Greetings and welcome to the Euronet Worldwide second quarter 2024 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speakers’ presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during this session, you will need to press star-one-one on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star-one-one again. Please be advised that today’s conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Mr. Adam Godderz, General Counsel for Euronet Worldwide. Thank you, Mr. Godderz, you may begin.

Thank you. Good morning everyone and welcome to Euronet’s second quarter 2024 earnings conference call. On today’s call, we have Mike Brown, our Chairman and CEO, and Rick Weller, our CFO. Before we begin, I would like to call your attention to the forward-looking statements disclaimer on the second slide of the PowerPoint presentation we will be making today. Statements made on this call that concern Euronet’s or its management’s intentions, expectations or predictions of future performance are forward-looking statements. Euronet’s actual results may vary materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements as a result of a number of factors, including those listed on the second slide of our presentation. In addition, the PowerPoint presentation includes a reconciliation of the non-GAAP financial measures we’ll be using during the call to the most comparable GAAP measures. Now I’ll turn the call over to our CFO, Rick Weller.

Thanks Adam. I will begin with my comments on Slide 5. We delivered a record second quarter on all key consolidated P&L line items. We delivered revenue of $986 million, adjusted operating income of $134 million, adjusted EBITDA of $178 million, and adjusted EPS of $2.25. Leading the way for these results was EFT with double-digit constant currency growth on all financial measures. For epay, results were similar to the prior year, and money transfer delivered constant currency revenue growth of 8% for the quarter with a modest increase in operating income on a constant currency basis. Our quarterly adjusted EPS was up 11% over the prior year, and when considering the first six months of this year, it’s up about 16.5% over the prior year. You can see we are well on track to meet our earnings guidance range we’ve shared with you and lining up for an opportunity to exceed the range. Moreover, this quarter we continued our track record of producing strong free cash flows, producing more than $80 million, and because we didn’t have any larger pending acquisitions or other requirements for the free cash flow, we repurchased $114 million of our shares or about 2% of the shares outstanding. Given the timing of the repurchases, there was only a marginal benefit to the second quarter adjusted EPS, but we know this repurchase will improve earnings per share by 2% for future periods. I’ll also point out that our consolidated operating margins expanded by about 90 basis points over the prior year and we expect to see continued expansion through the second half of the year. On Slide 6, we present a summary of our balance sheet compared to the prior quarter. As you can see, we ended the quarter with $1.27 billion in unrestricted cash…

Thank you Rick, and thank you everyone for joining us today. I’ll begin my comments on Slide No. 10. As you can see looking at the green trend line, that little dotted one on the chart, we continue on our path of double-digit earnings, reflecting the consistency of the consolidated annual earnings results. As I have reflected on these results, I think they provide an opportunity to highlight the success that we have delivered diversifying and expanding the business across all three segments, fully accepting that this diversification may result in fluctuations on the timing of when each segment delivers its contribution to the annual consolidated results. In EFT prior to COVID, our financial results were largely tied to how many people traveled in Europe during the summer months. While the travelers are still important to our annual results, we are seeing the diversification of our revenue and earnings contributions from non tourist-related ATM transactions in Europe from ATM transactions in new markets outside of Europe and POS transactions in our merchant acquiring business, and the benefit of new acquisitions such as Infinitium. In epay, the growth of our core business has remained strong, as Rick said, growing our core 10% this quarter over the same period last year. We continued to grow this core business with new products and new market expansion. We have also found success outside of the core business in running promotional campaigns for some of our large retailers and by making investments in our internal software to productize and sell it to external customers. These promotional campaigns are not always consistent from year to year, let alone quarter to quarter, but our top line, bottom line and free cash flows have all benefited from our success in managing these promotions. In money transfer, we have…

[Operator instructions] Our first question comes from Andrew Schmidt with Citi Global Markets. Your line is now open.

Hey Mike, hey Rick. Thanks for taking my questions. Appreciate all the comments. Just wanted to start off with money transfer - good to see the continued share gains there. Maybe you could discuss what you’re seeing in the competitive environment further. There’s been some more positive market structure changes in the U.S., maybe you could put some points on that, and then just more broadly on the marketing expense, if you could comment on where that’s being deployed, whether it--it sounds like it’s digital, but if you can confirm it’s digital versus retail, and then the expectation for the remainder of the year there. Thanks a lot.

