Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the POSaBIT Systems Corporation third quarter 2021 earnings call. At this time, all participants have been placed on a listen only mode, and we will open the floor for your questions and comments after the presentation. It is now my pleasure to turn the floor over to your host, James Carbonara. Sir, the floor is yours.
Thank you. Once again, welcome. With me on the call are Ryan Hamlin, Chief Executive Officer, and Matt Fowler, Chief Financial Officer. I'd like to begin the call by reading the safe harbor statement. This statement is made pursuant to the Safe Harbor for forward-looking statements described in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. All statements made on this call, with the exception of historical facts, may be considered forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Although the company believes that expectations and assumptions reflected in these forward-looking statements are reasonable, it makes no assurances that such expectations will prove to have been correct. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements due to various risks and uncertainties.
For a discussion of such risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ from those expressed or implied in forward-looking statements, please see risk factors detailed in the company's annual report and subsequent filed reports, as well as in other reports that the company files from time to time with SEDAR. Any forward-looking statements included in the earnings call are made only as of the date of this call. We do not undertake any obligation to update or supplement any forward-looking statements to reflect subsequent knowledge, events, or circumstances. The company will also be citing adjusted EBITDA in today's discussion. Adjusted EBITDA is a non-IFRS measure used by management that does not have any prescribed meaning by IFRS and that may not be comparable to similar measures presented by other companies.
The company defines adjusted EBITDA as net income or loss generated for the period as reported before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, and is further adjusted to remove changes in fair values and expected credit losses, foreign exchange gains and/or losses, and impairments. The company believes this is a useful metric to evaluate its core operating performance. Now I would like to turn the call over to Ryan Hamlin, Chief Executive Officer. Ryan, please proceed.
Thanks, James, and thanks everyone for joining the call today. I prepared a few remarks, and then we'll open up for Q&A at the end. Before we kick off, I'd like to acknowledge that unfortunately, we had to move this call from its original planned date of November 10th earlier this month. This was due to some resource constraints on our team, as well as ensuring we could provide thoughtful guidance for 2022 as part of today's call. Our goal has always been and will continue to be to work to an earlier announcement than is required by the CSE. Now let's turn our attention to our high-level financial results. As a reminder, all numbers that we are presenting today are in U.S. dollars.
Our momentum continued in the third quarter as we delivered another record quarter of revenue, increased our gross profit, and ended with $5.5 million in cash on hand. Transactional sales for our card services business totaled $106 million, up 151% compared to $42.2 million in the third quarter of 2020. Third quarter revenues were up 173% year-over-year and up 29% from last quarter, resulting in year-to-date revenue of approximately $15 million. Revenue growth was driven by customer adoption of non-cash payments, same-store sales growth, and onboarding of new merchants. Our revenue mix shift towards debit transactions also had a positive impact on revenue, as it has been shown to be a better customer experience which has fueled merchant adoption.
Additionally, our investment in additional sales resources has resulted in our largest backlog in sales pipeline of merchants to date. We will onboard most of this backlog in the fourth quarter, setting up for strong growth for the foreseeable future. Given our tremendous growth through the first nine months of 2021 and our visibility into year-end, we are on a trajectory to exceed the full year 2021 revenue guidance we provided back in July, and we'll discuss our new guidance near the end of this call. Turning to adjusted EBITDA. After four consecutive quarters of adjusted EBITDA profitability, the company has determined there's more value to be created by investing our profits in growing market share than reporting near-term marginal profitability. This is evidenced by our previously mentioned backlog of new merchants. As a result, we did record a slight loss in adjusted EBITDA this quarter.
Now some operational highlights in Q3. We didn't hold back and in fact accelerated our investments in hiring in pursuit of our stated goal of doubling headcount by the end of this year. We increased headcount from 23 to 38 employees, half of which were new hires in our direct sales teams to help our continued acceleration into the market. In October, we participated at MJBizCon in Las Vegas, Nevada, the premier cannabis event of the year. It was an exciting time for our team with attendance of approximately 27,000. We saw great interest in POSaBIT's current and future product offerings. All our hard work throughout the year has brought us to the point where we believe we are the industry leader in payments infrastructure for the cannabis sector.
