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

November 30, 2022

New York Stock Exchange US Financials Financial Services conference_presentation 29 min

Earnings Call Speaker Segments

Timothy Chiodo

analyst
#1

Okay. Great. Welcome, everyone. We are towards the latter part of the second day or technically, I guess the third day of the 26th Annual Crédit Suisse Technology Conference. We are very pleased to have with us today, 2 leaders from Shift4. We have Jared Isaacman, the CEO; and we have Taylor Lauber, who is the President and Chief Strategy Officer. I want to thank both Jared and Taylor and also Tom, Tom McCrohan, who is Head of Investor Relations for making the trip here to Arizona and supporting our conference for the second year in a row. So again, thank you guys for making the time. We know you have many asks and demands on your time, and we're glad you're here.

Jared Isaacman

executive
#2

Happy to do it. Thanks for having us.

Timothy Chiodo

analyst
#3

All right. Excellent. You know where we're going to start. We're going to start with a question on macro, and we're going to talk about Q4 trends. You had Earnings and Investor Day not too long ago, but let's just talk about in general, quarter-to-date, how things are shaping up.

Jared Isaacman

executive
#4

Yes. I mean the quarter looks pretty awesome. And I think that's largely a factor of the new verticals we're in. I mean we touch 1/3 of the restaurants and about 40% of the hotels in this country. So the fourth quarter should naturally be a little bit of a seasonal low coming off of a strong summer months. But it's shaping up like I'd say, much better than that. I'll give you an example, our Black Friday was up just under 60% year-over-year. And as, again, a company that focuses on payments in restaurants and hotels, Taylor would talk about, like, people generally stay home and eat out their fridge. They don't really go out. So that's much more a factor than new verticals. Allegiant, our airline customer finally came online. It's a big volume contributor. Sports and Entertainment, very strong in this quarter for us. You got a lot of football stadiums. And not just like the -- a lot of the college stadiums as well, which -- those are typically deals with the athletic departments. So you're getting more than football. You're getting all the other sports that are typically going on in collegiate sports and such. And then just entry into eCommerce, gaming, now that these verticals are taking some, like, again, that seasonal decline you'd expect to see in the fourth quarter out of the equation. So we're pretty happy it's shaping up pretty nice.

Timothy Chiodo

analyst
#5

Excellent. Thank you. I think everyone appreciates that update to kick things off. A couple of follow-ups related to that. So you mentioned Allegiant, but -- and you also mentioned some of the stadiums, part of that is the ticketing and part of that is your relationship with SeatGeek. Maybe you could just talk about the mechanics of how that works. Is SeatGeek sort of an ISV in that sense that you're integrated into? Maybe that's a good one for you, Taylor.

David Lauber

executive
#6

Yes, sure. So in the Sports and Entertainment vertical, you should think about SeatGeek like you'd think about any ISV in any of our big merchant relationship. This is just another piece of software. They need to collect revenue. It just happens to be a disproportionate amount of revenue for the customers. So what that mechanically looks like is we're working with a sports franchise on -- their stadium is probably the starting point because we have best-in-class software to help serve them there. And we're saying, "What are all the ways you collect revenue? What are all the software suites?" We can integrate to all of them, give a common payment experience, a common cost to those things and deliver value in a way that they haven't seen before. Typically, they've worked with these all in a disparate way. So, what you do is you get the software integration to that ISV and then every customer is using that ISV is suddenly an instant opportunity for us.

