Good morning. My name is Rob, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Lightspeed fourth quarter and 2022 fiscal year end conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, again, press star one. Thank you. Gus Papageorgiou, Head of Investor Relations, you may begin your conference.
Thank you, operator, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Lightspeed fiscal Q4 and full year 2022 conference call. Joining me today are JP Chauvet, Lightspeed's CEO, Brandon Nussey, Chief Financial and Operations Officer, and Asha Bakshani, our incoming CFO. After prepared remarks, we will open it up for your questions. We will make forward-looking statements on our call today that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. Certain material factors and assumptions were applied in respect of conclusions, forecasts, and projections contained in these statements. We undertake no obligation to update these statements except as required by law.
You should carefully review these factors, assumptions, risks, and uncertainties in our earnings press release issued earlier today, our fourth quarter and full year 2022 results presentation available on our website, as well as in our filings with U.S. and Canadian securities regulators. Also, our commentary today will include adjusted financial measures, which are non-IFRS measures. These should be considered as a supplement to and not a substitute for IFRS financial measures. Reconciliations between the two can be found in our earnings press release, which is available on our website, on SEDAR.com and on the SEC's EDGAR system. Finally, note that because we report in U.S. dollars, all amounts discussed today are in U.S. dollars unless otherwise indicated. With that, I will now turn the call over to JP.
Thank you, Gus, and welcome everyone. Thank you for joining us this morning. Before I get started, I want to welcome some of our new members to our executive leadership team. Rani Hammond, who has recently joined Lightspeed as Chief People Officer, Asha Bakshani, who has been promoted to Chief Financial Officer, and Brandon Nussey, who has also been promoted to Chief Operating Officer. I'm honored to be working with such brilliant executive team. Great companies are built by great people, and I am confident that together, our senior executive team and our thousands of dedicated employees will continue to make Lightspeed an extraordinary company. Now on to the quarter. Lightspeed reported another strong quarter today and closed off another year of solid growth. In the quarter, Lightspeed delivered revenues of $147 million, ahead of our previously established outlook.
We experienced an overall revenue growth of 78% and GTV growth of 71%. This was our 13th quarter as a public company, and I'm proud of the fact that Lightspeed has been able to meet or exceed our revenue outlook in every quarter. Brandon and Asha will discuss the financials in greater details, but I want to address top three matters on my mind. Number one, the prospects for Lightspeed as we enter a post-pandemic world. Number two, the continued launch and success of our flagship offering, Lightspeed Restaurant and Lightspeed Retail. And finally, our path to profitability. With the world returning to in-person shopping and dining, we are seeing increased demand for omni-channel solutions. As a result, this March, we had the strongest month ever for new business and customer locations. In hospitality, I was excited to see the following customers adopt the Lightspeed Restaurant platform.
Hawaiian Poké Bowl with 27 locations in Belgium, Le Jules Verne, a two-Michelin-star restaurant in Paris, ranked by Forbes as one of the top 10 coolest restaurants in 2021, and 1858 Caesar Bar, a Toronto-based brand with three locations with payments. In Lightspeed Retail, we were happy to sign the following customers, all with payments. Simply 10, with 46 locations, a U.S.-based fashion apparel retailer, a five-location chain of jewelry stores in Virginia with estimated annual sales volume of over $40 million. Goldy's Locker Room with 21 locations in Wisconsin and Minnesota. We continue to see strength with mid-market customers, which are generally larger, more established customers that tend to carry higher ARPU and GTV, exhibit far less churn, and deliver superior lifetime value.
Our e-commerce solution also saw strong traction, recently partnering with France's largest mobile carrier, Orange, that will act as a distributor of the solution to potentially thousands of SMB customers in France. We continue to expand our supplier network, adding brands such as Reebok, Eddie Bauer, and Intermix as partners and customers. As I look to the year ahead, I see several trends that are really encouraging. I think the most important of these is the return to in-person shopping and dining. We performed well during the pandemic because we were able to help our customers thrive online. Our solutions are primarily targeted for brick-and-mortar. With the world reopening, merchants are ready to open new locations, develop new concepts, and invest in our technology. There is nothing more encouraging for me to see customers back in stores and restaurants. Today, omni-channel strategies are no longer optional.
Yes, consumers are again gathering in stores and restaurants, but they are not going to forget the habits they developed during the pandemic. We believe trends like buying online and picking up in store or ordering ahead for restaurants are here to stay. Consumers have become more demanding in the past two years, and our merchants have to adapt. We are in an excellent position to help them do so. The pandemic reinforced the notion that physical retailers need digital strategies, and this is an environment where Lightspeed can really shine. Finally, there is a global rollout of payments. When we began our fiscal 2022, payments was available in North America and seeing strong adoption with our retail merchants. A year later, Lightspeed Payments is now available in all major markets in both our retail and hospitality offering, in both card present and digital channels.
