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

Okay. All right. Why don't we start off and really happy to have the team from Shift4 with us. Many of you may be familiar with the story, but it's a name we've covered very closely really since the IPO, which came out at a rocky time during the pandemic, but has really proven itself and how amazing it can be during good and bad times, frankly, and come out stronger on the other side of that, but really continue to add through both organic and a lot of inorganic, really cool deals. So anyway, guys. Thank you so much for being here. We have Taylor, who's the President of the company and incoming CEO. We have Nancy, the CFO of the company. So thank you guys both for being here with us.

Thank you.

Look, you guys just had an amazing Investor Day out in Vegas. A lot of interesting goals that were set, told the story. But I think just for purposes of anyone in this room that may be a little less familiar with it, maybe a recap of what the top takeaways you want to make sure investors understand about what Shift4 is, what the goals are going forward would be a good place to start.

Yes, sure. So it was a super fortuitous time to be having an Investor Day, not just the expiration of our medium-term guidance that we set in November of '21, but also a transition from a 26-year founder CEO who's leaving the business to go serve the people and government. So the right time to kind of set what does the next few years ahead look like. And an incredibly demanding time for us as a management team because our most demanding shareholder is Jared, our founder. So giving him confidence that he could step away from the business and not have the control he's historically had, and yet that we've got a great story to tell for the next several years ahead was something that was critical in crafting the entire day. Now, what did we tell folks? We spent a little bit of time on each of our core verticals. So whether it's restaurants, hotels, stadiums, we've got awesome products in each. Our stadium product is totally unrivaled. We're in 75-plus percent of all the professional stadiums in every league in the United States, and yet we're constantly winning more revenue streams from these teams in things like ticketing. So lots of revenue growth across that business. And I highlighted because I think we were in 1 stadium at our Investor Day back in November of '21, which is where we hosted our Investor Day at the time. So from 1 to nearly all in a 3-year period, was something that was a proof point, I think, for us and a really awesome product that has, by the way, applicability all over the world and also in things like theme parks and a wider variety of kind of the entertainment side of sports and entertainment. In hotels, again, an industry-leading product where we are #1, demonstrated not just by the large portion of hotels to roughly 40% that we support in the United States today, but also just a lot of awesome wins, whether that's win the Casino Resort in Las Vegas. I think the complexities of winning a customer like that are pretty easy to visualize. And things like Alterra Mountain Resorts, which is a few dozen ski resorts across the country, but also the Ikon Pass, which is like this really big $1 billion plus e-commerce opportunity. I mean, being able to serve the entirety of a merchant like that, I think, demonstrates our capabilities. We wanted to highlight that. We hosted it at Fountain Blue in Las Vegas, which is again another good example. And then in the restaurant vertical and where we focus on is generally table service, an admitted second place in that vertical, but not through -- or not in any ways to diminish our own growth and our own capabilities and the product pipeline there. and also demonstrate kind of the growth avenues, not just for the product but also for that vertical around the world. So we had representatives from Tao and Shoney's and some of our other restaurant customers there, talking to investors about what they love about the products and what they're adopting and how we're growing with them. All of those were kind of to underlie or to give a sense for our capabilities inside of these verticals, but international expansion is an opportunity irrespective of any of the verticals. And we had no capabilities internationally even just 18 months ago, and now we're in 30-plus countries around the world. I think that surprised people proving that out and showing how it works, was important to us. If you look at our -- the restaurant vertical specifically, I think 7% of our submitted applications from merchants were international in November so just a few months ago, in January, it was 32% to give you a sense for kind of the international growth behind the business. I think just in the nature of how investor engagement works, we've traditionally shielded our team from rooms like this because it can be a distraction from their day jobs. We didn't want to do that in the case of this Investor Day. So I think Jared, Nancy and myself did less of the talking and you got to meet the entire team to show kind of how we execute against this and I think they showed really well in that regard. And then lastly because we are Shift4, we all are boldly forward. We announced the biggest transaction in our history from an M&A perspective, which is a $2.5 billion acquisition of Global Blue so while it looks somewhat sudden in the announcement, the reality is it was a 5-plus year journey we've been on pursuing these capabilities and in dialogue with that business, and it finally became the right time. And so we've got kind of yet another leg of growth in a bunch of different geographies and a new vertical to go pursue.

