The Western Union Company (WU) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Okay. Good afternoon, everybody, and thank you very much for joining us again on the second day of our Wolfe fintech forum out of our 3-day conference. And again, I'm Darrin Peller, payments and fintech analyst at Wolfe Research. Really happy to have Western Union here with us today, which, as you guys know, is a company we spend a lot of our time doing research on, specifically around the digital transformation we see happening in the business. And so we're really excited to have them with us. Specifically, both Raj, the CFO, great to have you back again; and Shelly, it's nice to have you the first time with us, the President of Products and Platforms at Western Union. Shelly, it'd be great to have you. I want to talk to you about some of these trends. So thanks.

Thanks for having us, Darrin.

Yes. It's going to be fun.

All right. Well, as much as I'd love to have this in person one day soon, it's nice to get a lot more productive out here. And so, how's things going, I mean, in terms of the business over the last several months, really last year? If you could just start off high level for a minute in terms of the transformation we've been seeing in the industry around digital last year, touch on some of the trends and how the company has been able to handle it. Obviously, we've seen some very good numbers on digital, especially for you guys, in the last 12 months. But I'll turn it over to you now. Maybe, Shelly, if you want to start or -- just on some of the digital transformational trends we've been seeing.

Yes. I mean maybe the first thing I would say is none of us were obviously expecting COVID when it started just about a year ago. And I think we -- as that started to play out, our mindset was what are we going to do to rally around our customers and meet our customers where they are, right, so whether it was from our marketing efforts to really scale out our digital business, how do we make sure that our retail customers know which agent locations are open. We actually have customers that, believe it or not -- we launched a new telephone money transfer product. We launched a digital location. We launched home delivery in several different countries. We just sort of have this mindset of we're going to rally around our customers. And we created these rally teams to do just that. But I think, fortunately, our platform and our digital business was in a position where we were able to really be able to serve those customers and grow our digital business nicely last year because we were prepared for that. So obviously, there was a lot we were doing in terms of marketing and customer acquisition. And we did have a good year, as you said, last year in terms of improving really this tremendous growth of about 8.6 million digital customers now. And so it's exciting what we're thinking about in terms of how we can continue to grow that but also how we can expand the services that we provide to those digital customers.

I would just say, Darrin, if you dial back to 2019, when we were sitting at Investor Day here in Denver, we were talking about a $600 million digital business, right? And last year, we got approximately $850 million. This year, we're talking about a $1 billion business. So we were really well prepared because we had laid the foundation in the previous few years to be positioned to touch the customers, let's say, as they're looking for those. They were looking for digital options to send money last year, and that traction continues. And we think these customers are going to stay with us. As we surveyed them, they keep saying that they have ongoing needs. They like the business. They've created an account relationship with us. And so it becomes much more sticky than other kinds of business that we have.

It's amazing. I mean, when we see the daily -- the active user growth rate of your westernunion.com business customers, it's up 50%. I think that was what it was in fourth quarter, digital transactions up 80% in fourth quarter. Can you just touch on -- I mean, how much of this uptick do you see relate to really the COVID environment? And just how sticky is that? Because, again, I mean, that's something we're probably more excited about than others in the sense of that being something you can potentially monetize and hopefully [ benefit you ] over time.

Yes. No, the customers are quite sticky. We've had customers coming to us from other parts of the remittance market, so other digital players, the banking space. We also have had customers that have had new needs arising during this period because their need to receive money, Darrin, is higher than it ever has been before, especially over the last year or so as people are really being pressured in different markets around the world. And then we probably have had some traffic from the informal market as well. So all of these things have come in. Now when they come and visit our digital business, our wu.com business, they're creating an account with us, right? So then it's up to us to keep providing them a really good offering, make sure it's well serviced. They have lots of different options to send money and receive money. And so we really think that's going to be a sticky business. That's what is allowing us to keep growing our customer base this year and also to get to that $1 billion as the customers keep saying that they're going to use us again and again.