We are one of the very few companies that have rolled out a global physical and digital payment solution. I'm very encouraged by the early signs we are seeing in international markets for our payments offering. In Europe, the proportion of new customers that contract for payments alongside their core software subscription is now similar to the rates we see in North American retail. Delivering on these trends takes a strong product offering, which I'm thrilled to dive into with more detail. First, let me remind everyone of our strategy here. Lightspeed has no interest in maintaining multiple brands and product offerings. Our goal, which will be substantially recognized this year, is to be in all markets with these two core offerings, Lightspeed Restaurant and Lightspeed Retail.
Earlier this month, we announced the release of our latest retail offering, Lightspeed Retail, bringing together the best aspects of Lightspeed, Vend, and Ecwid to our new flagship retail offering. The new Lightspeed Retail expands our availability to the Android platform, offers a truly headless commerce experience, completely reimagines the user interface and of course, maintains industry-leading multi-store inventory management. Although our position in retail is very strong, we are far from being done. By integrating our supplier network into the offering, we will transform how SMBs work with their suppliers. I'm very excited about our progress here and look forward to making some announcements on this initiative in the not too distant future. In hospitality, we are continuing to see strong momentum with the global rollout of our new flagship Lightspeed Restaurant, accounting for more than half of new customers in March.
Our momentum continues to build, and I'm encouraged by how this product is also driving payments uptake. Finally, I want to touch on our path to profitability. Brandon Nussey will discuss our outlook for the year and will provide more details. As you will see, we expect to achieve our target organic subscription and transaction-based revenue growth of 35%-40% in fiscal 2023 and reach adjusted EBITDA profitability for the following fiscal year. Getting to profitability starts with strong unit economics. This has always been a priority for this company, and the trends we are seeing in the business are very supportive. We see good momentum in the mid-market. Our flagship offering are showing strong evidence of boosting software ARPU, and global payments adoption is growing. Expanding software ARPU and growing payments penetration is very supportive of improving unit economics.
When we went public, we committed to making payments a substantial portion of our revenue stream. In fiscal 2022, the transaction-based revenue is almost half of the total revenue. I believe that we have delivered on this commitment. We pursued an aggressive strategy with the goal of consolidating the best players in the industry and bringing game-changing technology to our customers. With our new flagship restaurant offering launched last year on time and the new retail omni-channel flagship recently making its debut slightly ahead of schedule, I believe we have also delivered on this commitment. It is very important to me that we do what we say we are going to do and continue to drive value for our customers and shareholders. The next two big goals for me are the commercial availability of supplier network and getting to profitability.
We have the team, operating discipline, resources, and ambitions to make it happen. Now I'll pass it over to Brandon.
Thanks, JP. It was a tale of two quarters in Q4. January and February saw the effects of Omicron disrupt our selling efforts and our customer volumes. As restrictions eased, we saw our best month ever in March in terms of new locations added and new business brought into the company. This gives us optimism as we look ahead to a post-pandemic world. For the quarter, we saw the GTV processed by our customers grow organically by 39%. We saw a shift in consumer spending behavior across a couple of vectors. First, a move back to the physical world and away from e-commerce and online ordering in our hospitality business. Second, a shift away from certain consumer durable categories such as bikes, sporting goods, and home improvement, and towards hospitality, fashion and apparel, and others.
These shifts are the latest in macroeconomic factors that we've faced over the past two-plus years. We stated previously that one of the strengths of this business is our diversified global customer base. This strength has allowed the business to perform well, even with these macro factors at play. When COVID began, our retail segment performed far better than our hospitality segment, aided by consumer spending in verticals where we have good market penetration. That helped to fuel our growth through the pandemic, and we've now seen those verticals cool off. Hospitality is back, and other retail segments such as fashion and apparel are faring better. Because of our diversity, we are able to deliver another strong quarter even with these changes.
Asha will talk you through our outlook for fiscal 2023 shortly, but it goes without saying that the macro environment carries uncertainty around how consumer spending will trend this year. However, we're fortunate to have the diversity of customer base and available growth levers that will help us continue to grow our business. Our growth levers are unchanged and remain growing our revenue through the combination of location and ARPU growth, expanding our payments and financial solutions across the over $70 billion of GTV our customers collectively process. As you've seen by now, we don't need all levers to be hitting concurrently as the opportunity for each remains compelling.
Before discussing those growth levers in more detail, I will note that this quarter's results, in which we reported 48% organic growth in software and payments, now fully lapse our easier comparative periods, as well as two of our largest acquisitions by revenue, ShopKeep and Upserve, hopefully easing any concerns about the business's ability to deliver strong organic growth while integrating our acquisitions. Digging deeper into our results reported today, overall revenue for Q4 was $147 million, ahead of our guidance of $138 million-$142 million. For the full year, we delivered $548 million of revenue, up 147% from fiscal 2021. Software and payments revenue for Q4 was $137 million, representing 93% of total revenue, and grew by 48% organically.
For the full year, software and payments revenue was $512 million and grew 153% in aggregate and 62% organically. As a reminder, our Q4 is seasonally slowest for our customers and the volumes they process. With transaction-based revenue now approximately 50% of our overall revenue, this seasonality plays an important role in the quarterly profile of our results. Additionally, as previously disclosed, we had a one-time pickup of approximately $5.5 million in Q3 of this year in our transaction-based revenue line that affects our sequential revenue growth profile. Gross profit dollars grew by 58% in Q4 from the same period a year ago. For the year, gross profit grew by 112%.