Additionally, at the beginning of Q3, we announced a partnership with springbig, a leading provider in cannabis loyalty and communications technology. By integrating springbig's loyalty platform with our payment solution, our merchants now have access to marketing tools and actionable data to increase engagement. springbig's loyalty rewards can be received and redeemed directly at the POSaBIT point of sale. We also announced a new partnership with Alpine IQ, the leading data and marketing solutions provider for the cannabis retail industry. Our two-way integration provides dispensaries with the ability to cultivate unmatched guest loyalty and drive incremental sales. Enabling loyalty rewards to be passed directly to our point-of-sale software for redemption is one of the many benefits of our Alpine IQ integrations. I now would like to briefly discuss the cannabis industry market dynamics and how this continues to be incredibly favorable for our expansion and our growth.
To begin, recent valuations in cannabis technology companies have been astonishing. Our private company peers in the industry are raising capital at very high valuations and multiples, unlike very few industries today. Given POSaBIT management owns 30% of the company, we are cognizant of this disconnect between our valuation and the private markets and will continue to educate and raise awareness to investors as we believe we eventually will be viewed comparably. Lastly, we, of course, are always looking at other ways to uplist to new exchanges to increase the exposure of POSaBIT to new investors. At POSaBIT, we are also benefiting from strong legislative tailwinds. Expanding legislation translates to direct growth of our business and growth in the industry at large.
U.S. cannabis retail sales are now projected to grow at a compounded annual rate of 19% from $22 billion in 2021 to over $38 billion in 2025. Further, cannabis production and sales were also deemed essential businesses during the COVID pandemic, with dispensaries remaining open in all states where cannabis is legal. Moreover, growth in cannabis-related tourism also continues to expand. Most recently, we entered the New Mexico market, making New Mexico the 15th state where we have established operations. The state of New Mexico passed legislation to legalize cannabis at the end of June, and within 90 days, we had partnered with one of the largest retail chains in the state. New Mexico is an up-and-coming market for us and is indicative of the intuitive nature we take to reach every corner of the legal U.S. cannabis industry.
Another lever for merchant growth, in addition to expanding into new states, is by getting deeper and wider in the states we already are in. It is estimated that approximately 90% of dispensaries still only take cash. That translates to an enormous opportunity of growth ahead by increasing cash adoption in states we are operating. Yet another growth engine comes from increased customer adoption and same-store sales growth within our existing base. The impact of same-store sales growth is derived from existing customers increasing their spend. Recall, our transactional growth for the quarter was $106 million, up 151% year-over-year.
We continue to see a strong trend that when a new store comes on board with POSaBIT, and as consumers get more accustomed to using our debit solution, they don't come in with cash, and so we continue to see an overall volume rise in our stores over time. If you consider the overall percentage of card transactions versus cash, we see an increase where we come in at about 25% of cannabis store transaction volumes initially, and then over time, that increases to 35%-40%. In some cases, we have stores that are doing over 60% of their volume through POSaBIT. Now turning to expanding our product offerings, we continue to look for ways to build out new product offerings to increase our wallet share, grow margins, and overall stickiness of our merchants.
Prior to quarter end, we announced the release of POSaBIT Connect, a publicly available OpenAPI that allows third-party integrations of all kinds to gain access to our ever-expanding POSaBIT product suite. POSaBIT Connect is a significant step forward for our company and the cannabis industry at large. With this OpenAPI, companies of every kind within the industry can gain access to the POSaBIT ecosystem. POSaBIT Connect enables integrations across a variety of facets of any retailer's business, including menus, customer profiles, product and sales data, bookkeeping, and of course, our industry-leading payments platform. Last month, we also unveiled our new POSaBIT Kiosk, a versatile standalone hardware option for dispensaries and retailers that allows customers to build out carts either in-store or online and pay for orders with a debit card directly from the kiosk. We believe POSaBIT Kiosk is a game-changing solution for retailers across the country.
Not only is it a line buster, but it's also a brand-new avenue for in-store marketing and represents a significant leap forward in how online orders are processed, paid for, and fulfilled. Importantly, via POSaBIT Connect, we are also an open platform, which means we allow all major menu platforms to fully integrate with the POSaBIT Kiosk, creating a fully functional and intuitive process for all sales coming from the kiosk itself, whether or not you use POSaBIT Menus or another industry e-commerce provider for your online menu service. POSaBIT Kiosk is currently being beta tested in select retailers with a full rollout expected in Q1 of 2022. Also earlier this month, we announced POSaBIT Cash Advance, a new loan factoring program for the cannabis industry.