Jared Isaacman

executive
#7

Yes, maybe just build on it a little bit, right? So sports and entertainment is a new vertical for us. 2020, we had 1 stadium. It was Allegiant Stadium. Raiders Stadium, if you will. Last year, you probably had like, I don't know, somewhere south of 50 stadiums with payments, now we have over 125. And it's all because of our software that basically, it is the category leader. It's what -- you can certainly wait in line and do the whole concession stands and buy your jersey and the merchandise shop, and we do that, too. But it's mostly about empowering consumers and the stands to order a burger and a beer and have it delivered to them. So when we did, like -- we entered into that vertical, like, kind of our base case is we're going to get a good portion of the sports entertainment stadiums. The upside case to that is we're going to move into theme parks, which we've done, but also, like, ticketing and gaming. The idea you can make a wager in your seat, right? Or to what Taylor was just describing is also getting all the ticketing action through it. And in terms of ticketing, we got a lot of those integrations. We're just a little late because, like, imagine if we were rocking some of the Taylor Swift action right now, like, we'd be blowing out fourth quarter, probably even more than what we're already doing. So we expect ticketing as, again, it was one of the upside cases to our entering in sports and entertainment vertical. It's going to be a contributor in 2023. The hard part is getting the integration, the SeatGeek integration, Ticketmaster integration. We've made really awesome progress in that.

Timothy Chiodo

analyst
#8

Very nice. Thank you, Jared. One last one in terms of macro and Q4 seasonality. The other one, and you referenced this, is charitable giving. So it's a vertical that you've been ramping quite nicely, and it does tend to have some Q4 maybe Q1 seasonality as well. Maybe you could just touch on that vertical and how that's going.

Jared Isaacman

executive
#9

Yes. The ballots are still being counted, right? Giving Tuesday was yesterday. So, like, we're still getting, like, the data into that. But I mean, that continues all the way through December. So really, you're talking about 5 weeks of the year is what makes the entire nonprofit vertical. Like, it's going to be -- I mean, from, like -- it's going to be a big year for us because we really just entered at the tail end of last year anyway. But I would say it is -- probably represents, like, one of the most exciting needle-moving verticals for us in the years ahead. It's just -- it's very hard to get into. We spent the entire year getting integrations to all the nonprofit donor management systems. And there's $450 billion of volume essentially that's being donated on an annual basis through largely traditional card-based payments. So I think this is going to be a fine quarter for us with respect to those verticals. That's definitely one example of taking out the seasonality of our normal restaurant and hotel traffic, but it's going to be much more of like a contributor in the years ahead as we, like, further cement our right to win in the vertical.

Timothy Chiodo

analyst
#10

Excellent point, Jared, in terms of smoothing out the seasonality with the hotel and restaurant maybe being a little bit lighter in Q4. And as charitable giving ramps in stadiums, it's going to make things much more less seasonal, I guess, you could say. All right. Let's move to another exciting one, which is around 2 acquisitions recently. So the European PSP just announced at the last earnings then, of course, Finaro, which was announced quarters ago and is closing in Q1. Of course, these businesses have customers and revenues and volumes and that type of stuff. But maybe more importantly, they bring you a lot of the capabilities outside the U.S. Maybe you could just touch on what capabilities they bring. And then what you will be able to do with those with some of your existing customers, new customers, et cetera?