Let's just start there. I mean, again, your biggest deal that you've ever announced $2.5 billion Global Blue. Maybe just to help us understand a little more around the strategy and rationale what it's going to do for you guys going forward?

Yes, sure. So part of it, the strategy and rationale come from conviction, which is that we've spent 5-plus years thinking about -- it's taking what's made us successful in the United States, and bringing that all over the world. And as we've learned about kind of these local markets, the commerce experience is fundamentally different in a lot of markets, the capabilities you need to deliver are different. What I mean by that is payment processing exists in many countries around the world, but merchants also need things like dynamic currency conversion. They also need things like processing of that tax refund. If you are a luxury goods retailer in Europe. This is a critical way you attract customers is if you're traveling abroad, you can actually get a refund to a meaningful portion of what you spent in the form of a VAT tax refund and Global Blue processes that. And they're 1 of only 2 in the world that do it and they own 80% market share. So we've kind of studied the commerce experience around the world diligently and constantly, and we look at capabilities that are pretty irreplaceable and Global Blue brought us 2 of those. And the synergies are very natural. We offer payment processing across the geographies that Global Blue does that. Both of these are essential. They're not optional to the customers that they serve. And we support 40% of the hotels in the United States have never offered Dynamic currency conversion and yet they're 1 of 3 providers that does that. So take kind of really natural synergies against a business that just announced 20% year-over-year growth in and of itself, and you can sort of get a sense as to why we're so excited about it.

Yes. I mean in terms of what you're incorporating in your outlook, when you think about incorporating Global Blue into it, just what synergies, what are you actually thinking about in terms of its contribution to the story?

Yes, sure. So the transaction requires I would say, an above average level of conservatism and prudism just on the nature of the fact that it's our largest and it's during a time of a CEO transition. So when we set expectations on this, it is a different set of expectations than we would traditionally apply. I think that's for all the right reasons. But what we did in presenting this transaction to our Board was to haircut the growth of their business. Luxury market growth, which is a big driver of what they've done, we simply removed it from the forecast. And we replaced it with this idea that we can cross-sell their customers. We can deliver their products into our customers. And through that, basically replace the growth they were doing on a stand-alone basis. So if it sounds unconventional, it's simply bet less on their future and bet more on the things that we know we can do in conjunction with them. The reality of how this traditionally plays out is both these things happen at the same time. And that's why I think there's embedded conservatism in how we think about it. But 80-rough million of revenue synergies in simply delivering our products to their customers and their products to our customers in a very modest way. I mean, we think about penetrating less than 5% of their enterprise customers volume. Yes, to come to conclusions like that and a little bit more but also modest of their SMB customers, et cetera. So in many ways, it's the exact Shift4 playbook. We have services their customers are already buying today from other vendors, and they have services our customers need. And combining these things can account for a really -- can result in a really nice business even if you take an above-average level of conservatism to what they've done historically by themselves.

So I want to put that in perspective. You're guiding this year to a couple of hundred million dollars of end-to-end volume without Global Blue, right? And you're looking at an addressable opportunity of Global Blue's businesses or its customers that have $500 billion of volume through them, assuming a small percentage of that converts over the next few years, but pretty small, I think 5% of enterprise, as you said, right, and some subset of the SMB side. So you're really only incorporating a little of that, and you're incorporating basically dynamic currency conversion being brought over to your hotels, which is kind of a no-brainer, like I was actually surprised your hotels don't have it today. So that's something that most hotels should want to have that's incremental, just the ability for a user to check out and pay in their own currency anywhere they go, which I think is all you're including. So that's just to put it in perspective, the magnitude of conservatism there.