The Cash Advance platform will allow POSaBIT's payment merchants to secure a loan from the company quickly and without hassle, and subsequently repay the loan through payout deductions from the company's in-store processing. We see POSaBIT Cash Advance as a tremendous opportunity for any of our current partners to quickly access funds and make their subsequent loan payments with relative ease. The pain point that this serves is clear. Retailers within the cannabis space are often in need of increased liquidity, whether that's to purchase desirable product in bulk, break ground on renovations, or scale their operations. POSaBIT Cash Advance provides these retailers with both access to cash and a painless repayment program. We see it as a huge win all around. POSaBIT Cash Advance went live in Q4 with select beta accounts, with a planned full rollout in early 2022.
Taken altogether, we believe these new offerings will continue to fuel our revenue growth in 2022 and beyond. They also reflect a pattern that is a key differentiator for POSaBIT and why we're the leader in the payments industry. We're the only payments provider that is open to all software service providers, meaning you could run your payments side by side with any POS or online order provider, enabling us to go after all 8,500 dispensaries in the U.S. to help with all their payment needs. Clearly, our momentum continues to accelerate, and we are well positioned for tremendous growth again in fourth quarter and into 2022. Technology partnerships and continued investment in growth, both in terms of our team and new product offerings, against a backdrop of strong market demand and favorable industry trends reinforces our confidence in continued success.
It's an exciting time at POSaBIT and the industry as a whole, and we look forward to providing you with additional updates as we continue to make progress. We will now turn our attention to our specific financial operating results for the quarter ending September 30th, 2021. I've asked our CFO, Matt Fowler, to review the numbers for you.
Thank you, Ryan. Our financial results for the quarter illustrate the considerable progress we are making to grow our business and improve profitability both year-over-year and sequentially. Payments processed through our platform for Q3 grew 151% to $106 million, compared to $42 million in Q3 of last year. Payments processed is a non-GAAP measure, but more importantly, it is a primary underlying driver of our business and more specifically, our revenue. Revenue for Q3 was $6.3 million, up 173% over the prior year quarter and more than 29% sequentially. As Ryan mentioned, we have had exceptional growth throughout 2021 and once again are raising our revenue guidance for the full year to a range of $19 million-$20.5 million.
Gross profit, inclusive of one-time adjustments of $211,000, increased approximately 148% year-over-year to $1.43 million, or 22% of revenue, compared to $576,000, or 25% of revenue in Q3 2020. After adjusting for one-time items, gross profit would have been $1.64 million, or 25% of revenue. Gross margins in Q3 reflected special promotional pricing and incentives that will have a short-term impact. Gross profit for the nine months ended September 30th, 2021, was $4.28 million or 29% of revenue. After adjusting for one-time items, gross profit would have been $4.49 million or 30% of revenue.
Operating expenses decreased in Q3 by 52% to $311,000 versus the prior year period of $643,000. The decrease is due to the impact of non-cash foreign exchange gain of $1.9 million during the quarter. Excluding the impact of foreign exchange, operating expenses increased by 220% to $2.2 million compared to $688,000 in Q3 2020. This is primarily the result of increased investment in building our internal team to support growth. Our balance sheet improved with $9.1 million in assets September 30, compared with $3.7 million at the end of 2020. Cash on hand increased by 462% to $5.5 million versus $980,000 at the end of 2020.
This was driven by increased transaction volumes and approximately $3.5 million of cash received from the exercise of outstanding warrants during the period. Adjusted EBITDA loss was $508,000 in Q3 2021. This compares to an adjusted EBITDA loss of $43,000 in Q3 of 2020. As Ryan mentioned earlier, the company has determined there is more value to be created by investing our profits in growing market share than reporting near-term marginal profitability. This is evidenced by our previously mentioned backlog of new merchants. That's it for me, Ryan. I will hand it back to you to conclude our call.
Thanks, Matt. In conclusion, as I mentioned already, we expect to exceed our 2021 guidance, which we had already raised earlier this year. Specifically, we are raising our revenue guidance to the following. Total revenue of $19 million-$20.5 million, up from $17.5 million-$19 million, an 8% increase from our second quarter guidance we provided in July of this year. Gross margin remains unchanged at 28%-32%, and transactional sales also remains unchanged at $350 million-$375 million. Now looking ahead to 2022. Two things to note first. In 2021, we revised guidance upward in Q2 and now again in Q3. Also in previous years, we have issued guidance for the coming year with our fourth quarter earnings report, which typically comes out in April or May.
