Shift4 Payments, Inc. (FOUR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

June 14, 2022

New York Stock Exchange US Financials Financial Services conference_presentation 33 min

Earnings Call Speaker Segments

Daniel Perlin

analyst
#1

Breakfast session, and you didn't have a chance to meet me at that point, my name is Dan Perlin. I head a fintech practice here at RBC. And we're going to talk about space, the final frontier. I think we're going to really talk about. But on kidding aside, we've got the management team a ship for Jared Isaacman, the Founder and CEO, among other great achievements that he's done over his life; and Taylor Lauber, who is the Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you both for being here. I know your time is super valuable, and we will use it judiciously. So thank you.

Jared Isaacman

executive
#2

Thank you. Thanks for having us.

Daniel Perlin

analyst
#3

You bet.

Jared Isaacman

executive
#4

Paradise, guys?

Daniel Perlin

analyst
#5

And we're live again. So here again, it's not the virtual setting. I wanted to start with some recent kind of expectations around volumes and what you've been seeing. April was a record. You called that out. My question really is, are you seeing a continuation of that trend? Have you seen any deterioration? Are you seeing weird pivots in terms of behavior? Anything you could start to elaborate on that would be fantastic.

Jared Isaacman

executive
#6

Okay. I mean certainly mine, and Taylor's inputs as well. But I think the continuation of pretty strong growth is still there. We expected this time of year to be setting records. I think just -- we went into last quarter's earnings report, with a degree of caution, at least in terms of our guidance for the rest of the year just because it's an awful lot of $90 steak dinner is taking place. And as much as we're continuing to see records being set, which should be expected. I mean we grew during the pandemic based on taking share. I mean our customers at that time were almost, I mean, entirely restaurants with some portion of hotels. So you're talking about industries that were highly impacted that we grew payment volume double digits in. That was purely a factor of taking share when probably every one of our customers' same-store sales growth was like negative 70-some-odd or 60-some-odd percent. So you should expect that we should continue to be able to take share and as a result, going into it. That said, you have a major humanitarian crisis going on the board, inflation, rising interest rate like there should be some healthy concern, I would think, going into this quarter and the second part of the year that at some point, consumers may rethink those $90 meals. That said, we're at least pretty pleased with what we're seeing so far.

Taylor Lauber

executive
#7

The only thing I'd add to that is that it's an interesting time for the question because this is the right around the 2-year anniversary of our IPO. And obviously, trying to predict what the future would look like in June of 2020 was quite a task, especially given the concentration of the hospitality sector that Jared mentioned. So what we would have expected at the time or what we did forecast was a 2-year recovery across our merchant base, but largely consistent across verticals. So we said it will take 2 years from merchants when the data pandemic began to get back to normal. What I think we've seen is the pace of recovery varies by vertical. And so restaurants have done quite well over the last 6 to 9 months, really raised prices early on, demand was pretty high coming out of 2020 for people to go out and eat once vaccines have been a little more prolific. The hotel vertical, at least in Q1 still had room to go. I think it still has room to go yet today. This is like a nice side to see. This is a hotel. It's an example of a customer of ours, and it's what it's right now. So the hotel vertical is probably the one we're watching most closely. And then lastly, I'd say stadiums still have not yet kind of hit their normal cadence. And it's a really fast-growing vertical for us. So as Jared mentioned, seeing records in June when you're mostly hospitality-oriented and you've had a lot of customers every year is not a surprise to us. But I would say the cadence of volume is much more normal for the hospitality environment, meaning step functions up in March, step functions up in June, staying elevated through the summer. And then troughing down when people go back to school is -- it feels a lot more normal in that curve than we experienced in either the 2 years in public.

Daniel Perlin

analyst
#8

Yes. So you're not seeing yet any trade downs necessarily in the restaurant vertical from more $90 steak dinners to slightly moving down? Are you seeing average tickets coming down? Or are you seeing more transactions occurring like the frequency with which those are happening, nothing kind of to call out? And is there any bifurcation that you're seeing between affluent and kind of less affluent consumers in that regard?

