Verra Mobility Corporation (VRRM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good day, and welcome to the Verra Mobility Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker, Mr. Mark Zindler, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good afternoon, and welcome to Verra Mobility's Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. Today, we'll be discussing the results announced in our press release issued after the market close, along with our earnings presentation, which is available on the Investor Relations section of our website at ir.verramobility.com. With me on the call are Jon Keyser, Verra Mobility's Interim Chief Executive Officer; and Craig Conti, our Chief Financial Officer. Jon will begin with prepared remarks, followed by Craig, and then we'll open up the call for Q&A. Management may make forward-looking statements during the call regarding future events and expectations, anticipated future trends and the anticipated future performance of the company. We caution you that such statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks and uncertainties that are difficult to predict. Actual results may differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements due to a variety of risk factors. These factors are described in our SEC filings. Please refer to our earnings press release and earnings presentation for our cautionary note on forward-looking statements. Any forward-looking statements that we make on this call are based on our beliefs and assumptions today, and we do not undertake any obligation to update forward-looking statements. Finally, during today's call, we'll refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measure is included in our earnings release and quarterly earnings presentation, both of which can be found on our website at ir.verramobility.com. With that, I'll turn the call over to Jon.

Thanks, Mark, and good afternoon, everyone. This is my first earnings call as Interim CEO of Verra Mobility. I want to start by saying thank you to our shareholders. I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you today. Having served Verra Mobility in several leadership roles, I know our business, our people and the value we provide to our customers. I also recognize the responsibility that comes with leading the company at this important moment. And my approach to leading Verra Mobility is straightforward, establish clear priorities, act decisively, communicate candidly and deliver on our commitments. These principles have guided me throughout my career from my service as a military officer in which I served in combat and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through my extensive legal career as a mergers and acquisitions attorney in roles at large multinational corporations, my time as Verra Mobility's Chief Legal Officer and also leading market expansion for our government safety business via our government relations function and my experience as Verra Mobility's Chief Transformation Officer. My leadership has been developed and battle-tested in times of crisis when the stakes are high. And although the ultimate stakes in business are clearly not the same as they are in war, some leadership principles transcend military service and leadership in business. On my first day as CEO, I set up a series of leadership principles and I discussed them with our employees. Those included integrity first, customer centricity, acting with urgency, and the belief that technology like AI, is a force multiplier. I shared these principles as a guide to how our leaders will lead, how we will make decisions and how we will hold ourselves accountable. And I'm very pleased to say that over the last few months, we have been building momentum. We've achieved great wins, and we've been putting those principles into action. And so I have 3 immediate priorities for our company. First, we're working hard to broaden and deepen our customer relationships. Second, we're spending a lot of time realigning our cost structure and improving how we operate. And third, we're positioning Verra Mobility for future growth and long-term value creation. We've already made tangible progress against each of these priorities since I stepped into the interim CEO role at the end of May. So let me first start with customer relationships, beginning with our tolling and large fleet customers. Verra Mobility operates at the center of a complicated multi-jurisdictional mobility ecosystem. We connect rental car companies, large fleet operators, governmental tolling authorities and millions of drivers. We manage vehicle identification, toll transactions, violations, payments, data and customer service across a large number of locations. And that capability has been developed over decades, and we believe it is very difficult to replicate at scale. The clearest example of our focus on customer relationships is our new agreement with Avis Budget Group. Following ABG's termination notice in May, we listened carefully to their concerns and strategic priorities, and we