Shift4 Payments, Inc. (FOUR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary
November 12, 2025
Earnings Call Speaker Segments
Sanjay Sakhrani
AnalystsAll right. Quick picture and then we're going to go.
Christopher Cruz
ExecutivesAll right. Thanks for indulging me on that one.
Sanjay Sakhrani
AnalystsNo, we got to put it up. We're honored that his first fireside chat as CFO, Shift4's new CFO, Chris Cruz, is joining us. Before taking the CFO role, Chris served for nearly a decade on Shift4's Board, following his role at Searchlight Capital Partners majority investment in Shift4. He also brings a deep experience across financial services and fintech. So thank you for joining us.
Christopher Cruz
ExecutivesYes. Thank you. Thank you for that introduction.
Sanjay Sakhrani
AnalystsSo I must say you hit the ground running on your first inaugural earnings call. I think you did a good job of providing a foundation on how you see the path forward and how you plan to evolve the messaging process. Perhaps for the benefit of the audience, you can give a highlight of the quarter and then what your primary focus areas are for the upcoming year?
Christopher Cruz
ExecutivesSure. Well, first off, thank you for having me. Like you said, it's always nice to get this -- the first of my fireside chats under the belt. So thank you. I'd say that the highlights for the quarter from our perspective was that we were able to deliver in line kind of the idea that we'll continue to do what we say and have always said that we will do. It was a quarter where we actually pulled forward our update about our medium-term guidance and helped highlight for people that we are in line with the medium-term guidance and that our medium-term guidance outlook remains intact, of which there are many metrics within that medium-term guidance. But one that's very near and dear to my heart is the potential ability to get to being ahead around the adjusted free cash flow exit rate of $1 billion by 2027. That at the end, I'm a cash is king kind of guy, and I'm intrinsics in that way. But I think that the idea that we were able to affirm around those things and that we continue to do what we say and have said we will do, that's highlight number one. We gave an outlook that I think also was in a narrower range, a guidance that's in line with what we said we would do from a full year guide perspective. And that number two is, I think, something that we're proud of. I think the third thing that we're really proud of is that the integration around Global Blue, an acquisition that I'm sure we'll talk about and that is a really exciting one for us, is ahead of schedule around a number of the integration fronts and that 2026 for us with Global Blue should be a really exciting one where we finally start to realize some of the value creation on the revenue side of that business. But those are 3 things that come to mind for me as far as important takeaways. And then I'd be remiss if I didn't say that we also, in this quarter, announced that our Board had authorized a $1 billion share repurchase program, which is about double the size of our prior share repurchase program. So $1 billion relative to what was $500 million expiring at the end of this year. And that, as capital allocation-minded people, we are eager to kind of execute against that authorization because right now, we're seeing our shares sort of trade lower on a multiple basis than the lowest we've ever procured them in the past. So it's a good balance to the overall equation of what we see organically, of what we see inorganically and then also just how we think about capital allocation in the overall picture of our framework. So those were a few of the highlights.
Sanjay Sakhrani
AnalystsWonderful. And as we think about the primary focus areas for this upcoming year, what are they?
Christopher Cruz
ExecutivesYes. The primary focus area for us is continue this exercise of diversifying and scaling. So I think one of the things that we're really proud of is that without subjecting anyone to a J-curve or an investment curve that might manifest itself through EBITDA margin degradation, we have been able to expand to now covering 6 continents. We're in many geographic new markets, namely in Europe. The underlying product set that we have, we were already leaders in restaurant, lodging, stadiums, entertainment, but to add this luxury retail vertical to it and now have 4 market-leading products, that kind of diversification to us is something we're really proud of. And it's going to remain a focus is really being able to continue fortifying around that diversification. That's one. Two, I alluded to it, but the opportunity to cross-sell and really start to harvest the value creation from the Global Blue acquisition, that's a really critical and huge value driver this coming year. I would say number three, within that is we look at our market-leading position within restaurants, and there is a lot of opportunity with our SkyTab product set, not only domestically, but we're seeing a huge growth internationally, where the demand for integrated payments, especially for that SMB, it remains unsatiated. And so the opportunity set there is really exciting. Those are a couple of the kind of focus areas, but I don't think we're going to stay away from our core knitting as well of continuing to find really attractive opportunities to deploy capital on either capabilities enhancements or what we call funnel toppers as a nomenclature that had been used in the past, but ways with which we can be really efficient at growing the customer acquisition opportunity in our way.
