Flywire Corporation (NASDAQ:FLYW) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Darrin Peller: There was a comment made about India slowing down. And just to be clear, I mean the comps were fairly materially easier. So I guess, maybe just a better understanding of what’s happening in the market around volume trends on a quarter by quarter basis or a vertical by basis would be really helpful. And then just quickly, from a financial question standpoint, just the FX. Can you just touch on that? I don’t know what FX impact was on the volume side also.

Michael Ellis: So the main thing that we called out in our comments was that India had lower FX volume than we had anticipated in our forecast. So again, India FX revenue grew, India FX volume grew, but relative to the expectations that we had, it was a little bit softer. So that affected a number of our geographies. But again, only part of what’s overall a very favorable picture of growth across the EDU business and growth in FX.

Operator: Next question comes from the line of Jason Kupferberg with Bank of America.

Tyler DuPont: Good afternoon, guys. This is Tyler DuPont on for Jason. Thanks for taking the questions. Just to start with a more numbers heavy question here. Since the updated guidance. There’s a few moving pieces to it. I just wanted to make sure I’m thinking about this the right way. It looks like revenue left ancillary was lowered by around $2 million at the midpoint on a full year basis. But if you add back the 3.8 from FX and you subtract out the $1 million from StudyLink. Looks like the guide has essentially ticked up by roughly $800,000 or so, on an organic constant currency valuation basis. So I guess, just first of all, is that the right way to think about it? And secondly, if you can provide any clarity on what you’ve seen evolving over the past few months from a demand perspective and how that translated into the updated guidance? Any clarity there would be helpful.

Michael Ellis: Sure. It’s Mike Ellis. So your understanding of the optimism we see relative to Q4 and our full year guidance. You’ve addressed that mathematics appropriately. It is $0.8 million that we added to Q4, and $1.6 million for the full year impact associated with it. So it’s a good result as it relates to the optimism of the business. Now when you talk about the trends that we’re seeing, some of it has to do with the fact that we are very excited about what we’ve seen in our educational clients across Europe and the UK, as well as our travel business growing quite nicely. So we remain bullish about Q4 and full year. And the math that you shared relative to the guidance was in fact accurate.

Tyler DuPont: And then just to double click on education. I wanted to ask about the domestic payments business within education. I know it’s an area of focus, but I’m just curious if you can provide an update on the success of onboarding educational institutions into domestic payments, both within the U.S. and internationally? I know during the prepared remarks, it sounded like there were a few clients that expanded into the service offering in the U.S. How would you compare that strategy, that land and expand strategy, versus international educational institutions? Are there any institutions that are going domestic directly and then going to foreign later? Just sort of how we should be thinking about pricing, take rate dynamics, anything there?

Michael Massaro: Well, first, let me just talk about the success with clients. So as you heard in my comments, we shared that we had signed, multiple clients in Q3 to the domestic student financial software offering that’s our SFS offering that added million of dollars of deal value to the quarter. And obviously, we look forward that being a business that stays with us for a long time. So in terms of the success of SFS in the quarter, felt very good about that and hoping to carry that momentum forward with all the work we’re doing around our go-to-market motions for SFS here in the U.S. The bigger picture of all this is that as a company, we’ve developed capabilities around domestic that are relevant all around the world. And the comment I made a couple of minutes ago was that that success domestically as we move around the world is allowing us to monetize domestic volumes in many countries is and that is becoming a more meaningful part of our revenue stream.

It’s a very good economics to us. The only thing that maybe a bit of a surprise or not surprise for all of you, but just understand that, that will show up in transactional revenue, whereas our SFS software shows up predominantly in platform revenue.

Operator: Next question comes from the line of Tien-tsin Huang with JPMorgan.

Tien-tsin Huang: I just wanted to clarify with the deployment being delayed and some comments on the sales cycle. Is that just a cyclical issue? Is it a resourcing issue? Or are you seeing clients maybe looking to lower the total cost of ownership of how they engage with you?

Rob Orgel: I think it’s just the nature of these kinds of more complex deployments when you are looking at the more complex end of the spectrum of what we do, which is most typical of education and healthcare where we are doing some of the bigger projects. We don’t get to completely control the time line and sometimes you see these things slip by a little bit. And so the comments we tried to make to put some color and flavor around this. Our sort of modest delays, we expect all of them to go live. The only question will be what portion of the contribution of the year that we met, but they will all go live and we expect they will all be long-term customers for us.

Michael Massaro: Tien-tsin, the only thing I’d add to that is, obviously, as I have said before, we don’t control when our clients do their billing. And as you get closer to that date, if they have any challenges on their end of launching or confidence in their IT systems being ready or who is on standby when they are launching a new system. All those things can lead to modest pushes as examples. And so again, we don’t control all of that. But obviously, as Rob said, we expect all these clients to go live continue to just get live, it’s just a question of when.

Operator: Next question comes from the line of Jeff Cantwell with Seaport Research.

Jeff Cantwell : Just wanted to follow-up a little bit on what you’re discussing with the EBITDA line and get a feel for — I mean, obviously, there’s a lot of moving parts to how you’re thinking about margins going forward. But can you tell us based on what you’re seeing right now and how you’re feeling about the business, are you thinking more towards the 300 basis point side of your guidance on an annual basis, that’s expansion or kind of 600? I just want to give a feel for where your expectations may have shifted based on what you’re seeing currently?