Q4 2024 Paysafe Ltd Earnings Call

In This Article:

Participants

Kirsten Nielsen; Head of IR; Paysafe Ltd

Bruce Lowthers; Chief Executive Officer, Executive Director; Paysafe Ltd

John Crawford; Chief Financial Officer; Paysafe Ltd

Jing Zhang; Analyst; UBS Group AG

Andrew Harte; Analyst; BTIG, LLC

Paul Obrecht; Analyst; Wolfe Research, LLC

Aditya Buddhavarapu; Analyst; Bank of America Securities

Spencer Brolley; Analyst; Jefferies Financial Group Inc.

James Friedman; Analyst; Susquehanna International Group, LLP

Presentation

Operator

Greetings and welcome to the Paysafe fourth quarter 2024 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. (Operator Instructions) A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. (Operator Instructions) As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It’s now my pleasure to turn the call over to Kirsten Nielsen, Head of Investor Relations.
Please go ahead.

Kirsten Nielsen

Thank you, and welcome to Paysafe’ s earnings conference call for the fourth quarter and full year 2024. Joining me today are Bruce Lothers, Chief Executive Officer, and John Crawford, Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, a reminder that this call will contain forward looking statements and should be considered in conjunction with cautionary statements contained in our earnings release and the company’s most recent SEC reports.
These statements reflect management’s current assumptions and expectations and are subject to factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from those forward looking statements. You should not place undue reliance on these statements.
Forward looking statements during this call speak only as of the date of this call and we undertake no obligation to update them. Today’s presentation also contains non-GAAP financial measures. You can find additional information about these measures and reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures in today’s press release and in the appendix of this presentation, which are available on the Investor Relations section of our website.
With that, I’ll turn the call over to Bruce.