Sanjay Sakhrani
AnalystsOkay. Just taking your products into new markets, can you just talk about sort of what that entails and the message you want investors to walk away regarding this theme?
Christopher Cruz
ExecutivesYes. So I would say that what we view as an efficient and also disciplined approach to new market entry, and let's use Europe as an example, where we have new markets that are opening for us. Take a market like Germany. What we have there is a place where off of our payment processing capabilities across Europe as a licensed direct member of the card networks and the card schemes, we have the ability to process payments baseline. From there, we then added the layer of using our market-leading position in restaurants, to enter that market with product #1. So -- but what don't we have in a market like Germany? We don't yet have the market position on lodging that we benefit from in the U.S. market. We certainly don't yet have Bayern Munich as a football club, soccer, American soccer club, and that stadium, where our stadiums and entertainment software and solutions, which you would find in almost 3/4 of the stadiums in America, that's not there. And happily, our luxury shopping -- luxury retail experience from Global Blue, it is there, but it isn't yet in the format of cross-sold with DCC solutions and integrated with our payment product. So what I would take away is when you look at any of the markets we're expanding into, how many of our market-leading products are present. And when those market-leading products become present, can they get to the levels that we experience from a market share standpoint in one of the most competitive markets in the world in the United States. And if you can answer that question and believe in that as an underlying pillar of growth, you'll be able to understand why we're so excited about this, right? And it's not just about one trick pony of restaurants or lodging, right? We're looking at expanding. And we've been able to expand to create market-leading positions in verticals, and we don't intend to stop. We're really judicious about tearing down an industry structure within a vertical, trying to find the most important component that might influence the payment processing cross-sell within that industry and then going after the assets, either organically or inorganically that are going to make that vertical make sense for us. So notably, we didn't buy a retail POS company, right? That was not what our industry research told us was the teardown way to approach retail. But to have a business that represents an 80% share of tax-free shopping to the most incredible luxury -- global luxury retail brands in the world and then from that position of strength, serves tens of thousands of other SMBs to facilitate a luxury retail tax-free shopping experience, that's unique. That's interesting. And that is embedded deeply within the POS integrated flow and within the payments integrated flow. So for us, when we did our industry teardown work as it related to specialty retail, we tore it down from specialty to luxury to find that very specific area that was going to be unique, non-commoditized. So that's what I mean -- that's what I'd like people to take away from is think about these market entries and think about our market-leading products in these markets and put that equation together as our organic right to win from a growth standpoint.
Sanjay Sakhrani
AnalystsSo do you think that there's been going to be more of such deals? Do you have to spend money to sort of now grow that business organically? Like how should we think about the path forward in terms of that?
Christopher Cruz
ExecutivesI would say right now, the funnel is obviously a north of $1 trillion funnel for us in terms of payment conversion opportunity. It's the largest it's ever been. Global Blue alone is a $500 billion opportunity, of which 20% of it is SMB. And that $100 billion relative to where we sit today from a volume opportunity is massive in and of itself. So I would say right now, execution is really at the forefront of mind. And if embedded within that question is, do you still see an interesting set of opportunities inorganically to deploy capital? I would look no further than the announcement we made in the quarter. The ability to carve out a business of a gateway that has $90 billion of volume that we refer to as Bambora, that is right down the fairway of what we do and only deploying $80 million of capital against other capital allocation announcements we've made, such as our $1 billion share repurchase authorization. I hope that you take away from it that we're approaching this with our playbook, but we're also not losing sight of what is the most efficient way to deploy the capital. So yes, I think there will always be these opportunistic places to make inorganic investments and continue to expand our funnel, but we have plenty to get through with our north of $1 trillion opportunity.