As a percentage of revenue, gross margin for Q4 was 48% as compared to 53% last year, owing to a greater portion of our revenue now coming by way of payments, which carries a lower gross margin but provides us an important incremental gross profit dollar per customer location. Adjusted EBITDA loss was $19.7 million and in line with our guidance. This loss was higher than a year ago, reflecting the impact of the adjusted EBITDA losses from our recent acquisitions of Ecwid and NuORDER. Adjusted EBITDA results in the quarter also reflect the impact of seasonality discussed earlier and our typical higher sales and marketing costs during the final quarter of our fiscal year. For the full year, adjusted EBITDA loss was $42 million or 8% of our revenue, which has improved from 10% last year.
We believe our path to adjusted EBITDA profitability is clear, and you will hear more from Asha shortly on our commitment to getting there. Turning to some of our additional business indicators, customer locations, excluding those standalone e-commerce customers brought on through the Ecwid acquisition, grew to 163,000 from 159,000 a quarter earlier. These customer locations provided ARPU of $270 per location, which is up from just over $200 a year ago. Growing the customer locations and ARPU remains a core part of our plans, and we continue to see opportunities to do both. Our focus is to optimize the mix of these, meaning we'll continue to target and privilege customers that drive solid underlying unit economics, high GTV, and generate an overall software and payments revenue that fit our strategic goals.
It's important to reiterate that we'll be focused on growing our business with the right customers, which may lead to variability quarter to quarter on this one metric. As mentioned, location adds in the quarter were slower in January and February owing to Omicron's effects on our end markets. However, March was our best ever for customer location additions, allowing us to reach this growth in overall locations. Customer location churn rates when excluding Ecwid overall were largely unchanged in the quarter from our typical levels. It's worth noting that within this, we're seeing some ongoing churn from customers brought on from some of our acquisitions in non-core verticals, typically carrying a lower ARPU than our overall average and typically have a lower GTV profile as well.
To be clear, this isn't new or unexpected, but it does reflect a mix change in our customer base and serves to slow down the overall location growth stats. Our focus is on growing our customer base that has good long-term value for the business and our strategy. As mentioned, overall ARPU in the quarter was approximately $270 per location and was up from just over $200 a year earlier. Software-only ARPU was $132, up from $113 a year earlier. Both of these exclude the Ecwid standalone e-commerce customer base, which does carry a significantly lower ARPU. Looking at our GTV, our customers processed $18.4 billion in the quarter, up 39% organically and 71% in total.
For the year, we processed over $70 billion of GTV, reflecting the scale of the business. Within overall GTV, we saw retail growth slow somewhat, reflecting overall industry trends. As mentioned, some of our best performing verticals during the pandemic further slowed in the quarter. Despite this, overall retail GTV still grew 17% organically and 74% in total. Hospitality GTV more than offset this as consumers resumed spending on travel and dining out in their communities. Hospitality GTV grew 67% in the quarter organically, and we saw this growth in all geographies and saw a really strong month of March in Europe in terms of customer volumes and new sales.
Looking at our payments, gross payment volume was $2.2 billion in the quarter, up 132% from last year and flat with our Q3. Please recall that our Q4 is our seasonally slowest quarter for processing volumes, where both our retail and hospitality segments show a slowdown from the busy holiday season in Q3. That our processing volumes were flat quarter to quarter sequentially is actually a very positive sign of progress overall given the seasonal impact. All told, it was another quarter of progress and another quarter of meeting our commitments despite new challenges being thrown our way. I'm proud of our execution to date, and I'm optimistic for the future. As I now formally turn over the CFO role to Asha, I'll let her take you through our outlook for the year ahead. Asha?
Thank you, Brandon. As we look forward to fiscal 2023, we believe there are several reasons for optimism given the trends we are seeing in markets reopening, our increased scale, the success of our integration efforts, the launch of our two flagship products, and last but not least, the opportunity that still lies ahead in payments and financial services. For Q1, we expect to achieve revenue in the range of $165 million-$170 million, an adjusted EBITDA loss of approximately $16 million. The adjusted EBITDA loss in the first quarter includes costs associated with our annual sales, customer, and partner summit, which we moved to a virtual format during COVID and which we are now bringing back to in-person this year.
Looking beyond Q1 fiscal 2023, we remain confident that we will continue to drive organic growth in subscription and transaction-based revenue of 35%-40% and will continue to realize lower adjusted EBITDA losses as a percentage of revenue on a year-on-year basis. As JP mentioned, driving a path to adjusted EBITDA profitability is a priority for us. For the full fiscal 2023 year, we expect revenue to be in the range of $740 million-$760 million, an adjusted EBITDA loss of approximately $35 million-$40 million, or 5% of revenue at the mid-range of our guidance, which is improved from 8% this year. As we look beyond fiscal 2023, we are committed to achieving adjusted EBITDA profitability in the subsequent fiscal year.
