Shift4 Payments, Inc. ($FOUR)
Earnings Call Transcript · March 11, 2026
Earnings Call Speaker Segments
Darrin Peller
AnalystsGuys, why don't we jump in again? Thank you, everyone, for joining us on Day 2 of the Wolfe FinTech Forum. Really happy to have Shift4 with us, a company that I'll never forget this IPO, and Chris remembers it as much as I do just given where he was at Searchlight at the time as an owner of it. But right in the middle of COVID, a company focused on restaurants and hotels coming public when everyone decided not to do anything but stay home. And it was an interesting time, but ended up being a very successful IPO and really has grown quite a bit since, and it's been a very successful company since. And with that, we're really happy to have Chris with us. Thanks for joining us. You've been with us for many years, we were just saying, but on a different panel. So happy to have you on the operating role now as the CFO of Shift4.
Christopher Cruz
ExecutivesRight. Thank you for having us. It's always fantastic to be here. This is just a must-attend event in my mind, and I'd like to keep The Street going for many years to come.
Darrin Peller
AnalystsLet's start with just it's been, what, 4 months or so now since you've been in this role, right?
Christopher Cruz
ExecutivesAlmost 6.
Darrin Peller
AnalystsSix, sorry. I mean when you think about the learnings you've had shifting from investor to operator, I mean, you've been on the Board, but help us understand what you're seeing that's different and what you're learning about the business that is worth sharing.
Christopher Cruz
ExecutivesYes. So for context, I've actually -- even though I'm new in the seat, not new to the company. I've been involved with Shift4 almost, well, for a decade now, 10 years running. 5 years representing the controlling private equity shareholder as a partner at a private equity fund, so 5 years of that life, where I wore a lot of hats in the company but never got the title recognition, and then 5 years after the IPO in 2020 as a Director. And so I've had the vantage point of being able to see this business just do extraordinary things. I mean you're talking about the journey that, for all of the folks in this room have probably seen the 5 years of public life, it's incredible what the company has come through and where the company is now. The things we do in 1 year is already like quite breathtaking. But from my vantage point, I actually have seen what is a north of 20x growth in EBITDA in 10 years. It's just a phenomenal growth machine, a compounder of value, and it's just been incredible to see it resiliently navigate through so many different episodes of life.
Scott Wurtzel
AnalystsYour mic's been cutting out.
Christopher Cruz
ExecutivesOh, sorry. It's been amazing to see the business just evolve through so many resilient phases of life, not least of which COVID, as you described it. But even competing in a zero interest rate environment when money is free and everyone's idea is worth funding, that's something we lived through, too. So it's a pretty incredible business with a lot of durable moats. So excited to now be back into a front row seat.
Darrin Peller
AnalystsYes. No, it definitely has grown into a ton of new verticals over the time that we've watched it, and it's incredible to see really what's ahead of us with some of the deals you've done. But just before we go into that, I mean, you recently reported fourth quarter, gave guidance for '26. Maybe just explain some of the puts and takes during the quarter and major assumptions that underpin the revenue and volume guidance for the year ahead of us first.