Jared Isaacman

executive
#11

Yes. I mean -- so this is the first quarter that we are processing payments outside of North America. So that's pretty awesome. So we said at the, in Q3, where we had -- I mean, I think we outperformed really well in terms of our Q3 results, but we did say, like, look, this in terms of some of our mega customers, like, this is going to be actually, like, a low point from a take rate perspective. When you get more of the international cross-border FX, like, your take rates go up, so that's absolutely going to play out in the fourth quarter, like, no question. And that's in large part due to our international capabilities that we didn't have previously. And this, in general, is a very exciting journey for us. I mean 23 years of our history has been entirely in the U.S., and we've grown incredibly well through those 23 years in what is probably the most competitive payments market in the world. So now like, having the means to process payments in Europe is pretty awesome through that PSP. They give us a lot of capabilities on, like, what we would refer to as the front end. So the integration layer to the software, recurring billing, 3D secure, fraud, business intelligence. And then what Finaro gives us when we hope that, that should -- that's just, like, a matter of time in early first quarter. Now you have the back-end banking and settlement capabilities. So like you bring those pieces together, and that's pretty compelling capabilities in Europe, coupled with the U.S., we're starting to get into that rare air that Taylor likes talk about it, just the Stripes, Adyens of the world that can have that global commerce capability. What I'd say is, like, a development over the last couple of months. As we spent more and more time with our teams in Europe now is like an increasingly growing confidence in our ability to connect different parts of the world organically. So if you had spoken to us 6 months ago, we'd say we have some very important customers. We have a lot of multinational customers. We are going to follow them all over the world and compete on a stage like an Adyen or Stripe can do, but we'll probably be doing at least a lot of the continents inorganically as we stitch them together. And I mean, I don't think it's changed like dramatically so. But I'd say, like, through some of the recent capabilities we brought in-house, like, we're increasingly growing confident on our ability to add certain geographic regions organically, which is pretty nice. Like we're -- we think we really brought on a hell of an awesome team in Europe right now, and they're very motivated. Like, they're excited about the customers we have, the ones that we stand a chance to win, and they're putting some pretty awesome proposals on the table in certain markets to go out and tackle organically. So I think, like, this fourth quarter is going to be, like, a very clean one. Like, we're not going to surprise anyone with, like, new markets. I think it's a pretty bulletproof quarter. And we're going to use this time in the early part of 2023 to play around organically with our means to, like, develop into some of these markets. And that might change, like, where we choose to allocate some capital in the year ahead.

Timothy Chiodo

analyst
#12

Okay. Great. Thank you, Jared. Thank you, Taylor. We're going to move on to one of the key investor discussion points, which is the gateway sunset strategy? And why this comes up so often? Of course, it's, those are smart acquisitions and they're contributing to your growth. Those are all good things. But they're increasingly important now because of the uncertain macro environment, because there is a dearth of companies that have something that's sort of in their control, right, an idiosyncratic driver that you can push to an extent, and that's really the question, which is, how fast can you push it if you wanted to? And what are the governors? Is it incoming calls? Is it support? Is there something technical? How fast or slow? And how much of that is in your control?

David Lauber

executive
#13

It's a great question. So it comes to the core of the philosophy we have at Shift4, which is, like, the most certain path to growth is a customer you already have. And we don't like to bet on finding the next new customer and the macro environment makes you even more hesitant. I mean I need to remind kind of the audience that we grew payment volume double digits during 2020 when 90% of our business was restaurant and hotels. The reason we were able to do that was because we had this embedded base of customers that we could go talk to at a time when this wasn't a high priority for a restaurant or a hotel to switch their payment provider in the middle of the pandemic. That is only reinforced today. So I would say the inhibitors are just enabling the conversation. You coined it actually really well, Tim. I think when you initiated coverage on us back at our IPO that, like, inertia is the enemy of this battle plan. As much as we like to think that this is, like, an awesome opportunity for the customer, they're going to save money, they're going to operate more efficiently, they're going to get all these technology benefits. The reality is, it's not at the top of the list when your hotel is the busiest it's been in 3 years or something like that. So what our sunset strategy is designed to do is, at a minimum, get the appropriate revenue consideration for the services we're providing, but at a maximum compel a conversation that they might just not have. I will tell you the strategy isn't any different than what we had when we actually acquired the businesses. The pandemic actually slowed progress. It's not always well understood, because we did grow really nicely during the pandemic that, that was probably a growth rate that was slower than we would have had otherwise. But this is an environment where we feel like we can pull the right levers, compelled the conversations. And it's going to feed growth over a really nice period of time for us. We're not in a rush to do this. We think that the pace at which our revenue growth has come through, the pace that our end-to-end volume come through is quite appropriate. But now is the time we can act on pieces of the plan that we had intended to do, like, many years earlier.