Sanjay Sakhrani
AnalystsPerfect. I want to touch on something you talked about during earnings. Obviously, as you spoke to, you guys have a pretty diverse platform now across many different industry verticals, but a big one is restaurant and hospitality, and you did talk about choppiness in that market, right? Could you just talk a little bit more about what's driving that? And it seems like it's gone up and down even over the course of the last month or so. So maybe you could just unpack that a little bit and maybe pinpoint sort of what you think is driving that?
Christopher Cruz
ExecutivesSure. So what we -- we'll start with the context -- what we talked about in the quarter was as a company that has the benefit of very large data assets, we get to see how spending is moving through huge parts of the economy and with very interesting cohorts of people -- of consumers. So we get to see the best Western off the highway, and we get to see the affluent American that can travel to Europe and buy luxury goods. And that concept of seeing the bifurcation is a very unique position to be in. And when we married what we were seeing in our data, which was a slightly downward skewed set of same-store sales numbers, I think on the call, we talked about it within restaurant and lodging as being a plus 1% same-store sales to a minus 4%, and that's relative to historically, we tend to see things a little more stable at a plus/minus 1% to 2% within the same-store sales end markets. When that started to show itself, we then married it with the appended third-party data that we were seeing from other sources and then triangulating it with the qualitative that we were hearing from everyone from Chipotle to JetBlue to the Fed. And this narrative of there's a bifurcated consumer, it would seem like the consumer at the low and middle end is starting to pull back. We are seeing elements of that within our own data sets, and it created a cautious tone. Now at the same time, I don't think that should surprise anyone. And in terms of the variables that we can control, we will act on those. So if we know that there's a slightly defensive posture within our same-store sales in some of our end markets, it just means you're allocating capital to the end markets that are less affected, and it means that you're going to emphasize customer acquisition discipline in the places that have more certainty. What does that translate into? It translates into us having a really high conviction around adjusted EBITDA and certainly around free cash flow conversion. So that's a little bit of what we're seeing and what we're responding to.
Sanjay Sakhrani
AnalystsOkay. You affirmed your full year guidance with a narrowed range and pointed to the volatility as the basis for the wider range on volumes versus the other guidance KPIs. Does the updated guidance entirely reflect this tempered expectation?
Christopher Cruz
ExecutivesYes. Our view is that I would have loved to have -- I and we would have loved to have had a narrower range in terms of the low to high on the volume. But I think as we looked at the data and we were looking at some of the volatility of that data, we just thought it was the right message to send that there's a real intentionality to the shape of this and that there is more volatility.
Sanjay Sakhrani
AnalystsOkay. Good to hear. I think that investors appreciate the disclosures around organic growth, especially the ones in the third quarter. And you talked about that it was tracking to sort of the 18% organic growth. Could you maybe decompose the organic growth into the core building blocks such as market growth, share gains in core verticals and then international exposure?
Christopher Cruz
ExecutivesSure, sure. So we -- I'll say directionally, right, we don't really deconstruct the building blocks. But I think it's fair to say that right now, in terms of the same-store number that we have disclosed, where we talk a bit about what are the trends we're seeing and how that in our -- in markets like domestic lodging and domestic restaurant, that has been more muted. Where we're seeing huge growth is this new market entry, bearing the benefits of the new market entry and expansion into international markets, that's where we're seeing a massive amount of growth. I think there's a few data points that all the way down to how many of our SkyTab products are we installing within international markets, those numbers to us are real pride points, 1,300 in the quarter as it relates to our SkyTab counts in terms of new wins is something we talk about. So when you deconstruct these 2 parts of domestic volumes versus international volumes, I think it's fair to say that we are seeing a really pronounced growth within the international markets. That said, we're also seeing it when you deconstruct some of the underlying verticals. Our luxury retail tax-free shopping business on its own grew 19%. And so those are examples where when you kind of look at the component parts, you'd be hard-pressed to find something in our business that is growing -- that is not growing at double-digit rates, even when you sort of break out the sum of the parts.