Well, I think the other thing because I can always hear in the back of my head, my new activist shareholder, Jared yelling at me about what we haven't described is the total extent of the opportunity. The reality is that doesn't encompass any e-commerce whatsoever. That's simply in-store sales that occur at these merchants. And we now have 30-plus countries of e-commerce capabilities, and we serve some phenomenal customers that are like the biggest and most demanding in the world through e-commerce. So we try kind of not to emphasize these areas where we're building out and investing and serving kind of marquee customers in a product development capacity, but yes, there is an immense e-commerce opportunity. By the way, there's an immense U.S. sales opportunity across these merchants because many of them are global in nature. So there's certainly volume well beyond that, but that's the in-store volume against the population they serve today.

Okay. That's helpful. And then, Nancy, why don't we shift to you and just touch on guidance for a moment. I mean, first, if you want to recap how the quarter turned out that you just reported fourth quarter. But more importantly, when we think about '25 guidance, just touch a little more on what's underpinning your assumptions and expectations. I mean you're calling for mid- to high 20% volume growth at the midpoint, mid-20s in terms of percentage revenue growth and I think 20% organic. But you exited the year at, what, almost 28%, if I remember correctly, organic growth, right? So overall, strong growth rates regardless. But if you could just kind of reconcile the exit versus the year ahead of us.

Sure. Let me tighten that a little bit. So last year, we reported 26% organic growth for the year. We put into the guide 20% plus and getting a lot of questions about this. So trying to emphasize the plus and kind of talk about the math underneath that. And so first, let me talk about the guide philosophy overall. Taylor has been talking about it all day. And I think the word I've been using is just confidence, right? Like there's a lot of confidence in this guide. We want to reiterate that we have a ton of visibility always to the year ahead, right? The bulk of our volume is going to come from deals that haven't annualized that we actually business we signed in '24 that will annualize into '25. It will come from the backlog that we've talked about, which is sales we've signed but have not yet installed or had their first transaction. And then it will come from, obviously, new signed sales, which will come both just from normal kind of new production, but also from our embedded funnel of over $1 trillion now when you add in Global Blue. So even before Global Blue, like just a really high confidence in kind of that $45 billion that we've built in as incremental volume. Specifically on the 20% plus, right, when we think about organic, first of all, we're growing over a bigger base, right? So the organic dollar growth is not slowing down. And again, very high confidence in the 20% plus. The way we think about that organic is you've got a few things that always year-to-year change is you've got now new acquisitions like Finaro and Appetize that are now part of our organic, right? They've been with us more than 12 months. They weren't in last year's 26% plus. And some of those models were still blowing up. So we'll always be conservative about how quickly we can convert those into our new products and services versus how the impact of turning off their existing products, especially as we kind of go further into their life cycle with us, we get less tolerant by keeping in old revenue streams. So there's always moving pieces. As it relates to Q1 specifically, getting a lot of questions about that today and seasonality. I think the most important thing to remember is that Q1 is a low seasonality mix for us just based on when you think about the 60 basis points of average spread that we talked about, that's just a mix by vertical in size. And from restaurants, in particular, which are kind of on the higher side from a spread perspective, Q1 is a very low seasonal year for us. So we're expecting about if we look historically, Q1 compared to the total year has been about 19% to 21% of our total achieved gross revenue less network fees for the year, and we expect to be in that range again for this year. And we've also given guidance about 45% EBITDA margin expectation for Q1. And when you think about that, our margins will go up throughout the year really because of 2 things. One is the mix of seasonality. So obviously, if we have higher spreads in a given quarter, that flows through for higher quarters. We always talk about the summer being high seasonal for hospitality and restaurants, but also because we continue to synergize the acquisitions that we've done over the last 12 to 18 months. So we've got really good visibility. I think last year, we exited the year saying we still had about a 300 basis point drag in margins. We know exactly where that's coming from. And so we'll be achieving that throughout the year.

Okay. I mean from a volume standpoint and just to reiterate the conviction in growth because -- I mean, again, these growth rates are certainly not if the market was 100% on board with 20%, it would be, I think, a much higher multiple. And so when we think about the conviction around it, and you annualize Q4 volume and you think of your backlog, which you didn't actually just to sort of set the record straight, your backlog was -- I think it was $33 billion going out of third quarter. Where are we now in the backlog? And if you annualize Q4 volume, you'd already be almost at the low end of your volume without incremental.

