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

All right. We're going to kick off here. We're very pleased to have Taylor Lauber, CEO of Shift4 with us today. Taylor stepped into that role as CEO, who was previously President and Chief Strategy Officer, I think most people know from his time there, he has been integral to the company for many, many years. And Taylor congrats on being here your first time in the role.

Thank you.

I think last year, Jared, was literally in space and you guys were unable to come. So we're glad you could make it. All right. So look, I think you have been instrumental in driving the strategy of the company for some time. As you think about how you would like to impact the company, what do you think is going to change with you as CEO? And what's top of mind for you?

Yes. It's a great question. I think what's important to understand is that our founder is still the largest shareholder in the business. And so like strategic priorities don't change much at all. And in fact, if we thought the business had to change strategic priorities, I wouldn't be the right person to affect that anyway because Jared and I have been really in sync with one another around what we think is the right way to grow the business and what we think our differentiation is going to be. What I will say is we're a fundamentally different business than we were a year ago and certainly than we were 3 years ago. I look back to our IPO, and we were a 600-person business with a nice presence in restaurants, this really nice ability to go win in hotels. Fast forward to today, we're, I think, 12x bigger on an EBITDA basis, 25x bigger on a free cash flow basis and 6,000 people, 65% of which are not in the United States. With not only those same rights to win in restaurants and hotels, now stadiums and now luxury retail, among many other things. So the business has evolved, and we have to evolve to be able to make sure that these 6,000 people know what's going to move the needle. And in fact, that's been kind of the most interesting, I think, growth challenge as we've seen in the business is what moves the needle is a very fundamentally different thing than 2 or 3 years ago. And you want to make sure every employee understands that so that they're spending the time in the right areas.

Got it. Okay. Sticking on the topic of new management, you announced that current Board member, Chris Cruz, will be taking over as CFO following Nancy's retirement from her role and her return to the Board. Can you address just the why now aspect of the question? But then bigger picture, just talk about any ongoing priorities or potential shifts with Chris coming into the role of CFO.

Yes, sure. So Nancy joined us just over 3 years ago, stepped down from the Board to join as CFO. And she was pretty adamant that it was going to be a 3-year stint and that we gave her this really ambitious list of objectives to achieve. And to her credit, she achieved every one of them. And the only out of ambiguity in it was Jared's potential departure from the business. And to her credit, she said, I can give you as much time as you need. And I said we're about to embark on the biggest M&A transaction we've done in our history. And can I get another 3 years? And she said...

What have you done for...

You can get a lot of my time, and I do not want to part ways with this company. I want to be actively involved, but I want to be actively involved as a Board member. And so we obviously had to respect that. And Chris, to his credit, he's like twice as smart as me because I told, no -- I told Jared, no, 18 years in a row when he asked me to join the business. Chris only told him, no, like 10 years in a row. And yet I think Jared and the team have proved both of us wrong in the amount of growth and opportunity they've been able to create. So what we get in Chris is somewhat unique. He used to own 60% of the business as a private equity owner of the business. He has been with us that entire past decade. and quite frankly, stayed on the Board long after they divested their share. And so he brings, I think, among many other things, a really unique appreciation for the hustle. And there's a lot of hustle involved in kind of what we're about to accomplish. And so we're thrilled to have him. And quite frankly, incredibly thrilled to have kind of Nancy's tutelage through not just the transition. She's a full-time employee through year-end, but also the next several years as a Board member.

Got it. Okay. I wanted to go into one of the topics that came up a lot post earnings. So I guess one thing that I think you've signaled quite clearly starting at the Investor Day is a change in the guidance philosophy and kind of seeking to kind of overpromise or -- the opposite, underpromise and overdeliver. Given all the moving pieces this year, right, so an Investor Day in the middle of 1Q, a trade war throughout 2Q and a transformational deal, it's been tough to actually test the guidance philosophy. So what is kind of the message to shareholders who are wondering if the approach to guidance and kind of the conservatism that you're looking to achieve has actually changed?