Sanjay Sakhrani
AnalystsGot it. I want to move to like guidance philosophy because it's something you talked about. And you mentioned that there's no change to the guidance philosophy at this point, but you left the door open for there to be a change. So maybe you could talk about how this guidance philosophy could evolve as we move into 2026?
Christopher Cruz
ExecutivesIt's a great question, and it's one that as somebody that's been sitting on what I call a bit of a listening tour with investors, with analysts, I clearly appreciate at this point in time why it's such an important topic. And so I want to say 2 things within that topic. One, totally reinforce what you said. There's no intended change in the quarter that we just had, no intended change to anything philosophical. It was a very specific and intentional approach not to change that philosophy. But in '26, especially now as I enter my 12th week in the seat, and we are deep and steep into developing what is a '26 plan that has a lot of interesting value creation levers within it. I think the idea of trying to be more, we'll say, of a guide philosophy that needs to be acknowledging that there needs -- there could be a revisit to that guidance philosophy, I think that's important. I say that though, and I also acknowledge that having had a 10-year front row seat to this business alongside a really incredible management team that has benefited from a philosophy that manages the business by setting bold expectations. And even if it means that when you shoot for the moon, you land on a star or maybe the better terminology now, you shoot for Mars and you land on the moon, like if that philosophy has led to a massive amount of growth from a basement start-up to where we are today, you don't want to dramatically change and hurt the culture that approaches things with bold ambitious targets. So there is this balancing act of a company and its culture and how it sets its targets and how it tries to hit those bold and ambitious targets, and then also acknowledging that there are market dynamics that might favor a different approach to guidance. So in the listening that I'm doing, acknowledging those 2 bookends, it wouldn't shock me if we find ourselves somewhere in between.
Sanjay Sakhrani
AnalystsThat makes sense. I won't push you on that more because I know you don't want to give guidance.
Christopher Cruz
ExecutivesThere's plenty of time to talk more about this between now and February.
Sanjay Sakhrani
AnalystsNo, I could, but I won't. Okay. Maybe you could talk about capital priorities going forward post the Global Blue acquisition. Obviously, you guys announced a big share buyback program. There's deleveraging, organic growth, inorganic growth. Maybe just prioritize sort of how you guys are looking at it right now?
Christopher Cruz
ExecutivesSure. So our capital allocation framework, we've talked about it many times, 4 big component parts: number one, invest in customer acquisition; number two, invest in product and capabilities enhancements; number three, inorganic growth; and number four, more of the share repurchase approach to capital allocation. Unambiguously, share repurchase right now, I think, is the most compelling on a relative value basis to things we see. But nothing is ever absolute. You don't ever approach this 4-part capital allocation model and say, hey, if there's a great opportunity to tuck in a gateway conversion at a really attractive value, you don't say no to that. The market gives you that opportunity when it wants to give you that opportunity. Expanding into international markets, which really is an investment in customer acquisition by another name, right, going into these new places in order to be able to bring market-leading solutions, you don't stop doing that because you think the valuation in your shares is interesting. So I would say right now, we are firing on all 4 cylinders where we did make an announcement in the third quarter about Bambora, where we continue to invest. If you looked at our cap software to revenue, it's only risen over time. So we don't underinvest in technology. We don't underinvest in platform. We don't have catch-up CapEx dynamics. And if you look at customer acquisition, we approach things with a mentality that our funnel is the widest it's ever been. We're in the most markets we've ever been, and we need to bring these market-leading solutions into those geographic regions. So we are going to do all 4, but it is really hard for me not -- it's really hard for me right now to ignore where we sit within our repurchase opportunity.
Sanjay Sakhrani
AnalystsAnd can we just talk about how quickly you could expand the $1 billion? Like what's the time line?
Christopher Cruz
ExecutivesI think of it as investing as opposed to spending, just to kind of put that finer point on it.
Sanjay Sakhrani
AnalystsDeploy. All right. Okay.