This will be a very natural progression for us, moving from 8% adjusted EBITDA loss in the year just completed to a 5% loss based on our guidance for fiscal 2023 to then set up a break-even or better year in fiscal 2024 while still achieving organic growth on the software and payment line of 35%-40%. We believe this balanced approach to growth and profitability is the right one given the opportunity we see ahead, the strength of our balance sheet, and our desire to run a disciplined long-term business. As a reminder regarding this outlook, we expect seasonality to continue to have an impact on both our revenue as well as our adjusted EBITDA performance, as Brandon mentioned earlier, whereby Q3 will be our seasonally strongest quarter and Q4 our seasonally weakest quarter.
Furthermore, as we complete our integration work and roll out our flagship offerings, we will realize ongoing synergies which we plan to reinvest in core areas of the business, allowing us to invest in growth areas while remaining flat on operating expenses throughout the upcoming year, except for Q1, where we have a higher adjusted EBITDA loss given our in-person sales partner and customer summit I mentioned earlier. We expect transaction-based revenue to grow faster than subscription revenue year- over- year as merchants make greater use of our financial service offerings and as we attract a greater mix of higher GTV customers. We expect our gross margin to reflect this revenue mix. Our focus will be to grow our overall revenue through an optimized mix of software and payments ARPU per customer. We ended the quarter with just under $1 billion in cash on hand and almost no debt.
We are in a strong cash position, which bodes well for us in today's volatile market. With that, we will now take your questions.
At this time, I would like to remind everyone, in order to ask a question, press star then the number one on your telephone keypad. Your first question comes from the line of Dan Perlin from RBC Capital Markets. Your line is open.
Thanks. Good morning, everyone, and a nice quarter here. I wanted to just jump in on this path to profitability. Really happy to see that announcement by you guys. I'm hoping maybe you can just tease us a little bit with some of the underlying assumptions, you know, beyond what you've just described. Talk a little bit about why you have confidence in achieving the 35%-40% organic growth. Then if we think about the, I guess the cadence within that, you know, fiscal 2024, would you expect to reach profitability early in the year or kinda as an exit rate? Thanks.
Hey, Dan, it's Brandon here. Yeah. Look, the path to profitability, it's always been important to this team. We think we've always talked about the need for balancing growth, the market opportunity, and this path. Hopefully, our operating results have shown that, you know, going from, I think we were -18% a couple years ago to -10% to -8% to -5% in this current year. It's been an ongoing thing that we've always prioritized and felt was important to run a disciplined long-term business. As we look at the assumptions, you know, we're coming into a year where you're seeing us launch our flagship offerings, you're seeing us integrate those acquisitions fully. We're starting to realize the synergies across those. As you heard from Asha
That doesn't mean we don't invest in the growth areas. It's basically allowing us to continue to put operating expense into the things that are gonna grow while maintaining flat OpEx overall throughout the year. Those are some of the underlying OpEx assumptions on the revenue line. You know, hopefully you got a clear message from us. We continue to see, despite the uncertainty in the market, good opportunity to grow the customer base with the right mix of, you know, ARPU and the type of customer we wanna bring on, along with just this still largely untapped financial services opportunity to grow payments across the world now that we have that solution everywhere. Yeah, you know, we're heads down.
We're continuing to operate, and we are committed, and hopefully, you heard that from us here today, on getting to that profitability point.
Yep, loud and clear. Which is great. The second quick follow-up is, you know, you highlighted in the kind of prepared release, you think you'll shine kind of in this environment as consumers start to kind of pivot back to in-person shopping and dining. But can you be a little more specific about maybe some of the exposures, you know, in terms of overall mix that we should be mindful of that will help, and support that as a tailwind? And then just conversely again, you know, how does Ecwid play in that narrative? Thank you.
Yeah. I'll take this one. Good morning. Look, simply put, I mean, you know, the pandemic was not, you know, our environment. You know, the majority of our GMV is in the physical world, and what we've really seen in the last few months is a strong return to physical everywhere. That means, you know, I mean, restaurants are fully booked, and GMVs are back to normal. We're seeing a lot of the shift from e-commerce back into physical. All of that is really good news for us. Even in the context of, you know, the uncertainty, you compare that to a world of COVID, where our customers were asked to shut down and to stop operating, all of this is really good news on our end.
So I think that's deep down how we're looking at this. I think the other big reality is most of the businesses that have shut down during COVID and, you know, those free spaces are now just creating a multitude of new concepts and new restaurants opening, and I don't know of any restaurateur who would use a legacy system. They'll go towards platforms like Lightspeed, so as they open their operations. Feeling really good there. Then the last piece of all of this is, you know, we've always said it, a customer using Lightspeed Payments has double the ARPU, the net ARPU of a customer without, and now Payments is launched globally in every region, you know, where we operate. That means, you know, with very strong attach rates.
Now that means if you look at this is our CAC to LTV or LTV over CAC is very strong, and that helps with our path to profitability and strong growth in the coming years.