Yes. So what we've said, and then Taylor can certainly add on here is our backlog in Q4 is larger than it was in Q3, and that's with about $5 million of volume coming into the quarter as being achieved.

And in terms of our backlog, it generally represents our largest opportunities that have signed, which naturally come with complexity and how they're activated and installed, something like Alterra is a long process, right? It's dozens of hotels. It's the Ikon Pass, which is a phenomenal e-commerce opportunity. But if it's not perfect by the time the season starts, you're going to wait until next year to get it done correctly. So I think it applies some conservatism to that backlog, not in believability that it will come through, but just when it comes through.

Okay. And then just touching on the medium-term outlook, which maybe both of you can touch on this, but the guide you gave was really 3 different growth scenarios with the building blocks of a sit on your hands kind of scenario where you're not adding a bunch of new things. Maybe just help us understand how you build up to the high teens that revenue growth there on that sit on the hands experience versus upside of the 2 other scenarios you talked about, which obviously include both M&A and just adding a lot more business.

Yes. I'll talk about the philosophy behind it, and then Nancy can talk about kind of the numbers that roll into each case. The sit on our hands case was because investors ask. It's not because that's what we do. We don't sit on our hands. But to demonstrate what we think the business could do against our existing acquired base of customers and cross-sell, our existing wins in the verticals that we're serving. That is the sit on our hands case. Now what it ignores is it ignores the capital reinvestment that we've traditionally done with our free cash flow, and I would kind of compel investors to look back at our Investor Day, we've kind of demonstrated that whether we invest in R&D, whether we buy back our shares or whether we buy companies, every single 1 of those dollars has resulted in a 16% free cash flow yields. And the free cash flow growth in the business is quite nice. So sit on our hands case is quite -- is somewhat academic or theoretical. Global Blue is real. So we wanted to demonstrate the impact of what the Global Blue business will be over the next few years. The most likely case is simply a modest reinvestment of that capital at rates that or at yields that we would traditionally see. I think the M&A opportunity for those that have been skeptical of it, I think we've proven an ability to find things that others don't and synergize them in incredibly interesting ways. And Global Blue puts us in 50 new countries in new verticals with new capabilities. I don't think that slows down. We'll be modest of our leverage ratios in the face of any economic uncertainty and a large transaction that we're embarking on here, but that most likely case is kind of define that way for a reason.

Yes. I think the only thing I would add to that is it's important to remember just how -- what the building blocks are and our visibility into those building blocks because in that sit on your hands case, is obviously the assumptions we have around all the acquisitions that we've done and how they'll play out. So both blowing up kind of the old models and our success in converting those into our existing end-to-end model. And I would say it's not really -- it's pretty modest, I guess, in terms of what you have to believe because we didn't put in, I guess, what we see as kind of expanding margins, expanding free cash flow. It really is a sit on your hands case without reinvestment, which is just run rate.

That's great to hear. Yes, you have pretty good visibility on some really important verticals so I want to ask about trends for a moment. I know that was -- it's a little bit on the spot for now, but it's important given all the headlines we're seeing in the macro. So between hotels you look at and restaurants and obviously stadiums and now unified commerce. Just maybe give us a sense of what you're seeing out there because the headlines could be a little a little scary at the moment with pending consumer confidence questions and tariffs.

Yes. So I would say the trends we've seen in the recent term are very consistent with what we've seen for the past year. We are a pretty cautious and risk-averse organization, and we sort of try to predict where we think pain can come into our merchant base. And we've generally gotten it wrong. So what I mean by this is restaurants have been kind of modest, down 1% year-over-year on same-store sales through our analysis, reasonably consistently throughout the year, it might go up or down a point.

You're saying all the way in from last year through now.