Well, with respect to the competitive dynamics of the industry, you’ve got to understand the money transfer business is hyper competitive, always has been. We really haven’t seen much difference. You can see that our revenues per transaction, our margins per transaction really haven’t changed over the last couple of years, so even though we hear about competition, we really haven’t felt it. Maybe one of the reasons for that is we’re growing four times faster than the market - I don’t know, so with respect, I don’t see much change there. With respect to your second question of where did we spend the money, most of that was digital. You saw that our digital growth was 24% over prior year, was 44% growth in our new customer acquisition. We’ve realized that our marketing is working, we’ve got actually a new set of executives who have been working on that over the last few quarters. We see the results, so we thought that would be worth making additional investments, so mostly in digital.

Perfect, thank you for that, Mike. Then maybe on the EFT segment, I appreciate the comments about the travel recovery, but if you could put a finer point on how the tourist ATM performance came in relative to your expectations. I know last year, we had some fluctuations in transactions. Wondering if trends--

Yes, last year--

--early observations in the third quarter. Thanks Mike.

Yes, so last year, we didn’t miss transactions, we missed spend per head, okay, and so this year it looks like it came in about where we thought it would. As far as this whole travel recovery and everything, I think that’s pretty much--you know, so we’re at 95% and we’ll probably grow a little past that. At the end of the day, this whole travel question is finally in the rear view mirror, so I think from this point forward, it’s about network expansion, it’s about making the network more effective by getting rid of the ATMs that aren’t as effective, and then of course with EFT, we’ve got a big chunk of business coming from our EMS, from our merchant services business. Oh, and did you hear the word, access fees? I mean, that’s what I’ve been hoping for, for a long time. What that means now is that when you get travelers within the euro zone going from a euro to euro country, and that country, the recipient country now gets that traveler and their access fees, there is possibilities for me to make two to three times as much on that transaction as we did before, and that’s in multiple countries now. I think we lit up three countries or something this quarter, we’ve got several more in the offing - that’s going to give us a nice little boost in margin, because it’s the same transaction, same number of transactions, you’re just making three times as much money as you used to make.

Absolutely. Yes, you’ve been talking about those for some time, so it’s good to see those come through.

Finally!

Thank you very much, Mike. Appreciate the comments, Mike. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Pete Heckmann with DA Davidson. Your line is now open.

Hey good morning, thanks for taking the question. Following onto the ATM access fees, I think you said three more countries are potentially going--you’re going to roll that out potentially in three more countries later this year. I guess so far, the countries that have rolled it out don’t appear to be big, where Euronet has a big footprint - correct me if I’m wrong there, but do you see some of the countries like Poland, Spain, any of the countries where you have a very large footprint also considering allowing those ATM access fees?

Yes, so yes, they are a little bit smaller countries. Some of them are really good little tourist countries, like those island countries of Cyprus and Malta, etc., and they were all euro countries, so being able to add access fees is a great thing for us. With respect to the bigger countries, you mentioned Spain. Spain, we already have surcharge and access fees in Spain, so that’s not going to change too much. I think access fees for locals may come too, but that’s going to be later in the year, we would expect. But the point is it’s coming now, finally after hoping for a long time. We should be able to have access fees in most countries. It would be nice to get them in Poland - I don’t see that happening this year, but we’ll have to wait and see.

Okay, okay. Then just--

But it’s all--yes, it’s all pure margin, Pete. I mean, that’s the nice thing, and in a lot of these markets, you can make money on a cross-currency transaction, but the locals get by for 30 cents, so that’s--that will help us.

Definitely.

And the interchange--and also, I’m sorry, the interchange increases are happening as well. There is--I mean, the reality is we’re not the only ones who own ATMs in Europe. The banks own them, the big banks with a lot of overhead are over here, allowing internet banks to utilize their ATM infrastructure at a third or a fifth of what it really cost them, so they’re basically subsidizing their competitors, so the big banks are pushing for interchange increases. That’s why we’re starting to see that happen as well.