Jared Isaacman

executive
#14

Yes. I mean, the way you should think about maybe of those is more, like, you tune to the software world, like our gateway opportunities is basically an incredible ARPU expansion story. So you have this called approximately $150 billion of gateway volume that's like incredibly sticky. I mean it is highly dependent on us to achieve a commerce-enabling experience, not the merchant acquirer that sits behind us. It's our encryption, it's our tokenization. It's our IP. It's our integration to the software itself. And just based on how the industry has evolved over the last 20 years prior to our acquisitions, they somehow, despite providing all the technology in order to drive the commerce experience, received the smallest portion of the payment economics. And we're rebalancing that. So over the years ahead, I mean, this isn't going to be -- originally, it could have been, like, a 10-year gift that keeps giving. We're going to pull it into like something closer to about 3 years, but you're going to continue to get to monetize those relationships to gain approximately the equivalency of what you'd get if you were settling the transactions as a merchant acquirer. So in a world today where you're making $0.05, you're going to get to 50 basis points and $150 billion in volume. That is a pretty astounding opportunity. And -- but it'll happen over time. You're not going to club customers over the head. It will be a gradual adjustment. It'll trigger some phone calls. You'll tell them you'll wave your gateway fees, all the carrots that have made this successful. Pursuing this opportunity for 5 years will still land well for EMV readers, SkyTab, point-of-sale systems for your lobby bar or restaurant and such, and you will gradually move that $150 billion over to be end-to-end customers and their life will be better or they'll pay the equivalency. And that'll be, like, a 3-year journey.

Timothy Chiodo

analyst
#15

Okay. Jared, because -- I'm sure that those that are maybe listening or maybe on the webcast, they're going to hear that 153 years. And I just want to clarify. You're not expecting to get all of that in 3 years. You're more just saying that maybe the bolus of the efforts would be over the next 3 years?

Jared Isaacman

executive
#16

What I'd say is for the 5 years that we've owned our gateways, like that volume has done one of two things. It's either stayed doing exactly what it was doing, which is your point on inertia. They have other problems to deal with. They have their hotels, they're trying to get labor to clean rooms, or it went to our non-platform. Those are the 2 directions. It's very, very difficult to leave, and you're not -- even if you are leaving, you're doing it at probably a greater cost and it's, there are a lot of pain associated with this. So we're generally there. And what we're doing is we're righting wrongs of the past. We're prior owners of these platforms, intentionally undercharge these customers to monetize them upstream from us. It was a JV of JPMorgan and First Data, and we're fixing that. Now of that 100, do I think every should be adjusting their models to $150 billion times 50 basis points in 3 years now, but, like I'd say, like, if you want to do $150 billion times 50 basis points times 50% and say, like, half the customers went somewhere else or received some sort of a waiver, like, that's a pretty awesome number on top of the fact that there's far more to the Shift4 story than just that. We're growing in a number of new verticals. We're winning our -- we have a third approximate share of the restaurant, 40% of the hotel market. 50% of our production comes from winning the customers that aren't in the 30% and 40%. So, like, that's just a nice, very quantifiable growth driver for the business that's available to us. We're uniquely advantaged from it. It's a huge asset organization, and we're going to do all the other things, too.

David Lauber

executive
#17

That's critical. Customer base available to us, available to no one else at a time when, like, the macro should make everyone a little bit nervous about finding the next incremental customer. We don't feel the same apprehension.

Timothy Chiodo

analyst
#18

Well said, Taylor. I think that's a good summary of the idiosyncratic point. Last point on this, and we'll move on to SkyTab POS, which is another great topic related to Shift4 . On the $150 million, just to summarize it, fair to think about it as, some portion of it will be converted over the next 3 years. Some portion of it might not be, but they'll be priced higher, right?

Jared Isaacman

executive
#19

Correct.

Timothy Chiodo

analyst
#20

And then some portion, it might not work out. But you're willing to accept that because of the increased unit economics for the other 2 portions.

Jared Isaacman

executive
#21

100%.

Timothy Chiodo

analyst
#22

Okay. Perfect. All right. Let's move on to SkyTab POS. So definitely a big topic and it was a focus of the Investor Day in New York just a few weeks back. So maybe let's just talk about the go-to-market strategy there. Because there was a change, you've in-sourced. You've got about 350 heads internally working on this, but you still have third party as well, so you kind of have the best of both worlds. So with that as an entrée.