Yes, from last year through now. In the face of, I don't know, $100 stakes in $25 cocktails, it's not the end of the world, and it's been quite consistent. What it does demonstrate is a notable but modest decrease in spend on a year-over-year basis that's been very consistent throughout the past year. We would have predicted hotels had more same-store sales pressure simply because if you follow kind of the evolution of the pandemic, you had kind of people starting to travel in '22 to '23. And really, those hotels couldn't even staff to the occupancy levels that they wanted to, and '23 was kind of the first summer where hotels were staffed appropriately and travel was high, that continued through this year. So while it wasn't really meaningful same-store sales growth, there was same-store sales growth in the hotel vertical, that's kind of played through. Retail has been mixed, and that's more of a function of it being a smaller and chunkier sort of vertical for us. But no sort of dress of consequence, really just steady. And that steadiness has continued. Valentine's Day, our busiest day ever. It will be until Mother's Day because guys don't like to cook for some reason, but we're seeing kind of a very typical experience in our same-store merchant base. It certainly evolved with things like heavier Q4 for us now that we're in more stadiums, et cetera. But on a merchant basis, it's been quite -- I don't know, boring.

Yes, very stable.

Okay. So even with that, basically, it sounds like barely low single-digit same-store sales growth rates. I mean your guys' organic growth rates have been well over 20%, your manufactured growth.

It's probably worth just kind of concluding what Taylor said is say, we've never relied on same-store sales, right? Like that we've been -- when Taylor says we've been conservative, that's the way of saying that's not really a driver that we put into the growth model for some time.

Let's look a little more into the verticals now. I mean, again, we were on a panel earlier about point-of-sale differentiation and you are diversifying a little more into things like unified commerce, but you still have your heart being founded or you're grounding in restaurants and hotels and stadiums, some real differentiation on a vertical basis. So starting with restaurants. I mean SkyTab was a big initiative going back over a year ago now, right? How has that been progressing for you? Talk a little bit about your progress and just general positioning in the restaurant category.

Yes, sure. I would say it's gone well. This is an area where you'll never hear us being content with our progress. Keep in mind, our vantage point into restaurants is very unique vis-a-vis anyone else that serves the space. And what I mean by that is we focus largely on table service restaurants. I think investors are done a disservice when people talk about this massive restaurant TAM and yet you never see the same solution in a coffee shop that you see in a fine-dining institution or in a fast food restaurant versus a table service bar and grill. So let's talk about table service restaurants is the market we endeavor to serve. Our positioning is informed by having acquired 6 different brands in the vertical. And they all serve a wide variety of table service restaurants built 2 brands. inside of the business. And then also the largest payment processor for Micros, which has been a dominant player in the restaurant vertical for many, many years. So all of this data informs kind of the product we want to build for the future, which is SkyTab. And I would say where we endeavor to skew and to serve is the big, complex table service, multi-location and/or really high-volume single location where the market is not well served by a single product today. We tried to demonstrate this by -- at our Investor Day, where Tao, who's historically been using Micros has been collaborating with us on the next product for them to adopt into the future. That's the market we endeavor to serve. I would say and it's going quite well. Outside of that, you've got the rest of the world, which looks like the U.S. did 20 years ago. And what I mean by that is there's maybe a piece of software, some third-party hardware, it's running on and a bank terminal off to the side. So delivering a consolidated vertically integrated product to the rest of the world has been a significant priority for us. We tried to illustrate this in our Investor Day to say in November, 7% of the restaurants signing up for Shift4 came from outside the U.S. And in January, 2 months later, 32% of the restaurants joining us came from outside the U.S. as just a way to emphasize the very, very small green shoots of the international opportunities.

Yes. I mean hotels is another area that I think international could be an opportunity for. But I mean that's been -- you guys -- you're the largest payments engine for hotels. I think you're over 50% of the strip in Vegas as an example, right? But if we think about what you're doing that's allowing that to continue to grow, the differentiation that allows that to basically replicate what you did in the U.S. now that you have so many footprints internationally, is that an opportunity or a gateway conversions still an opportunity? Where do you see that?