That's great. Thank you so much.
Your next question comes from the line of Timothy Chiodo from Credit Suisse. Your line is open.
Great. Thank you for taking the question. Good morning, everyone. I wanted to dig into the location. This is not necessarily new messaging. You've been talking about a focus on larger, higher quality, higher LTV locations for some time now, and you've recently expanded with a feet on the street sales force. This is all very much aligned. The locations this quarter, as you mentioned, were a little bit better at 4,000, and you said that March was a really strong exit rate, giving you some confidence for the year. Specifically in terms of modeling, should we start thinking about the return to, call it 5,000-6,000 location adds per quarter? Should we be still thinking about that 15% location growth? Again, being cognizant of that all locations are not exactly the same to your financial model.
Hey, Tim. Yeah, we tried to give a little more color in our prepared comments on this. We've got, and this, as I tried to say, isn't new, it's not unplanned, it wasn't unanticipated by us. Some of the customers who've come in by way of acquisition, you know, they're in categories that are like convenience stores or they're, you know, white label OEM relationships. We're seeing some of those naturally churn off as we continue to focus on attracting the type of customer that, you know, we think has the right attributes for the long-term strategy here. We're not stressed over that, but that is sort of playing into, you know, the overall location metric that you're all staring at.
You know, if we kind of put that to the side, we're achieving the growth that we always have kind of talked about on the location stat line. We're quite comfortable that, you know, we're attracting enough of the right customers to continue to meet our goals and that's where our focus is gonna continue.
Okay, great. Thank you, Brandon. My brief follow-up is if you could give us some context on what the payments penetration rate is that is implied in the achieving EBITDA profitability in fiscal 2024?
Yeah, I don't think we have a specific number for you there, Tim. We're gonna continue to roll out payments. We're quite happy with how this has gone. We've got more than double the customers year-over-year on this solution, driving more than 130% of processing volume.
You know, as JP mentioned, we're seeing good success in international markets. You know, that's the metric we're gonna stay focused on as our GPV and our revenue growth on this line. You'll just continue to see that overall penetration rate continue to grow in line with that.
Excellent. Well, that sounds great. Thank you so much, Brandon.
Your next question comes from the line of Andrew Jeffrey from Truist Securities. Your line is open.
Hey, good morning all. Appreciate you taking the call. I think if these results and this outlook, you know, don't finally quiet some of the noise around your stock, I'm not sure what's going to. JP, I really like the focus on unit economics. I wonder if you can elaborate a little bit. I think you talked about a couple of the drivers, software attaches as well as payments in terms of improving your LTV to CAC. Can you expand perhaps a little bit with your new retail and restaurant solutions, perhaps the increment to unit economics that seem to have you pretty excited?
Yeah, of course. Look, I think, well, first of all, we're really proud of the two last releases we've done. You know, everybody was questioning, are you gonna get two real go-to-market products that are gonna be, you know, very competitive and reaching all regions? This is job done for us. We have, you know, our restaurant product is out with all of the great features, and our retail product X-S eries is now out, and it includes, you know, all of the headless commerce. It now goes into Android, which is a huge market for us. You know, we were only operating on Apple until now, so that's a big lever for us.
It has, you know, of course, all of the workflows for omni-channel to pick up in store and then finally incredible web hooks on the API. We're really proud of the work and we really feel those products are extremely competitive. Now this being said, the most exciting part about these products is the attach rates on payments are very strong, and what we're seeing is as our customers buy these products, ARPU grows. And again, that's ultimately, you know, going back to our strategy here, which is lifetime value is important.
So I think just a way of summarizing the strategy is we need to push as hard as possible these new products, but we need to put it to ensure that we're not everything for everyone, and that we go after a segment that is really valuable to Lightspeed. I think on that front, those two products are incredible and we're seeing higher ARPU, better attach rates on payments, so super excited about that.
Okay. That's terrific to hear. Thank you. Maybe just a geeky question, but I think it's important. I was just looking at the MD&A and mentioned that, you know, Brandon, perhaps moving more to monthly contracts. Do any comments on how that might affect churn? It sounds like some of these bigger customers will churn less, but anything we should think about in terms of the differences between monthly and annual contract terms?
It's been an ongoing journey for us. I think we first introduced or started to make some comments around this almost two years ago, where we with the release of payments and launch of payments started to adjust some of our go-to-market strategies around this. We still attract you know a subset of customers that prefer to pay us annual. Though we are seeing that continue to move to monthlies. To answer your question, you know, over the past two years, those were the questions we were asking ourselves as we made this shift, and we really haven't seen a noticeable difference in churn. Expect that not to as we look forward as well. It's just simply a what we think is a payment terms change for the customer.
Maybe just to add to this, I mean, if we do this right, monthly customers are paying a higher fee than annual customers. We're keeping a close eye on churn, and churn is actually in the good direction, but we're getting higher ARPU. Again, this goes to our strategy and we're well. I think we're balancing in the right way monthlies versus annuals and churn rates on those. So very happy there.
Helpful. Thank you very much.