Taylor Lauber

executive
#9

No. I will say our base is mostly table service restaurants. You have to kind of extrapolate or you have to extract what you'd see in fast casual. But no, we're not seeing a lot of that. I will say you saw price lift faster last year, right? So there's just not as much room, Jared mentioned the $90 steaks. It's hard to imagine they can be $110 steaks in the current environment. But we had breakfast in the restaurant here today, and it was packed, and it was $130 for 2 people. That feels like a healthy ticket. I'd suspect that struggles to grow. And interestingly, you've got cost inputs rising on a lot of these. Now where you're less concerned about the ability for a business to take prices in hotels. There's still pent-up demand. We're still just loosening some of the travel burdens that have been on international travel just this past Sunday, TSA travel activity is not back to normal or at least not back to 2019 levels. So there's definitely room in pockets, but I would say, the restaurant vertical is probably a broader set of data for us, next to hotels, and prices are healthy. But a cause for concern, like you don't expect that they'll continue to grow at least at the rate that they did.

Daniel Perlin

analyst
#10

Yes. How -- I mean if you go back prior to the pandemic, how tethered were to travel? Like sometimes just questions as to whether or not you are super tied to it or there's also some incremental wins and share gains that makes it so hard sometimes to determine whether or not cyclical or seasonal nature of your business are actually embedded in that. But when things really slow, you can start to see them, so?

Taylor Lauber

executive
#11

Yes. Well, so I can tell you, in 2018, we supported virtually 0 hotels. We started to add some in 2019. We added 10% of the hotels in the country to our end-to-end platform from the day the pandemic began, so over the last 2 years. So it's been odd for us to try to triangulate exactly what a normal curve is for a market when we're growing as fast in the market as we have. We've got lots of interesting data, but we haven't seen a normal year for any one of those hotels that store our platform, which gives us confidence, and quite frankly, it helps kind of ballast that conservatism we've got in the restaurant vertical because it doesn't take nearly as many hotels to offset your average restaurant given the size of them.

Daniel Perlin

analyst
#12

Yes. Let's talk about some of the new verticals and really the road map that you guys are on. So Jared, you talked about in the last call, which I think was good for level-setting purposes for a lot of people that you have a lot of these areas where your volumes are running at in many instances, less than 1% of what you think the attainable volumes are going to be either annualized or maybe by year-end. So can you kind of refresh for us what some of those key markets are, key verticals, areas of focus that you think are most relevant to get us over the next, call it, 2 quarters even?

Jared Isaacman

executive
#13

Yes, sure. So try to communicate that as a signal to the opportunity to come as we've moved into these new verticals. I mean, this was kind of our commitment made and we were fortunate enough to be able to pull off an IPO during a pandemic is that we're very concentrated in restaurants. We have a good opportunity in hotels, but we should come out of this pandemic with more -- bring our integrated payments capability to other verticals that typically are served by a multi-software commerce environment. And we've done that. We've gone into stadiums, nonprofits e-commerce, travel and leisure, gaming. And when we said, look, this is -- these were the results for the quarter. And by the way, less than 1% of the anticipated volume from these new verticals, it's less than 1% of the committed volume for these verticals. So it's not -- to me, it's never a question of if, it was just entirely when. Now moving into new verticals is hard in an integrated payments world, right? I mean this is what people should be excited about in this like next evolution of payments as you're going from nonintegrated terminals where you could drop those off in any market, they're not going to last long, but it's relatively easy to get going. You're moving into a new vertical like say, nonprofits, for example. We can't go into that with a Salesforce.org integration. We had no reason to have that when we were focused on restaurants or hotels and you have to complete that. And then a lot of nonprofits, which is why we're attracted to the vertical had -- I mean it's probably 100 different. If we have 425 or so different software integrations now to support the verticals we're in, we're probably going to pick up at least 100 or so as we make our journey across nonprofits. That's not a light switch. It should actually be really hard to do. So when you do end in that vertical, not only do you have the right to win in it, but it's easy -- it's relatively easy to defend knowing anyone else to follow and have enough fill battle to go. That's how it goes in every vertical. Now some like, for example, Starlink, I mean it's a proprietary integration, you get that done, volume gets cut over. That's a -- that's pretty awesome. Our game plan from there is purely about international expansion thereafter. But even whether it's gaming, travel and leisure, nonprofits, even e-commerce, you're accumulating integrations now, which are fantastic for the customer kind of the anchor customers you have within those verticals, which, again, I think last quarter, less than 1% of committed volume associated with it. And now you have a right to win across what is a much larger addressable market. So it takes time to accumulate those integrations, but when you have them, they're pretty valuable just as they've served us quite well in our core verticals.