So it's an awesome question. I'd say I'd root it in what we have the most conviction in, which is when we set kind of our medium-term guidance, we feel really strongly about our ability to achieve that. And I think we tried to dimensionalize that in our Investor Day, which is we'll tell you what we think the business would do if we never reinvested another dollar. We'll tell you what we think the inclusion of Global Blue will be. And then we'll tell you this most likely case, which is that historically, we've been able to reinvest our free cash flow and sustain higher levels of growth as a result of that. We feel incredibly highly convicted in that. With that being said, we have -- as we think about guidance, we have typically volume that we guide towards for the full year. We have gross revenue less network fees and then we have EBITDA. And the thing we have most control over is generally the profitability of the business. Also revenue is something we have pretty good line of sight into. And volume can be tricky. We have this interesting mix of SMB and enterprise that's hitting at the same time. I don't know that we've done ourselves a huge favor to not guide volume quarter-to-quarter because we certainly have a good insight into a quarter's worth of volume. And I think that's where some of the disconnect has happened is a quarter like last quarter where we fell right within the range of what we felt comfortable would be -- where our volumes would be and yet the Street was slightly off from that. So I think we can do certainly a better job at dimensionalizing the level of control and also giving shorter-term insights into what we think is going on.

Yes. No, that makes sense. I would just tie in the last 2 questions together. I think the last couple of years, I think the company starting from the top is very focused on the volume and revenue targets that you laid out in 2021. The company achieved those. I think Nancy, to our credit, did a great job steering items like EBITDA and free cash flow. As you think about kind of new CFO incoming, how do you think about the construction of the guide? Who sets the guide internally, who's kind of involved?

Yes. Ultimately, this is going to be a lot of Chris' responsibility, which is that -- he's the closest to the financial picture of the business, the forecast of the business. It's our job to make sure that we're setting up -- meaning my job to make sure we're setting up the business for growth, not in the next quarter or 2, but 3 to 5 years from now and that we're planting seeds because those seeds are what drive that needle-moving performance in the outer years. So Chris is going to have a really loud voice in the guidance philosophy of the company. We're somewhat constrained by the fact that we've been public for 5 years, and there's expectations that our existing shareholders have about what we're going to do. But ultimately, this sits with Chris, and I want to give him time to approach it. I will say as a private equity investor, he is very focused on profitability per share. I mean that is just the nature of how they think about the world. As we talked with Jared about his potential departure from the business, profitability per share is obviously what he cared the most about as an owner. I want to give Chris some latitude because he's new in the seat, but that is at the end of the day, what an owner of the business cares the most about. We want to give good insight because that's been an incredible KPI that we, quite frankly, haven't talked about.

Got it. Yes. No, that makes sense. All right. So sticking with the topic of the most recent quarter. I think as you mentioned, revenue came in roughly in line and then the moving pieces above that were take rate a little bit higher, volumes a little bit lower, at least than what the Street had been expecting. You called out some timing shifts on the enterprise volume side, so offset by strength on the SMB side. So can you maybe just talk about some of the moving pieces and then how you're feeling about visibility on kind of go-lives for some of the larger, chunkier clients in the pipeline?

Yes. I want to try to demystify this as best as I can, and I can't say we've gotten it perfect. But what I will say is we had a 17-year history of boarding a pretty ubiquitous type of customer. I jokingly refer to that as the Bar and Grill in Boise, Idaho. We had a singular product. We had a singular go-to-market and the average customer looked pretty consistent. And then from our IPO forward, we were presented with really interesting opportunities, and I mentioned that in hotels, stadiums and a handful of other kind of emerging verticals where the average customer was meaningfully bigger than that Bar and Grill in Boise, Idaho. And I remember back in -- I think it was Q3 of '22, we surprised investors with meaningfully higher volume growth at lower spread because this enterprise opportunity began to manifest itself. Where we find ourselves today is the book is much more balanced than that. So I actually don't subscribe the idea that enterprise has slowed down in a meaningful way. There's always go-lives that maybe supposed to go this month or went next month or something like that. But in reality, we have a robust SMB opportunity. Outside the U.S., the majority of what's boarding today is in SMB. And then we've got an enterprise opportunity. It's just a little more mature than it was 3 years ago. And it's the combination of these things that I think we could do a better job of illustrating the contribution because we started the year with high conviction in spreads, which kind of definitionally means we feel pretty comfortable about the way the book is going to manifest itself, and that's played out.

Yes. Got it. All right. And then just on the other side, on the SMB side, it's very clear from the quarter that the SMB onboarding seem to be outperforming. The commentary on spreads for the remainder of the year was pretty upbeat. And it seems like, in particular, you've seen some traction on the international front. So maybe just update us on what you're seeing on the SMB footprint today and particularly on the international trajectory.

