Shift4 Payments, Inc. (NYSE:FOUR) Q3 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

Shift4 Payments, Inc. (NYSE:FOUR) Q3 2025 Earnings Call Transcript November 6, 2025

Shift4 Payments, Inc. misses on earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $0.98 EPS, expectations were $1.46.

Operator: Greetings, and welcome to the Shift4 Q3 2025 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. On today’s call, we have Taylor Lauber, CEO; and Christopher N. Cruz, CFO. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Tom McCrohan, Head of Investor Relations. Thank you, Tom. You may begin.

Thomas McCrohan: Thank you, operator, and good morning, everyone, and welcome to Shift4’s Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. With me on the call today are Taylor Lauber, our CEO; and Chris Cruz, our Chief Financial Officer. This call is being webcast on the Investor Relations section of our website, which can be found at investors.shift4.com. Today’s call is also being simulcast on X Spaces, which can be accessed through our corporate X account at Shift4. Our quarterly shareholder letter, quarterly financial results and other materials related to our quarterly results have all been posted to our IR website. Our call and earnings materials today include forward-looking statements. These statements are not guarantees of future performance, and our actual results could differ materially as a result of certain risks, uncertainties and many important factors.

Additional information concerning those factors is available in our most recent reports on Forms 10-K and 10-Q, which you can find on the SEC’s website and the Investor Relations section of our corporate website. For any non-GAAP financial information discussed on this call, the related GAAP measures and reconciliations are available in today’s quarterly shareholder letter. With that, let me turn the call over to Taylor. Taylor?

David Lauber: Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining the call. Starting with our quarterly performance, we delivered results in line with our Q3 guidance. Gross revenue less network fees were $589 million, and adjusted EBITDA was $292 million. Each of these was up 61% and 56%, respectively. When excluding the impact of Global Blue, gross revenue less network fees grew 19% year-over-year. You will find in our shareholder letter that we also highlight the organic growth of the business, that is to say excluding the impact of recent M&A. Chris will go into more detail here, but that growth was 18% year-over-year. Volumes were in line with our expectations at roughly $55 billion. Each of these growth scenarios can be compared with the medium-term guidance we set forth in our Investor Day in February, and we’ve also done so in our shareholder letter.

You will note that the high teens sit on our hands case compares favorably with 19% delivered in this quarter, while the inclusion of Global Blue obviously brings things notably higher. Furthermore, we continue to find attractive capital allocation opportunities, which supports our most likely case of 30%-plus gross revenue less network fee growth over the medium term. Chris will walk you through our adjusted free cash flow, but while early, we’re also feeling ahead of pace for our $1 billion target. Some notable puts and takes in the quarter. Our blended spreads on payment volume were stable at 62 basis points, and we expect them to remain so through the end of the year. Tax-free shopping had some tough comparables, particularly in Asia as a result of a particularly weak Japanese yen last summer.

Sales in Store were negative 11% in Asia during Q3, but recovered throughout the quarter and were positive in October. Separately, in the U.S., the last 2 weeks of September and the subsequent weeks of October presented more same-store sales volatility than we’ve seen in prior periods. While not consistent across verticals, same-store sales have generally skewed negative to our expectations. To put a finer point on it, we saw same-store sales, whether that be restaurants or hospitality, range from positive 1% to negative 4% with meaningful volatility week to week. While not immune from the broader economy, our deliberate and balanced transformation over the past several years does mean we are more diversified and scale, both geographically and by industry than at any point in our history.

We also continue to add lots of high-quality customers, as I mentioned above. And we continue to complement our growth with massive payments cross-sell funnel, which becomes increasingly attractive during times of economic uncertainty. The competitive landscape has been a topic of serious debate among investors throughout the last few months. While I can imagine it’s tricky to aggregate all of the various data, we would like to reiterate that the competitive landscape from our perspective has been unchanged for quite some time. We are the #1 in hotels in the U.S., we are the #1 in stadiums, and we are the #2 in restaurants but with a large TAM and a clear differentiation in both our strategy and product focus. We are only just beginning to bring these products all over the world where there isn’t a clear market leader for any of these verticals.

Global Blue also puts us as an undisputed category leader in luxury retail global. And with regard to Global Blue, this is our first quarter since closing the transaction in early July. This business brings both an industry-leading product for luxury retail and also an extensive two-sided network consisting of the best luxury brands around the globe and the high net worth shoppers that frequent them. They are also deeply embedded in the commerce experience at the store, presenting natural synergies for payments. Sales in Store at Global Blue were 5% above the prior year, with Europe growing 13% and Asia being negative 11% for the reasons that I mentioned earlier. We’re reasonably happy with these results considering the negative impact currency has played throughout the year.

These results are also before any synergies from business combination. You will find the detailed summary of Global Blue’s performance in our shareholder letter. And from an integration perspective, we are on track with previously discussed plants. Our 3-in-1 payment terminal for payments, currency conversion and VAT refund eligibility detection is in beta. We also highlighted several Australian hotel payment wins in our shareholder letter distributed this morning. Of note, all the hotels mentioned are owned by Accor, the largest hotel operator in Australia and New Zealand, and also a very large hotel operator globally. The Australian hotel wins represent an early proof point to our strategy to take our industry-leading products into new geographies and markets around the world is working.

In Restaurants, we’re proud to welcome Nobu, but also signed thousands of other restaurants this quarter across Canada, the U.K., Ireland and Germany, with our international production improving to over 1,300 merchants signed each month. In Hospitality, we won Hyatt Vacation Club and will power payments for their over 20 resort properties around the globe. In Sports and Entertainment, we signed the Cincinnati Bengals, Clemson University, North Carolina State, Rutgers University, and Syracuse University, that one was for you, Jordan. Lastly, we’d like to point out the opportunities that can seem unique, but are a function of the platform effect of constantly adding integrations relevant for our other customers. To that end, we signed Hertz and will power payments across 60 of Hertz’ rental car locations.