Christopher Cruz
ExecutivesDeploying, that might be another good term. But I would say Look, there's -- we don't want to guide to a pace. We don't want to guide around exactly what we're doing within it. I think the easy way to describe it right now is, since the valuation is below the lowest we've ever acquired the stock, and I hope all of the ways with which we've been conveying it would suggest that we want to be actively executing against this. When you think about a couple of the other things that I said on the call, we today are sitting at an LTM pro forma net leverage of 3.2x. Generally, as a general matter, as a guidance matter, we do not want to have leverage be sustainably above 3.75x. So if you thought about a 0.5x, right? If you thought about what that means, that alone, that's $0.5 billion. And so you sort of have a few things out there that could give some visibility into what is in our capacity. But at the same time, too, we are going to be looking at the continued valuation and be opportunistic there. And we're going to look at not necessarily wanting to always have a bit of a measured approach within this because historically, we've repurchased shares almost every quarter. It's really important to us as having an owner's mentality to be as absolutely dilution neutral as we can be. So dilution neutral to SBC, dilution neutral to other areas. I mean, we are looking at EPS and free cash flow per share as important metrics for any one of us that is thinking with an owner -- a long-term owner's mentality.
Sanjay Sakhrani
AnalystsGreat. I want to touch on free cash flow. You've guided to 50% plus adjusted free cash flow conversion. What are the primary levers that drive this metric higher towards your long-term goal of $1 billion?
Christopher Cruz
ExecutivesSure. So I would say absolute growth is going to be the #1 biggest driver for us. We have a business that this year will do almost $0.5 billion of adjusted free cash flow. And in the quarter we just announced, obviously, sitting north of $140 million and quite proud of our ability to continue free cash flow conversion even at a high 40s rate at a time when our interest expense is really still coming -- is at the highest level it's been, right, from the perspective that our capital structure today is the capital structure that accommodated the closure of the Global Blue transaction on July 3. So when you think about where we sit from an interest expense standpoint, we are -- and thinking about the seasonality of interest expense, Q3 of this year might be the highest interest expense you would expect to see. So when you think about how many points of free cash flow conversion that impacts, if you go year-over-year, we had like an 8-point swing in free cash flow conversion on simply interest expense alone. So you look at our pace of deleveraging or you look at our growth outlook, and I imagine that by the time we get to exit rate '27, one of the biggest step function changes within free cash flow conversion would simply be the mathematical reduction in interest. Now if we find ourselves with interesting opportunities to deploy that capital, let's say, inorganically, we're certainly only going to do it with free cash flow accretion. We're going to have an eye towards free cash flow accretion in mind. So what does that mean? Well, again, hold us to the standard of what you've just seen. Q3 was the closure of a large acquisition and taking on capital structure that now had a higher cash interest expense. On a year-over-year basis, we still grew adjusted free cash flow dollars. So I think we are disciplined in how we think about cash flow accretion. And I think whether you want to assume we are deleveraging and put that into the model or whether you want to look at our historical track record of having deployed capital and still be able to be accretive to free cash flow generation, I think both of those things kind of fit within the model. But for simple math, if you model it out and just say, I'm going to run the business out from here, I'm not going to assume deployments. What you will see in your model is that you're going to see a large step function change in free cash flow conversion points simply from deleveraging. And then you add the growth on top of that, and you'll end up with a conversion metric that I think is very achievable.
Sanjay Sakhrani
AnalystsOkay. Great. I want to kind of summarize all of these lines of questionings into the stock. Okay, right, which is I think the game plan for you to get stock -- for the firm to get the stock back on track is number one, obviously, refining the messaging and ensuring that the targets are aligned with sort of how the Street is thinking about it. You want the Street to sort of understand what you guys are doing in terms of expanding and growing the business, especially internationally, where there's been a lot of movement, especially with Global Blue and sort of questioning of what that acquisition brings and how that -- and I have a line of questioning on Global Blue, but I want to make sure this point is hit. And then obviously, capital management and putting your money where your mouth is and buying back stock. Like is there anything I'm missing?