rapidly deployed teams from across our organization to develop a path forward. And I am pleased to report, as we said in our press release on July 28, that we've reached an agreement with ABG on the key contractual terms for a new 7-year tolling and violation services contract, extending a relationship that had already spanned nearly 2 decades. I believe this is a really important outcome for Verra Mobility. It demonstrates the value of our technology for our customers and our ability to listen to our customers and adapt to their needs. And I want to say thank you to Avis Budget Group for their renewed faith in us and the new relationship we're building together, including at the most senior levels of both companies. Now I also realize there have been many questions about the approaching expiration date from our contract with Hertz. Today, I'm also pleased to announce that we have entered into a new 5-year agreement with Hertz that provides long-term visibility for both companies and establishes a strong foundation for the next phase of our relationship. Hertz is an important and long-standing customer with highly engaged and a very talented team that is modernizing, strengthening and building Hertz's business. And I'm honored that they have chosen to extend their relationship with us, and I believe this is a vote of confidence in Verra Mobility's technology, operating capabilities, integrations and scale as well as the work that our teams have done to develop a more flexible and customer-focused partnership. And I want to thank the senior leadership at Hertz for their collaboration and trust in Verra Mobility as a technology partner for years to come. So together, the ABG and Hertz agreements represent meaningful progress towards stabilizing our commercial services customer base. We're thrilled to continue to provide Verra Mobility's capabilities and expertise at scale to help our customers mitigate risk and achieve success. With respect to some key developments in our government safety business, I'd like to highlight that we announced that we were recently selected as the automated speed safety vendor for the city of Los Angeles, California. And as we zoom out for a moment, we are negotiating and hope to finalize that contractual agreement. And once completed, I'll be proud to say that with the passage of Assembly Bill 645 in California, which authorized speed enforcement in the state, Verra Mobility will have been selected as a technology partner for 6 out of the 6 cities that were authorized by that legislation. And Verra Mobility is honored to serve these customers and help them achieve their goals for safer, more efficient transportation, and our shared mission of saving lives. And as we discussed in our National Stop on Red press release on Monday, one of the most important rewarding aspects of our work is seeing the real-world impact of our technology. Across the communities we serve, we're seeing measurable improvements in driver behavior and roadway safety, including a 28% reduction in red light violations within the first 60 days of San Jose's program and a nearly 50% decline in traffic fatalities immersed, reinforcing that automated safety enforcement is one of the most effective tools available to make roads safer and to help save lives. And our focus on customers extends well beyond individual contract negotiations. In June, we appointed Stacey Moser as Chief Customer Officer and unified our sales, account management and marketing leadership across our largest commercial and government businesses. This change creates a stronger, more consistent voice of the customer within Verra Mobility and allows us to identify issues earlier, respond more quickly and bring the full breadth and capabilities of our company to every customer relationship. Because to me, customer centricity also requires that our leaders responsible for product and engineering operations and our unified customer-facing organization be as close as possible to the CEO. So we're dramatically improving our customer centricity, and that's going to be one of the primary measures of success for this new organization and our structure going forward. Over the past several months, our Board's Transformation Advisory Committee has also worked with management on a review of our organization, our operating model and strategic priorities. That work reinforced an important conclusion. While Verra Mobility has historically been organized around separate business units, we increasingly operate as one integrated mobility technology company and doing so is a far more efficient way to operate. Our customers don't think in terms of reporting segments. They come to Verra Mobility to help solve problems related to regardless of whatever product, technology or service delivers the solution. Increasingly, our competitive advantage comes from a combination of our technologies, our customer relationships and our operational capabilities and not from individual business lines. So that reality is reflected in how we are managing the company. We