Our presence in nonprofits continues to grow as well, evidenced by the dozens of nonprofits attracted to our platform each quarter as well as the on and off-ramp services for many crypto and Stablecoin platforms such as Stellar and Plasma. As has been the case each quarter, these are just a few of what we’ve highlighted in our material, even a smaller fraction of what we’ve actually onboarded. We are delivering these impressive wins while relentlessly streamlining our operations. And in that regard, as many of you know, we take the leading part very seriously in our M&A and integration approach. We made multiple small divestitures, most notably acardo, which is a couponing business owned by Vectron, for $34 million. These sales remove noncore business lines and help keep our laser focus on revenue synergy opportunities.

We also closed SmartPay this week. As previously mentioned, this provides us with an existing and proven distribution channel to sign restaurants, hotels and stadiums in Australia and New Zealand. By equipping a proven team with industry-leading products like we have, we can be highly confident in the success of their go-to-market. The combination of these 2 events are roughly neutral, meaning the divestitures and the acquisition of SmartPay and their contribution to the remainder of the year, but both were important operational milestones. Lastly, we agreed to acquire Bambora, otherwise known as Worldline North America. While I’m sure many of you would like to see us slow down, the opportunity presented by a $90 billion payment gateway was something we would not ignore.

A core competency of our business and team is to constantly seek out interesting technologies, great customers and excellent talent. Those of you who know our track record of executing on gateway conversions and other synergies can appreciate why this makes so much sense. We expect that transaction to close in Q1 of ’26 and are encouraged by our pipeline of opportunities. I wouldn’t be able to discuss capital allocation without the notable dislocation in our own valuation despite the continued performance and numerous opportunities we see ahead. In short, our own equity is one of the more attractive opportunities we see. And with expanding cash flows and accelerated deleveraging, we simply can’t ignore it. To that end, our Board has authorized the new $1 billion stock repurchase program, which is the largest in our history.

We will be implementing a plan to purchase at what we view as highly attractive levels right away. And with that, I’ll turn it over to Chris for his first earnings call. Welcome aboard.

Christopher Cruz: Thank you, Taylor. We delivered another quarter of consistent results that set new third quarter records across all of our key performance indicators. Volume grew 26% year-over-year to $55 billion. Gross revenue less network fees grew 61% to $589 million. Adjusted EBITDA grew 56% to $292 million, and our adjusted free cash flow conversion was 48%, resulting in $141 million of adjusted free cash flow. Our Q3 adjusted EBITDA margins continued to deliver in line with our expectations of approximately 50% in spite of the continued expansion investments we are making to become the most diversified and scaled that the business has ever been in its history. Double-clicking on our revenue categories. Our Q3 blended net spreads remained stable at 62 basis points, and we continue to expect full year spreads to be stronger than the 60 basis points previously communicated.

This stability extends across our verticals of Restaurants, Hospitality and Unified Commerce. Subscription and other revenue was $119 million in Q3, up 16% compared to the same period last year. The growth continues to come from our market-leading vertical software solutions. However, as solid as this growth continues to be, we remain focused on deleting the parts and deprecating legacy revenue streams from acquired companies in favor of what we believe to be higher quality of revenue. This dedication to strategy will continue to influence year-over-year growth rates. As Taylor mentioned in his remarks about the medium-term guidance update, Q3 organic growth for gross revenue less network fees was 18%. Organic year-over-year growth of 18% compares the performance of the base business by removing newly acquired revenue from both the Q3 2024 period and the Q3 2025 period.

It’s also worth noting that these disclosures related to updates about our medium-term guidance would have been done next quarter at year-end. But based on recent industry events, we wanted to be proactive about pulling forward these disclosures, including that of organic growth for you all. Since the third quarter of 2022, we have grown gross revenue less network fees by 3x, expanded adjusted EBITDA margins by 600 basis points and achieved the balanced transformation of becoming a more diversified and globally scaled provider of software integrated payments. Through continued execution on cross-sell value creation and our delete the parts approach, we expect to maintain disciplined focus on margins and benefit from the operating leverage in our business.

An example of the Shift4 playbook at work is the deleting of legacy parts through divestitures. Additionally, and although early, we are encouraged by the potential of AI applications to enhance our operating leverage across operations and product development while enhancing our own ability to drive decisions informed by our large data assets. As it relates to Global Blue, we wanted to provide a more clear breakout this quarter given its new inclusion in results. Global Blue contributed $156 million to gross revenue less network fees and $68 million to EBITDA, which were in line with our overall expectations despite headwinds faced by the business in the Asia Pacific market. Additionally, the subcomponents of Global Blue, consisting of: one, tax-free shopping, acquiring and dynamic currency conversion will be reported within payments-based revenue, while the post-purchase solutions subcomponent will be reported in subscription and other.

As you can appreciate, we expect these breakouts to be less relevant over time as we cross-sell products to customers and bring on customers using multiple products. Our adjusted free cash flow in the quarter was a record $141 million, which modestly exceeded our expectations given our third quarter, along with our first quarter, are the higher cash interest expense periods in the year. As you get to know me more, it should come as no surprise that I believe that the ultimate measure of business durability is compounding growth in free cash flow per share. So I’m particularly enthused by the progress of this metric, especially as a jumping off point towards our medium-term guidance goal of exiting 2027 with $1 billion of run rate adjusted free cash flow.

GAAP net income for the third quarter was approximately $33 million, resulting in diluted EPS of $0.17 per share. Non-GAAP net income for the quarter was approximately $148 million, resulting in a non-GAAP EPS of $1.47 per share. Note that the latter EPS metric uses our non-GAAP share count of 100.7 million shares, which increases share count by 10 million shares to treat the mandatory convertible preferred on an as-converted basis. On debt capital structure, we are in the enviable position of being efficiently tranched with all debt trading above par, resulting in access to attractive cost of capital in multiple deep markets. As of Q3, our net leverage pro forma for the full year effect of Global Blue was 3.2x, with notable deleveraging achieved quarter-over-quarter that resulted in our newly issued term loan already stepping down by 25 basis points of cost.