Christopher Cruz
ExecutivesYes, sure. So to start at the '26 guidance and sort of breaking it down a little bit into its parts, one of the things that we tried to introduce was really this concept of a growth algorithm, how to deconstruct the business into a few parts that are digestible, that are areas that people are trying to get acclimated to. So one of the first parts of that is disaggregating within the revenue streams, within the gross revenue less network fee streams, disaggregating tax-free shopping, calling that out, breaking that out and then giving a pro forma growth outlook on that component of the business, separating away from our North Star, which is payments-based revenue. And within that payments-based revenue, really trying to disaggregate for people an understanding of two distinct narratives: the Americas region, where our most mature market makes up the majority of the payments-based revenue and where all of our market-leading products are available and served and will not for 2026 have any noise from the annualization of M&A from the prior year. So a pretty clean view on the mature part of our business. And you contrast that inside of payments-based revenue to the worldwide segment. Super fast-growing part of the business where we are disrupting what is effectively a competitive environment of bank terminals that are unintegrated from the perspective of payments, almost looking at it through the lens of integrated payments many, many years ago in the Americas is kind of the environment we see in Europe. And we're going to disrupt it with market-leading solutions that have been battle-tested in the Americas. And so when you deconstruct all of those components within the pro forma and then subscription and other, a low single-digit growth outlook. You combine it all together, and that's the algorithm that we're trying to convey to folks and help them understand. Within actual variables that are probably worth calling out that we have called out, one of the biggest ones that's been topical for us for quite some time, especially in the second half of last year, was the same-store sales environment in the Americas in payments space. And what we really tried to say about that same-store sales environment is that for this year, we're trying to give a neutral outlook, a flat same-store sales perspective. That's what's embedded into the guide. And historically, we probably would have had low single digits positive contribution embedded into the guide from same-store sales. If you go back through the history of same-store sales, it would have been a positive contributor in most years. This year in the guide, we're modeling that or we're guiding that neutral, a slightly negative first half that continues off of the Q4 trends and then a moderately positive back half, which is just anniversarying on soft comp. That's one thing to think about there. And then the other thing I'll call out as it relates to the tax-free shopping component of the guide, we're trying to be conservative around the variables that we know are already showing themselves as having some headwinds in front of them, things like Asian travel tourism tensions between Japan and China as well as some currency dynamics where the outlook on the U.S. dollar relative to the euro was a little soft. It's obviously strengthened since we've had the Middle East conflicts, the GCC conflicts. But now we do still think that it is important for investors to understand that a strong U.S. dollar is net positive to the demand side of tax-free shopping far more so than the financial translation benefit of a weak U.S. dollar. So for us, when we see this U.S. dollar weakening outlook from the big money center banks, et cetera, in a forecast, we have to make sure that, that gets into the guide. But then on top of all of that, we also just view that the first year you own a business, and this is a bit of my own philosophy from the many years of the seat that I used to sit in, the first year you own a business, you have to be conservative on it. It's just important. It's prudent. A lot of things can go bump. Obviously, the events in the Middle East are a great example of that.
Darrin Peller
AnalystsYes. I want to get into conservatism in guidance in a moment. But before I do, just given the view you have -- guys, Shift4 is probably the largest processor for hotels that I can think of in the world, certainly for stadiums around the world. Most of the stadiums we all go to, they're processing at this point, and you've grown that extremely well and restaurants. So you have a really good view of a lot of key sectors.
Christopher Cruz
ExecutivesExperience economy, as we call it, yes.
Darrin Peller
AnalystsI mean can you just give us a quick snapshot of what you're seeing happening now at hotels? And maybe is it a K-shaped economy -- or restaurants? Stadiums are probably pretty resilient, I would imagine.
Christopher Cruz
ExecutivesYes. I would say that when you actually look at where commerce is happening, you put it well, right? The experience economy verticals, where folks are actually going shopping, dining, staying, playing, those kinds of areas, that's where you're going to find a lot of our solutions. And what we see is definitely the continued trend of this concept of a K-shaped economy. We can see it in our data, but actually you can see it in a lot of data. One of the things often cite especially in lodging, because lodging in the U.S. is so perfectly segmented from a chain scale standpoint, that when you pull down data from a third-party provider, one of the well-known ones would be like STR, like S-T-R, right, you can see that the economy versus luxury same-store sales that they're reporting, occupancy stats and the sort, it's pretty clear. You don't have to ask for a proprietary look from anyone. It's pretty clear, the dynamics. And then anecdotally, we obviously have the benefit of being able to talk to folks. And phrases that you'll hear is, it's not as if the economy end of that spectrum is soft or weak, and in some aspects, it doesn't exist. And so that would probably be trend one. Probably not that new news to folks, but it is consistent with some of the things we're seeing. I'd say the other thing that we're seeing is that at least to the start of the year, things were looking pretty stable. Things are actually looking pretty positive in the Americas. And I would say the only thing to caveat around that was weather. But for weather, it would have been a really solidly positive quite start to the year.