However, we believe it is important for us to announce our revenue guidance for 2022 now as part of our Q3 report. Therefore, our initial revenue guidance for 2022 is $36 million-$39.5 million, which at the midpoint reflects a 91% year-over-year growth in 2022. We are pleased to say we expect to continue our trend of doubling or nearly doubling our revenue for four straight years. Thank you for your interest in our story and for being here with us today. Operator, we'll now open the floor to take any questions. Thank you.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, the floor is now open for questions. If you have any questions or comments, please indicate so by pressing star one on your touch-tone phone. Pressing star two will remove you from the queue should your question be answered. Lastly, while posing your question, please pick up your handset if listening on speakerphone to provide optimum sound quality. Please hold while we poll for questions. Your first question is coming from David, Private Investor. David, your line is live.
Hey, Ryan. Congrats on the quarter. Had to say the customary line. Question for you. You know, one of the things that strikes me over and over again with the company is you guys are in 300-some-odd dispensaries, and there's 9,000 in the country. I know the rate is low of those that do accept digital payments, but it seems to me like this is a giant land grab, and whoever gets there first and does a good job will continue servicing those clients. So what is and what can the company do to really accelerate that and grab as much land as you can while you can? Because that becomes obviously very valuable and has a very long tail to it once you get those customers, I would think. Correct?
Correct. Yeah. Thanks for asking the question, David. Good to chat with you again. Yeah, I mean, I think you hit it square on, which is, you know, we've spent the last several years building out this great payment infrastructure platform, and right now the game is distribution. It's one of the reasons, frankly, why we announced POSaBIT Connect. You know, we are actively engaged with many of the industry providers to provide our payments platform and API so that it can be integrated. You know, we don't have to go after every single one of these merchants on our own, but instead, we're going to take advantage of the channel that already exists and all the other partners that are already out there that have integrated, you know, with, like you said, the 8,500+ dispensaries.
You'll definitely see us focus a lot more as we go forward into our distribution partners and opening up our platform to make sure that it's really easy to integrate us and expand across those 8,500.
Got it. Just a quick follow-up. Given the landscape, is it not worth direct sales? Is the payback too long? You know, why wouldn't you?
Yeah
sort of go aggressively after the market directly?
That's a good question. That's something we definitely addressed in the last six months and, you know, why you saw that we have hired so aggressively and that over 50% of the people we hired in the last couple of months have been our direct sales people. We are definitely attacking it at our direct sales level, and we're still relying on our partner channel as well. You know, when we talked a year ago, we didn't really have a very large direct sales team. We really relied fully on our channel. Now we are aggressive and have recently placed sales in market on the East Coast, in the Midwest, and continue to invest in the West Coast as well.
Got it. Last question from me. You guys talked about the largest backlog that you've ever had. You know, we'll fill that out in Q4.
Yeah.
What does a pipeline look like talking to customers till they're, you know, in and up and running? Is that a couple of months or, like, one to two quarters kind of?
You know, it depends. As I've always said kind of publicly, you know, if you're working with large MSOs, which we certainly are targeting, that's a little bit longer sales cycle. The smaller mom and pop shops, you know, those are pretty easy, and we can turn those around within weeks usually. Our focus has been on the MSOs and the larger franchises, multi-locations. That's tended to extend out the pipeline. We literally have hundreds of merchants in our pipeline right now that we're aggressively working through that, some already in the underwriting process and some moving, you know, into actual onboarding.
Got it. Okay. Awesome. Thanks for the answers.
Thanks, David.
Okay. The next question is coming from Gary Ribe from Accretive Wealth. Gary, your line is live.
Hey, Ryan. How are you?
Good, Gary.
Good. I just have a question. Is there some fourth quarter seasonality in the business? I think that's my first question because
Sure. Yeah, I mean, there is certainly seasonality in the cannabis industry. I mean, you know, in the April month of 4/20, that tends to be big. The fourth quarter with the holidays, you know, we had Green Wednesday here this last week right before Thanksgiving, and then, of course, Black Friday. With the Christmas holiday coming up, all of those tend to be pretty large days as far as sales volume goes. We tend to see a strong Q4. You know, like the nice thing about this cannabis industry is there's not a ton of variation. I mean, it's very consistent. It's one of those kind of, again, deemed essential services, and so sales are pretty consistent throughout the year.
Yeah, we definitely will see a little bit of an uptick in Q4.