Jared Isaacman

executive
#23

Yes. So I think it's important to know the history a little bit. We've been around for 23 years. And unlike probably any other payments company that's been around 23 years, virtually 100% of our transaction volume is integrated and connected into software. So we were very early to recognize that inevitable convergence between 2 industries. And the first entrée, too, was an organic initiative in, call it, 2006 time period called Harbortouch. And we bundled restaurant point-of-sale software, hardware, SaaS and payments and had tons of success in it. And as a result of our experience in doing so, we went out and acquired 3 other restaurant software POS companies, Future POS, POSitouch and Restaurant Manager, each with, call it, north of 10,000 customers that had the software, so we knew it was, like, really sticky, very important. It's basically the ERP for the business, and weren't monetizing payments. We bought those assets. We've pivoted their revenue model towards payments, grew a bunch beyond that. Now long term, you never intended to have 4 different restaurant POS brands because you have cities like New York and Miami and whatnot, where you have, like, 4 different dealers representing 4 different restaurant POS software. We're the beneficiary of all the payment volume, but, like, eventually, you're going to want to separate yourself from that. You're going to want to consolidate your brands to a single cloud-based product. You can promote 1 brand. You can consolidate your support around 1 product, increase the velocity of development around a single product. But if you do that, you're going to create channel conflict amongst these 4, call it, dealerships in these cities. So what we did is looked at what is, like, our single largest expense, which is ongoing revenue share to our third-party distribution partners and say, let's look at 15 years of data and say which cities are going to be winners no matter what. And we have a large enough existing customer base there. We have existing third-party distribution there, and we know which ones are going to, like, continue to be able to sell our SkyTab, which is a more modern product, into these markets for years into the future. Let's acquire them, so we can eliminate one of our cost of goods in terms of our residual expense. Now we're taking on some fixed overhead because you're hiring the sales force within those regions. When you're improving your unit economic model, because all the new go-forward customers that are going to take SkyTab POS, you no longer have that ongoing residual expense. So it's going to accelerate your payback period on your customer acquisition cost. So we thought in this climate, absolutely 100% right thing to do. Third quarter, we deployed somewhere around $400 million in consideration. We picked up probably $100 million a year in free cash flow, improve the unit economic model on, like, our flagship product going forward and took greater control of our destiny in terms of our sales force within these markets. We also kept third-party distribution in more sparsely populated areas that we do want to sell our product into, but it wouldn't make sense to have that fixed overhead and say the Midwest or other parts of the country where there's just not enough density of restaurants to kind of justify the investment. So awesome way to kind of shed a lot of, like, legacy baggage from the past after we fully monetized it, like, really attracted everything we could out of it and have, like, good use of capital and really get our new product out into the market, so.

Timothy Chiodo

analyst
#24

Excellent. Thank you, Jared. I wasn't going to, I was a little bit later on the list, but since you mentioned it, it probably just makes sense to tackle it now, but you were talking about some of the in-sourcing and also the associated, basically, the buyouts of the residuals, the commission. So I think it's just good -- maybe Taylor or maybe, Jared, you want to tackle it, just the mechanics of that. In other words, there was a commission stream that was to be earned by a third-party sales force, and you essentially NPV that and purchase it in, in other words, buy it in, and it's essentially reducing your COGS, increasing your gross profit and increasing your EBITDA, but maybe you could add more context to that, Taylor.

