking. So I think having now got the suite of skills and including, for example, bringing Love2shop Essentials into that mix as well, I think we've got a lot more to offer specific government departments, whether that's the DWP, the DVLA, more broadly across government. So I think we've got more in the toolkit. And I think we're thinking harder about how we harness the right resource to engage actually and sort of really make the most of those procurement frameworks. So I think there's more to come from us in that area. Clearly, the reality is they're competitive. The outcomes are obviously binary. And I think the sort of the preparation period actually ahead of actually sort of the procurement process is actually probably longer. But I think the prize is clearly a material one. And I think if you win these contracts and you deliver well, then I think that you're well embedded actually for a long period. So for us, I think you're absolutely right. There's a greater opportunity perhaps than there's ever been in terms of actually sort of offering our services into central government. We are doing already more with the DWP. We're talking particularly around the open banking opportunity. And I think you should expect us to be seen to be doing other things with other government departments. On Parcels, I think to be fair, that's more a function of mix in terms of the sort of, if you like, the rate card across carrier and also across the particular sort of service, whether it's actually a collect service, whether it's a return or whether it's a store to store. We haven't seen any positive movement in terms of pricing. I would say pricing remains competitive in the parcels market. So I think it's more a function of mix than it is actually a change in the rate card.

The next question comes from Joe Brent from Panmure Liberum.

Three questions, if I may. Firstly, can you tell us a little more about the progress you're making with the High Street banks and the scale of the opportunity there? Secondly, it's good to see the growth with Royal Mail. Can you give us an indication of the ramp-up and when this might reach maturity? And finally, you've delivered GBP 6 million of savings in FY '25. Are there any further savings in FY '26 or any annualization benefit from the savings you made last year?

Sure. If I may, I'll take the first 2. And I think, Rob, it would be great if you could actually pick up the last one. Progress with the High Street banks. I think as I said, look, for those of us in the business, this has been a really, really long-term project. And the reality is that in rolling out to the first -- for the first 2 high street banks over the next few months. I think one for the app-enabled consumer deposit, one for the card-enabled consumer deposit. I think for the first time, and I think it's exciting. The high street banks are thinking about how we use our network, I think the quality of our network and I think the breadth of it. So I think -- look, I don't want to oversell this on the way in, but I think that I think there's a lot of commitment from both banks to the way they sort of communicate and actually market this to their customers. I think -- that enables us to actually access cash deposit and withdrawal. So I think it could be quite material for us. And I think certainly, the focus we've got on its operational delivery, I think, demonstrates to us internally how important it is. And certainly, I think we'll be able to give some early indications when we get to our November interims as to how that's landed and sort of the early adoption. On Royal Mail, I mean, look, we're very early days. I mean, look, we're at 7,500 locations. Royal Mail want to push that up to 10,000 quickly and actually 15,000 longer term. And we are seeing -- you may have seen some marketing over the summer. I think Royal Mail are increasingly ramping up that marketing. As you know, they've gone through a change of ownership and are now owned by EP, the Kretinsky group. And I think there is a real commitment from them to out-of-home, away from doorstep. And I think PUDO for them, and I think Collect+ particularly is a real focus. And I think again, you will see further progress in volumes from Royal Mail by the time we get to November. And certainly, I think we're in the very best position we can be in the early preparation for peak. And I would expect to see a really material ramp-up in the volumes we're seeing there at the moment. Our current run rate from memory is around the GBP 3 million to GBP 4 million annualized, and I would expect that to grow very materially from here. Rob, do you want to pick up the last question?

Yes. Joe, in terms of the third point around potential future savings, I think it really ties back into the new target that Nick spoke about in terms of driving greater automation and agility. And obviously, we've appointed an external party to support that, taking a very structured approach to say, well, where are the opportunities to look at automation and agility to improve process efficiencies internally and also the customer experience as well. So we've gone through an initial discovery phase there. We haven't yet gone out with any kind of potential upsides from a financial perspective, but I do strongly believe there's significant opportunity through automation and increasing the kind of the simplicity of how we do business. I think that's probably something we'll update on probably for the midyear perspective in terms of our progress. So it's a little bit too early to tell insight in terms of what the size of the prize is in terms of cost savings for the future. But I do think there's significant potential there.

I think just to clarify, am I right that there's nothing in consensus yet for the savings you might make out of that automation and greater agility?

There's nothing in there in terms of consensus.

Ladies and gentlemen, that was the last question. I would now like to turn the conference back over to Nick Wiles for any closing remarks.

Thank you again, and thank you, everybody, for joining us this morning. As I said already, I think good progress in the year. I hope we've been very clear as to the targets for the business over the next 3 years, and we look forward to updating you again with our interim results in November. So thank you. Have a good day.

Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now over. Thank you for choosing Chorus Call, and thank you for participating in the conference. You may now disconnect your lines. Goodbye.