are confident in our continued transformation and that it will enable faster decision-making, greater operational leverage and an even stronger customer experience. So after increasing our customer focus, the second major priority we identified in our leadership transition has been furthering our transformation efforts by realigning our cost structure and improving how we operate. Consistent with the leadership principle I discussed earlier, our organization acted with urgency. We completed the principal labor and certain non-labor cost takeout efforts in a rapid fashion that was made possible by the transformational work that we started months prior. This was also benefited by the interaction between management and the Transformation Advisory Committee. These decisions are always difficult. They affected capable colleagues who made meaningful contributions to Verra Mobility, and we did not take these decisions lightly, but the actions were necessary. They were necessary to help us align our organization and cost structure more closely with our current priorities, speed decision-making and accountability and to ensure we have an organization that is poised for future growth and success. We've now moved into the next phase of the program with an increased focus on non-labor spending, third-party costs, procurement, organizational complexity and opportunities to further improve the efficiency of our processes. And while we transform to reduce lower value and duplicative activity, we believe strongly in investing in technology, investing in product development and investing in customer service and implementation capabilities. To me, transformation cannot be a series of isolated cost actions. It must be disciplined, sustained efforts to improve how we allocate resources, how we prioritize, and how we serve our customers and generate returns and new growth. And that's exactly what we're doing. Now I want to spend a moment on AI. In the last couple of months, our transformation has been pursuing 2 principal bodies of work related to AI. The first is using AI to improve how Verra Mobility operates. We are now evaluating, experimenting and using AI that can help us accelerate software development, automate repetitive work, improve forecasting, identify operational abnormalities, and help employees analyze information more quickly. Our objective in deploying AI is not simply to deploy new technology for the sake of technology. It's to improve the speed, consistency, and quality of our work and allow our employees to spend more time on customers, complex decisions and innovation. The second body of work is incorporating AI into -- more deeply into the products and services that we provide. This is critical to how I see the future of Verra Mobility. Verra Mobility operates one of the largest connected transportation technology platforms in North America. Across our network, more than 28,000 intelligent edge sensors like cameras, radars, LiDAR, and monitoring sensors capture real-world transportation activity. We process over 230 million toll transactions and 56 million traffic events annually. We issue approximately 50 million parking permits and support these operations with more than 16,000 connected devices. So this combination of connected infrastructure and sensors, proprietary transportation data and mission-critical software creates a unique foundation for AI. Unlike organizations that are just beginning to collect data, -- on a rolling basis, we have over 10 petabytes of transportation data, and we have years of operational intelligence generated through real-world customer workflows at significant scale. Over time, we believe AI will allow us to transform this data into increasingly valuable insights, improving image and sensor interpretation, predicting operational conditions before they occur, understanding changes in conditions, optimizing transportation and enforcement operations, automating complex decision-making and delivering more intelligent software and edge hardware for our customers. We believe this positions Verra Mobility not only to improve the efficiency of our own operations, but also to create a new generation of AI-enabled transportation solutions that strengthen customer outcomes, improve roadway safety, increase the long-term value of our technology platform and ultimately help save lives. Now before I turn it over to Craig, I want to say a heartfelt thank you to our employee population. While I've been out on the road visiting and engaging with our customers, I've also been traveling to many of our sites across the U.S., meeting with all levels of employees. This has been a difficult past few months, and our employees have responded with resiliency and confidence. Their hard work and dedication energizes me, inspires me and the rest of our executive team. And at Verra Mobility, we are one team. So with that, I'll turn the call over to Craig to discuss our second quarter financial results, our outlook and the financial implications of the actions that we have underway. Craig?