Okay, that’s great. I just wanted to follow up on the--within money transfer, I think there was a comment that some competitors were either exiting markets or something about competitor consolidation, and you had new agent accounts up 35% year-over-year. Can you just give a little bit more color on that?

Okay, so yes, that’s happening, but you know what? To be honest, that’s always kind of happening. It’s a hyper competitive market. We saw two larger guys kind of go belly-up this last quarter, so, but there’s always somebody, you know? Their transactions, their money transfers get spread out across the industry. Because we’re growing faster than everybody else, we kind of get more than our fair share.

Got it, okay. I’ll get back in the queue. I appreciate it.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Charles Nabhan with Stephens. Your line is now open.

Good morning and thank you for taking my question. With the acquisition of the ATMs in Malaysia this quarter, I was wondering if you could just kind of level-set for us and give us a sense for what the fleet looks like from a geographic standpoint in terms of how much is in Asia, how much is in Europe, how you think about that fleet from a travel versus local or domestic concentration standpoint.

So we’ve got a little bit of a mixed bag here. The ATMs we just bought in Malaysia are focused more on locals, but of course there are international travelers to that. In the other markets, where we deploy our own ATMs, we’re really focusing more on travelers but we’re catching a lot of the locals too, because those developing markets are just under ATM-ed, you might say, so both the locals and the international tourists do need access to cash. As far as the total number, Rick, maybe you can help me here?

In Malaysia, it was about 800 ATMs, and they’re all in Malaysia. None of those are in Europe or whatever.

Right. But as far as outside of Europe versus inside of Europe, you know, we mentioned Asia, we mentioned North Africa. Between--across all of them, we must have 3,000, 3,500 ATMs, something like that, I imagine, outside of Europe?

Yes, and I would tell you that the concentration of ATMs deployed during the first half of the year, it’s been a larger focus outside of Europe than inside of Europe. We’ve been talking about that for some time, that we see a number of new markets to go to. We see good opportunity in the Asian markets, those North African markets, the South American markets, and I would expect that we’ll continue to see that kind of progress.

Got it, helpful color. I appreciate that. As my follow-up, I believe you had commented on epay, the comps getting a little easier in the back half of the year and potentially exiting ’24 at a mid to upper single digit operating income growth. I guess first, I wanted to make sure I heard that correctly; and then secondly, I wanted to get some color around the revenue side of that equation. If we’re exiting at mid to high single digits operating income growth, how should we think about that from a revenue standpoint?

Yes, we would always say that our operating income will grow at a rate a little faster than our revenue, because we enjoy the benefits of leverage and that. But I believe you did hear it right, is that we expect the operating income growth to pick up here in the second half of the year. We’re going to get the benefit of the execution of some of these promotional programs that we didn’t see in the second quarter, and we’re--as I said, we would anticipate for the full year of our epay that we’ll be in that mid to upper single digit operating income growth range for the full year, which then by definition means that as we go through the second half of the year, we’re going to see even stronger numbers to get to that for the full year. So yes, I think you heard that correct, that we should expect to see more momentum build in the second half of the year for epay.

And a little bit more, as Rick said, it’s a little bit more weighted for the fourth quarter. I mean, these promotions are signed up, we will implement them, we kind of know what’s happening, we know the timing of them, so they’ll be more in the fourth quarter than in the third quarter.

Got it, thanks again.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Darrin Peller with Wolfe Research. Your line is now open.

Hi, this is Daniel Krebs on for Darrin. I wanted to talk a bit about merchant services and Piraeus. Has this expanded beyond Greece yet, and how should we think about the sizing and impact of expansion into Spain, Portugal and Italy across the coming years? Thanks.

Okay, so most of the growth that--the stellar growth that you saw in the second quarter was in Greece, but we are now expanding. We’ve signed up--you know, we’ve got sales forces out there pitching our product now in those three countries that you mentioned, which are Portugal, Spain and Italy, so we’ve got a great platform. It’s screaming successful in Greece. We want to use that and attract similar merchants in these other Mediterranean-touching countries. We’ll see more of that over the coming quarters because we’re just starting there, but in the meantime with 15,000 frickin’ new merchants per quarter for the last several quarters, that’s pretty amazing. We’ll just keep growing those.