Yes. I think, I mean, we're excited about the transactions per customer and the retention that we see of the new customers that we acquired last year. I like to say it's good news, good news, right? It's good news that the new customers that were new to Western Union, we're finding strong retention, strong transaction frequency. And also, when we have our customers migrate from retail to digital, we see the same thing. We see actually more transactions, more frequency of interaction with us and stronger retention.

That was actually what I was going to ask you about next, is the engagement level of these digital customers relative to the -- some of the ones that would use cash or were more cash-centric through an agent before. If you can give us a little more examples or color on how much more engaged your digital customer is than the cash customer, I think that would be really helpful for our investors.

Go ahead, Shelly. Go on.

Yes. Well, I'm not -- Raj, I'm not sure what sort of quantitative numbers that we want to share there. But I would just say this: I mean it's sort of natural -- it's natural to engage with us more, right, for a digital customer. I mean one of the things maybe to point out here is that we're doing a lot of technology transformation really across our business. And one of the areas actually that we're putting in some new technology that I'm pretty excited about is actually our customer messaging platform and our ability to interact with our customers in different ways, whether that's SMS or email, callbacks, et cetera. And obviously, when you have a digital customer, you have more options in terms of how you can engage with them. And so I think that's one of the things that's front and center for us is having an engaging experience, engaging with them in terms of how we communicate with them, how they can communicate with us. We have a whole new set of virtual assistants and virtual agents that we've launched this year. And then I think we're seeing that in terms of their transaction frequency. And one of the things I'm sure we'll talk about a little bit later, too, Darrin, is just where we take that in the future because, obviously, we have some plans in terms of how we can get even more engagement.

Well, one of the data points that is sort of indicative of the level of retention is the 30% growth in the annual active customers that we have in wu.com. So we grew into 8.6 million customers last year. That's up 30% from the year before. So these are customers that were active during the course of the year. That number was up 30%. So that's sort of an indication of how much retention we're getting from the customers. The retail business, the nature of the retail business is just different. You have people that are walking in. They're doing a onetime transaction. They may never visit us again, but we get that every single year. Here, the retention levels are far higher than anything in our retail business because of that account relationship. And we'll try to get more data points over time, but that's -- it really is working out in our favor in terms of the account relationship and what we can do with that.

And just to be clear, I mean we've had this question a couple of times, but the thought that you're cannibalizing from one area of the retail side onto the digital side, you've pushed back on that quite a bit, right? I mean you don't see that in your metrics or your surveys.

No. And it's quite amazing. Even while the digital business and wu.com have taken off over the last few years, the new customers that are visiting wu.com are still 80% new to the company. They have not used us in the previous 1 to 2 years, and that metric has stayed relatively consistent even during the course of last year. These are largely new customers. So the cannibalization of our own retail business is relatively small. And as I mentioned before, these customers are coming from other parts of the remittance market, whether it's the other digital players or banks or they have new needs that are arising or they're coming from the informal side, so we're taking share away from everyone else. And you've seen our share last year, we grew our cross-border principal by 12%, Darrin, last year. And the World Bank, at least the last data point they have, is minus 7 for the last year. So we know we're getting share from other players in the market.

I think that comes down to the fact that, I mean, you guys are clearly one of the leaders in terms of digitally enabled innovators out there, whereas there are still a lot of single-corridor players. There's a lot of banks that don't have that digital capability, right? And so a lot of white space probably available for someone like you or maybe even others. But is that fair?

Yes. Go ahead. Go ahead, Shelly.

I think also, right, we offer more choice, right? I mean we have the biggest digital network, but we also have the biggest people network, and you can use those things interchangeably. And so I think the fact that we can offer choice and offer it globally, across the world, lots of places where others aren't, I think is substantial, right? It's differentiating.

Yes. So it implies...