Thank you, Jon, and good afternoon, everyone. As Jon outlined earlier, the second quarter reflected strong execution across the business. I'll spend the next few minutes walking through the financial results, discussing performance across each of our businesses and then updating our outlook for the balance of the year. Let's turn to Slide 4, which outlines the key financial measures for the consolidated business for the second quarter. Our Q2 performance was ahead of internal expectations with total revenue, adjusted EBITDA dollars, margin and adjusted EPS landing stronger than expected. Our results were bolstered by New York City camera installation timing, operational improvements across the enterprise and strong advancements in commercial services collection performance. Let me begin with our revenue performance. Government Solutions service revenue increased 17% in the quarter, driven by New York City camera installations and 8% growth outside of New York City. Within New York City, incremental net new camera installation growth exceeded the updated contract pricing change, generating 36% service revenue growth in the second quarter versus last year. As you may recall from our last discussion, inclement Q1 weather drove a delay in our expected installation volumes under our new expansion contract. Our team has fully caught up with the second quarter, and we are now back to where we originally expected to be by the close of the first half of 2026. Commercial services revenue returned to growth, increasing 6% year-over-year, driven by strength in both rental car tolling and fleet management. Total Parking Solutions service revenue increased about 1%, primarily on SaaS revenue performance. Total Product Revenue was $17 million for the quarter. Government Solutions contributed roughly $14 million and T2 delivered about $3 million in product sales overall for the quarter. Consolidated adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $111 million, stronger than our internal expectations and largely driven by the New York City camera installations I mentioned earlier. We reported a GAAP net loss of $48 million for the quarter, which reflects a noncash goodwill and intangible asset impairment charge of $104 million for the carrying value of T2 Systems. The tax provision of about $6 million after adjusting for the impairment and other nonrecurring expenses represents a normalized effective tax rate of about 28%. GAAP diluted EPS loss was $0.32 per share for the second quarter of 2026 compared to $0.24 of income per share for the prior year period. Adjusted EPS, which excludes amortization, stock-based compensation, and other nonrecurring items, was $0.38 per share for the second quarter this year compared to $0.34 per share in the second quarter of 2025. The adjusted EPS favorability versus prior year was driven by the increase in adjusted EBITDA and a reduction in shares outstanding, partially offset by increased depreciation expense. Another point Jon emphasized was the resiliency of our business model, and our cash generation during the quarter continued to reflect that strength. Cash flows provided by operating activities totaled $56 million, and we delivered about $33 million of free cash flow for the quarter, which was in line with our internal expectations. Next, I'll step through the performance of each of our businesses, beginning with Commercial Services on Slide 5. CS year-over-year revenue increased 6% in the second quarter. RAC tolling revenue increased 5% over the same period last year, driven by increased product adoption and tolling activity despite a 1% decrease in U.S. travel volume over the prior year quarter. Our FMC business increased 3% or about $1 million year-over-year, more than offsetting the prior period churn we experienced in the second quarter of last year. Commercial Services segment profit margins increased 100 basis points over the prior year, driven by operating leverage and continued success in lowering bad debt expense on improved cash collections. Turning to Slide 6, government solutions service revenue increased 17% in the quarter, driven by New York City camera installations and 8% growth outside of New York City. Total revenue grew 20% over the prior year quarter as product revenue increased about $4 million year-over-year. Government Solutions segment profit was $31 million for the quarter, representing margins of approximately 24%. The decline in segment profit margins is primarily attributable to the New York City pricing change. While this represents a reduction in segment profit margins over the prior year, this performance was better than expected due to the pacing of the New York City camera installations I discussed earlier. Additionally, we generated another strong quarter of contracted bookings in Government Solutions, reflecting continued demand from municipalities seeking technology solutions that improve roadway safety and traffic management. During the second quarter, we booked $25 million of new annual recurring revenue and contract awards. Notable bookings were concentrated in several work zone speed and school bus stop arm programs. Over the trailing 12 months, new incremental ARR bookings totaled approximately $74 million, reflecting sustained demand and stronger conversion across our pipeline. Let's turn to Slide 7 for a review of the results of Parking Solutions. We generated revenue of $20 million and segment profit of approximately $2 million for the quarter. SaaS and services sales increased about 1% compared to the prior year, while product revenue was effectively flat compared to 2025. Parking Solutions segment profit margins declined 465 basis points versus last year, driven primarily by product sales mix and the timing of operating expenses. Okay. Let's turn to Slide 8 and discuss the balance sheet and take a closer look at leverage. We ended the quarter with a net debt balance of about $1 billion, which declined sequentially due to second quarter free cash flow. Net leverage landed at 2.4x, which reflects the full in-quarter repayment of our credit