Got it. Okay. Because by my math, you guys have done about $15 million in revenue on the year so far, and sort of the high end of your guidance implies, you know, maybe $5.5 million of revenue in the fourth quarter, which is sequentially lower, which I would have thought would have been sequentially higher. Just, I was a little confused as I thought about that.
Yes. I mean, I think that, you know, the general rule, as you know, with guidance is to, you know, give guidance that we feel extremely confident in. Certainly, you know, we're watching it carefully as we go forward. Yeah, that's the guidance we felt comfortable giving at this point.
Got it. Okay. That's fair enough. I realize it's a game of expectation setting and whatnot. Then I guess and I can appreciate the having low expectations. Then just one more for me. Like, I would assume that like a number of your clients, customers are sort of less banked. Have you guys thought about partnering with any like BNPL type players or anything like that, just to sort of expand the payment options for these people?
Yeah. You know, the banks actually are a really important channel for us, and there are several banks throughout the states that we are operating in that actually have a close relationship with us and actually do refer us customers directly, and we reciprocate. When merchants come to us and are looking for bank help, we usually connect them up to one of our banking partners. You know, we made an announcement last week with a compliance partner of ours called Shield, who has an extensive relationship with many of the banks throughout the industry as well. We work pretty closely with both Shield and our partners, our banking partners directly and do have a fair amount of referrals that we pass on a monthly basis back to them.
We're certainly open and are welcoming to help our merchants find banking partners.
Got it. You guys aren't looking at doing anything with the buy now, pay later space or anything like that at this point?
No. Yeah, not right now. You know, that's a great topic. We've certainly discussed that particular one quite a bit as a board and as a leadership team. The average ticket item in this industry is pretty small, so I'm not saying there's not a market for it, but it's maybe not as relevant of an industry that might make sense in other larger industries where the ticket is just higher. I mean, the average ticket in this space can be, you know, $25-$45, and so it's just not something right now that we feel is the most urgent thing for us to work on. We really wanna focus on what David had said earlier about market expansion and getting into those 8,500 dispensaries as fast as we can.
Yeah, that's the main game. I get it. Cool. All right. Thanks a lot. Good job.
Thank you.
Once again, if you have a question or a comment, please indicate so by pressing star one. The next question is coming from Alexander [Tracy], Private Investor. Alexander, your line is live.
Hi there. My name is Alexander [Tracy], and, congrats on the quarter. I was just curious if you'd provide a little bit more context on the delay of the quarterly call.
Yeah, you bet. It's kind of why I wanted to kick it off that way as well. You know, we are. You heard me say we are a company that grew from 23 to 38, so we're not a huge company and, you know, resources are very important. You know, as we were gearing up to do our earnings, we felt like, from a resource standpoint, we hadn't prepared enough to do this call. More importantly, we wanted to make sure we had given really thoughtful guidance for our 2022 plan because we knew we wanted to announce that in Q3 instead of push that out to next year. That was really the two main driving forces, is that we just...
We're a little bit behind from a resource standpoint, and secondly, we wanted to make sure that we felt great about the guidance that we were giving for 2022.
Okay. The next question is coming from Walter Ramsley from Walrus Partners. Your line is live.
Thanks. Congratulations. That was quite a quarter. The revenue was up 30% sequentially. Could you talk about the gross margin, though? I mean, that declined sequentially also, even with the adjustment factored in there. So is there something specific that occurred or, you know, can you just kind of explain what happened and, you know, what you expect with the gross margin, say, in fourth quarter? You know, you already sort of talked about next year, I think, although I'm not sure I got it all straight.
Yes.
Anyway, if you could just talk about the gross margin, I'd appreciate that.
Sure. Good to chat with you again, Walter. Yeah, there was a couple things. We had the one-time adjustment, which really was just a one-time adjustment to the top line, and that was $211,000. That certainly affected the margin. You know, that's why we added that back in. It was up to 25%, which was just a little bit below. I think it's 1% below what we had done in the prior quarter. The main driver of that is it goes with the theme that we've been talking about, which is it's all about market acceleration right now, and we've specifically been working with larger franchises and MSOs. As we do so, we are creating one-time incentives to move them along in the process to sign up.
Those one-time incentives might be a discount on hardware or, you know, minimal to no setup fees that we would typically charge. That, you know, compounded to a little bit less margin in the quarter, but we've strongly believed as a leadership team that was the right decision to make for the long-term health of the business, to land those strategic accounts and so that we can have that moving forward in Q4 and beyond.