Yes. It's a very meaningful opportunity. And so to contrast the large complex restaurant, let's take that hypothetical Tao, now let's put it inside of a Vegas resort. And suddenly, the payments integrations you need to support are no longer just the restaurant. It's the front desk, it's the online bookings, it's the lobby bar, it's the spa out to 70-plus different pieces of software across hundreds of revenue centers. That's what our platform supports today. And what's amazing about our position in the vertical is when a new software company comes up, and they want to sell into these great hotels, they call Shift4 and they integrate. And so we're not seeking out new integrations to figure out how to grow on behalf of our customers. The best software company is trying to serve the vertical are calling us and making our library of supported platforms that much more robust every single month. What's really fascinating to us and why we started this international journey over 5 years ago, is that all of this software is installed all over the world. So the Hilton in Times Square using the same property management system as the Hilton in Madrid. And yet what often do we see in Madrid, we see a bank terminal that's not at all connected off to the side because that merchant needs local settlement capabilities, they can get local funds into their local bank account. That's what we're endeavoring to solve and what we've been endeavoring to solve for the past 18 months. It's what brought us from the U.S. with payment capabilities into 30-plus countries around the world, again, in just 18 months. not because we don't have the merchants are ready to serve and the software integrations, but those local settlement capabilities are really important. And what we've been kind of -- what's enhanced our conviction is just the bare bones announcement of capabilities has compelled hundreds of hotels outside the U.S. to embrace the opportunity. And that's where you get conviction to actually invest more and grow it faster.

That's great to hear. Let's just from a vertical standpoint, we'll kind of wrap it up with a catchall on unified commerce, which you've had some success with your large strategic customer, obviously, getting into new markets already. But when you think of your capability and differentiation to go head-to-head with other big providers of e-com globally or unified commerce globally. You have a lot of confidence in doing so. And I think Global Blue now also gives you an intro to even more customers that can be in that category. So just explain to us the opportunity to go head-to-head with some others and why this -- why you have a right to win in that area?

Yes, sure. So any time there's kind of 1 dominant player in a really interesting segment of the market, we get excited about it. I think it's very easy to differentiate ourselves vis-a-vis 1 competitor, no matter how great they are. The market values selection and choice and opportunity. And clearly, our customer base was compelling us to be outside the U.S., right? We serve verticals that exist all over the world. And the problems we've solved in the United States still exist all over the world. So it's sort of was shouting at us that we need to invest in these capabilities around the world. What we don't like to do is we don't like to spend money hoping there's a customer on the other side of it. We like to spend it with high conviction that we know who the customer is going to be, and these aren't wasted dollars even in the early stages of product development. So for those that are newer to the story, I'd compel you to go back and look at our November '21 Investor Day had really ambitious plans to expand our capabilities across a variety of merchant categories largely within e-commerce. We talked about not-for-profit. We talked about gaming. We talked about enabling that large strategic customer all over the world. And we had none of those capabilities, but we had signed commitments from huge demanding customers that they would work with us in pursuit of these capabilities. And that's why on the backs of a really demanding customer, you can profitably add 30-plus countries over 18 months. And know that when you are in these countries, there's going to be a lot more opportunity for what we've done for 25-plus years, hotels, stadiums, restaurants and now retail will be undoubtedly a large portion of the story simply because we've got like really mission-critical products in the face of Global Blue.

Just to wrap it up on the financial side, Nancy, I mean, I know you guided towards margins being flattish, basically stable year-over-year, which is effectively good operating leverage on the high growth rate, partially offset by integrations and deals and coming in -- some of them coming in and investment in them, right? When we think about your free cash targets, you talked about 50% conversion, which is a bit of a step down. So maybe just remind us why that's happening. And then your conviction and I think you said $1 billion of free cash run rate exiting '27, it's a big number so just talk us through the...