Daniel Perlin

analyst
#14

Yes. When you think about those specifically and you think of the cadence and kind of what you get excited about over -- again, as you say, this isn't just a light switch that flips. But I am interested to know which one of those verticals you're kind of most excited about near term? And which ones you're most excited about opportunistically longer term?

Jared Isaacman

executive
#15

Yes. So I mean Starlink is one for sure, right? I don't think that was a -- I appreciate the thoughtful. Starlink is awesome, right? I mean since this company was really founded in my parents basement, the dream of being able to go international has always been there. I mean it's 23 years later. Now we finally have begun that journey with the Finaro acquisition, and there will be others in order to support what I think is one of the best justifications for international expansion possible, which is the subscription billing sexy tech platform that has opportunities literally in every part of the world, except Russia and China. So I mean that -- following Starlink into all these regions of the world is fantastic when it opens up a lot of additional doors in what I think are some interesting verticals. So -- but just saying that, that was a door opener in a lot of good ways, but also for our existing integrations and products as well. So we're going to go in parts of the world as a result of Starlink and then take our restaurant product there, which is SkyTab POS, take our hotel integrations, take our stadium product in those regions. That was a huge game changer for the organization. I mean -- and in any case. So that's one. And then I'd say like Starlink aside because that was an easy one. It's going to -- nonprofits for sure. It's -- there's a lot of opportunity there, as I mentioned before. Share similar characteristics to where we've had success historically, which is multi-software environment. Typical nonprofit has a dozen or more different software applications. The entire vertical could have 100, as I mentioned before, and they don't talk to each other. I mean, our platform was created to solve that problem for hotels, which is what we took in the stadiums. Now we're taking the nonprofit. The spreads are quite healthy. Oftentimes, you're putting it on the donor be a tip or a percentage you're probably seeing that on a go on. So there's a lot of characteristics and it's $450 billion payment opportunity within the nonprofit vertical, and we have a good right to win based on an anchor customer in St. Jude and when we think the giving block as beyond a good conversation starter. So that's probably next to Starlink. I think where the second most amount of enthusiasm.

Daniel Perlin

analyst
#16

Okay. Well, that kind of dovetails into the 2 acquisitions, which I did want to talk about. So let's talk about maybe Giving Block for a second because that one is done. You just mentioned it in terms of opportunities. How do you think that evolves over time? How quickly can that start to really be a contributor to the company? And maybe just again, for audience sake, the strategy behind why you bought it.

Jared Isaacman

executive
#17

Yes. So I mean just making it very simple. The Giving Block is the largest crypto donation marketplace. So all you have to believe there is that people will have crypto. It will grow in some popularity and prevalence, and they'll be willing to donate and that nonprofits will be willing to receive it and convert it to dollars or some other currency to help whatever important cause or initiatives they have underway. That was very easy for us to get our arms around. I can't say everything in the crypto space was, but that for sure was. And really the strategy there is entirely the cross-sell of traditional card payment volume. I mean hands-down. All you to believe is that this is -- nonprofits, again, are going to be motivated, interested. One to have a conversation as it relates to crypto donations, and that conversation can dovetail into traditional card payment volume, which is how we make our revenue. So from our perspective, it's working really well. It was, I think, getting that deal done. And at the end of the first quarter was kind of a sign of times to come because Taylor and his team was able to put to work their deal structuring skills that they -- they were dying to do for a couple of years to '21 and '22 didn't really afford many of those opportunities, but it was definitely -- I think it can't get hurt type deal that we struck with a lot of upside. From our perspective, tracking really well even during this climate. We still have tons of nonprofits that are signing up on a traditional SaaS model simply to be able to receive crypto donations, get a nice spread off of the donation itself. But really, again, what was our strategy right from the start and part of the deal rationale was you're going for the cross-sell on traditional card payment volume, which is what we do incredibly well. I'll kick over to Taylor to talk about Finaro.