I will take this opportunity to make clear that our leverage guidance remains unchanged with a view that the business should not exceed 3.75x net leverage on a sustained basis. With the company’s current share repurchase authorization coming up for expiration at year-end, the Board has authorized a new share repurchase program of $1 billion through year-end 2026. This authorization level is the largest in the company’s history and comes at a time when we have ample liquidity and access to capital to execute upon it. As a reminder, our capital allocation framework judiciously assesses relative value across 4 areas: one, customer acquisition; two, product investment; three, acquisitions and investments; and four, share repurchases. As we evaluate how the current market backdrop compares to historical periods of share repurchase execution, we think it notable that valuation multiples at present would be comparable to the lowest we have executed repurchases in the past.

Further, as stated before, the company is the most diversified and scaled it has ever been in history and is generating record results across all key performance metrics. At the same time, the business is delivering growing levels of adjusted free cash flow that continue to require reinvestment. Although we believe that any 1 of our 4 categories of capital allocation opportunities would generate accretive returns, it is hard for us to ignore the relative attractiveness of the trading level of our common shares on an absolute basis, but particularly on a growth-adjusted basis. As someone that has invested in this business multiple times over the past decade, I am eager to make immediate progress against this new $1 billion authorization to enhance long-term shareholder value.

Now for guidance. For full year 2025, we are reaffirming guidance within a narrowed range. We now expect volume to range from $207 billion to $210 billion, representing 26% to 27% year-over-year growth. For gross revenue less network fees, we now expect the range to be $1.98 billion to $2.02 billion, representing 46% to 49% year-over-year growth. And for adjusted EBITDA, we now expect the range to be $970 million to $985 million, representing 43% to 45% year-over-year growth. We are affirming our adjusted free cash flow conversion expectation of plus 50%. Within this guidance, our view on Global Blue’s contribution remains unchanged as the business does have a seasonally higher calendar third quarter versus its fourth quarter. Also, we wanted to point out that even though these are now narrower ranges to our prior guidance, there is an intentional shape to the relative ranges.

The implied fourth quarter range in volume is approximately 5% from low to high, while the same range in gross revenue less network fees is slightly less, and in adjusted EBITDA, this range is 4%. The intent here is that we believe a wider range of outcomes is prudent based on the uncertainty we are observing in macro and industry conditions. While at the same time, for a metric like adjusted EBITDA, there is more in our control and demonstrates our commitment to execution. In summary, after taking into consideration an essentially neutral impact from the acquisition of SmartPay and the offsetting reduction from noncore divestitures, our full year 2025 guidance is reaffirmed within a narrowed range. One last item. In response to inquiries about gross revenue, recall that we do not formally guide this metric.

However, we expect a gross revenue range of $4.09 billion to $4.15 billion for the full year. Before passing back to Taylor, I did want to take a moment to express my sincere gratitude to my CFO predecessor and now Board member, Nancy Disman, for the transition support, mentorship and fantastic finance foundation she has established. You will be missed by the team, but I’m certainly thankful to continue to have you on speed dial. With that, let me now turn the call back to Taylor.

David Lauber: Thanks, Chris. Before we go to Q&A, some of you may have seen the exciting news that our Founder and Chairman, Jared, has been nominated to run NASA. Again, we’re going to be updating you as things progress. But just to be clear, we don’t expect really anything is going to change from our previously disclosed plans. He intends to remain the largest shareholder of the business. And so we wish him well, and we’re really excited for the road ahead. With that, we’re going to turn it over to Q&A. But Tom, I think you had a question we were going to address from X.

Thomas McCrohan: Yes. So the question from X this quarter comes from [ Dor Barda ]. And his question is, where is the company’s primary focus right now? Are you edged down on integrating and cross-selling into the $1 trillion acquisition funnel? Or are you simultaneously investing heavily in net new product development?

David Lauber: Yes, it’s a great question. And the answer to both of those is yes. So hopefully, you can sense the theme for this quarter is a reminder of what we always do, which is that we take our category-leading products and we find as many customers as possible to get those in the hands of in as capital efficient of a way as possible. And so whether that is leveraging capabilities like the sales force that SmartPay brings us into Australia, or the distribution network and existing customer base that Vectron gives us in Germany, taking our products into these new geographies with an embedded right to win like an established sales force or an existing customer base is always a significant priority for the business. And with that, operator, if you wouldn’t mind opening the line up to Q&A.

Q&A Session

Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Dan Dolev with Mizuho.

Dan Dolev: Great results, Taylor, and congrats on the new CFO role. My question is for you, Taylor. What are the implications of Jared getting nominated to NASA? I think a lot of people are interested in that. And great results, again.

David Lauber: Yes, sure. Thanks for the question. Good to hear from you. Well, first of all, it’s great for the country. The ambition that we’ve seen inside our walls for 26 years really has always deserved a bigger stage. So I think it’s a phenomenal thing for the country. Now with regard to the company specifically, it’s likely to simplify our structure quite meaningfully. So if you recall from the ethics agreement that he executed back earlier in the year, he is not required to divest the stock, but he will be relinquishing the super votes associated with his shares. So it likely means to collapse down to a single share class, which I know a lot of investors will appreciate and simplifying our TRA structure. So I want to reiterate, he intends to remain the largest shareholder of the business. This is something he feels passionately about, but I think it will simplify our share structure when it’s completed.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Timothy Chiodo with UBS.