Got it, understood. Do you expect that 15,000 merchant per quarter number to step now with this geo-expansion, or more of the same going forward?

Well, we’ll just say that we’re growing well faster than the market, and we’re going to continue to do our best. We’ll find out what those numbers are. Obviously if we can get into new markets, that would help us because most all those 15,000 were just in one market. Greece is a great market, but it’s 10 million people and it’s only so big, so being able to get into three new huge markets would be really nice.

Yes, understood. That sounds great. Thank you so much for the color.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Ken Suchoski with Autonomous Research. Your line is now open.

Hey, good morning Mike and Rick. Thanks for taking the question. Maybe just on the direct access fees, did something change in the market that allowed you to introduce those fees, and I guess, is there any way to quantify the upside to revenue and operating income, either this year or next year, from direct access fees and higher interchange rates? Thank you.

Well yes, quantification, we’ll hold off on that. I mean, we’ve tried to give you some good perspective that we expect our earnings to be growing 10% to 15%. As we’ve shown you, we’ve already grown it well outside that range for the first half of the year, and we feel very good about our opportunities to continue forward. This will just give us more confidence that at delivering those kinds of results and puts us in a good position to continue that growth trend into next year, because obviously this year, we’re only going to get a small part of it because we’re only getting a part of the year of it. In some of those cases, we may only be getting a month or two of it, which means that next year, that’s going to be lining up for growth contributors there. We’ll hold off on giving sizing of numbers, but suffice it to say it really reinforces our confidence for growth this year and puts us in very good position to see a path to similar double-digit growth rates for next year, again consistent with what we’ve done over the last 10 to 20 years.

Okay, and just to be clear, can you go into other markets and add these surcharging fees, or does a rule have to be put in place for that to happen?

It does have to--there’s a complicated kind of web of things that have to happen, anywhere from card scheme rules to regulatory rules and things like that. But if you kind of go back several quarters and look, we’ve been talking about this now for several quarters. We can kind of read the tea leaves. As Mike said, these banks have gone years with cost increases and no increases in interchange rates, and there’s more and more competitors that are non-bank competitors in the market, and those guys aren’t deploying ATMs, they’re just living off of the benefits of their competitor. The environment is changing. We’re seeing that the banks are kind of getting to the end of their rope on this. We’re seeing where like, even in the U.K. a few years ago when Link took down the rates and ATMs were pulled out of the market, now they’ve come back in and they’ve said, you must keep ATMs in place, and offered some additional incentives for ATM owners to keep ATMs there. So we’ve seen this kind of developing and we can’t tell you exactly how many more countries will be available next year, when they’ll open up, but we really feel confident that the inertia is moving in our direction on both the access fee front and the interchange front.

Okay, great. That’s really helpful, Rick. Then maybe just regarding the increased digital marketing spend in money transfer, why do this now? Was there something you saw in the market from an opportunity standpoint and you wanted to grow your digital footprint - I think digital is just 12% of transactions, or was it more of a response to what competitors are doing in the market?

Yes, it didn’t really have anything to do with competitors. We’ve got a new digital marketing team over the last year, their results have been quite improved over the last year, and so we just wanted to put a little bit more gasoline on the fire of expansion because we saw the results. At the end of the day, digital marketing should bring results, and if they’re not bringing enough, you use less marketing; but we’re happy with what we’ve seen.

Well, we saw those results, which is the first and most important piece, and then secondly we feel very good about what our earnings contribution for this year is going to be and we felt that we had the earnings stream to be able to invest in it.

Okay, great. All right, thanks Rick, thanks Mike.

Yes, and still pick up a million shares of stock on the side.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Mike Grondahl with Northland Securities. Your line is now open.

Hey guys, just a follow-up. The $3.9 million marketing advertising spend for money transfer, any regions to call out where you spent more of that, or was that kind of even across the globe?

It’s kind of even with where our transactions come from. We get the bulk of our transactions from the U.S., so most of it was there, but we spread it out.