Your next question comes from the line of Raimo Lenschow from Barclays. Your line is open.
Hey, thanks for squeezing me in. Two quick questions. First, as we are living in a, you know, slightly newer world, uncertain world, can you just remind us, how we need to think about some of the changes that are coming through in the economy in terms of inflation, et cetera? Is that just kind of, you know, driving higher GMV or something like that? You know, since we haven't had inflation for so many years, I don't know, if there are more aspects we need to think about. But that's my first one, and then I had a follow-up.
Maybe I'll. When you look at inflation and even you look at, you know, potentially the economy not going in the right direction, the way we look at this, well, first of all, is we're a high growth company, you know, and so what we're seeing here is payments and especially payments, you know, the deployment of payments globally will offset, we think, any slowdown from, you know, from the GMV. The second big thing is when you think about inflation and you think about, you know, again, a recession. This is all good for Lightspeed, because what we do is we help merchants basically optimize how they operate, have way less manual processes, and operate with fewer employees. I think that also will drive well into Lightspeed's direction.
Maybe the last thing that we're thinking about is, you know, as COVID lifts and people go back to the physical world, this really has a strong impact on Lightspeed. It's. I mean, any kind of recession is nothing compared to what our merchants have seen through the times of COVID. We're feeling really good about this, and we actually think that as merchants need to automate and do more, we're gonna be in a really good position here.
Okay, perfect. Thank you. That's very clear. The follow-up was on the supplier network. Could you just remind us a little bit in terms of where we are on that journey and how meaningful this could become, like, in terms of the top-line driver for the coming quarters? Thank you.
Yeah. Maybe just again, for me, this is probably the most exciting project at Lightspeed right now. As you know, we acquired a company that provided us the technology. We've been working hard at integrating this, and we'll be announcing in this quarter some really exciting new products coming out. Again, what is the value here of the supplier network? We're trying to create network effects within the verticals where we operate. Here what we're doing is by connecting suppliers and brands with stores and consumers, and at the center of this is data and financial services. We have this strong belief that if we wanna help our merchants do better, we need to go upstream and see how our merchants work with suppliers.
And here, really we're trying to do what nobody else has done, which is trying to connect or to have a completely integrated supply chain for the verticals where Lightspeed operates. Again, more to come on that front, and it's been a huge effort for us and we're very excited about what's ahead and how this is really gonna help our merchants, you know, again, drive more profitability.
Okay. I'll look out for it. Thank you. It looks exciting.
Your next question comes from the line of Daniel Chan from TD Securities. Your line is open.
Hi, good morning, guys. Just the payments penetration rate continues to tick higher by about 1 percentage point every quarter. Just wondering if that's consistent with your expectations, and how is adoption in Europe tracking relative to your prior rollout in North America?
Hey, Dan. Yeah, look, payments we continue to be very pleased with how we're doing here. As I mentioned, customers more than doubling year- over- year. Our process volume is 132%. Our revenue line growing close to 90%. It continues to go well. JP mentioned that attach rates in Europe are now rivaling sort of what we've been seeing in North America. All told, very pleased. The thing that's out of our control a little bit, and again, we focus on the things we can control, but we are seeing consumer spending shift categories right now. I called some of that out in our prepared comments.
Areas where we've been traditionally very strong, like bike shops and sporting goods, you know, consumer spending is shifting, and it's moving towards hospitality and, you know, fashion and apparel and some categories like that where, you know, we're not as well penetrated just yet. Not overly concerned. We continue to sell well, and that ultimately is all opportunity for us, as we look ahead. So all told, you know, continue to be quite enthusiastic about how the payments rollout is going.
Okay. Thanks for that, Brandon. My second question has two parts. Just wondering how attracting and retaining talent, whether that's been impacted by just the share price and whether you have any plans to change your comp structure to address it. Thank you.
Yeah, I mean, look, it's been well documented how tight the labor market's been and of course, you know, as you mentioned, what's happened in the broader stock market and the downstream effect of that. You know, Lightspeed's certainly not been immune to that. Having said that, we've been pretty pleased with our ability to attract and bring in new folks. We've brought in some really strong new leaders in marketing and sales. You heard JP talk about our new CPO, Rani . We've been pretty happy with how we've been able to bring in new folks.
You know, the ongoing pressures of the talent market and compensation, that's just something we're dealing with and have been dealing with and expect we'll continue to have to deal with.
Okay. Thank you.
Your next question comes from the line of Eugene Simuni from MoffettNathanson. Your line is open.
Well, thank you guys, and thanks for taking my question. First question I wanted to ask is a bit on the competitive landscape. Obviously always a very intense competitive landscape in this industry. I was hoping you could comment a little bit on what you're seeing out there and maybe compare and contrast the U.S. environment maybe with what you're seeing in European and Australian markets. As a result, what are you seeing in pricing environment, kind of promotional environment, and how you are navigating that?