Darrin Peller
AnalystsOkay. That's helpful. Let's take it back to guidance for a minute. I mean, listen, last year, there were a couple of hiccups on the results versus the initial guide. Investors had thought there was conservatism. It turned out to being more in line at or sometimes even a little shy of it. How do we feel confident that right now you've built in the proper conservatism in the outlook that you just gave for the year ahead of us?
Christopher Cruz
ExecutivesYes. So I think, look, the way to probably think about some of the variables that you could look to that might be a bit different from prior year's guide, we talked about same-store sales as one. So I'm not going to belabor that point. But that is a low single-digit positive contributor to, we'll say, historical guides, historical points in time grounded on the fact that it has historically been flat.
Darrin Peller
AnalystsRight. Now you're calling for flat.
Christopher Cruz
ExecutivesRight now we're calling for flat. The other one I would probably call out is that historically, you also had the benefit of inflation-plus pricing environments that, if anyone was to look at their Netflix bill or anything that you have as an expenditure, over the last few years you probably got more, maybe in some instances, a lot more than inflation-plus from a pricing or an ARPU expansion or what have you. I think the payments industry is no different. And so in some historical years, within the guide, you would have embedded something that looked a little more inflation-plus. And I think that's something that I've tried to call out by saying we're anticipating, and it's now going to age terribly, but we were anticipating a benign inflationary backdrop. A hard thing to say with $90 oil, but that is something that we were anticipating within the guide. So I do think that those two variables would have been like low single-digit positive contributors unto themselves, each individually, so maybe an MSD kind of impact.
Darrin Peller
AnalystsOkay. All right. So you probably did build in a mid-single-digit type level of conservatism in the outlook just based on macro factors.
Christopher Cruz
ExecutivesYes, I won't exactly phrase it that way, but I would say that those are the things that more tangibly you can call out as differences.
Darrin Peller
AnalystsDepending on what the macro does. Okay. Let's shift to organic growth. Again, I mean, Shift4, as long as I've covered it has done an amazing job integrating assets that you acquire that really make perfect sense. But with that said, investors really are kind of hungry to know what the underlying organic profile looks like. Help us frame what you see as this year's organic profile and how that compares to last year.
Christopher Cruz
ExecutivesYes. I think that the growth algorithm introduction, depending on how you sort of cut and slice it, you're ultimately going to land on a place that suggests low double digits. So that LDD dynamic, it was very intentional in the way that we tried to break down the components of this growth algorithm so that you could see Americas payments-based, again, largest component of the payments-based revenues, that will largely be unaffected by the annualization of any prior year M&A. So mid-teens there. That's about as ex-M&A as it gets for an incredibly mature market and our largest part of our business. The intention of breaking out a pro forma growth component of tax-free shopping allows you to get at the same concept, right? So this is ex the effect of some sort of an annualization noise. This is what that's doing. And then subscription and other, giving that as a low single digit. So you can basically isolate out the worldwide component of payments-based revenue because that will be very much affected by the annualization of the M&A of Global Blue, of Smartpay and look at the business as a whole and say, I have a pretty clear picture of what this business is doing excluding the effect of M&A. And it's actually no different than, we'll say, the implied fourth quarter in terms of what was happening from a growth standpoint. And when you look at the year, when you look at the fourth quarter, even what should be implied by the first quarter's guide, LDD is the way to think about the business.
Darrin Peller
AnalystsOkay. And just how does that compare to last year?
Christopher Cruz
ExecutivesI would say in last year, and it does tie back a little bit to the components that we just described, so these two macro variables of inflation-plus and Triple S. But I think in last year, that would have been in the third quarter we had reported an 18% rebased growth. And then earlier in the year, when Triple S was actually positively contributing, we were seeing north of 20%.
Darrin Peller
AnalystsOkay. Let's shift to free cash flow because as much as I think investors kind of expected more moderate growth expectations than prior Street numbers for top line, free cash was a little bit of a negative surprise to The Street when you came out with flat guidance effectively year-over-year. There were some inputs in that I think it's worth sharing and just reexplaining again. But help us understand what informed that flat profile year-over-year. And then thinking about what you've talked about medium term for a minute, you talked about $1 billion exit run rate exiting '27 for free cash. Just where do you stand on that? And maybe put this year into context with that.