revolver, which is 100% undrawn at present. Consistent with Jon's comments regarding disciplined capital allocation, we have $66 million available under our $250 million share repurchase authorization. However, our priority today remains strengthening the balance sheet while maintaining financial flexibility through building cash reserves. Finally, let me turn to our outlook for the remainder of 2026. As Jon discussed earlier, our business continues to perform well operationally. However, the recently completed Avis Budget and Hertz renewals include revised commercial terms that are materially less favorable to us than the prior agreement and affect our financial outlook. Accordingly, we have updated our full year guidance as follows: We expect total revenue in the range of $945 million to $965 million. We expect adjusted EBITDA in the range of $360 million to $370 million or an adjusted EBITDA margin of about 38%. Importantly, as discussed earlier, the changes to our outlook are largely attributable to the revised pricing associated with the Avis Budget and Hertz renewal agreements. Our underlying operating performance across the business remains consistent with our expectations. We expect 2026 non-GAAP adjusted EPS to be in the range of $1.11 to $1.17 per share. And lastly, free cash flow is expected to be in the range of $105 million to $115 million for 2026. The free cash flow guide anticipates higher CapEx spending versus prior guidance, driven by the accelerated timing of the Los Angeles Metro contract award and several accelerated school bus stop arm awards. The vast majority of the CapEx will be spent in Government Solutions to implement newly awarded photo enforcement programs. Additionally, we anticipate a $30 million use of working capital primarily related to both our recent RAC contract renewals and the timing of expenditures and collections of our ongoing installation work in New York City. Moving on to the segment level. For total year 2026, Government Solutions is expected to generate the high end of mid-single-digit total revenue growth, which reflects the blended growth rate across the segment, including low double-digit revenue growth for service revenue outside of New York City and high single-digit growth for total revenue within New York City as new expansion installs and product sales more than offset the price normalization. Overall product revenue for GS is expected to be roughly flat. The outlook for GS margins is unchanged. We expect segment profit margins to contract by approximately 450 to 500 basis points compared to 2025, primarily due to the New York City renewal contract, including service pricing adjustments from the competitive procurement process and the inclusion of minority and women-owned subcontractor requirements by the City of New York. We expect third quarter margins to contract to comparable levels as Q1 then ramp up to the mid-20s by Q4 2026, fueled by volume leverage, Mosaic cost savings and school bus stop bar seasonality. We still expect GS margins to land in the low 20s overall for total year 2026, consistent with what we shared on our prior calls. Consistent with Jon's earlier comments regarding our long-term customer partnerships, we are very pleased to announce both the renewed Avis Budget and Hertz agreements and look forward to expanding on our partnership with each of these long-standing and highly valued customers. While the new agreements provide greater contractual visibility over term, they were executed at lower pricing levels than our existing relationship and include an option for the customers to modulate their fleet volume. Additionally, we have reduced our full-year TSA assumption such that full-year volume is expected to be around flat with 2025, representing a 1% to 1.5% reduction from our prior TSA assumption. As a result, Commercial Services revenue growth is expected to decelerate over the back half of the year in each of the third and fourth quarters, and we expect the overall growth will be in the negative high single-digit range for the year in total versus 2025. CS segment profit margins are expected to contract over the balance of the year as well with the full year total expected to be in the low 60% range. We continue to anticipate that Parking Solutions revenue will be up low to mid-single digits versus 2025 levels, driven by growth in SaaS, subscription and professional services offerings. Lastly, we expect Parking Solutions margins to be slightly accretive to 2025. As Jon discussed earlier, we have taken action to realize the cost reduction initiatives that we committed to earlier this year. In total, this represents about $20 million of annualized costs that we expect to take out of the business. I would expect to generate full run rate savings beginning in 2027. Other key assumptions supporting our adjusted EPS and free cash flow outlook can be found on Slide 10. Before I wrap up, I'd like to briefly touch on our segment reporting. As Jon discussed earlier, we're continuing to evolve how we manage the business. As part of that process, we're evaluating whether changes to our organizational structure and the way our leadership team reviews financial performance could affect our operating and reportable segments. For the second quarter, nothing has changed. We continue to report our results as we have historically. This evaluation is still underway. And if it ultimately results in a change to our segment reporting, including potentially reporting as a single operating and reportable segment, we would communicate that at the appropriate time and recast prior period information as required. Before I turn it back to Jon for his closing comments, I'll add that our second quarter results demonstrate the operational momentum Jon described earlier. While we have updated our outlook to reflect the economics of 2 important customer renewals, the underlying execution across the business remains strong. Our balance sheet continues to strengthen, and we remain focused on disciplined execution during the second half of the year. Jon, back over to you.