[ Just think about -- nevermind, Darrin. ]

That your digital -- your new adds are going to be sticky and stick around, so that when retail comes back, ideally, we're in a nice place where digital is a higher percentage of the mix. Sorry, Raj, you were going to say something though.

No, I -- just think about omnichannel to omnichannel in 200 countries times 200 countries. That's really the vision we have. And that's something that most other companies will never be able to provide. And we do it seamlessly across the world with the regulatory compliance capabilities, the technology that supports settling in minutes and the 130-plus currencies that we can settle in with consumers. That's really the opportunity here. And we don't care how consumers transact with us, whether they want to use their mobile app, a bank location, one of our retail locations, our online business, they want to pay out to a retail location or pay out an account or to a wallet. That's really what we're trying to create here. And different customers have different needs, and we want to be able to meet those needs.

And we'll come back to digital more in a minute. But at the end of the day, as much as the digital side is going well, I think a lot of investors also do ask about when you guys see retail coming back or the cash side maybe normalizing a bit. And that's [ just something around ] the pandemic -- some extent, pandemic related. But any thoughts on that? I mean just remind us of where the compares start to get a little easier down that front. And then I think, again, if we can get to a point where that comes back to, let's call it, flat to up a little bit, then the whole growth rate might look a lot better at some point. But it's a question of when we get there, right?

Yes. Yes, we expect, Darrin, the retail business is going to grow this year. So we do expect it to bounce back. Some of it is because of the impact from last year. There's going to be a lot of volatility this year, as we described before. So Q1 is likely to be the lowest quarter overall for the company just because of the continued impact of the pandemic. But Q2 will be the highest quarter, and then we'll see more stability in the second half of the year. But that does envision retail growth this year, and that's in our outlook of mid-single-digit constant currency growth on the top line. So we think probably retail is not going to be back to where it was before the pandemic started even this year, but it is going to get some growth this year, and I think that's on the right path. I do think that the retail business can be a stable business for us again. As we dial back again to what we said at Investor Day a year or so ago, a couple of years ago, we said that retail could be flat-to-up single-digit type of business or stable for us. I still believe that's true, but we need to get through the pandemic, which obviously hasn't gone yet, but we need to get through that. And I think we can be stable there. And given the digital mix that we have with the $1 billion digital business this year, it gives us a much stronger starting point from which to think about growing the company because this year alone, we're going to add probably $150 million-or-so of revenue just from the digital business, and that's almost 3 points of growth for the company, right? Just the starting point is bigger from which we can work with.

When we go back to the retail versus digital, one of the topics that keeps coming up, again, I know this is short term and not what you focus on as much, but it's still the spread between your revenue and your transaction growth rates. That has to do with the mix, right, and the growth on one category. So I mean, Raj, can you just remind us of the trajectory that you guys had expected and how folks should model that out for the next several quarters?

Yes. I mean, Darrin, Shelly and I have spoken about this a lot, but we really don't think too much about what is the spread between transactions and revenue because it's not the most important driver for us. We -- ultimately, our objective is to drive profitable top line growth. So we want that top line growth. We're seeing the success this year -- we will see the success this year of the strategy we deployed last year. So yes, we had growth in digital white label. That's going to continue this year. We also had a pricing strategy around wu.com to catch customers. We wanted to make sure that we were positioned to capture all these customers. That's why we're going to be able to drive mid-single-digit growth this year, and we're also expanding margins. When we look at the overall digital business, it was about 20% of consumer revenues last year. And the year before, it was around 14% of consumer revenues, so that's up 600 basis points from where it was a year earlier. And we expanded margins overall even in a down revenue environment last year. That's going to happen again this year. We're going to expand margins. We're growing top line. Digital is going to be a big part of it. So what I would just tell you, Darrin, is that the revenue transaction spread is less important. It's really about what kind of growth we're getting in digital, and it's largely incremental. And so it is very margin supportive, the digital growth that we're getting.