Timothy Chiodo: Again, Chris, good to be working with you here. I want to hit 2 things. First one on Bambora, and then if you don’t mind, a brief follow-up around Q4 end-to-end volumes. So on Bambora, let’s hit that one first. So $90 billion of gateway opportunity. And I just think back to the time of the IPO and the gateway opportunity back then was $200 billion, and it seems so large. And here we go adding another $90 billion. So I was just hoping you could add a little bit more context around that $90 billion and what’s in there in terms of verticals and how other parts of Shift4 and some of the learnings from prior gateway conversions might help to make this gateway conversion a very successful one. And then I’ll follow up on the numbers after.

David Lauber: Sounds great. I’ll hit this one. And you hit the nail on the head, Tim, which is this is textbook Shift4. It is a good technology product with a really captive base of customers and $90-odd billion of volume. Now as also is the case, the volume varies from some of the other verticals we serve. There’s some business services in there. There’s a few different flavors. So it’s probably inappropriate to take one gateway and apply it to the next and apply it to the next. But we feel really strongly that this asset, the sticky customers, many of which have been on it for 20-plus years, will benefit from a consolidated payment solution. This has not been a huge priority for that business for a period of time. On top of that, there’s a lot of transparency in this one, which I think behooves us all given the skepticism around M&A in our industry.

It is widely understood what Ingenico had paid for that business years ago and what we’re paying for it now, which is significant fractions of that. It is clearly telegraphed by Worldline what the contribution of the business is, and then we get to take that and enact a bunch of revenue synergies. Now there are also some capabilities. It’s like one of the larger ACH providers in the country. So there’s some capabilities we’re going to get from it as well and more talent, which we always need more of. So very textbook Shift4 and something we literally train ourselves to be on the lookout for opportunities like this all the time.

Christopher Cruz: Yes. And one, thanks, Tim, for the congrats. But on Bambora, the other thing that I think is a really interesting way to frame the attractiveness of it is to look at how many of the capital allocation framework boxes it checks on its own. I mean in and of itself, you can think about the gateway volume potential as a large expansion in customer acquisition potential. You can look at the ACH EFT component as product and capabilities enhancement. And then, of course, in and of itself, I think it’s a continued reflection of a disciplined approach to making acquisitions and investments. So that’s just one other thing that I think is worth noting and is something I’m enthusiastic about with that transaction.

Timothy Chiodo: Excellent. And the minor — the numbers follow-up. So implied for Q4 in terms of the end-to-end volume, you mentioned a range there. But on an absolute dollar basis, it’s roughly $57 billion to $60 billion. And just clarifying, there’s roughly — I think it’s slightly less than $1 billion or so a quarter in there from Global Blue acquiring business, and then there’s another — something in that range, maybe slightly less than $1 billion as well from the couple of months of SmartPay. But when we add up those numbers on an absolute basis, is it reasonable for investors to think about taking that $57 billion to $60 billion, annualizing it or multiplying by 4, adding on some conversion, some new production, thinking about same-store sales and churn, but reasonable jumping off point to model out 2026 end-to-end volume expectations?

Christopher Cruz: Yes. I think from the perspective of is it reflective of a jumping off point, putting aside kind of like minor nuances and seasonality that’s changing a little bit in the business, I think it actually is a reasonable jumping off point reflective of kind of the run rate shape of the business. So I think you articulated it well.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Jason Kupferberg with Wells Fargo.

Jason Kupferberg: Thanks for all the new disclosures. And I wanted to just start on organic growth. I know you were 18% there in Q3, obviously, very consistent with the medium-term Investor Day target. But I think we were trending a bit above that in the first half of the year. Maybe you can clarify that. And then just give us a view on Q4 organic top line growth, just trying to piece together how the current year is coming together, because I know we’ve been targeting 20% plus from a full year perspective.

Christopher Cruz: Thanks. So one thing I just wanted to clarify off the top, and hopefully, it didn’t get lost in sort of the prepared remarks was that some of the disclosures really are as a result of an update to the medium-term guidance, which we would have realistically planned for the year-end. But we, given industry events, decided it was prudent to be proactive and pull some of these things forward. And so I just wanted to make sure I reiterated that point. Look, I think on the organic growth, the idea that we have a growth that’s on a gross revenue less network fee basis in line with our — I think the way we’ve articulated it in the past is the sit on our hands case would signal the consistency of the business. From that perspective, I think we’re sort of in line with what we had guided to as far as that case and that medium-term guidance.

David Lauber: Yes. And just with regard to the full year, I think, and Chris characterized this well in his remarks, there is caution. Our ranges give us an outcome of greater than 20% down to below that. And I think that’s just prudent. The same-store sales environment has been quite volatile. And I don’t mean that as persistently negative or anything else. Tried to characterize that in my prepared remarks as well. So yes, it’s still within our guidance range, but we want to be prudent. We want to give, obviously, the in-quarter disclosure as well.

Jason Kupferberg: Okay. No, that’s helpful. And then just a follow-up on Global Blue. Those slides were really helpful also. I think you had the volumes up 5% in Q3. Just curious how that’s been trending quarter-to-date, what you’ve assumed for Q4 there? And then anything you can tell us just in terms of what the year-over-year Global Blue growth was in GRLNF as well as adjusted EBITDA. I know you gave us, obviously, the Q3 ’25 actuals.

David Lauber: Yes, sure. So I’ll start with the performance of the business has been strong despite volatility. So that’s really encouraging. And Chris can keep you honest here, but the year-over-year growth of their revenue was about 19%. So a phenomenal business. I think we tried to point this out at the time of the acquisition. In terms of the Sales in Store, which is the tax-free shopping segment of their business, what you saw was a combination of reasonable strength in Europe. Now keep in mind, Europe generates more revenue per Sale in Store than Asia, but also a pretty significant headwind in Asia. So there were a confluence of factors back in the summer of ’24 that made Chinese shopping in Japan particularly strong. And so comping that was going to be quite difficult, and that’s why you have that negative.