Bruce Lowthers

Thanks, Kirsten, and thank you all for joining us today. We had a very active quarter and released much of the 2024 results and 2025 guidance last month. So I’ll start off with a few simple messages that we’d like for you to take away from the call.
In 2024, we delivered 7% organic revenue growth supported by all key regions and product lines. Last month, we announced the divestiture of our direct marketing payment processing business, which marks the completion of our portfolio rationalization and sharpens our focus on Paysafe’ s ideal customers and verticals.
This represents an important step forward to enhance our financial performance and valuation by eliminating a declining non-core revenue stream and reducing our exposure to higher risk merchants. We continue to reduce net leverage, which is 4.7 times at year end, down from five times at the end of 2023.
At the same time, we made significant investments, while returning more than $40,000,000 to shareholders through our first ever share repurchase program. We have a few puts and takes across the numbers in Q4, which John will take you through in more detail, but I want to reiterate that we’ve made incredible progress delivering on our priorities and executing our three-year growth plan. Turning to slide 4.
Our fourth quarter and full year results are consistent with our press release last month, so I’ll keep this brief. Revenue in the fourth quarter increased 1% year-over-year resulting in full year revenue of $1.7 billion, an increase of 6%. When we look at the organic growth, excluding impacts from disposed business, FX and interest, our revenue growth would have been roughly 6% for the fourth quarter and 7% for the full year.
Adjusted EBITDA was $103 million for the fourth quarter, resulting in $452 million for the full year, down 1% compared to last year, largely reflected the accelerated merchant exits in Q4 related to the direct marketing business, as well as associated increase in credit losses. As a reminder, we also made incremental investments totaling $29 million as part of our 2024 objectives to expand our sales capabilities and optimize the portfolio.
With the portfolio repositioning now behind us and given that a large portion of these investment expenses are one off in nature, we expect to see meaningful improvement in our adjusted EBITDA growth in 2025. We also generated strong unlevered free cash flow of $300 million in 2024, reflecting a 66% conversion of adjusted EBITDA. Lastly, for the first year since going public, we achieved a positive GAAP net income, which was $22 million for the full year of 2024, compared to a net loss of $20 million last year.
Turning to slide 5, I’ll double click on our growth drivers in 2024, aligned with our strategic initiatives. The first bucket that you see here is attrition, which includes our voluntary attrition from relationships we exited in higher risk sectors such as crypto.
This also reflects market attrition within SMB, particularly at the micro level, which typically has higher levels of attrition. The next pillar is growth from our existing clients or same store sales, which contributed roughly 9% to growth during the year.
The last pillar is our growth from new client wins, as well as the introduction of new products, which together contributed roughly 11%. When we put all of this together and look at our organic performance, we see 7% growth in 2024, supported by cross selling and growth with existing clients as well as new logos and new products.
Turning to slide 6, I’ll close out the discussion of our 2024 objectives. We successfully expanded our sales capabilities by welcoming 170 new quota carrying reps to the Paysafe sales team. We continue to see good momentum across our enterprise level accounts where revenue is up more than 10% for the year, including double digit growth from e commerce on the merchant acquiring side and single digit growth from digital wallets on the consumer side.
The investments in our sales team expansion and portfolio optimization reached $29 million for the year, which generated more than $50 million in year revenue, and we expect this contribution to roughly double in 2025. On our consumer acquisition strategy, we made several foundational improvements, which have supported stability in our user base. Our classic wallet users surpassed 1 million for the first time in three years, driven by the development of better incentives and promotional programs.
Across the broader 7 million user base, we’ve seen favorable trends from new partner integrations, such as Revolut and Deutsche Bank, as well as new product introductions. For example, revenue from online distribution of our e cash solutions nearly doubled compared to last year, as more users are loading their accounts digitally versus going into a store.
We expect consumer acquisition to benefit from continued product initiatives, market expansion and improve marketing execution in 2025. Finally, while still relatively small numbers, our revenue generated from our product initiatives continue to be up significantly compared to last year and reflects 6% of our total revenue in 2024. We are focused on driving this higher in 2025 with a goal to reach double digit contribution over the near term.
Turning to slide 7. I’ll highlight some of the additional points on the momentum we see across the sales organization. Today, we have a more balanced growth profile, including double digit growth from our top 20 clients. We also saw a 6% increase in the total number of enterprise level merchants in 2024. Our growth was relatively broad based across all key regions, including high single digit growth from our top 20 countries.
When we look at how this compares to the performance of these metrics during the two prior years, growth was in the low single digits or even declining. So we’ve demonstrated a lot of improvement across the board. Turning to bookings, in 2024 approximately 1/3 of our new enterprise deals measured by annual contract value were with existing customers, reflecting both territory expansion and product cross selling.
Additionally, we saw total ACV of bookings expand 40% over last year, including strong growth in Latin America. Our current pipeline has also grown by more than 40% and we are targeting a 20% increase in our enterprise pipeline for FTE as our sales organization becomes more productive.
In 2024, we enhanced our training program for new sellers by launching the sales academy. This initiative provides an effective onboarding experience coupled with continuous learning. Our goal is to empower our sales teams to approach challenges with confidence, enhancing their ability to close deals successfully. Overall, we have a much stronger sales motion in place today and it boils down to execution in 2025.
Moving to slide 8 for a supplemental view of growth by business line. In 2022, several of our core products were in decline with growth entirely driven by the SMB business. Over the last two years, we’ve returned to growth across all core products, particularly high value areas such as e commerce and wallets, despite a headwind from FX and interest this year.
SMB growth remains healthy in the mid-single digits supported by consumer resilience in the US as well as our initiatives to optimize the portfolio. So again, across a number of views, you can see the quality of our revenue and the overall balance of our growth profile has improved.
Turning to slide 9. When you look at the last three years, we’ve seen an acceleration of organic revenue growth, where we’ve gone from flat in 2022 to 4% in 2023 and 7% in 2024. We believe this view helps you see the underlying growth when we exclude the inorganic puts and takes and going forward into 2025. This view will exclude the divested business as well.
It’s also important to highlight that we have delivered this improvement in growth and quality of revenue, while investing significantly in the business, rationalizing the portfolio, and maintaining solid free cash flow and reducing our leverage.
Turning to slide 10. Our team has a lot to be proud of when we look back at our achievements over the last three years. I won’t spend much time on this as we’ve covered most of these topics already, but I’ll share a couple of additional highlights.
One area that we haven’t discussed as much externally are the steps we’ve taken over the last two years to drive cost savings through centralizing our service functions and eliminating business units, which allowed us to self-fund a portion of our investment needs and redeploy resources to revenue generating functions.
We now have the right people in the right positions to be more successful and better aligned with our goals. And continuing with the topic of efficiency, we've also improved deal execution with faster onboarding for enterprise merchants.
In 2024, our average contract launch time frame was about 60% faster than we were delivering in 2022, driven by continued process improvement, system consolidation, and the creation of a focused customer success team.
On the consumer side, we’ve enhanced customer experience by implementing intelligent self-service tools. And now 44% of our customer service contacts are resolved through automation. These improvements have resulted in lower friction and improved engagement with our digital wallets, along with the reduction in the total number of customer service cases.
Lastly, we’ve talked about derisking in connection with the disposal of direct marketing, which lowers our revenue volatility and credit loss exposure. But we’ve also enhanced our profile more broadly to minimize and diversify our exposure across our risk, compliance, and regulatory functions.
Turning to slide 11. We view 2024 as the completion of our turnaround, now shifting our focus to the real growth engines of the company. On the product side, we’re driving more revenue from new products, advancing our PaySafe Wallet platform across our branded solutions, including market expansion within Latin America, as well as unbranded solutions, such as our business wallet for SMBs and white label wallets.
As our new sales organization continues to ramp up, we will focus on enhancing our sales cycle productivity and revenue conversion. We also see opportunities to bolster both of these areas through partnerships, which will help us reach new merchants and consumers and expand our product and service delivery across our core regions.
Lastly, we continue to drive greater scale and interoperability of our products, enabling users to leverage the functionality of the entire Paysave network and create better experiences for our customers and employees. With that, I’ll ask John to review the financial results and outlook.