David Lauber

executive
#25

Yes, sure. So I think the most critical thing is it's a revenue stream that we know better than anyone else. It's our own customer. It's our own merchant. We've been sharing the processing revenue on that merchant with a partner that we've gone to market with in a third-party relationship. So our ability to value the relationship, understand the retention characteristics of the merchant, we think we're uniquely advantaged. And quite frankly, this opportunity didn't exist for anyone else because it's our customer. The important thing to understand though is that this can be perceived as financial engineering until you realize, we actually bought the partner that service the merchant relationship directly in that local market, and we own the software that, that merchant is using already as well. So it has really, really strong characteristics, retention characteristics around the reality that this is a better way to go to market for our new product anyway, and I think Jared touched on that. The only other thing that's kind of, like, less known within this is that every one of these partners had a small portion of their book that was not on Shift4 for one reason or another. So Imagine now you own this distribution partner. They're an employee of Shift4 and they're immediately prioritized to go after their existing base of customers that have never been on Shift4 before. So, in some ways, you deployed capital in a hyper efficient way to make your business better for the future for all the reasons Jared mentioned, but you also got an embedded lead list at kind of 0 cost that they're sprinting at to this day.

Timothy Chiodo

analyst
#26

All right. That's a great summary. I'm glad we made a quick stop on that because it's an important topic. All right. Let's continue with SkyTab POS. So this is the one -- we had talked about this a little bit in the past, but investors are anxious to see the metrics, not right away, right? It's still just coming out of beta right now, but people will be looking for location numbers. Similar to the location numbers that Toast and Lightspeed disclose. Maybe you could just talk about what investors should be expecting in terms of location numbers and also the fact that in terms of getting locations, you have multiple means of getting them, customers, but also transitioning existing.

Jared Isaacman

executive
#27

Yes. I think -- I mean, look, we want to be able to share as much data as you can to understand the health and trajectory of the business. I think, like, location count can be misleading. You can get a lot of locations by putting devices in, like, office, mini-marts and such, too. So we tend to compete upmarket. I think Toast is a fantastic product to be very clear. Like, Toast is going to keep in a lot. Shift4 is going to keep winning a lot. In fact, I think we're like the 2 that are going to just keep winning a lot. I think it's kind of -- it's not even a 2-horse race. Like, it's not a winner-take-all. We're both going to do just fine. But I would say that if you look at the sizzle features in a product, because that's really where it's at. The actual core functionality of ringing up a cheeseburger is no different. It's the same. There's no innovation happening there. Do you want to add pickles, no mustard, we got that, right? So it's all the extra stuff. And if you're building a product that -- with payroll and capital offerings, you're generally appealing to, like, a new business. And we are -- our product -- our sizzle features are free loyalty, free online ordering, free marketplace. You're appealing a little bit more off market. So bottom line is, like, if you're looking at it from a stick count perspective, like, our customers should be contributing higher average volume per location and should have lower attrition. And when you're going after new customers, where no matter how good your POS system is, if the pizza is not good, it's going to fail in the first year. So I think, like, whether it's volume that we're giving, obviously, continue to get volume. We'll give a take rate. We'll give you a sense as we have throughout the last year, the beta period of the size of the installed base. And I'd say, yes, we are, like, uniquely advantaged, because not only do we have a great distribution force that knows what they're doing, it's going to win in an awesome addressable market. There's plenty of share donors out there for both Toast and Shift4, but we also do have about 100,000 restaurants that are already using some form of our payment technology today. And they're mostly Windows-based POS systems, and they will be migrating to the cloud. And we will more than have our foot in the door. Our gateway customers is an opportunity to go after it. Our existing software-only customers and our legacy customers. What I would say of that 100,000 population of existing Shift4 restaurant-related customers, only about 15% are paying SaaS fees. So if we were to upgrade all of our customers tomorrow to SkyTab POS, you're talking about a multi-hundred million dollar revenue opportunity just by adding SaaS to the customers you already have in addition to the payments volume. The thing is that's only going to be part of the story. The vast majority of the story is just winning in the addressable market and expanding internationally with it. Anything to add?