Okay. Just touching on 1 or 2 more aspects before we go back to the digital strategy, maybe first on pricing for a minute. Any changes you're seeing from a competitive landscape standpoint, whether it's pricing-wise or just different entrants into new markets? And maybe just especially in the rise of digital we're seeing across the industry, has that impacted it? Because as much as it makes -- made it tougher to physical kind of cash-centric players, there are quite a few digital-centric players that have tried to make a push for the last few years as well.

Yes. So the key difference that I would just really think about is most of what we have today with our digital business, our wu.com business is a retail payout transaction. So even if it's being initiated on wu.com from a debit card account or credit card, sometimes, the vast majority of that is being paid out at a retail location. So that's not where the digital-only competition is playing. When we shift over to the digital-only, meaning account to account or online to account, we're also competitively priced because it's a brand-new business for us. It's that 50% of the market -- or 70% of the market that we're really going after. And we really believe that we can be the provider of choice in that space, whether it's white label to the banks or going after other account-to-account opportunities, and it's largely incremental. So pricing really isn't a big consideration for us there. It's largely incremental revenues and profits and customers that we're going after because these are different use cases from our traditional retail payout, if you will. The principal amounts are multiples of what we see in the retail side of the business. And so it's a very different business. And I think we're very well positioned competitively to get a large part of the share. And last year was a clear example of that. And this year, we think that momentum is going to continue.

Okay. But I mean, just to put it bluntly, it sounds like -- or do you see pricing as relatively stable on the digital side?

Yes.

Okay. [ And then I was... ]

[ It's stable. ] It's much more of a proactive activity on our side to go after this customer acquisition. That's really the [ tactic we have there ].

Yes. That makes sense. And then just quickly on the strategy around your B2B offerings. When I think about just the legacy of Custom House or Travelex but really your position in the market now, and again, there seems to be more competition. Maybe there always was. What are your thoughts on the position there and the strategy?

Shelly, you want to take a crack at that? Or do you want me to start?

Yes. I mean -- so I think, first of all, in our Western Union Business Solutions segment, it's not one product, right? It's not one thing. We're competing in a couple of different market segments, right, whether it's serving the needs of small and medium businesses in terms of hedging and foreign exchange sorts of services, whether it's helping a payroll provider or another organization do mass payments, right, to taking care of all their cross-border payment needs or serving a university and having a solution so that their students, their international students, can pay their fees. So I think it's -- we're not -- the competitive landscape is different, I think, in those different market segments. And certainly -- and this is one of the areas where we're also putting some investment and effort in terms of technology playing a big role in terms of the product that we can offer in those different segments.

Okay. I mean, I guess, so it sounds like you're still planning -- you're planning on investing in it to try to really differentiate it further.

Yes. I think in very targeted ways, right? So very -- look, as I said, what it takes to compete with the universities and education segment is different than maybe providing services for gig economy payroll as an example.

The business had a good track record before the pandemic hit. And so we need to get through this period here, but we believe there's good potential in that B2B business still.

Okay. Okay. All right. I intentionally left a good amount of time to go back to digital and go through the strategy because I really think that's going to be the conversation we have more and more about you guys over the next couple of years. And so when we think about the growth in active users you've had, obviously, the pandemic helped, but there's a lot of proactive measures you are taking to really enhance that. And you see that in the market share gains from the app download data that you've shown as well. So maybe, Shelly, it's a good place for you to come -- to start with just explaining some of the steps that you are taking lately to differentiate and really attract customers digitally.