Yeah. So maybe I'll take this. Good morning. Look, ultimately, the way we look at the competitive landscape is we look at our close rates, and we ensure, and we basically look at who we lose against, and you know, are we competitive there? We listen to our customers. For me, it's very clear in my mind that the new offerings we launched are extremely competitive, and they're arguably the best products we've ever had. On the interface front, on the usability front, on the workflow front, on the complexity front. I think again, when we look at Lightspeed today, we're very happy with it. When we look at our close rates, they're doing extremely well.
I think there's no reason for us to believe that we're not ahead of the game and continuing to lead this market. I think for me, the big thing when we think about competition is we want to lead in the segments that are interesting to us. You know, I always said, and I'm gonna go back to this, there's 46 million restaurateurs and retailers on the planet. On those 46 million, there's 6 to 7 million that are in our bull's-eye, which are the more sophisticated, the more established, less prone to churn. You know, in the physical space, we have 163,000 out of 7 million. This is a huge market, and the bulk of this market is on legacy systems. For us, that's really what we're focusing on.
In that segment, we're extremely happy, and we've progressed a lot. I think the last piece in my mind there is, you mentioned, you know, Europe versus the U.S. versus Australia and New Zealand. Yes, we are a global player. We have we have the same solution set for the globe, and I think that sets us apart also when you look at some of our customers who need to sell globally. But feeling really good about this and certainly feeling really excited about what we're doing with suppliers because that's gonna ring-fence any other competitor in our segments, and it's gonna accelerate our adoption within the verticals that matter for us.
Got it. Got it. Very helpful. Yeah, maybe picking on what you were just talking about, the supplier services and just broader subscription services. One way we look at it is kinda your subscription services revenue yield as percent of GTV. It looks like that continues to tick up year-over-year, which is good to see. Can you talk a little bit about kind of what's driving even relative to the merchant size, what's really driving the ARPU of your subscription services and what are the opportunities they have? How kinda quickly can it continue to grow?
Yeah. I think it's, I mean, I've been in this company 10 years, and it's almost every quarter, the ARPU continues to grow. It's very simple. What we have is a platform with multiple modules. Customers normally start with one or two modules, and over time, as they see the value, they buy more from us. You know, I'll just give you a few examples. You might start with your core commerce platform and POS, and then you'll move on to, you know, your omni-channel, and especially now with our headless commerce, arguably this is a really good module. You'll move on to analytics, you'll move on to loyalty, you'll move on to integration with accounting platforms, you'll move on to payment.
This is the core strategy of Lightspeed, is basically providing a platform with multiple modules, and as you buy from Lightspeed, you become more successful. That's really what's driving all of this. In both industries, hospitality and retail, we have a number of modules that our customers can buy from us. It's really the story of we integrate with everyone. You know, we wanna be a fair player on the market, but the integrations with our products are always greater than what you have with the rest of the market. Over time, people buy more from us.
Got it. Okay. Well, thank you very much.
Your next question comes from the line of Thanos Moschopoulos from BMO Capital Markets. Your line is open.
Hi, good morning. Hey, guys. If you look at attach rates in the North American retail, which is your most established market for payments, are you starting to bump up against the ceiling on your payments attach rate for new customers, or is there still more runway on that?
Within retail, I think we're pretty pleased with the attach rates overall. You know, as we've talked about, there's always categories that we're, you know, not gonna be able to onboard and so on. Yeah, I think within retail, we've got that in North America, we've got that fairly well optimized. There's still opportunities for us across the board, you know, as we enter hospitality more deeply and international markets more fulsomely. I'm pretty pleased with how things are going in North American retail.
Yeah. Thanos, maybe if I could add on the product strategy, we are just trying to add more value to customers who attach payments, so we're making it more and more natural. You know, we do analytics engines that are based on payments. We do everything we can, basically. Actually, if you look at this world of omnichannel, with the customers going online and offline, and now especially with the new headless commerce we've launched, there is real value which is not just about, you know, what are your rates. There's real value in attaching Lightspeed Payments, and I think it's becoming more and more natural for our customers to bundle in payments as they buy Lightspeed.
Sort of a related question, you called out a couple of larger payments wins. I was kinda surprised. I didn't think you'd be competitive for payments for that kinda customer size. Is that new? Does that reflect maybe you know more of a concerted effort to go after larger payments customers, or has that always been part of the strategy?
It's always been the strategy. I think we have an extremely good flow, and we, you know, in our go-to-market, we are distinguishing the big customers from the small ones, and everybody is gunning in the right direction. Again, for me, it's the value we bring to customers, even the large customers, you know, having a fully integrated reporting where you can see exactly, you know, what hit your bank account versus what was sold is always gonna be simpler than having, you know, a payment provider completely, you know, disintegrated from the core platform. I think, again, for me, this is a natural move.
I think as we go forward, more and more customers are gonna need this, and we're certainly focused on creating more value for customers who buy payments so that it becomes a natural step, you know, as of the buying process.
Great. Thanks. I'll pass the line.
Your next question comes from the line of Richard Tse from National Bank Financial. Your line is open.
Hey, thanks. Nice quarter, guys. You guys are obviously have become one of the most global players in the market here today. Obviously, it brings probably some strategic synergies, including diversification. Does it bring any operating synergies, you know, relative to your competitors that you can use?