Taylor Lauber

executive
#18

So as Jared mentioned, we've had this goal in the international for quite a while. And as we think about kind of the landscape and what you need to be successful in markets, you need software integrations and customers and you need the payment methods that are prevalent in those geographies. We have 2 of them. We have all the software integrations relevant for really broad industries like restaurants, hotels, stadiums, increasingly nonprofits. We have global customers that collect revenue all over the world. I think any major hotel chain has a substantial base of business with Shift4 large restaurant chains. So we struggled for quite a while to solve the last piece of the puzzle, which is the international pipes that allow you to actually accept payments in different geographies. We looked at a wide set of assets and ultimately landed on Finaro, which had at its essence, just what we needed, which is that they were a European bank, they were a direct participant in card schemes and they can do acquiring. But in many ways were quite opposite of Shift4. So while we've been card-present in U.S., they've been cross-border and card not present in e-commerce. So I could learn a lot about the markets they enter, their customer base is not correlated to ours, and yet it gives us the right to expand our customer base. And while we're still waiting on regulatory approval for the transaction, it's a European bank, so that can take some time, we are allowed to cooperate together on business cases, and that made it quite attractive. So just this past week, we completed the technical integration whereby someone paying with an American payment method in Europe, will route to Shift4 and vice versa to Europe. So we're actually able to support customers as soon as like today on the platform. And that obviously creates a really nice self-fulfilling prophecy around the transaction itself. What I envision next for that asset is you're going to find the stadiums that already use our software that Jared mentioned overseas as a natural cross-selling to payments. They're using a third party for that today, they can bundle it all with us, increasingly restaurants. And Starlink, yet again, an immediate use case for all of their capabilities, which is at its core is e-commerce and the majority of their customer base is going to be all over the world.

Daniel Perlin

analyst
#19

Yup. Yup. And the timing, again, your expectation for closing hasn't changed?

Taylor Lauber

executive
#20

No. So we expect it to close in Q4. And I think what -- we gloss over it, but it shouldn't go unnoticed. Every time we've made an acquisition, it's come with an embedded base of customers and profitability associated with those customers. And that helps derisk investments kind of at all points in the cycle. And so one of the things that's great is like we've never bought a business with embedded payment volume. We bought a business in the revenue. This comes with $15 billion of payment volume that will contribute in a totally noncorrelated base of customers yet on a market that's growing pretty quickly.

Daniel Perlin

analyst
#21

Now it seems like a great fit. The other question that we get and you talked a little bit about it with sports and entertainment venues. I'm interested really to kind of explore that vertical a little bit more because when you bought it with VenueNext, it seemed like you had a specific market in mind. But it also seems like when you sit around today, and I think we even talked a little bit about it on the conference call you're able to do a lot more with that. I think ticketing was one of the examples you had given. So maybe can you talk about like the vision that you had when you bought it, but what is really transpiring to open up these new addressable market opportunities as well?