Christopher Cruz
ExecutivesWell, those are your statements, but I would say that I think those are all important value drivers for sure. I think we do believe, though, that a big thing that's missed about our business is just fundamental durability of growth. I genuinely believe that we have demonstrated our ability to consistently grow the business at high rates this idea that we put out a medium-term guidance that has -- I don't necessarily love the terminology, but sit on our hands case of high teens with Global Blue, mid-20s and then north of that, if we continue to deploy capital and do what we've historically done, find attractive ways to generate returns on capital deployed. If we do all of that, we should be a business that can grow in the mid- to high 20s according to those medium-term guides. But even if you said, okay, all you're going to do is your organic case of being a high teens growing business, I struggle with the model folks are building that would somehow suggest there's any data points that would suggest we're doing something less. And if we are that, then I would say this question mark around durability of growth, which from my investor lens, should manifest itself in a growth-adjusted multiple greater than 1, because it has durability and it has visibility would tell you that our underlying valuation multiple is either wrong or that there's huge question marks that we really have to help close the gap on around durability of growth. But between those 2, that's probably the only other one I'd add.
Sanjay Sakhrani
AnalystsYes. Good. That's very clear. But maybe we can just dig a little bit deeper into because I do think Global Blue is a really instrumental part of the story on a go-forward basis, as you indicated. Maybe you could just talk about sort of your -- the early read on Global Blue. You've had some choppiness in Asia Pacific, for example. Was that sort of unforeseen? Or is that just normal course of business?
Christopher Cruz
ExecutivesI would say it was foreseeable, but modeling it was difficult because of the absolute magnitude of the numbers. So for the context point around this, Global Blue has measures there, we'll call it, GMV or volume metric in what's called sales in-store. That sales in-store metric within Asia Pacific, so within the Asia Pacific region was a minus 11% for the quarter. And the European region, which is the majority of the business, was a plus 13%. That translated into a global sales in store of a plus 5%. So let's unpack the minus 11%. Within Asia Pacific, you're talking about the Japan market. Within the Japan market, what you're really talking about is an issue where Japan was anniversary-ing a comp that was north of 100% -- and so it's less about was it foreseeable that it was going to be off that 100% comp? Yes. Modeling that was really, really difficult. And when we were starting to see certain weeks that were performing off plan, we got a little bit nervous and started to think about, well, what about this is understood? And what about this should be understood more transparently to our constituents. And I think that's where the Asia Pacific story really narrows. Now everything is normalized, and now we are back to -- we've anniversaried that heightened level of comp set, and now we're at a place where we're seeing a very stable business, but isolated. So then let's bring it back, though. Where does that fit within the larger scheme of things in terms of what we're trying to drive value creation around -- to us, Yes, that was an event that happened. But the biggest value creation for us is about the payment cross-sell. The business still grew 19% revenues year-over-year. The business still grew global sales at a 5% variable. So yes, it has its anomalies within its portfolio, but it's still a good business. And our biggest opportunity is to go and tackle a $500 billion cross-sell, $100 billion of which is SMB, where in the end, we are displacing an unintegrated bank processor. That is something we've had a great deal of success doing in the markets where we're already leaders.
Sanjay Sakhrani
AnalystsPerfect. And that 19% that you mentioned, how do you think it sort of tracks into 2026 and long term?
Christopher Cruz
ExecutivesYes. So, again, I don't want to give guidance around how we view any one subcomponent of the business or especially for the Global Blue business. But I would say that the idea of Global Blue having been a public company before and having had medium-term outlook in the past is something that I think is a relevant data point, right? I think in the past, as a public company, they've provided medium-term outlooks themselves that were kind of in the low to mid-double digits of growth. And I think that's relevant. I think structurally, the business has that ability. I think what's fundamentally missing from all of that is the Shift4 component of delivering on a conversion opportunity that's led through a real product point of difference. And when I say that, I mean, we're talking about today a tax-free shopping experience that, for the most part, is not as deeply integrated into a point-of-sale system and certainly is not integrated into the payment processing flow in a way that one would expect. When you go into the enterprise of a Louis Vuitton, you will feel and see an experience that's totally integrated. But in the vast majority of the business, the tens of thousands of SMBs in Europe, that's not the version of the experience you see. That is a complex payment checkout with a bad sales associate experience and a bad consumer experience. And this is our jam. I mean simplify payment complexity. That is what we do. So that's the part of the business that I think is missing from that guidance -- that would have been missing from that historical stand-alone Global Blue public company guidance.