Yes, sure. So I'll start with the premise that whether it's a recent M&A transaction where we see a lot of cross-sell opportunity or it's a new market that we're entering for the first time, SMBs are always the first to adopt the value proposition. And it's not uniquely valuable to SMBs. It's the reality that if you're a single decision maker in a small business, you can sign a piece of paper today and we can implement you tomorrow. If you're signing up in the U.K., your payment device shows up the next day by way of example. So SMBs are the quickest to adopt the value proposition, whether it's in a new country or it's as a result of a recent M&A transaction. And then as time goes by, you have the ability to go win medium-sized merchants. And then I think if the gateway acquisitions of years past are any indication, after a handful of years, you can win the largest of the enterprise opportunities inside of them. So in a year where we've just completed a lot of M&A, we've seen good traction within the SMBs, and in a year where we've started to hit stride internationally, you're seeing a lot of SMB activity. Again, I don't think it's a commentary on our ability to win enterprise. I think it's the relative maturity of a handful of different strategies that are going on right now.

Got it. Okay. So sticking with the international footprint, I was wondering if you could talk specifically about Vectron. I know it's an extended closing process. I think you now have full control over that asset. What are the day 1 changes that you're making to the organization? And any updated thoughts on rough time lines for bringing SkyTab to that market?

Yes, sure. So just to level set, Vectron is a restaurant point-of-sale business. We really got to know well in Germany. They had about 65,000 restaurants using their point-of-sale platform, very few of which had ever adopted payments as an integrated solution, most of them using a bank terminal off to the side. And really interestingly, they had this awesome reseller network of about 300 value-added resellers that found the customers, installed the customers, service them. Why is that valuable to us? Because I don't speak German. And we want to be in these markets, an embedded and trusted reseller network who knows where the customers are is going to be our fastest time to market. So we agreed to pursue Vectron. We ended up acquiring about 75% of the shares and then went through a procedural process to gain operational control of the business. I think this is one area if we're being self-critical, the timing around international acquisitions is something that took -- they have taken longer than we would have anticipated, and it took until about June of this past year to gain operational control of Vectron. What does it mean? It means all the employees are part of our system. They were never part of our system before that. They look at all the same screens we look at. The value proposition can be clearly pushed around what this means. It was important to us and important procedurally that Vectron ran the way it kind of always had up until we were able to get control of the business. So today, several hundred merchants a month are joining our payments value proposition, but not -- we don't have an urgency to push SkyTab in a market where there's 65,000 customers already using a piece of software that they like. And so we will make sure SkyTab is ready for any of those customers that want to migrate to an Android-based solution over the years. But right now, it's really about making sure their existing customers have an integrated payments experience and that they're really happy with it. And then over time, we'll just make sure they've got the right product for the next evolution.

And what about the opportunity with the resellers? Do you think net new business in Germany could start to be deployed on SkyTab over some period of time?

This is such a fascinating thing with resellers because the immediate opportunity is all of their existing customers, but they've never run their business that way. They run their business by adding new customers all the time. And so it's actually an interesting mix of new customers they add where they attach payments and software right at the start of the value proposition, right at the start, and then existing customers where they add on payments to them. And we would expect just instinctually, it's easier to go after your existing customer, but that's not what salespeople do for a living. So right now, it's a healthy mix of both. And that's great because it keeps the cross-sell funnel full for a long period of time.

Got it. All right. And then sticking with SkyTab, this is the company's primary POS platform. How should we be measuring your progress on growing the SkyTab footprint, both here and abroad?

I'll tell you how we measure it. We measure it at 2 different levels. We look at the penetration rate of the product, and then we look at the KPIs within the merchants that they're installing. And by that measure, everything looks great, meaning the existing customer using it is bigger on average than it was a year ago. The retention rate is higher than it was a year ago, and the satisfaction rate is higher than it was a year ago. One misconception I think investors could have is that we mandate that every one of our customers be on SkyTab, and we simply don't. To this day, more restaurants are using another product than are using SkyTab because we only started to say SkyTab is the product you're going to sell just 3 years ago. So we're very happy with the customer level adoption of it. We are not insistent that a restaurant switch to it. Quite frankly, it doesn't change our economics much if they switch to it. So if they're happy, we're happy. And then in the case where they become unhappy with an older piece of software, they want to upgrade the hardware technology in their ecosystem, we offer SkyTab there. But it's a very small percentage of the customers that use SkyTab or upgrades. We still push it as our net new product offering. And I think Vectron, which you highlighted is a good example of that. There's no reason to disrupt 65,000 restaurants because we want a different software suite. It's capital intensive and it creates friction, but we'll make sure it's available for them should they want to use it.