Thanks, Craig. Let me close by returning to the commitments we made when I assumed the CEO role. First, we said we would broaden and deepen our customer relationships. And what did we do? Well, I'd highlight that we have reached a new 7-year agreement with ABG and renewed Hertz under a new 5-year agreement. We were also awarded the new contract in the city of Los Angeles, which once operational, will represent one of the largest speed enforcement programs that we have at Verra Mobility. Second, we said we would accelerate our transformation with urgent focus on organizational changes to make us faster and more efficient, and we have realigned the customer organization. We've combined and catalyzed the product and engineering organizations. We completed significant cost-out actions and established clear operating accountability. We're igniting the use of AI to help us improve our operations and the products and services we offer to our customers in the future. And while these are important early steps, we believe the results of these swift actions will help create stability, predictability and shareholder value. I intend to continue to lead Verra Mobility with deliberate intent to make this company more focused, more efficient, and more of a transportation technology leader. And when we do that, I believe we will create value for our shareholders. So thank you again for your time and attention today. And at this time, I'd like to invite Sherry to open the line for any questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question will come from the line of Tomo Sano with JPMorgan.

Congratulations, Jon, on a new role.

Thank you very much. I appreciate that.

On the Avis contracts, could you please walk us through the circumstances that led to the initial termination notice? And then what were the primary factors that ultimately drove the Avis to resume the notice and enter into an extension, place?

Yes. So Tom, what I would say is, as we disclosed, we received the termination notice from the customer. That was deeply disappointing, of course. And then after a series of leadership changes, I took it upon myself and the management team to get together -- and we reapproached Avis, and we listened. We have one mouth and 2 ears. And so we approach that long-held customer with that in mind. We better understood what they were trying to do. And I'm very pleased to say that we, after a series of meetings and negotiations, built, I think, what is a very, very strong basis for a what I call a constructive long-term relationship going forward that takes into account their strategic priorities and also the values of the work that Verra Mobility does, the value of our technology platform and the way we operate to help them de-risk the operations that they do and deliver better services to their customers. So I think that speaks again to the value of broadening and deepening our customer relationships. it's a very, very large focus for me and for the organization.

And a follow-up, following the Avis and Hertz renewals, could you summarize the key economic changes versus the prior agreements, pricing, any variable components and volume assumptions? And if you give us any updates with the enterprise as well?

Tomo, it's Craig. I'll let Jon come in at the end and give you some perspective on enterprise. But let me start with everything we said was really in our prepared remarks, but I'll go ahead and summarize that. So Hertz is a 5-year extension. That was obviously done early. That wasn't done and that wasn't up for renegotiation until the summer of 2027. As Jon mentioned, ABG is a 7-year deal. Look, I want to say it again, financially, we're thrilled to partner with both of these customers. We couldn't be happier. If I think about kind of what we said in the script and what we said in our earnings release, we talked about that they are in less favorable terms. We talked about that there may be some ability to modulate some of the volumes. That's something I think if you listen to the public statements from some of our customers, they mentioned that on their call. But here's what I would say is we've had these customers for 20 years, as Jon mentioned, we're in daily contact with our customers. Fleet volumes have always been important to us. And obviously, that's how they run their business. So I think we'll have a pretty good idea of what's going on for at least the near term. And I think the other thing is as we gain experience under the new contracts, we'll be able to better be positioned to give some -- maybe a little further down the road look someone that I can't today. And then I would say, I think in total, I could imagine that this question would come up quite a bit today is for competitive reasons. We can't disclose anything that's going on between our customers. But again, from our view, I think these contracts really strike the right balance of competitive pricing and pricing in the differentiated value of what we do at Verra, scale, reliability, and innovation. The contracts are unique. They're tailored to each customer. I don't know that that's necessarily new. They've always kind of been that way. And then I would say the final thing, long-standing, very, very deeply integrated partnerships, which I think were really strengthened as we had a leadership change here at Verra Mobility, and I think you can see the results. So Jon, do you want to say something about enterprise?

Yes, sure. Very impressed by the Enterprise Mobility team and what they're doing. I'd also just mention that we're engaged in positive discussions with them. And I think that for all of our large railcar customers, something that I think is rather defining as we're engaging with these large customers at the most senior levels in their businesses. They're also recognizing that they can use us as an accelerator in their business, particularly with respect to technology. We are a technology leader here, and I feel really, really comfortable with where we're taking these relationships. We're providing new technology avenues for them to continue to have more success in their businesses as they're also trying to transform. They have very complex businesses to run. And my goal and our company's goal is to make sure that we're helping make their lives easier and helping improve their end customer experiences. And that when we do that, we're going to have a great degree of mutual success. So really, really proud of the way we're refocusing the organization here to deliver a more customer-focused and customer-centric experience for our customers.

One moment for our next question that will come from the line of Daniel Moore with CJS Securities.