Jared Isaacman

executive
#22

Yes. So we acquired VenueNext based on our experience with a single stadium, which was Allegiant Stadium. And I think now well in excess of -- we have 100-plus stadium payment customers using VenueNext. So a lot happened in a very short period of time. And what we learned is, one, this is a market we want to be in. This is very much like hotels, restaurants. That Allegiant Stadium is very much like a Vegas resort. I mean you have retail shops, you have a VIP suite section, you have ticketing, concession stands, there's restaurants. I think there's even a couple of light bulbs in the joint. So there was a lot that was quite attractive to us and why we wanted to pursue the vertical of what we found when we sized up the landscape. Because keep in mind, we're like anyone else, I think, out there. I mean we are 99.9% integrated. Like you're not hearing that story from anyone else. What is that like meaning almost virtually 100% of all transactions that run across our rails are connected and integrated them into software. So you only get that way because you've been doing it a very long time. So any time you're looking at a new vertical, you have to consider whether you want to buy, build or partner. And that's very, very challenging because you get the wrong choice, you could alienate everyone else in the vertical come up short. So based on that experience, we looked at sports entertainment and said, okay, we have some integrations in this space already. We could choose to just play the partnership approach. We think that's incorrect because the competitive landscape is pretty narrow. There's only a handful of software companies doing it. Most of them are pretty ancient. We believe, based on what we're seeing in the pandemic right now, everyone is going to adapt to a mobile-first strategy. So does that mean like less weighting in the concession lines, more ordering burger and a beer from your seats. VenueNext, very scrappy player, growing fast without an integrated payments fueled value proposition, have to believe that if we incorporate that component to their strategy, they'll grow even faster, that turned out to be correct. Now like your base case in that is a very large portion of stadiums are simply going to switch over to the product. You're going to capture the payment volume, you can capture SaaS. This is a good investment. That's playing out very well. Your upside was gaming. So by virtue of having like the majority of stadiums in this country, you have a greater right to win within like your wagering verticals. That turned out to be the case. Winning our relationship with BetMGM has much more to do with our stadium business than it was that 40% of in-venue casinos or a ship or a customer. But the other kind of upside case to it was ticketing. And so by virtue of the VenueNext acquisition and the traction we've had within that vertical, we've got at least 3 ticketing integrations right now, one that's already delivering volume. So that's a huge game changer because I think at the time the acquisition 1.5 years or so ago, we said, look, we think within 3 years, we'll be getting about $4 billion of end-to-end volume. If you think about where we expect to be next year in terms of that, that's not like a huge percentage of our volume. But you start clicking in ticketing and gaming, then it can grow to be, I think, a much more meaningful portion of our overall payment volume. Yes, so that would be your kind of 2 upside areas. Both of those, I'd say, are playing out as we hoped for.

Daniel Perlin

analyst
#23

Yes. As you go out and you have these conversations with these stadiums, how do we get comfortable that the upgrade cycle is actually in process and that you guys are helping drive that growth?

Jared Isaacman

executive
#24

Well, I mean, just -- I mean we're showering you with press releases I mean we're -- we haven't had a football cycle yet, right? So I think I'm pretty excited about this football season, put it that way. We haven't had the benefit of that the last year or so. It's super real. I mean -- again, nobody wants to wait on the concession lines anymore. They're all highly motivated to do this, and they're going to -- going entirely to ship more in VenueNext. I said it before, like I totally believe we are the category leader in this space. We're going to continue to be and we'll take it into international markets. But yes, I mean it's all going to be a mobile experience. So I think I saw an articles this morning at Fiserv or something residing the number of locations they have on Clover and Midas. I mean, that's a somewhat sleeker looking version of an old concession stand terminal. That's not the direction it's going. It's going entirely mobile apps. Now you'd never know I mean, that it was us there because it would be in Orlando Magic app or it'd be a Six Flags app or whatever it is. You pick it, it would be there, but it's VenueNext software that's doing it, and it's would be our payments behind it, other than Disney.