Got it. Yes. So just to be clear on that, on the Vectron side, like are you allowing those resellers to continue to sell the legacy Vectron product for net new purposes?

100%, yes.

Yes. Got it. All right. You also -- I mean, to stick with this topic of the back book, it sounds like there hasn't historically been a lot of conversions from Harbortouch, Focus POS, POSitouch. How do you think about this idea of kind of mining the back book over time versus kind of continuing to cash flow, what I assume is a pretty profitable customer base?

Yes. It's all about what's satisfaction of the customer and what do they think is going to drive the best guest experience for them. And so we certainly are there to the extent they say, I'm looking at -- I want to upgrade or I want something that's Android-based or I want a better integration to, I don't know, DoorDash or REITs or something like that. We offer SkyTab on those terms. But in reality, I think we -- SkyTab is much more about making sure our sales force can win the incremental customer today. It's a tough debate because there's a lot of operational efficiency in having every customer on a common piece of software. But there's some capital trade-offs to doing that in a rushed fashion. And so we look every day and we say, what's the likelihood that this customer is going to continue to be happy on that product? And what mechanisms do we have to make sure that to the extent they want to look at something new, SkyTab is the first product that they look at. We're very happy with, I think, the relative mix of that strategy today.

Got it. Okay. So let's talk about Global Blue, transformatively large acquisition, largest in the company's history. Can you just level set on what are you expecting for the business? I think you said high single digits previously. I know there's been a little bit of focus on some of the disclosures they put out prior to the deal, seeing some very strong growth in kind of local currency terms. So maybe just talk through your expectations and maybe talk through some of the puts and takes from kind of gyrations in the macro year-to-date.

Yes, sure. So first of all, it's an amazing business. I think ignore kind of the niche of commerce that they serve, which is they help a traveler abroad get a tax refund for purchasing what's generally a luxury good. They have a really strong market share in that. They've grown it quite steadily vis-a-vis their competition. So they are embedded and a critical component of the European and Asian locations for the best retailers. This is a door opener for us to talk to these awesome customers about the rest of their commerce ecosystem. And so what we liked about the business is they had a demonstrated track record of gaining share against a relatively limited field of competition. We actually got to witness because we've spent over 5 years looking at it, we got to witness how the business would behave in pretty existentially scary scenarios, whether that's a pandemic, whether it's a large shopper base encountering economic duress, whether it's the U.K., which I think was their largest country at the time, simply saying we don't allow this anymore. I mean we have to watch the business and the resiliency of that business through some pretty interesting shocks. And what did you see? You saw they steadily won share. They had far more control over their own destiny than we expected. And they have an ability to grow inside of their customers that is incredibly unique, which is that if I can make this process easier and I can make it more digital, more refunds occur and therefore, my merchants make more money, we make more money and the consumer gets a better experience. All of that attracted us to the business in an undeniable way. And to your point, kind of attracted us to the business to the conviction level of we will do the largest transaction in our history by an order of magnitude. Isolating them as a stand-alone business, short-term, certainly, they benefit from currency fluctuation and they get detrimented by it and there's ebbs and flows, but they would tell you in the medium term that they thought they could grow the business kind of 12% to 14% pretty consistently over several years. And they would do that through a combination of luxury market growth, countries that are net adding this as a benefit and customers. And then lastly, that digitization concept. We felt really convicted in kind of 3 of those, the ones that were in our control. And then what we felt a little uneasy about was how do we know what luxury markets growth is going to do. And yet when you sort of say, but we can bring a lot of synergies to this business. Their currency conversion product, we can instantly enable all of our customers for once the work is done, we can actually cross-sell a lot of their customers on payments, you can get conviction that the luxury market doesn't have to grow for it to be an awesome grower, or if the luxury market does grow, it an even better grower than that.

Yes. No, that makes sense. Okay. And then I guess, getting to the exciting part on the synergies. You -- I think you outlined a fairly conservative approach you took to deriving the synergies that you expect from the deal. But I think it would be helpful to just go through them again. What's going to be your approach to realizing those synergies, having those conversations with merchants? And kind of where do you expect the synergies to come from initially?