Yes. Well, so I think there's a couple of big pieces of this. First, obviously, is user experience. So you can never be done with user experience when it comes to digital products, right? So we'll continue to work on that every day and every month and every quarter. Some of that's improving the speed of how the app responds. Some of that is just providing new features and functionality in terms of the experience itself, right? So I think that will continue to be a focus. We have a number of things that I'm pretty excited about in terms of some technology upgrades that are going to really provide us some new business opportunities here this year. We're upgrading our customer messaging platform, so the ability for us to interact with our customers in different ways. We've actually launched a number of virtual agents across our business so that our customers can contact us in different ways, however is convenient for them. We're upgrading our loyalty program and platform, so that will come later in the year. And so that will provide us some new opportunities to keep engaging our customers and give them some more choice, just make that experience smoother but give them more choice in terms of what we can offer for our loyalty program. And we'll continue, obviously, with the strong marketing that we started last year and are certainly doing as well in terms of customer acquisition. It's really all about that customer engagement and retention game, right, in the digital space. And so we're going to keep doing that for our current digital customers for money transfer. And we're also -- many of you heard us talk about the fact that we're going to do a market test later this year in terms of expanding the product and the services that we can offer to our digital customers. And we haven't put forward yet exactly what that product is going to look like, but it wouldn't be hard to imagine, right, that it's centered around an account. We're going to leverage the bank license that we have in Europe. We're going to start market test in Europe. You can imagine a debit card. You can imagine multicurrency. You can imagine different options in terms of being able to bring the receiver into the ecosystem. Of course, one of the opportunities for us -- there's really 2 opportunities as we build towards this ecosystem, right? One is retention of our current customers for money transfer. But then, of course, the other is, as we offer them other products, that provides us an opportunity for new revenue streams as well. So kind of our vision there is there's a whole -- we're going to build from the core, build from our trusted brand, build from these customer relationships with our existing customers. We're going to expand the financial services that we can provide. We'll provide some of those ourselves. We're also going to do this in a way where we have a marketplace where it will allow our customers access to financial services from other partners. And then, of course, you can imagine it wouldn't just need to be in financial services. You could imagine some lifestyle shopping sort of featured on our marketplace at some point. And then we'll keep going from there.

That's great. I mean, that is definitely something we're waiting for and been really wondering about for some time now, just given the active growth of these digital customers. First of all, I mean, what kind of time frame do you envision some of these being able to start really going out to the market?

Yes. So some of the things I talked about in terms of our loyalty program, and that will be for all of our customers, not just those that were in Europe, and that will be later this year. And we're going to do a market test later this year, fall-ish time frame, and start that test. And then let's see what we learn, and we're going to build from there. We're going to -- we're taking a very sort of iterative fintech approach, if you will, right? We're building something that can be scaled, but we're also building it for this customer set and market, and we'll adjust and learn as we go.

But it seems like the experience you're having with these digital customers in terms of engagement and loyalty is ripe for this, though, is that right? And is that in markets outside? That sounds like it's Europe or parts of Europe and the U.S., I guess, right? I mean it's probably the markets where there are the send markets the consumer has really the cash and the wallet primarily and that's being used.

Yes. I mean I think those are 2 of the markets, but I think we see an opportunity in other markets as well. And I think it's a combination of the engagement we're seeing from our digital customers, but also, we're talking to them and doing research in terms of what kind of products they can imagine they would be interested in from Western Union.

And Raj, I mean, from an expense standpoint, are these investments embedded in your margin targets? Because this can't be cheap.

Yes. Yes. No, the -- they are embedded in our outlook. So our outlook envisions all the things that Shelly is talking about. And think about our platform that we already have there, and this is not creating the wheel from scratch. We are adding some specific capabilities to be able to go do this test because we have been investing in our platform and our capabilities and our cross-border capabilities for several years. So we're talking about some incremental investment. It's not something that's going to break the bank. But it is some incremental investment, and that's certainly in our outlook.

Yes. For what it's worth, I mean, I think one of the things that's so enticing is the customer acquisition cost you might actually have is probably an advantage, right, in the sense that a lot of these customers are already with you for other reasons, including money transfer, the same way with some of the P2P offering wallets that have customer acquisition that are low cost relative to banks and others that have to spend on it.