Christopher Cruz
ExecutivesYes, sure. So what did we talk about on free cash flow, let's start there. What we tried to give people visibility into is the free cash flow bridge and why year-over-year adjusted free cash flow is expected to be flat at $500 million as a guide point. The biggest component of this is the annualization of interest expense on one side as a year-over-year headwind to free cash flow. And then the reduction in interest income is probably something that also people didn't necessarily pick up on. For context, we were carrying cash balances that were quite high last year. If you looked at the Q2, for example, Q2 earnings or Q2 10-Q, you would have seen a $3 billion cash balance sitting on the books at a time when interest income was actually generating quite a high rate. So you normalize for those two effects and that gets you the vast majority of the way in terms of the bridge that you need to model. The second part of it then becomes this concept of the Global Blue, both timing of close and seasonality of the tax-free shopping business. So tax-free shopping is a seasonal business where in the first half of the year, it's free cash flow consumptive. So it does not generate much free cash flow. And then in the second half of the year, the working capital unwinds and it becomes very, very free cash flow generative. So in a year, it just looks like a free cash flow generative business in a conversion rate that isn't that far off from the broader businesses' overall conversion rate. The issue is that we close on the business on July 3. So in 2025's numbers, you get the second half effect of the positive and you don't have the first half effect of the low consumption. So then I think when we came into this year, I would argue that, yes, as I rewind the clock, I think the communications could have been better such that a business that was public, that we had assumed -- in the business of retail which is obviously seasonal, we would have assumed that to be maybe less of a surprise. But the fact that it is now sort of, I hope, an understood fully transparent kind of part of the equation, I hope that's now fully out there. And then the last part of the free cash flow piece is the component that is we are investing. So integrating the business this year of Global Blue is also about expanding pan-regionally across EMEA and APAC. As we do those things, we are investing. And that shows up in the free cash flow bridge. That shows up in a lot of forms of investments such as investments in go-to-market infrastructure, and we do call it out as well, investments in AI. And within that whole bridge, when you step back, the majority of it is the capital structure annualization. Then you have the effect of Global Blue and then you have the effect of international expansion. So then the second part of your question, how does that now flow into the previous aspirational but achievable goal of a $1 billion exit run rate '27 figure that had been previously described? I would say that it is important for people to understand that the algorithm that you look at in '26 for free cash flow, that's what you should be focused on. That's what I'm focused on, right? I'm not here to provide an outlook in my first year as a CFO, in my first year in setting the guide. I think what people need to hear from me is '26. They need to understand how do you model the growth algorithm of the business, how do you model free cash flow in the business. And I really want you to take away from it that in that bridge, the incremental free cash flow conversion is called out at 60%. That is the number to look at for modeling incremental free cash flow conversion. So you pick your sort of approach to adjusted EBITDA dollar growth, you convert that at 60%, and it would be hard to get to a significant expansion on overall adjusted free cash flow from the 42%, right? You're going to grow probably single-digit percent points on the 42%, but the math of it is fully laid out. And so that's probably my #1 most important takeaway for people when they ask me about free cash flow because I'm not here to set some sort of a guide point beyond '26.
Darrin Peller
AnalystsOkay, All right. I think we understand. All right. Just building off of what you're talking about with Global Blue, I mean, international expansion, it should provide for, I think, a nice cross-sell opportunity when you think of internationalization of business for even more than you've already done.