Great. And you're giving me an opportunity to mention something else I want to make sure everyone's clear on. When you think about what we presented at Investor Day, it really was if everything was status quo taking our free cash flow conversion to north of 60%. I want to just remind everyone that bringing that down to basically kind of that 50% plus range is interest and taxes, right? It seems like the financing we did last year, $1.1 billion of notes and the interest rate associated with that will obviously impact adjusted free cash flow and that first semiannual payment is going to hit Q1. So that was a little commercial for me to remind everybody about the Q1 impact of that. But when we think of actually the trajectory and how do we get to $1 billion, it's really what we've been talking about for some time. Our service model is just improving our operating leverage with really pretty much every market that we're serving right now is an improved service model. And I always go back to because it's going to be even more relevant now with the Global Blue. If you think about stadiums is the best example. If we bring in something like ticketing into a stadium where we're already in the stadium doing F&B, but we're not doing parking or the suites or the ticketing, there's no incremental expense to service that customer. So when we think about where Shift4 started, especially back to the IPO, small, midsized restaurants that would call us to change the price of a cheeseburger on their menu. The model as we move to SkyTab and every one of the commercial markets that Taylor just talked about is a more efficient economic flow through all the way down to not only EBITDA margin, but then to free cash flow. So when we think about the building blocks to the $1 billion, which kind of takes into all 3 layers of the 3-year midterm guide that we put out, the status quo sit on our hands plus GB, plus a modest $200 million of cash flow reinvestment into the business. This is just run rate, right? You don't have to believe that margins could expand far greater or convert to free cash flow far greater than what we're already doing today in the 60% plus trajectory. It really is just a run out. And we've been doing -- we've been talking modestly about the investments we're making in the business, right? One CRM, moving our total infrastructure with AI to cloud-based tools, everything is driving efficiency in the way that we service a customer. So when we layer all these things on top of each other, the outcome is the $1 billion. And we just thought that was really important to kind of underline everything that we're doing.

Got it. I'm going to open it up to the quad to the audience in 1 minute. Last question, Taylor, as you're transitioning into the role of CEO now and Jared's moving to NASA and the government, just your thoughts, number one, on the strategy, anything different you see in terms of a way to operate the business. And just to hit on a point that's probably a little bit of an elephant in the room is just still Jared stock. He still owns what about 1/3, 25% of the company or so. And so just remind us his view of what he's planning on doing, at least depending on what the government.

Yes, sure. So I'll preface everything with that there is an ethics review of all of Jared's holdings there they analyze what is permissible, not permissible he needs to get rid of, et cetera. I can't comment on kind of the time line of that review, but I can give you what our expectations are, which are that he'll continue to hold Shift4. He stated that, that's something that he is personally important to him. We also don't view it as controversial in any way. So we anticipate him to continue to hold the 25% of the business that he holds today. This is why I've been joking that he's like no longer my boss, but he is my activist shareholder. He is not going to be silent about his opinions on whether we're doing a great job or need to do better. And generally, he always said we can do better. So I think that will continue long into the future. There's no prohibitions from me giving him perspective on what's going on in the business, quite frankly, giving him data on what's going on in the business and getting his perspectives back if he's not actively engaged in selling the stock. So I expect to get a ton of insight from him in the years ahead. And we don't anticipate he's going to be a force seller of the stock in any way.

And then maybe just tax cover...

Oh, yes. I can't comment on his liquidity needs over time, but I can say that he has every opportunity and quite frankly, right, after 26 years of running the business to take a step back, both economically and emotionally and he's chosen that he wants to stay older so.

Okay. That's great to hear. Questions, guys.

In the context of the 75% market share in the stadium space, can you talk about the opportunity remaining on the ticketing side and how we can see that play out?

Yes, sure. So ticketing is a small fraction of that based of customers today. This will also be the first year that even for that small fraction, we're experiencing a full year worth of ticket sales. If you recall, the Appetize transaction in Q4 of 2023, really represented an ability to convert a ton of stadiums on a software basis over and opened up a ticketing opportunity, but you need a full year worth to get a full year worth of the volume. So both the embedded ticketing wins that we've announced have a year to seasonalize which is great. And then there's still lots more that we had across that base. And quite frankly, I think that's important because ticketing sales can represent between 2 and 5x what sales actually occur inside the venue. So to take what's sometimes viewed as a niche vertical and capture a heck of a lot more volume than in-venue commerce, has been our specialty. It's why when you think about Global Blue and you think about just what sales occur inside of a store, your imagination should go to all the sales that don't occur inside of the store, we're pretty good at that so there is plenty more to go in that regard.

Very good, guys. Thank you so much for joining us.