So the blend of 5 is something we’re reasonably content with. Also keep in mind, and we tried to just kind of illustrate this. When the dollar depreciates and the Chinese currency depreciates, that is really hard on the business, because the shoppers spend less. And so while there’s a little bit of translation benefit, it is not a positive for the business when the dollar depreciates. I wanted to clarify that point as well. So awesome business dealing with volatility in their end markets and dealing with it quite nicely and growing strong on a year-over-year basis before we enact any synergies, which is phenomenal.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Darrin Peller with Wolfe Research.

Darrin Peller: I know there were some headwinds in the quarter, whether it be the discussion you had around the currency dynamics in Global Blue or same-store sales you called out, or even some faster conversions of software, yet you came in roughly in line with your guide. And so maybe just help us understand what you saw that made up for that shortfall, and if those trends are sustainable going forward or outperformance trends? And then, Chris, first of all, congrats again. But when I think about guidance, there’s been a few quarters of volatility around your guide. So just help us understand your philosophy to build up from a guide standpoint going forward, what we should think about from a conservatism, how you think about it that way versus being more in line, or anything else you can provide?

David Lauber: Yes. So I’ll start with that, and then Chris can hit the guidance philosophy. With regard to things that we were pleased with during the quarter, customer adds is something we’re particularly pleased with. The pace of international adds is something we’re particularly pleased with. So the shopping trends that I mentioned in reaction to Jason’s call was something we were particularly leery of. Quite frankly, predicting where that would land was almost a fool’s errand given how strong the success was of Chinese shopping in Japan back in the ’24 period. But maybe just to balance it out, and I made this comment in my prepared remarks, growth in SiS in Asia has grown to positive again on a year-over-year basis in the most recent month of October.

So things are going well on that front. It remains somewhat tricky to predict where travelers are going to shop, and there are significant countries and weightings to that. So we’re going to continue to get better at that. But Chris, do you want to hit the…

Christopher Cruz: Yes. Well, actually, I’ll just add on to one point around that is, in some of the variables that we saw through the quarter that were changing, I think Taylor in his prepared remarks highlighted the note that if you were to look at some of the week-to-week trends that we were seeing within same-store sales in some of our verticals, you could end up seeing like a plus 1% to a minus 4%. And that kind of volatility was something that we were trying to react to throughout the quarter. You add to that the topic that we’ve now talked about a couple of times already around balancing out European strength for Global Blue Sales in Store in the tax-free segment, offset by what looked like a pretty tough headwind in Asia Pacific.

And you just had a few moving parts that I think warranted caution going into that period. At the same time, the backdrop was one where certainly from a macro data, certainly from an industry data, from data points we were seeing throughout, it was enough to want to make sure that we were expressing caution. So a lot of data points to take in. At the same time, I think we have the most data we’ve ever had as far as being able to try to inform our decisions around it. So I think that’s a positive. Maybe to the second part of your question, Darrin, one, thanks for the congrats. And two, so look, on guidance philosophy, it’s a nuanced topic, I’m sure, and especially one that I think will need some evolution over time as I get more comfortable in the seat.

The first thing I would say, though, is that from a philosophy standpoint, there really isn’t an intent to change the underlying philosophies. I think the frameworks that we use, the way we inform it with data, the underlying approach to the most important drivers within the business, I mean those are things that I think are pretty foundational, not looking to make dramatic changes. I think as we look at this set of macro backdrop, it is just something that, from my perspective, we want to make sure that we’re taking in all of the right data sets and that we’re making the most informed decisions possible based on the recency of the information. But certainly something that I think will be an evolving topic. And so feel free to keep asking.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Andrew Jeffrey with Truist Securities (sic) [ William Blair ].

Andrew Jeffrey: Well, so we’ll update that. It’s been William Blair for about 1.5 years. But Chris, welcome. Look forward to working with you. I want to say that my wife and I happily contributed to Global Blue’s third quarter revenue growth. A question on the pace of processing conversion in that business. It’s a big opportunity. I think you said somewhere around $550 billion. Can you just update us on your right to win, how you see payment processing cutover or conversion sort of playing out? And what you — I guess, competitively, there’s one sort of callout processor, I think, today for a lot of those Global Blue merchants. How do you sort of manage those relationships, recognizing that the VAT refund business is such a high-value product for merchants?

David Lauber: Yes, sure. I’m going to actually cover this one. It’s a great question. But I think it’s really important to distinguish between the headline customers that everyone knows and the breadth of the Global Blue business. So certainly, in Downtown Paris, everyone knows the Louis Vuittons of the world. But the reality is you can just as easily go to a village on Lake Como in Italy and nearly every merchant is using Global Blue. And these are SMBs. So we see a breadth of conversion opportunity from SMB all the way up to the largest of the enterprises. And if history is a guide, the earliest success comes from all those assets. It is incredibly low friction to switch from an existing bank terminal into what from a product perspective is going to be pretty revolutionary, which is the terminal that they’re used to, but it also does currency conversion and it automatically detects that the shopper is eligible.

So to the extent you were traveling in Europe and you encountered a store where they didn’t present you with the tax-free option, that’s likely because the cashier just didn’t know or didn’t think to ask. And yet our technology is going to sort of prompt that just like it does in the largest enterprise environments that Global Blue has built so successfully. So from a competitive landscape, we see an opportunity to win business from a ton of local banks in that SMB spread. We can win it reasonably quickly. And then, again, history being a guide, enterprises take longer and take more time. Quite frankly, I think you’re probably referencing Adyen. They’re a phenomenal company. We admire them a lot, and they serve these enterprises quite well.

We’re an important piece to the commerce puzzle in that environment. So we want to make sure the technology works incredibly well for those customers. But the conversion opportunity goes far beyond the logos that you see. And if you think, what we’re really good at is we’re really good at getting that mom-and-pop store a much better technology solution that, quite frankly, is much stickier and harder to leave. And owning all these pieces, we can do that in a way that traditionally has only existed for the largest enterprises.