Sanjay Sakhrani
AnalystsSo as we think about the next 12 months, what can we expect in terms of progression against those goals?
Christopher Cruz
ExecutivesSo I think the big thing you're going to hear a lot about from us is the underlying progress of, first, getting out of beta and actually being live and starting to have real wins of customers that are using what we're going to refer to as this 3-in-1 payment experience where you can do payments, dynamic currency conversion and tax-free shopping all in a single device, even at an SMB, that's a really important milestone. Once you get out of that milestone, it's about the go-lives, and it's about the progress that we're making with the for lack of a better term, the logo wins, the cover pages, the things that we have done to demonstrate our continued momentum in all of our other verticals, that's what you should start to see. Baltimore Ravens gets now supplemented by a luxury retail page that starts to show those wins. And it should manifest itself in our gross revenue less network fees numbers. All of the KPIs, it should manifest itself there. And as it comes through in '26, all of it then becomes really important anniversary-ing in building blocks as it becomes full year effected for '27.
Sanjay Sakhrani
AnalystsGot it. How macro sensitive is Global Blue's business?
Christopher Cruz
ExecutivesSo I would say as a stand-alone business that is exposed to, we'll say, an upper income individual that has the means to travel for luxury goods, it has certainly its sensitivities. Those sensitivities seem to be quite durable right now and are a very interesting portfolio balance to other sensitivities that we at Shift4 have. That's statement one. I'd say statement two, the elasticity of demand for that consumer is affected by things like the relative FX. And this is something that we tried to talk about within our shareholder materials because I think it was lost on some people. A soft U.S. dollar relative to the euro might have a positive effect on financial translation within our statements, but we are not rooting for that by any stretch of the imagination. Strong U.S. dollar to power the demand of that consumer to go abroad and purchase those goods and transact in those tax-free shopping ways, that far outweighs any financial translation benefit that we have. So even though there were questions in the quarter about what was the benefit of financial translation, we look at it more as it was a detriment because it chilled and cooled demand. We're now seeing the reversion of that or we're seeing actually an improvement of that right now. So I would say that, that's the other variable that we pay attention to. And if we thought we were a big data business, Global Blue's data assets are insane. I mean the ability to understand ticket level POS integrations to consumers across cohorts. I mean they are excellent at it. They're so good at their data set, data analysis, data assets, regressing impacts of FX, they actually are a really important consultant constituent to the luxury brands themselves. The brands pay for the data.
Sanjay Sakhrani
AnalystsAll right. I have one more before I see if anyone in the audience has questions. The 5% same-store sales number that you gave.
Christopher Cruz
ExecutivesThe sales in-store, yes.
Sanjay Sakhrani
AnalystsIn-store. Like what's a good growth rate for that business in terms of same-store sales on a go-forward basis?
Christopher Cruz
ExecutivesSo I'm not a luxury retail expert yet. But when you look at the underlying driver of luxury retail and the inflationary model that's baked into it, it's pretty enviable what they are allowed to do in terms of embedded inflation into core average selling prices. It's well north of a mid-single digit. That variable is structural within luxury. What I don't have as an offset, which is more going to move, not as a durable movement, but rather it will move in a cycle is that, that demand that I just talked about can be affected by both FX and it can be affected by, we'll say, the perceptions of wealth effect that the high net worth is feeling. So I think of take the luxury retail number of structural inflation in sales and then we'll say, offset it by some of these other, we'll say, macro drivers. And I think you're probably a little bit north of where they delivered this quarter.
Sanjay Sakhrani
AnalystsGot it. Perfect. I'm sorry, we've run out of time audience, but thank you, Chris. Really appreciate it.
Christopher Cruz
ExecutivesAll right. Thank you. Appreciate it.
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