Absolutely. We're not going after some new customer. It's really the customers that may be customers of our money transfer services. These are customers who trust the brand. They recognize the brand and they -- we're -- we'll see what the tests show, but it appears logical that they would trust Western Union to have a broader banking relationship with [ I think ].

And have you already done any type of data checks with your customers to see any interest levels on this? Or is it still in the idea form?

Shelly?

No, no, no. We've done customer research, and we'll continue to do customer research as we develop the product, right? We'll be taking a very iterative market test kind of approach. But we have gathered a lot of research from our customers in terms of what's most important to them.

This has been really enlightening and helpful. I appreciate all that. When we think about the -- just a couple of quick ones before we take off, and there's a number of questions from the audience. So let me just try to fit in a couple more quick ones. I guess one of them is on this topic. How do you plan to leverage your bank license in Europe to drive deeper penetration? So is that the real backbone of a lot of this for you guys in the sense of offering those financial services? And what would you do? Can you leverage that outside of -- that's a European bank, I think, right?

Yes...

Yes. It's a European -- oh, sorry, Shelly. It's a European bank...

We're going to leverage it for the market test we're starting in Europe. But I think one thing that's important is that the vision that we have is that we're not going to offer the exact same thing in every part of the world because each market is slightly different, right? And our customer sets are slightly different. So we don't necessarily have to have a bank account in every part of the world. We can have a wallet. We also don't necessarily have to have a banking license ourselves, right? So we're looking at it from a building optionality, right, having a global solution with the ability to have local relevance. So that's the way we're approaching this opportunity.

Okay. Very helpful. Last one from us, and then we'll turn to the audience. And just what types of these capabilities would you consider adding via M&A versus developing organically?

Yes. Well, we have a lot of organic efforts underway in terms of transformation for our platform and technology overall. We're making good progress on our cloud journey. We've got 15 petabytes of data in the cloud now. So we've got a very strategic data foundation, which is important, right, because it allows us to understand a lot more about our customers. It's part of what's fueling our more sophisticated pricing sorts of capabilities. So there's a lot we're doing organically. What I would just say is in terms of M&A sort of acquisition opportunities for us, obviously, we probably get most excited about digital and what we can scale there but also new capabilities. When we think about building this ecosystem and building this marketplace, are there some assets that we could acquire that could help us get there faster, particularly as we get through this market test and understand a little bit more about the reaction and feedback that we get from our customers?

Okay. Let's take some from the audience, if you don't mind. First one is, how should we think about the unit economics of a transaction? Digital on the send side and receive side versus a transaction that is digital send but cash payout or cash to cash, if you can maybe think about the 3 scenarios. And then over time, where do you envision the mix goes across those 3 areas?

Yes. There's a lot of questions in that. The -- we've tried to show, Darrin, and you've seen it in our last year's third quarter call, we had a lot of data in the slides that we presented. But at a high level, the digital business, whether it's wu.com-branded offering or digital white label, is margin accretive to the company. It's largely a new customer. It's largely incremental business, incremental revenues, profits, and it's margin accretive. And I sort of described earlier that even with the significant growth that we've had in digital, we've actually been able to increase margins during the course of last year even in an overall down revenue environment and naturally what we see this year again. For the retail business, we have a starting point that's probably higher from a revenue-per-transaction standpoint. wu.com is a little bit lower. And then white label is even lower from a starting standpoint because of the role that we play as a processor. However, the margin profile, the contribution margin profile is quite different. Retail has a certain contribution margin. wu.com is higher than that. And then the white label side is even higher than that. So the dollar contribution from a wu.com transaction is quite attractive. It's not exactly the same as retail, but it's not too far away from where retail is. And that's really what we're trying to show here, is that we have 80% of the new customers visiting wu.com are new. They have a very good profit profile to them. Same with the digital white label, it's largely incremental opportunity for us, very good profit profile, whether it's on a margin or a dollar contribution basis. And then look at the overall performance of the company. Last year, we drove margins higher. We're doing it again second year in a row, and this is with significant digital growth. So it's a very profitable transaction, and that's what we're going to continue to say.