Christopher Cruz
ExecutivesYes, absolutely. I mean it is one of the most exciting parts of the business right now. And it's because you have to start with like the macro of the framework, the competitive framework, the industry structure in the markets that we're expanding into. We're going after unintegrated bank terminals and we're bringing solutions that win and have battle-tested, winning proven capabilities in the most competitive market in the world. And that feels like the right place to therefore invest your incremental and marginal dollars. So when people ask, could you accelerate investment and really close the gap on the market leader on restaurants in the U.S.? I say I could. But I'll generate a heck of a higher return going after unintegrated bank terminals in the European market, where we're bringing battle-tested market-leading solutions. That's just a better utilization and allocation of capital. But I think that it's an exciting place also because we just made an investment in a business that gives us day 1 pan-regional, full across-the-board European infrastructure and APAC infrastructure. But let's focus on Europe for a second. Global Blue, as much as the cross-sell is exciting, as much as the market-leading position within a very killer application within retail of tax-free shopping is all exciting, to us, one of the most underappreciated elements of the asset is day 1 pan-regional instant infrastructure in which to bring all of our products into, right? That is something that, I think, is one of the most underappreciated aspects of the business. And you have to appreciate, too, that when we get the core product of Shift4 One, which is tax-free shopping, plus payments, plus currency solutions all into a single device out into the market targeting for 15 countries this year, right? When that gets out there, you have to appreciate the amount of payment platform development that also has to happen so that local payment methods, local wallets are all accepted. All the operations, support, provisioning infrastructure had to be in place. All of that is totally usable for every other of our card-present solutions serving the experience economy. And oh, by the way, we have a lot of customers that are just waiting for us to turn the lights on that will follow us into the market.
Darrin Peller
AnalystsYes. It seems like a great -- I mean, look, when we think about Shift4 right now and going ahead, you have, let's call it, $250 billion of end-to-end volume. I mean you have $100 billion of volume you could attack just with Global Blue of SMBs out of the $500 billion that Global Blue has. That should make perfect sense, I think, for your solution that you can bring over on to your platform.
Christopher Cruz
ExecutivesYes, that's exactly right. And that's going to be the focus area. It's interesting because it's a business whose backbone was built on enterprise because serving the largest global luxury brands and having like an 80% market share doing it, they are excellent at that. The SMB DNA that Shift4 has to bring payment solutions, that actually end up becoming, as folks in this room will know, just a really good unit economic proposition in SMB. Like when you do payments, SMB is a really powerful part of the economic segments. If you're doing tax-free shopping, enterprise is what keeps all the lights on and it's the best place to be because the volumes are so good. But for us, we actually are bringing an SMB-first DNA into a business that has been less focused on its SMBs. It has tens of thousands of SMBs because a small boutique in Milan does want to have and offer tax-free shopping, but they are not nearly as valuable to the Global Blue business, to the tax-free shopping business as pick your luxury global brand. And so it's an interesting synergy that we bring to the table on just focus, on competency. An enterprise-first business meets an SMB-first business and we now have a product set that will make the unit economics of SMB super attractive when you put together tax-free shopping, plus payments, plus currency solutions. So we're going to go after that opportunity as the primary focus.
Darrin Peller
AnalystsI mean has there been any evidence of success you could point to so far? How has it been going? And just what's the timeline on this? Because, again, this is, I think, probably one of the most important data points to get the stock working, is success with this integration.
Christopher Cruz
ExecutivesYes. Look, I think that being live in multiple countries with multiple merchants on a product that's never existed before is a huge proof point and it's a huge point of pride. And to be able to then set a target where you actually want to expand very quickly in opening multiple countries at once, which does mean not just this product but all of the payment infrastructure behind it, that is no small feat. And from that perspective, essentially, when are you actually going to start seeing the realization of the $80 million of revenue synergies? And I think that, that remains on the pace that we guided to. And I think that it's on us to be able to prove that, that could be accelerated. But I'm not here to make a change right now around the previous guidance that was set around revenue synergies.
Darrin Peller
AnalystsJust remind us the timing again.
Christopher Cruz
ExecutivesYes. So $80 million fully realized in the '27 time frame. So you'll actually see proof points in the year of '26. But ultimately, I'm not here to change the outlook on the overall.
Darrin Peller
AnalystsAnd when we think about profitability of the company now, because, obviously, when you integrate assets, there could be some impact to margins and noise short term. I mean how do we think about overall margin profile of the core business, more of the mature assets, I guess, you could say? And just levers you can use to drive margin expansion over the medium term.