Andrew Jeffrey: Okay. That’s helpful. And just as a follow-up on SkyTab and sort of the growth in your software revenue, recognizing the divestiture of some legacy software. Can that accelerate? Do you expect that to accelerate? Sort of does it grow in concert with Global Blue volume conversion? Or how do we sort of dimensionalize the software contribution going forward?

Christopher Cruz: Yes. This is Chris here. I think we’ve articulated this in the past as acknowledging that the idea that we have a North Star model that really emphasizes what we view as highest quality of revenue will come from payment processing. From that perspective, I think we are not shy about the statement that we will look to deprecate the legacy revenue streams, deprecate software revenue streams in favor of the higher quality of revenue. And so I think from that perspective, even though our Subscription and Other was an attractive growth, it grew nicely in the quarter for sure, it’s an area that I think will be an area that will continue to be an impact on like adverse growth in the future.

David Lauber: Yes. Just to pull it back to philosophy here, we prioritize payment volume as the primary source of monetization. We deliver a heck of a lot of technology to these merchants. Carefully weighing the fixed and variable costs that a merchant pays for our product is, I think, something we spend a lot of time on. Most of our competitors have significantly higher fixed costs, which really manifests themselves in that subscription and other revenue stream. So we tend to lean more towards payments even if the technology solution being delivered has a lot of software embedded into it. And to Chris’ point, as a byproduct of this acquisition history, there is always some legacy revenue that we’re deprecating. So I completely acknowledge this is probably one of the harder lines to model inside the business. But generally, anything we’re doing is in pursuit of that payments revenue growth.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Sanjay Sakhrani with KBW.

Sanjay Sakhrani: Congrats, Chris. I guess the share buyback announcement and authorization was a pretty strong statement. Maybe Taylor and Chris, you guys can talk about sort of the cadence of how you expect to take advantage of it. I know you talked, Chris, a little bit about the leverage constraints and stuff. So maybe you could just speak to those as well. And I think it’s the right thing to do given where the valuation is. So I would love some color on that.

David Lauber: Yes. I’ll start with this one. There’s been times in our history where we weigh an attractive M&A pipeline against evaluation in our equity and it’s a tough decision. In this case, and Chris will comment on our leverage profile, and that comes into this a little bit, but this one isn’t a tough decision. So we are trading at levels that we were trading at in December of 2020, and yet there’s 12x the EBITDA in the business and accelerating free cash flow and deleveraging at an accelerating pace as well. So the obvious thing to do here is to buy as much of our equity as we’re going to be permitted to buy within reasonable price ranges. But to Chris’ point, executing at current levels is consistent with the lowest price we’ve paid for our equity.

And we’ve been pretty aggressive with buybacks. I think M&A kind of gets the headlines, but we’ve repurchased, I don’t know, 12% to 15% of the company in the 5 years that we’ve been public. This presents an opportunity to do even more than that at the lowest multiples we’ve seen in the company’s history. So incredibly excited to be able to deploy capital into such an obvious opportunity. Chris, do you want to hit the leverage?

Christopher Cruz: Yes, sure. So I think I made reference to the fact that on sort of a pro forma LTM basis, we’re at 3.2x net leverage. I think the perspective that we have around having ample cash on hand, we have ample liquidity. We are approaching $0.5 billion in adjusted free cash flow generation. So there’s probably not been a period in history where the company has had sort of the, we’ll call it, availability to capital, but also access to capital across the multiple deep markets. So you take that into consideration, you take into consideration that the free cash flow generated needs to get reinvested. And it’s not to say — and I hope this was clear, it’s not to say that we don’t think that there are attractive areas within all areas of our 4-part capital allocation framework, but right now, it is really hard to ignore the relative attractiveness of where we’re trading today.

David Lauber: Yes, that’s a good point. These dollars are not coming at the expense of a missed product development opportunity or integration priority or, quite frankly, M&A opportunity, but there’s more of them than I think many expected at this point, and the equity is certainly lower. So we have to act on it.

Sanjay Sakhrani: Great. And just to follow up on some of the choppiness that you’ve seen in the Restaurant and Hotel verticals in the third quarter. Could you maybe just explain what you’ve seen thus far into the fourth quarter and if that’s persisted. And I know, Chris, you kind of talked about weighing that as you provided your refreshed outlook. But just how we should think about that? Because like when we look at like cross-border volumes and such, I know it’s sort of an overarching number, so it’s not specific to your verticals or such, but like how should we think about that as we move through the rest of the year?

Christopher Cruz: Yes. Look, I would love to be able to know with precision exactly what the rest of the year is ultimately going to look like. But from a recency data, again, we benefit from being able to see data in a near real-time manner. But from a recency data, here’s a for example. I think coming towards the end of the quarter, we were actually starting to see what looked like stabilizing trends in Restaurants, and it created some encouraging signs off of a quarter that had seen some downward skewed negative volatility. But of late, we’re starting to see a little bit of a softening again in some of those trends. That would be for example. Now happily, I just want to underscore, because it’s an interesting contrast to what you had brought up this idea of cross-border, I think prior to us being as diversified as we are right now, that comment, the impact that cross-border is looking more positive, restaurant might have some softness, that would have been an irrelevant comment a couple of quarters ago.

But now actually, from the diversification standpoint, I really think it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that because of the positioning of the business, because of the balanced transformation that we’ve been able to achieve, we actually do have these puts and takes, these offsets. So I think in the grand scheme of things, we do have acknowledged uncertainty in certain areas, but actually some enthusiasm in some other areas.

David Lauber: Yes. I would call you back to the revenue diversification that we highlighted in our shareholder letter. And I don’t know if this is going to be helpful or further confusing you, but we see all the data points you do about United Airlines having their strongest weeks in their history and Chipotle, no one is buying the burritos. Like we see both of those. And we see them manifest in many ways inside of the cohorts inside of our business, which is Global Blue has got strong shopping and same-store sales in your average restaurant are bouncing week-to-week, but skewed towards that negative volatility. It’s confusing, but quite frankly, the scale and diversification of our business is awesome at this point relative to our history.