Yes. So it's a great question. Keep in mind, the secondary of the 2 products, but they are a category leader in it of currency conversion, offering that to the consumer at the point of sale. We've never offered to any of our customers ever before. And yet we support 40% of the hotels in the country. We support a lot of these environments where it's a pretty common product. And so in that regard, it was obvious to us that if we own this business, we can like kill 5 birds in our product development pipeline by enabling that inside of our own merchant base. It's table stakes if you're going to Europe, merchants demand it at the point you're installing. And in America, it's a real nice to have, and we now get to enable all of our merchants with it. So on the currency conversion side, we get to take what would have been a partnership and suddenly, we own a best-in-class provider in that regard. And then on the tax-free side, these are merchants that every one of them is hobbling together a payment solution. Some work better than others. And we can now deliver all of that under one roof. And in the best circumstances, that means we can offer immediate eligibility detection. So the retailer is not guessing that you're eligible for this, you paid and the software recognizes you as eligible for this refund, and it drives the cashier through the experience. Business owners love it because that cashier might not otherwise know to do this. And now that you've integrated the products really, really tightly, the consumer is going to get money back that they didn't realize they could get back. The cashier is going to drive revenue back to your business and incremental spend that they didn't have before. So we think by owning all these value -- these components of the commerce chain, we can actually just create a better experience. That's been evidenced by the likes of LVMH and their best largest, most global customers that demanded a lot of this efficiency, and we can bring it all the way down to the SMB, who quite frankly, has a pretty disjointed experience today and can get a lot better through a single vendor.

Makes a lot of sense. All right. One minor modeling point, I've made a note to ask this. Could you just remind us on the geography of Global Blue? How should we expect those revenues to show up in the income statement?

Yes, sure. So I'll start by saying the next few quarters are pretty easy. We have a regulatory obligation to report them as a stand-alone business for the next few quarters. So no mysteries there. Outside of that, they are denominated in U.S. dollars with about 2/3 of their revenue coming from euro-denominated activity and 1/3 coming from Asia activity. So it is a business that is more susceptible to currency fluctuation than others we've had in the past, ultimately translated back to U.S. dollars. It is a little bit more susceptible to geopolitical events. Obviously, people have to want to travel for this to be a product that has adoption through it. But in terms of the contribution, I would think about 1/3 of our total business in geographies we haven't been in before, which is really exciting.

Got it. Okay. Great. All right. And then just in the absence of disclosing kind of quarterly organic growth, how would you encourage investors to gauge the organic growth of the business? And then how are you thinking about organic growth disclosures over time?

I'm going to channel my predecessor and get a little cynical for a second because there's this debate, are we phenomenal capital allocators who find excellent businesses and pay really low prices for them? Or do we buy really old agent businesses and extract the ton of synergies out of them? And the reality is we're pretty good at both of those things. And the way it manifests itself is we have a sales funnel that is always incredibly large, meaning we could double, triple, quadruple the business without finding a new customer. And Global Blue obviously makes sure that funnel is incredibly full. And then separately, we have go-to-markets that are pretty unique in the verticals that we aim to serve. And the combination of those things represents itself in times like this, 20% plus organic growth, but also a really interesting opportunity to synergize businesses. And I think this is not as manifested. So I think investors love to focus on the revenue growth as the metric that they want to look at. The reality is our margins despite having done a lot of M&A, even in very recent terms, our margins have expanded the whole time. That's where you get the -- that's where you can notice the benefit of delivering a really good synergized product in the face of M&A because we don't buy 50% margin businesses. And yet even though you're getting this low-margin business, the synergies are realized pretty quickly.

Yes. Makes sense. All right. Just on the stadium side, you've obviously made a lot of progress in the vertical. Just where do you stand now in terms of market share? And then bigger picture, when we think about the payment flows at stadiums, how do you measure market -- how do you measure wallet share? And then if you could just update us how much of the ticketing opportunity have we actually seen come through the numbers?

Yes, sure. So I'll start by saying I won't comment on our market share. That's for good reasons. We have a lot of it. And we have a lot of it across every league in the United States. So we found adoption across MLS, NHL, NBA, NFL and most recently, a lot of adoption in Major League Baseball. We've also found the product has tons of applicability in kind of the broader theme of entertainment. So you'll find us in those theme parks and increasingly in the stadium, Zoos and everything else. So the TAM is a bit larger than we would have anticipated for the product itself. What we would have said is that we thought the U.S. stadium opportunity, meaning in-venue commerce is probably a high single-digit billions payment volume opportunity. And that when you can attach ticketing, it's like 3x to 5x of that. Today, if I were to look at kind of a month's worth of volume today, ticketing and in-venue are about the same. And so what's the opportunity? The opportunity is that ticketing should be 3x to 5x. What it is, and we can still win more stadiums.