Got it, and then--

And by the way, that $3.9 million was the increase of spend. It doesn’t mean that if you take that way, we have no spend. That was just an increase this quarter over the run rate that we’ve had.

Yes, the incremental amount. Great, great. Then hey, when you say access fees, Mike, is that a fee on top of domestic interchange, or--

Okay, so usually the way these things work is if you’re--a domestic access fee is the technical term for a surcharge, and usually in these markets, the way it works is if you can, do a domestic access. If you can do a DAF, you then don’t get the interchange, okay? This interchange of 20 cents or 30 cents or whatever goes away, but you pick up two or three dollars on the domestic access fee.

Got it. I know you guys won’t comment on a range for, let’s say, 2025 from these DAFs, but on average, is the fee going up, I don’t know, 10 cents, 20 cents per transaction? Is there any metric you can give us to help us kind of size it?

Okay, so you’ve got to be careful, because we’ve got a mix of transactions. You don’t necessarily DAF--like, let’s say you’ve got a euro card, I don’t know, it was issued in France and it goes to Romania or whatever--no, Romania doesn’t have--. Let’s say it goes to Cyprus, which is euro as well, okay? So before that, we would make what’s called an international interchange fee, which would be about one euro. Well now, we can make three euros.

Got it, and that’s all margin?

But you’ve got--you know, you can’t multiply it across all the transactions, because we have cross-border transactions, cross-currency transactions, local transactions. It’s a mix.

Network participation, where we have arrangements--

Yes, we have network participation agreements in a lot of these markets. Actually, when DAF comes to a market, it give us an opportunity to actually acquire even more transactions by signing these network participation deals, which allow us to sell our transactions on a wholesale basis to people like these internet banks. There’s just a whole bunch of different things.

Sure. Well hey, I’m glad you’re getting a little--

But at the end of the day, it’s pricing pressure up, you know?

The other thing that this does, which is so different than interchange, bear in mind that interchange, we have no say in what that number is going to be. We have to take the 30 cents and that’s it, that’s all you get. In the access fee world, we have some decision making that we can make on the price of that transaction. We could set it at two, we could set it at three euro, we could set it at one euro. It really gives us more flexibility to manage our business than just simply take whatever the card schemes are going to give you.

Yes. You can really use some price elasticity algorithms to figure out what maximizes for us.

Great. Well hey, I’m glad you guys got that tailwind, and it’d be nice to get a little bit more color in the future quarters. Thanks, guys.

Yes, yes.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Gus Gala with Monness, Crespi, Hardt & Company. Your line is now open.

Hi Rick, hi Mike. Thanks for taking the questions. I think looking back, after the merchant services Piraeus acquisition, you talked about structural margin, kind of a decrease in EFT. It’s now been two quarters of plus-60 incremental EBITDA margins. Taking all the commentary on what’s happening to the ATM fleet beyond the access fees, just like the potential for geographic--like, that mix changing over time and then Ren, do we think maybe the margin structure is closer or even better than we thought it was going to be, going back a year or two years?

Going back a year or two years, I’d say definitely yes, okay? But I think going back to, let’s say call it ’19, in ’19 I would say that we had a lot lower cost structure. As you’ve heard us talk about, the cost over these last few years has been very, very significant, and so my sense is that compared to--certainly compared to a couple of years ago, definitely yes. I would probably be more bullish today on what that operating margin in EFT would look like than I would have been six months ago, because we’re seeing the realization of some of these access fee opportunities come to the table. We’ve also seen the results of the management team being able to effectively manage costs and deal with that, so I would probably feel--and as Mike said, the Piraeus merchant service business has been growing nicely. That margin on that business is probably more right in line with the lower end of the average on EFT business, but as it’s growing pretty fast, it kind of helps solidify and anchor that. So yes, I’d probably feel a little bit more bullish about it now, but maybe not quite as strong as what we would have seen in ’19.

Great, I appreciate all the color.

Yes no problem. Thank you Gus, and I think we’ve got to shut down now because it’s top of the hour. But Gus, thank you for your question, and for everybody else on the line, thank you very much for listening. We’ll catch you next quarter.

This concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.