Christopher Cruz
ExecutivesYes. I'm glad you asked the question that way because it is a tale of two different markets, right? The idea that you have an Americas mature market where the margin profile is really attractive, that's embedded within the business. And then you have our expansion, and this is putting aside the Global Blue transaction. Just the expansion into any new region, any new market is going to come with a margin headwind because until you get the gross profit density in a country, you will have a lower margin profile. Just the laws of physics of it. And that's what we're experiencing as we continue to expand abroad. So when you think about the EBITDA margins of the business overall, this idea that the guidance would suggest sort of a 47% EBITDA margin, that EBITDA margin profile does still have within it the expansion headwinds. And yes, it has a combination of the profile of Global Blue, which we had previously disclosed was a low 40s EBITDA margin business. But being in a new country, and in the case of Europe, multiple new countries, you have much lower margin profiles as you build up density. So I do think that it is prudent to understand that there are puts and takes within where that EBITDA margin can go. And in some respects, the faster we're growing, the more we're growing inside of these expansion markets, the more you might see some of those margin headwinds. But we will do what we've done historically, which is try to find places to allocate capital and try to build up density more quickly, which then might allow us to potentially improve upon those margin profiles. But I do think people need to understand that about this interplay of fast growth and expansion, what does it do to margins, versus if we can allocate capital, we might be able to improve margins.
Darrin Peller
AnalystsRight. Okay. DCC, Dynamic Currency Conversion, has been an opportunity for you guys really more so now, especially in light of Global Blue having that offering you can utilize. Are you going to be ready to use that in the U.S. for the World Cup? I mean where are you on that opportunity? Because it seems like consumers coming into the U.S. should want to use it. We haven't historically seen it in the U.S. that much.
Christopher Cruz
ExecutivesYes. It's interesting because, I would say, in -- so DCC is our -- and I'll step back. And let's not even just call it DCC, like FX-based revenue or currency-based revenue products that we can bring to consumer to business payment environments is one of the most exciting things that is again an underappreciated component of what we acquired within Global Blue because, yes, it is an opportunity to cross-sell probably, first and foremost, our European base, right? The idea that you can actually bring a DCC solution that's up and running and working, cross-sell it onto our European base, that is a really attractive revenue synergy opportunity. This idea of bringing it to the U.S., which for folks that have followed us for a while, we were actually developing our own developed DCC solution. When we acquired Global Blue, we were able to actually put that on pause and bring this solution in. The adoption of DCC, the consumption of it isn't that prevalent in the U.S. because, for the most part, travelers understand that everything is indexed against to the dollar. So it's less about the opt-in and the usage of it. But where it becomes incredibly competitively important is that on the margin, there are hotels that when they run the RFP do say, do you provide DCC? And we've actually lost RFPs on the bags that we actually didn't. And that's why we were developing it to begin with. So I would say it may not have as pronounced of an impact on, we'll say, the take rates or the adoption or the upticks. But I think competitively, if you are going to win things like the World Cup or other massive global events, you have to have it just to play. And that actually shows up in hotels and that actually shows up in other forms of international commerce that might be trying to come to the U.S.
Darrin Peller
AnalystsSo time-wise, by the World Cup?
Christopher Cruz
ExecutivesYou got it.
Darrin Peller
AnalystsAll right. I want to leave time for the audience for a couple of questions. So let me ask you a couple of quick ones. Just Bambora's, I think, around $80 billion volume opportunity to convert over, where are you on that? What's the timeline on that? Because again, I mean, that's something you've done well with gateway conversions before on. And then when I think about all the other deals you've done, I mean, have you really integrated everything properly, whether it's Vectron or Givex or Eigen? It seems like a lot, and I just want to make sure you guys have done what you need to do on those deals before you move on to the next.