Okay. Next question is, can you speak to how STC Pay fits into the long-term digital strategy?

Yes. I mean it's a key part of our overall digital strategy. You know that we're going to be making an equity investment in STC Pay. So we will really become the preferred provider for them as they expand into other parts of the Middle East region, and they do have plans to expand. We love the relationship that we have within Saudi Arabia. STC Pay itself is a -- they have a remittance business. They have a wallet, a business that they -- that was developed over just a year or so. And they have plans to be more of a bank, sort of how the consumer testing we're going to do later this year. So they have plans to be much more of a bank, credit cards, debit cards, loans. And they have plans to expand into other parts of the region, Bahrain, Kuwait, UAE, and we've become the preferred provider for them. So it's a key part of our overall digital strategy, and we're hoping for good things from that relationship.

Okay. Well, actually, on that, do you have other -- I mean there was that, and there was the Sberbank partnership, and there was a Korean -- if I remember correctly, a Japanese or Korean one as well, recently.

Yes.

Have there been any others? Or do you see any others in the pipeline?

Yes. There are several partners. We just haven't announced them yet. There's another partner in the Middle East that we're not ready to quite announce yet, but you'll be seeing that. And we have many that are in the pipeline. They're not all going to be like a Saudi Telecom because that's a very unique situation in Saudi Arabia with millions of migrants there. But they're -- I think these could be interesting that partners that will continue to build our pipeline on the white label side of the equation.

Okay. Another question is, where do you see -- as much as you can answer to this, where do you see normalized digital growth settling out on the other side of the pandemic?

Well, this year, I would say it's normalizing to a -- last year, we grew digital revenues by almost 40%. This year, the implied growth rate is less than that, obviously, by getting to $1 billion. So whether it's high teens or 20% or something in that range, it's a more normal level of growth, I would say. If we can keep growing it at that level -- and we haven't given a longer-term outlook. But if we can keep growing it at that level, it could be very beneficial to us, again, in terms of mix of business and what it does to the overall growth profile of the company.

Actually, a different client asks a similar question for the retail, for the brick and mortar side. Just if you can give us a sense of your view on organic growth and trends, pricing trends for nondigital brick and mortar segments.

Yes. I mean, this year, we're going to get growth in the retail business. We see the business rebounding partly because of what we saw last year. And we do think the retail business can be stable for us longer term. And we -- certainly, we want to come out again, Darrin, at the right time and give a longer-term outlook. We're not quite at that point yet. But let's let the pandemic get behind us, which hopefully is not too far in the distant future. And then we'll be in a better position to give a longer-term outlook. But most of the things that we said before, they sort of were thrown off track in some ways because of the pandemic. But we'll try to reengage on the longer-term outlook here after we get through some of these months here.

Okay. And we'll take one last one, just in the interest of time. And it dovetails [ a little to when ] we asked about M&A a little bit, but it's -- do you envision fintech partnerships in your build-out of a digital wallet along with other opportunities and capabilities?

Yes. Shelly, why don't you take that?

Absolutely. I mean I don't have one in mind to share anything -- any specifics to share just yet. But the reason that we're building this with the marketplace in mind is for that exact reason, is it will allow us then provide our customers access to other services that we may choose not to provide ourselves. And so I think that absolutely is part of how we're building this, and it will actually even be, to some extent, part of our market test.

Okay. Okay. Guys, this has been really helpful and informative. And it was a nice discussion about different aspects of the business we haven't always done before, so really helpful. We're out of time, though. So thanks for everything, Raj and Shelly, nice having you. For everyone on, I think we have another session coming up at 3:40 with the CEO of Paysafe. But anyway, everyone, be safe. Again, Raj and Shelly, thank you very much for joining us.

Thanks so much.

Thank you.

Okay. Goodbye now. All right. Take care.