David Lauber

executive
#28

It's just -- it's the same story we started with in this conversation, which is, like, to fulfill our, like, really lofty growth ambitions, we want to know we already have the customers inside of our ecosystem to continue to grow in the way we have. And the restaurant vertical is no different. So, like, 85% of the restaurants using Shift4 technology don't pay us any SaaS today. SkyTab's a natural lift, and a bunch of those don't actually use payments with us today. They adopted the software years ago. And so you get a really high lift when they embrace the product. So in a time of uncertainty, we want to know we're going after proven restaurants that have a trust relationship with Shift4 and with our distribution partners, and that new business survivor bias is totally off the table because they've been doing business with you for years.

Timothy Chiodo

analyst
#29

Perfect. Taylor. I like how you likened it to the gateway opportunity in that similar way in terms of having the in-house customers. I'm glad you clarified that. That was well done. Let's -- I have one -- many more actually. I think we're going to get time for one quick one and then we can go to the audience. We have a microphone that we can bring around if you want to ask a question. But let me just get one last one in, Taylor, where we can by do this quickly because we've already talked about it in the past. But I just think it's important to clarify for those either listening to a webcast or yes, you raised your guidance across all of your metrics for the year. You had a strong Q3, you beat and you raised the guide for the year. There were some inorganic contributions, yes, but those were incremental, i.e., just want to have you elaborate on this point that you would have raised your guidance even without -- $0 or without any inorganic contributions.

David Lauber

executive
#30

Yes. So to be abundantly clear, we acquired a small European PSP, just, like, 2 days before the third quarter ended. It's less than 1% of our volume contribution for the year, and it's less than 1% of our net revenue contribution for the year. So intellectually honest, there is less than 1% in organic contribution, but that guide would have -- had to move regardless of that.

Timothy Chiodo

analyst
#31

Perfect. Well said. I just wanted to make sure we said that. Let's go to the audience. Is there anyone who would like to jump in with a question? We have just a few minutes left. Okay. Right here. We can bring the microphone.

Unknown Analyst

analyst
#32

Just a quick question on Shift4Shop and your casino and online gaming initiatives. There's very competitive segments, but there's a huge TAM and huge market opportunity in Shift4Shop, Shopify competition, online gaming. Obviously, you guys have made inroads at Caesars and station casinos. Can you just talk about the dynamics in those segments and what the growth opportunities are in the next couple of years?

Jared Isaacman

executive
#33

Yes. I mean gaming is very important to us for sure because, I mean, probably about 40% of the physical casinos and resorts in the country are a Shift4 customers, so it makes sense naturally to pursue the gaming opportunity. I'd say with, like, BetMGM, for example, we probably have about 25% of their volume in every state we're licensed in or tracking towards that. And I think our international moves, for sure, are opening up even more opportunities for us to pursue gaming customers. Shift4Shop is, like that's a tough one. I mean we told you at the beginning of the year when we thought the world was heading for a choppier place, we were going to prioritize our resources towards needle movers. And Shift4Shop is a good product. It's got a free plan, like, just give us payments if you want to use it. But we just can't pump too much money into that one. I mean even the best player in the world loses money, right? So this is a climate where everybody is asking us about expanding margins and free cash flows, and we've committed to doing that, and we'll keep doing it during the fourth quarter and through the years ahead. Can't do that if you're pumping like $100 million a year in the marketing into that. So what we're doing is we're, again, we're like, we brought the team down, sized down to an appropriate size. We're making it much more about, like, a, call it, a Shopify for restaurants, deeper integration with SkyTab POS, online ordering, more restaurant-theme templates. And we know we have some good fans who like using the product. It's just -- it won't -- it's very hard for that to be, like, a top 5 needle mover.

Timothy Chiodo

analyst
#34

Excellent. Thank you for the question. I think with that, we're basically running out of time here. But this is the end of the presentation portion of the conference tomorrow. I believe it's mostly just one-on-one meetings. So I think this is a strong way to close it out. I want to again thank Jared, Taylor, Tom, for making the trip here to Arizona. Thank you, everyone, for joining the 26th Annual Technology Conference.

Jared Isaacman

executive
#35

Thanks.

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