Okay, I get that. That makes sense. Another one, the foreign exchange adjustment, I mean, it's a big number, but, what is it? I mean, your company is reporting in dollars. You do all your business in dollars. I mean, what's with the foreign exchange adjustment?
Yeah, I'll let Matt answer that one.
Yeah. That's tied to the parent company being Canadian, you know, obviously all our equity is Canadian dollars. So like from the warrant exercises, that all came in Canadian dollars, and then we do an intercompany loan between that and the U.S. sub, which creates a foreign exchange impact with that intercompany loan.
Just to clarify it, I mean, did that actually cost any money or, I mean, how do you?
No, it's completely non-cash.
Yeah. I mean, you don't give it any real serious thought, do you? I mean, it's just an
Correct.
Accounting convention. Is that right?
Yep, absolutely.
Okay. Good. All right. Got that. Just one final thing, I guess. I don't know if you wanna get into it, but a lot of the other MSOs that are public, you know, been talking about the oversupply situation throughout the American marijuana industry and Canadian too, I suppose. Does that have any real bearing on your company one way or the other?
You know, the only way that would kinda have an effect is if there's sales pressure to reduce cost. Obviously, the average ticket is something we watch carefully. We could see maybe a small depressed average ticket over the next couple of months as there's more of a supply in the markets. Today we are at about, you know, somewhere about $80-$82 per ticket on our debit transactions. You could see that maybe dip down to $75-$76. You're not gonna see a massive impact to our top line revenue. What you might see is a very slight impact to our overall transactional volume because if you recall, our revenue drivers, you know, come off a per transaction.
We're making money off of that transactional fee that we charge on the overall volume.
Okay. Your next question is coming from.
Thanks, Walter.
Robert Bose, Private Investor. Robert, your line is live.
Hey, Ryan. Congrats on the quarter and thanks a lot for taking the call. Didn't you say you can, could you elaborate a little bit more on the cash advance business and kinda how we can think about the economics of it and maybe some of the direct and indirect revenue benefits potentially as you kinda provide the service to your clients? Just trying to understand that a little bit better.
Yeah. Yeah, no, it's one of the products that, you know, when I get asked about, you know, margin, incremental margin and whatnot, you know, this is a great example of that because it can be a product that gets added into our existing payment processor base. If I'm a merchant today and I need quick access to, let's say, $50,000 because I need to take advantage of maybe bulk sale because just like the previous caller said, you know, if there's a surplus of cannabis, maybe they wanna store a little bit more now and buy, they would come to us and simply ask for that cash advance. We would look at their last several months payment processing through us, and we would do it as a factored loan.
We would evaluate the risk based on their transaction volume and give them a loan amount that we'd be willing to loan up to. What we would do is we enforce a payback on every single deposit that is made back into their account. Let's say they loan $50,000 out, and every single day they process, let's say, $5,000 through us, we may hold $500 of that $5,000 every single day until they've repaid the amount plus interest. There's some original loan origination fees that we can charge. There's obviously interest on that. There's revenue opportunity. You know, these are typically relatively high interest loans because this is hard to get capital in this industry.
Right.
You know, we see interest rates in the 20%-25% plus loan origination fees, which is good capital upfront. Then, you know, kind of a subtle but really important value is the stickiness of this because once we engage in these relationships, we have further deepen the stickiness of our product, and it's hard for that merchant then obviously to move on to anyone else because they now have a contractual relationship with us to repay that, and that repayment is through our payment service. It kinda has a win across the board where it gives them access to easy capital that they might not be able to get otherwise. We get to have pretty decent stream of revenue and high interest rates, and we get to extend the stickiness of the merchant.
Right. I guess in theory, they can reinvest that capital to drive greater sales on site, which would have a revenue impact.
Exactly.
With the deposit.
Yep.
Excellent. What's the uptake been like on that product?
Yeah. As we mentioned, we just launched it this quarter, so we have a couple in beta today. We're gonna formally roll that out in Q1. Right now we're learning about the program with a few sets of initial beta customers. We're actively taking merchant applications today. We're just not loading them up until the new year.
Got it. Excellent. Thanks a lot, Ryan. I appreciate it.
Thank you. Thanks for your question.
Okay. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This does conclude today's conference call. You may disconnect your phone lines at this time and have a wonderful day. Thank you for your participation.