So for us, there are data points that help inform future investment and all these other things and help us, quite frankly, put chips where we think verticals are going to be the most successful over a period of time. But yes, that industry to industry volatility absolutely exists. We’re getting both benefit and detriment from that. And this bifurcated consumer, I think, is a real thing.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Adam Frisch with Evercore ISI.

Adam Frisch: It’s Adam Frisch. Chris, congrats on the role and great job getting out of the gate pretty hot here this morning. The organic number is really interesting, very welcomed as well. I think you said the number excluded the deals done in both of the third quarters. But is that to say that this quarter included contributions from deals completed in the quarters in between? So maybe just a little color here on the calculation would be great. And then I have a quick follow-up as well.

Christopher Cruz: Thanks for the clarifier. Absolutely not. Yes. No, it’s meant to be clean of acquisitions for the periods.

Adam Frisch: So the 18% does not include any acquisition impact at all from the prior quarters or, I guess, from the prior 4 quarters?

David Lauber: Yes. It’s the best way to look at the base business, right, which is if you did not have M&A in either of the measurement periods, what would have happened in that base business is great.

Adam Frisch: Okay. Okay. Cool. Welcome that very much. And then second, as a follow-up, assuming Jared gets confirmed, I’m getting a bunch of inbounds this morning from investors about whether his shares would create a liquidity event and how that would be handled. So I wanted to give you a chance to address that on this call before it takes on a life of its own potentially.

David Lauber: Yes, yes. No, I completely appreciate that, and I addressed this right before the Q&A started. His ethics letter from the first go round is publicly available, not required to divest his shares, and doesn’t intend to. He intends to remain the largest shareholder of the business. So we don’t anticipate anything there. And in fact, I just want to say he does anticipate converting his shares from the super voting shares down to common. So I think the share class will likely collapse into a single share class and be much easier to understand from the investor standpoint, and quite frankly, open us up to pools of capital that don’t invest in multi-share class companies today. So from the company standpoint, it’s frustrating not to see them in the halls on a daily basis, but the corporate structure gets a lot cleaner.

Christopher Cruz: Yes. And then just — since we’re on the topic, to reiterate a point that also Taylor brought up earlier was the idea that beyond the share class structure potentially changing and collapsing to simplified, you also have what in the last go around, we had talked about the concept that the tax structuring would also attempt to simplify to the ups.

Adam Frisch: Great. Okay. Cool. And then just maybe one last one. The merchant conversion progress from prior acquisitions, any color there that you can provide? There were some disclosures in prior quarters, didn’t say anything this quarter. So maybe just a little bit there on how you’re progressing there from the acquired merchants?

David Lauber: Yes, absolutely. Happy to provide color. And this isn’t an intentful omission. It’s the simple fact that our earnings shareholder letter was, I think, 190 megabytes when I tried to download the public version this morning. So the cross-sell is going quite well. I think that’s probably best evidenced by simply the customer adds that I mentioned earlier in response to what I think was probably Darrin’s question. So customer adds across the board, whether that be in Germany, whether it be in the U.K., whether it be in Canada, all of those are fueled in some way. buy an M&A asset, whether that’s a small sales team or an embedded base of restaurant customers in Germany or Gateway Hotel customers in Canada. So the customer adds are really, really encouraging across the business.

It’s quite frankly, what helps ballast that same-store sales anxiety that we see in the core base of the business. So it’s going well across all of them. This is muscle memory for our business. So if you recall, what happens when we acquire a company is all of the customers inside of that become part of a sales funnel that our team is chipping away at on a daily basis. So the fact that an acquisition occurred doesn’t really mean much to the average business development professional inside of Shift4. It just means they’ve got a lot more customers in their call queue to execute against or in their campaign. So it’s going well across the board, quite frankly.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Will Nance with Goldman Sachs.

William Nance: I wanted to follow up, I think, on Tim’s earlier question on the volume and approach it a slightly different way. Just look at the kind of low 20s exit rate on volume with a little bit of inorganic contribution, it’s kind of roughly in line with where the Street is expecting volume growth in 2026. So I was wondering if you could just talk about the puts and takes off of that run rate and just kind of what would lead you to kind of accelerate or decelerate into next year and just things that we should be keeping in mind as it relates to modeling out to 2026.

Christopher Cruz: Yes, sure. Thanks, Will. I would say probably in line with a similar kind of commentary here, and maybe Taylor will have a slightly different nuance to it, but from my perspective, again, it’s hard for me to ignore, sort of from a recency standpoint, data that we’re seeing. And so I’d say there’s a degree of balanced caution within some of the verticals, offset by, obviously, what we’re seeing is the diversification effect where we are also seeing some recent strength in other areas like in cross-border, like in luxury. So I would say that the exit rate, which is kind of where Tim’s question was at, that annualizes kind of the fourth quarter. I think that’s a fine starting point, but we gave the ranges on volume really from a ’25 standpoint for a region.

And I think that, that range, again, the intentionality of the shape of that range, where the volume range is the widest relative to something more in our control like an adjusted EBITDA, that range is widest because of wanting to acknowledge that there’s a complex macro backdrop.

David Lauber: Yes. If I had to barbell the 2 items, probably most front and center is we say this volatility of same-store sales is quite real, like it looks bad 1 week and it looks okay the next. It’s very confusing, and you want to be cautious about what that could look like over a sustained period of time. Maybe on the other end of the barbell, you’ve got Global Blue, which is really contributing nothing of substance to that payments growth rate and a massive customer base, lots of geographies, et cetera. So those are kind of — that’s a cylinder that’s not firing of any consequence yet and yet will be significantly in 2026.

