WEX Inc. (NYSE:WEX) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Sanjay Sakhrani: And I guess like what you’ve seen year-to-date with the weather and stuff, I mean, there’s nothing that has led you to be more cautious or anything like that?

Melissa Smith: No. And from a trend perspective, there’s nothing that we’ve seen. Same store sales was down in the fourth quarter in North American fleet, which was included in our numbers by 1.5% over the road has been down throughout the course of the year for 2%. And we just are assuming that the over-the-road market is stable in our numbers as opposed to seeing a significant rebound. So there’s a little bit — I’d say just a little bit of weakness that are coming through, some of that we think is weather related. And we’ll know more as you see that play out in the first quarter. But anything that we’ve seen coming through January…

Jagtar Narula: Has been in line with expectations in January.

Sanjay Sakhrani: And then Melissa, you sort of talked about the annualized benefit of the acquisitions. Maybe you could just talk a little bit about the contribution? And then Payzer, I know it wasn’t really added to earnings, but maybe sort of what you guys expect in 2024?

Melissa Smith: Payzer itself, we are expecting that to continue to grow at the rate it was. So plus 20% in our guidance in 2024. When you accumulate both the acquisitions, it’s in our long term target at 2% to 3% of overall revenue growth, and it really is not material to earnings. Because Payzer came in, we talked about the fact that was dilutive last year that they’re moving it to accretion during the course of the year, so it didn’t really impact from an earnings perspective but it’s giving us a two different lift in revenue.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Ramsey El-Assal with Barclays.

Ramsey El-Assal: I wanted to ask in the nontravel part of corporate payments. How much exposure you have to political ad spending in 2024? I recall that, that was a vertical that you were exposed to, I believe. And I’m just curious how much you think that’s going to benefit you this year, given it wasn’t really in numbers last year as there wasn’t a lot of political spending?

Melissa Smith: Actually really good memory, it was part of our model many years ago. It is actually not part of our model now. And so we really don’t expect or not planning to have any meaningful impact based on the election.

Ramsey El-Assal: And then I also wanted to ask about the strong sales momentum in Mobility, and just ask you to kind of break that down a little bit for us in terms of what’s driving that. It seems like you’re having some success in the marketplace. Is that sales investment, incentive structures, is it other factors that might be helping you to convert some customers out there in the marketplace?

Melissa Smith: It’s been a long legacy of ours to deliver from a sales perspective and across the business. But in Mobility, we’ve had a multichannel approach where we’re pulling in business for our partners with which there’s over 20 branded relationships, the names that you would recognize. And then on top of that, under direct channels. What I would say is in the course of the last couple of years, there’s been a significant conversion where that business is coming from, where much more is coming through the business digitally. And so a lot of the work and change in work has come from increasing our marketing effort, changing the ways that the business comes through, so it’s coming through more fluidly through our digital channels.

And so we’ve seen the benefit of that with the fact that we were actually bringing in more with less sales costs associated with that. And so when I talk about the success of that, I feel like we’ve done a great job pivoting and marketing in a different way into that part of the business. And we changed our credit practices in the course of the last year. And so that really required us to reboot applications volume activity in the course of the year. And you can see the benefit of that has come through really every quarter. The improved applications that are coming from some of the smaller accounts are getting — have grown the size of the customers that are coming in are larger than they were a year ago, and therefore, we believe more profitable.

And so I feel good about not just the numbers that we’re bringing from a sales perspective, but the quality of what we’re bringing in.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Andrew Jeffrey with Truist Securities.

Andrew Jeffrey: I appreciate you taking the questions. Lisa, I’m curious about your comments about fee card attach in in travel. And I wonder if you could talk about different use cases. I know the merchant model is one of the drivers, but are there other use cases to which you’re referring that’s driving attach? And then I wonder if you can expand a little bit in the same vein, just in corporate, you saw good volume growth and a little bit slower revenue growth this quarter, a little better than 3Q and just sort of the dynamics of fee card acceptance and attach in that segment would be really helpful.

Melissa Smith: Yes, and your last point better than 2Q and 3Q and you can look sequentially, it’s improved each quarter. Going back to the travel question. There’s two real primary drivers of the volume growth that we’re seeing within travel that we were trying to highlight. One is the fact that we’ve been working with our partners to shift volume to us in most of our partners where many of them use multiple providers. And so we’ve been working with them to make sure that we’re set up in a way that creates the value to them to move volume to us. And then the second part of that is the migration what you’re talking about, which is largely this migration to the merchant model where the virtual card transaction actually is in play. Otherwise, people are paying the hotel directly. And we have benefited to both of those things and you can see that coming through the 40% increase in travel spend we saw in the fourth quarter.