Christopher Cruz
ExecutivesYes. I like that question. It's like the question I would ask when I was on the Board. It's like, are we there yet? Are we realizing yet? So obviously the Bambora transaction just closed. But in the sign-to-close process, you get a lot of time to plan. We are really confident in the underlying ability to execute on gateway conversions. That is probably the most successful transaction type in terms of the payments cross-sell or the monetization of payments off of any other payment-adjacent product. So it's something we're very excited about and why you couldn't walk away, why we're excited about that deal. The second part, though, this idea of integrating in general. I think the pace of progress that we have around integration continues to meet what our expectations are. As a culture that constantly preaches delete the parts, get flat, stay flat, we truly, truly integrate at an operational level, at a revenue model level. And from our perspective, the pace of those integrations is going as we would expect. That said, we have stated in the past that we do think, and we can analyze this, that there is a 200 to 300 basis point opportunity with some of our older acquisitions from a margin standpoint that could still probably be further optimized, further integrated. And that remains.
Darrin Peller
AnalystsOkay. All right. Last question for me is just capital allocation. I mean I think you have a $500 million left in your current buyback off. And when we think about your use of capital going forward, just I'm curious to know if M&A is still going to be a big part of the story given how much you've already done and need to probably keep digesting. And so just help the audience know what your strategy is and your thought process is there.
Christopher Cruz
ExecutivesYes. I'll start by pointing to one of the things that's been an incredibly consistent part of what we've done is operate with a capital allocation framework that allows us to be very thoughtful about driving the best relative returns with capital across acquisitions, across organic investments into customer acquisition, across managing things like share repurchases and the sort. And I don't think anything should be viewed as a change to the way with which we look at the capital allocation framework that we published and talked about for a long time and that it is a balancing act across all of those fronts. Now to your question, though, when you sit in an environment that we've just been in and continue to be in where we're seeing quite a valuation change, a valuation paradigm shift for fintech as a sector as a whole, and certainly ourselves, it is hard not to ignore how compelling the opportunity of share repurchases continues to be. I don't think we shied away from it in the third quarter results when the share authorization was first announced. And I don't think that, that has changed in our tone. And so I do think that, that remains an important part of the capital allocation framework. But meeting the high bar of relative return from an acquisition standpoint, there are things that are starting to show themselves as hitting that bar. They may not be large things but they are things that hit the bar and strategically advance and accelerate an existing priority, things like European card present distribution, tuck-ins and the sort. So I think that those are going to be things that we're always going to be balancing within the capital allocation framework.
Darrin Peller
AnalystsOkay. We probably have time to take one question, if anyone has? Yes, Scott.
Scott Wurtzel
AnalystsI guess, Chris, on the stadium opportunity, you guys have obviously shown a ton of success around adding new stadiums, really kind of capturing the market there. Just wondering if you could talk about sort of where the incremental opportunity is from here on stadiums, whether it is continuing to add new venues, expanding share of wallet, just that overall opportunity.
Christopher Cruz
ExecutivesYes. I'd say it's two fronts. Knowing that the time is tight, but one of the biggest and most exciting, which isn't necessarily something net new for an audience like this is there are a lot of revenue centers inside of stadiums and entertainment as an environment. And F&B and retail is where you're going to find us in the most prevalent. But the ticketing opportunity can be a volume jump that is multiples of what is in F&B and retail. And sort of the opportunity for us to continue to get the payments volume of the ticketing side of the business, both season as well as event-by-event ticketing, that remains a huge opportunity of growth within sort of this land and expand of stadiums and entertainment. And then the second one is we are the market leader on stadiums and entertainment with commerce technology solutions in one of the most competitive markets in the world in the Americas. We are just starting on everywhere else. And so the ability to bring that product globally into the EMEA region where we have our well-invested infrastructure, the APAC region, et cetera, that's a really exciting opportunity for the team.
Darrin Peller
AnalystsOkay. All right, guys. I think we'll stop there. This is great, Chris. Thank you so much, guys.
Christopher Cruz
ExecutivesGreat. Thank you so much. Yes. Thanks, everyone.
For developers and AI pipelines
Programmatic access to Shift4 Payments, Inc. earnings transcripts and 32,000+ others is available through the
EarningsCalls.dev REST API. Plans from $24.99/month — full transcripts, speaker segments,
full-text search, and the recently-added /api/v1/transcripts/recent polling endpoint for ETL pipelines.