William Nance: Got it. Appreciate that. And that was going to be my second question. Just on some of these logo wins, you had the earlier question, I get it’s early and some of the ones on the page are kind of more enterprise in nature, but wondering if you could just speak to the sales process that led to some of these wins. And Taylor, I know you’ve been doing a lot of traveling over the past couple of months. As you spend time with the Global Blue team, how are you thinking about evolving the go-to-market so that when we see some of the wins on these pages, I’m thinking back to when you put the Hospitality wins and we’d see something indicating it was a gateway conversion. Like how do we think — how are you thinking about potentially starting to work payments into the selling process of some of these new wins, maybe not some of the logos that we’re seeing on the page, but into some of the more SMB sales?

David Lauber: Yes. It’s an awesome question, and I’ll sort of contrast the 2 businesses for you, because this is exactly what we’re spending a ton of time on right now. Global Blue is a phenomenal business focused on the highest end of the enterprise, solving the most complex problems and never losing a single customer in that process. They serve the enterprise customer exceptionally well, and they’re kind of built to do that. Where if I were to criticize and say there’s areas that we can bring strength to the table, it’s the service of the really long tail of SMB customers that don’t have the best coverage model. They adopt Global Blue because it’s a product that the consumer demands and has a lot of traction, and they want to be able to provide that to the shoppers.

So it’s the village of Bellagio, where it’s in Lake Como, right, where there’s tons of little mom-and-pop merchants that offer the service, too. So the skill set we’re trying to bring to the organization is how do you efficiently serve thousands of SMBs across Europe and the rest of the world. And I think we’ve got unique skills to bring to that. The skills they are bringing to us are how do you serve the largest and most demanding enterprises within luxury retail. So we’re both learning a lot from each other in that regard. And then the only thing I would say is — and by the way, we’re having conversations with every flavor of customer, right? So we’re having conversations with SMBs. Those are quick. It’s, “Yes, this sounds great. I’ll do it.” And then we’re having conversations with their largest enterprise customers, and they’re saying, “Hey, can you help us with this unique problem we have today?” So I’m really encouraged across the board.

But the laws of physics are simply those big customers take longer to get those conversations done than the small customers. So I think that’s going to be the bulk of the focus.

Christopher Cruz: Yes. And I’ll add that when you start to look at that customer stratification, it’s at a unit economic level, very logical that if you are providing a TFS product to the longer tail of SMBs, the gross profit and revenue density isn’t necessarily there to provide the technology and quality of service that you would want if you add to the equation the cross-sell of services that now turn the gross profits and the unit economic model into one that looks a lot more like the SMB that we serve. It makes a ton of sense to be providing all of the service levels, all the support, really starting to elevate the significance of that SMB customer within that segment or within that business is exactly like the benefits of the cross-sell.

David Lauber: Yes. And sorry to belabor the answer. I think it’s really important, though, where we’re going to have to spend a lot of time with you all and the Street is what’s the volume pull-through of this. Because to be clear, I think the enterprise customers offer the highest volume opportunity at the lowest spread, but these SMB customers are the inverse of that. And we are quite content with the volume growth that looks lower and a spread that’s stable to growing, because that’s a fast win cycle. To be clear, all of it is an opportunity, but I think volume growth relative to net revenue growth is something that has undulated inside the business as we skew from time to time more towards enterprise, more towards SMB, et cetera. So that’s where we’re going to owe you the updates, but my prediction is early success in SMB, and what’s going to feed the funnel 2, 3, 5 years from now, it’s going to be that enterprise base.

Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our last question comes from the line of Dominic Ball with Rothschild.

Dominic Ball: Great to hear about Global Blue. On competition, we’ve seen some turbulence with one of your legacy acquirer peers. Does this present an opportunity to accelerate share gains in the U.S.? And on the enterprise side, we’ve seen Oracle Payments extend their offering powered by Adyen, but it doesn’t seem like it’s going to be exclusive going forward. So how do you view that development? And could this open up further partnership opportunities with MICROS?

David Lauber: Yes. Awesome question, and congrats on the call, by the way. I think you were the long one. In terms of competition in the United States, I really do want to foot stop this point from my prepared remarks. It’s relatively unchanged for our lines of business, which is in Restaurants, we tend to focus on table service. This is not where you see the Clovers and the Squares of the world. We do see Toast. And I know Toast has got wider ambitions to do far more than just table service. But in our kind of slice of the world that is Restaurants in the United States, competition is relatively unchanged. Toast is a great company. We’re winning and growing quite nicely in that regard. And we don’t see significant pressure from others.

Quite frankly, any, let’s say, industry chaos tends to be helpful to the extent that big companies are struggling. It will help us, by the way, just as much on the enterprise sale as it will on the SMB sale to have a company that’s sort of struggling to redefine its image. Now to go to your point with regard to Oracle, I think they’ve always had this ambition to try to deliver a simplistic product to their customer base that embeds software payments, et cetera. That’s very, very hard to do with the products they serve. And so much — take yourself out of a point-of-sale system that they sell and put yourself into any other software, it’s very enterprise grade and requires a lot of pieces. And this is where Shift4 has found unique success. It’s taking what is an otherwise very complicated solution to implement that merchants are dependent on and stitch together all the parts to get it done and do it in a way that feels like an SMB experience, where our team comes in, connects all the dots regardless of the complexity.

Again, Yankee Stadium is probably a good example of trying to make an SMB experience delivered in some of the most complex environments. So we don’t see really any issue. We partner with Oracle constantly in the Hotel vertical as we have to, to support them. We also activate a lot of restaurants. And we’ll be there to the extent any customer needs the help.

Thomas McCrohan: Operator?

Operator: Thank you. At this time, I’d like to pass the call back to management for any closing remarks.

David Lauber: Yes. Thanks to everyone for dialing in this morning and also for the great questions. I look forward to catching up with you all individually as the weeks and quarter progresses.

Christopher Cruz: Thank you.

Operator: This concludes today’s teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.