Got it. All right. I'm going to try to speed run through the last vertical here. On hospitality, I think the hospitality, the footprint is sort of a hidden gem of the company, really strong competitive dynamics. You're one of the biggest providers in the industry. I think one flip side of that is high market share, digitized end market. The growth tailwinds are naturally a bit lower or so you would think. But is that right? Do you feel like there's more to go get in the U.S. hospitality space? And then you could talk about the opportunity to take your U.S. footprint abroad.

Yes, sure. So I'll start by saying we believe we have about 40% of the hotels in the United States on our platform. We've got 1.5 more to go for every one that we have. So the opportunity inside the United States is tremendous. Recent examples of kind of how far that can go, Alterra Mountain Resorts, where we're doing all of their resorts plus a really strong opportunity in their e-commerce volume where they sell their season tickets to their mountains. The Wynn Casino Resort in Las Vegas is an example of how far this can go, and that was a win, no pun intended off the street, like a new customer joining us for the first time. So the opportunity inside the United States is still quite robust, but the maturity of the market outside the United States is very, very, very far behind. Your average hotel is still using a bank terminal. And so our value proposition should resonate incredibly nicely. And to the extent it's the same software company selling into those hotels and some of the same brands that exist inside the United States, our value prop is already well known. So it's a big area of focus for us. And we actually don't need to distract ourselves with either one to win. These are completely independent teams pursuing the opportunities, all with the payment platform that we have, which is we're integrated to the 1,200 most popularly used pieces of software for hotel.

Got it. All right. I have here a question 15. What is Jared up to? I think we can see in the Form 4s what his thoughts are on the stock. But maybe if you could talk a little bit about his involvement in the company and where his focuses are on a day-to-day basis.

Yes, sure. So it's fun. He -- we have several hours a week where we work with Jared on different initiatives. So he's talked about things being really important to him are the capital allocation philosophy of the business, where is the next dollar spent and why, is something he's just really passionate about, the success of SkyTab as a product and then international expansion and making sure that we don't repeat the same mistakes that we made over the last 20 years building this in the United States. And taking those early days lessons learned and applying them to new markets is something that he's been really instrumental with. So we talk regularly every few days around these big topics. He's my largest shareholder. I need him like thrilled and happy and low stress. And so I like to use him very sparingly. He's -- interestingly, he's still on all of our distribution lists. So if you do something stupid, you still see the missile on occasion from Jared hit the inbox. So like what are you talking about? But I think this opportunity that he had with government forced us to really focus on the priorities and what's he great at and make sure he gets to do just that, and that's what he enjoys. And what's all the other stuff that comes with a 6,000-person company that, quite frankly, can distract Jared from what he wants to do. So you're right, largest shareholder, very much our North Star in terms of how we think about driving value for him and can certainly help us from repeating mistakes that he's learned over the last 26 years running the business, but also deserves the opportunity to like be on a bigger stage. I don't know when he's in the White House, that feels like an appropriate setting for kind of the ambition he's taken on and the amount of -- the level of problems I think he could be applied to. So I think we found a decent mix for today.

Got it. In the last minute here, I just wanted to hit on capital allocation. You've been very clear more M&A is likely to continue. In the near term, like are we expecting a digestion period post Global Blue? Is it full steam ahead? And then maybe just a more tactical question. And your long-term targets around the most likely case, what's a reasonable amount to include from year-to-year?

It's a great question, and it's easier to answer that question, which is that over a sustained period of time, what do we think you could reliably reinvest into the business and maintain really nice growth rates as a percentage of that. So when we laid out our most likely case, we contemplated about $200 million a year in redeployment into M&A opportunities that either give us access to new markets or give us cross-sell or something like that. The reason I say it's the easy question is because it's not up to us when we buy things. And I know that sounds strange, but we have an incredibly rigid philosophy in what we're willing to pay and the demands we expect and what, quite frankly, synergies we can bring to a business. This has manifested itself very cleanly in the fact that we bought 6 businesses over the last 18 months, many of which we have looked at for 5-plus years. We've got some of our best investment banking advisers in the room here at Goldman. And they know how picky we are in working through these philosophies. And what I would tell you is when an objective -- when a deal meets our growth objectives and our price objectives, you kind of have to do it. So you'd sooner integrate slower and know you've got it than move faster. All this to say, I think the last couple of years, we saw a really robust opportunity, who's to say what the next few years look like, but we're in 50 new countries that we weren't in before. So the opportunity set is certainly not shrinking.

Great. Well, I think with that, we're out of time. Taylor, thanks for doing this. Really great to see you, and I appreciate the conversation.

Thank you.