Taylor Lauber

executive
#25

So I will say the installation cadence was a learning exercise for us for sure. So if you take our average customer for thousands of restaurants each quarter, it's generally a sole proprietor making a decision and payments to yours within 48 hours. Even a franchise hotel, especially if it's on our gateway, the pinnings can be ours quite quickly. These are teams that make decisions during the on-season and implement during the off-season. So Jared referenced being excited for football, it's because we've got a really nice pipeline of stadiums we have to install that have been contracted for several months, and we're going to install in July, so that they're ready for August. So getting that cadence down. And by the way, it's a different cadence for other seasons of sports. So getting that cadence down was something that was a bit of a learning exercise, definitely a longer lead cycle. And then ticketing, we only inked our first ticketing transaction in the first quarter. And yet there's integration work that has to happen. So I'd say we're incredibly pleased with the appetite for the product, we're trying to be patient with the installation cycle, and we're excited to have kind of a full contribution of the sports season. Jared mentioned football, that probably will be the first where we've got really nice representation of both colleges and Pro stadiums. And we're getting a more normalized season than I think we've seen.

Daniel Perlin

analyst
#26

It's awesome. Yes. All right. So stick versus carrot. Gateway volume conversion. We talk a lot about this. What are you learning so far? Are you testing the waters? Did you already do that?

Taylor Lauber

executive
#27

It's working. Some people are like what's happening? What were you doing?

Jared Isaacman

executive
#28

No, I don't think we're frustrating anyone. I think the strategy is working just as we anticipated.

Daniel Perlin

analyst
#29

Okay. So maybe let's tell us what that is.

Jared Isaacman

executive
#30

Yes. I mean, so we -- just history, we bought our first payment gateway in late 2017, which was where we took their name. Prior to that, we were like entirely in the restaurant vertical. I mean that was our only right to win and really only just one lane of the restaurant vertical. So it was a very strategic move because it took us into -- gave us our hotel integrations. It took us into specialty retail and some others. Understanding how scarce those payment platforms are that possess those integrations, having a good appreciation for that and the ability to pivot a gateway from a processor agnostic model and low end to end. We jumped on another gateway right in the fourth quarter of 2019. And it was a business that was declining and losing money actually and just our private equity sponsor was like, look, given our IPO time line here, you've got to be able to make 2 gateways look like 1 pretty quick and kind of rest the decline, pivot the strategy and such. And we closed on it and then we ran into a pandemic. And given that the concentration of customers on that platform or restaurants and hotels, it was hardly a time to create disruption or have any sort of stick at all is a component of the arsenal so entirely carrot first worked really well. It continues to work incredibly well, and we're growing quite quickly in that space. That said, it was always part of the plan, and we are dedicating a shocking percentage of our OpEx resources towards maintaining that duplicates. It's like 10x, the number of pipes that we need in order to drive transactions. And we -- just to give you a sense, like there's not a first data connection, like -- there's like 10 first data connections. And if you have 2 gateways and you have 20 of them. And that story isn't very different for a global world, but basically, any of the legacy acquirers or massive consolidation over the years, right? So certainly, my exposure to SpaceX and philosophy is like taking out the parts and Cortez model, burning the ships to build a better future of tomorrow. Well, we got a lot of legacy in the organization as it relates to some of these acquisitions. Too many of our resources are spent maintaining a Heartland Connection Global or First Data one. So aside from the fact it was always part of the initial game plan. It's the right thing to do to properly be rewarded for doing the entirety of the integrated payment experience to be like incredibly clear on that. It's our platform integrated into the software. It's our tokenization, it's our encryption. It's our business intelligence and analytics tools. And getting a very, very small portion of the payment economics as a gateway. It's never right. So roll forward 2 years, it's a different time in the market, we can incorporate a little bit of the stake. We can be more properly rewarded for driving the transaction experience and ideally repurpose a lot of our internal resources that are spent kind of maintaining the past as it relates to these gateway connections on building that better platform for tomorrow, which is, hey, we're expanding all over the world in order to serve some pretty awesome customers. That's what we should be excited about, and not maintaining First Data EMV certification from some platform from 25 years ago. The results of which are awesome. I mean, I don't think that we had any doubt last quarter that they would be awesome or the quarter prior, and we said we were going to start picking this strategy back up. So I think we'll be able to share a little bit more, obviously, in the coming months, but I think it's working exactly as we thought it would.

Daniel Perlin

analyst
#31

Okay. And strategically, what you're saying to these clients, obviously, it's better for them to do this, but you're sunsetting it, is that kind of the -- I mean, I know there's probably other strategies, maybe that's too simplistic, but I think investors are trying to figure out exactly what it means to return.

Taylor Lauber

executive
#32

Yes. So Jared mentioned is, it's dozens of connections. It's hundreds of software suites, and it's lots and lots of customers. So I think people can get quite confused when they hear a stat like we boarded 10% of the hotels in the country in 2 years, and assume that somehow that was a favorable market condition for us. No. This is not an easy time to convince hotels to migrate. The hotel we're in right now is a good example of a gateway-only hotel. 30% of the hotels in the country sit on our gateway. They've been through probably 3 flag changes in the last 6 years under new ownership. Like this is just not a decision that they make. And so what we've -- especially not during a pandemic. And so what we've tried to do is compel the conversation. And one of the obvious ones is if we have noneconomic relationships or noneconomic bank connections. We will sunset them, we'll give them ample notice, and we'll simply say that we're comfortable with you leaving or we're very comfortable with you saying there's a lot of benefit to you staying, but not on this pipe. And then moving over further, there's relationships that make probably some sense, but the economics have to change. And we have to charge more. And to the extent you want to stay on that pipe, that's fine. But every one of those fees puts you in a circumstance where they're calling and having the conversation that they might not have had if they were in the middle of an ownership change or something like that. I think the durability of the product speaks for itself when you can go through 3 ownership changes and yet the gateway stayed the same, the entire time. So we're very comfortable with the customer base, but now is the time to be much smarter about the number of connections we want to support and the economic terms we want to do.

Jared Isaacman

executive
#33

Yes. Just to maybe -- go into that just a little bit deeper. So there are some connections that will outright go away. So inside the, again, first data world, if you have 20 connections, probably 90% of the volume is on 2 or 3 of them. So -- the other, whatever '17, there's no kind of choice there. So it's just not economical for us to maintain those connections anymore. It's leading too many resources on better projects. So you're just letting them know that those are going. That to me is like we're not going to maintain Windows 95 forever. And in doing so, I would say like those are -- you're talking like 75%, 80%, 90% type percent are going to just move end to end because it's the easy button that we have all the tokens, we can convert it over very simply. Then you have those small number of connections that are concentrated volume. You're never going to sunset those. That would be like almost like -- I mean like active terrorism in the country, you're like $100 billion in volume going on and you're doing that. But what you are going to do is be properly rewarded for driving those transactions. To give you a sense, to be clear, that one gateway I referred to that we bought in the end of 2019, hopes good allocators of capital and spotting opportunity. That gateway was a joint venture between Chase and First Data. They did not run that entity to make money. So they would do very uneconomic deals with certain customers on that platform and then further monetize the relationship upstream of it. So you could have like one of the world's largest hospitality brands, where all of the global reservations, like you're talking about driving like tens of billions in revenue is like a $250,000 a year subscription agreement, right? So we're not going to do that forever. Like you're highly dependent on that platform to fulfill those global reservations, drive those transactions. You can pay us for that the right way. And then if the other party, if they choose to stay on a First Data or Chase, that's fine, and if they want to reduce their pricing accordingly, that's fine, too. But those are like opportunities to have pretty sizable revenue lift. And that would be an example of like a pipe or you're not going to sunset, but you are going to be properly rewarded for it.

Daniel Perlin

analyst
#34

Yes. Awesome. I can't believe we just ran through 30 minutes with that discussion. No, that was great. So thank you all for being here. Really appreciate it. Huge fans of the story and opportunities abound. So thank you very much.

Jared Isaacman

executive
#35

Thank you.

Daniel Perlin

analyst
#36

Thanks.

For developers and AI pipelines

Programmatic access to Shift4 Payments, Inc. earnings transcripts and 32,000+ others is available through the EarningsCalls.dev REST API. Plans from $24.99/month — full transcripts, speaker segments, full-text search, and the recently-added /api/v1/transcripts/recent polling endpoint for ETL pipelines.