Well, I mean, yes. Trying to think of the right way to answer that for you, Richard. Certainly, as we think about how we get leverage across, say, our development teams. You know, we've got development centers in Germany and the Netherlands and obviously here in North America and Australia. Those are helpful in a tight labor market for us to, you know, be able to bring in talent and realize that benefit where we're not just chasing talent in one specific country. The benefits of scale, I think we've always talked about. You know, the more GPV we're driving, the better economics we're gonna get, more value it's got as we look forward to our supplier network and things like that as well.
So you know, we're huge proponents of scale for sure, and I think it really matters a lot in our market.
Yeah. I think also I'd add a few, I mean, obvious ones, but you know, when you think about our relationship for performance marketing, where we you know, we can centralize the performance and have much better rates because of the volumes that we're doing there. I think we are becoming a go-to brand globally, which also helps when you look at backlinks and you look at how the performance of organic growth. Again, it's much easier when you have more customers than fewer to find synergies. Obviously operating in all regions brings us more customers and better intake of business, so we can then leverage a ton of our suppliers.
Okay. That's helpful. Thanks. This question is sort of related to the hardware piece. You know, I know it's not sort of the focus, but it is sort of part of the offering and, you know, with the sort of challenges in the supply chain and chip shortages, like was there any impact in the quarter and how do you think about that sort of going forward, just to make sure that you've got enough inventory on that side that it's not an issue here?
We've been managing through this for a few quarters now. We haven't had an impact on say business activity of selling and so on. It does have an impact on our hardware margins. You're seeing that show up where as we go to secure inventory to meet our growth rates, we're just having to pay more to secure that inventory in some cases. So that does show up in the margin line. Then you'll just see the inventory balance on the balance sheet has been growing as we look to make sure that we have sufficient inventory to meet our own growth. It's certainly something that's there.
As you mentioned, it's not a huge part of our business, but it's something we need to manage through.
Okay. It hasn't had any impact, is sort of the bottom line the way I hear it.
Right.
Okay.
Not to selling activity or anything like that.
Right. Okay. Appreciate it. Thanks, guys.
Your next question comes from the line of Josh Baer from Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.
Great. Appreciate the question. Wanted to ask on payments, really, what's it gonna take to get to that 50% attached level? Specifically, just wondering like the hurdles to overcome, the timeline and also the trajectory, and we should expect steady increases or more of an S curve, like with the broader availability of payments now, should we be expecting an inflection in that percentage of GPV processed through Lightspeed Payments? Thanks.
Yeah. Thanks. Thanks, Josh. Yeah. Again, we're gonna stay focused on our process volumes. That's what we can control the most. The penetration rate is subject to some variability as consumer spending shifts around and so on. I think that metric is a very good one from an opportunity perspective. From a progress perspective, we think the GPV or payments volumes are the right measure. I don't think you'll see it be linear. You know, this is not perfect science necessarily, but I do think, you know, as seasonality will play a role in certain industries and then as we unlock markets and get meaningful traction, I think you'll see that line steepen at certain points rather than just be a linear extrapolation. A lot kinda goes in there.
Should we get to the 50%, you know, that's gonna be a very great outcome, I think, for the business and the shareholders continue to see opportunity to get there and the path there will, yeah, it won't necessarily be linear. I think you'll see periods of time where that line steepens.
Maybe if I can add two things. One is we have a high volume that's outside the U.S. This was recently launched, and the exciting news is we're seeing really good attach rates and similar attach rates to North America. Everything for us says we're gonna. Of course, that's gonna drive a ton of GPV. Feeling really good about that. Then I think when you look at the last pieces on the global environment, when you look at the attach rates on new customers and you look at how churn works in SMBs, we are gonna get there no matter how we skin this. When you look at attach rates that are really strong new customers, we are getting into that direction. So again, not concerned, not worried.
We are where we wanted to be on a GPV front and, yeah, feeling really good about payments.
Great. Thanks for the context.
Operator, I think we have time for one last question.
Your final question comes from the line of Josh Beck from KBCM. Your line is open.
Excellent. Well, thank you for the question, and congrats, Brandon and Asha, on the expanded roles. You know, I wanted to ask about the go-to-market with the flagship platform. You've obviously had the restaurant product in the market for a while. You're just really out of the gates on the retail side. You know, what have you learned maybe from the restaurant flagship launch and how are you applying that to the retail launch?
Look, again, everything is very much in line or ahead of what we expected on that front. We launched, you know, Retail is launched sooner than we thought, so that's super exciting. What did we learn? I mean, simply put, it's a blueprint, it's a sequence, you know? There's a very strong sequence. We're going market after market, and as we deploy the new product, we are monitoring very carefully ARPU and close rates. You know, just being very clear, if we were to launch and we didn't see an increase in ARPU, we didn't see, you know, good close rates or at least the same level of close rates, we would've paused, but we haven't seen any of that for now.
Maybe just sharing one data point, more than 50% of all of our hospitality deals globally now are on the new platform. That tells us, okay, we're heading in the right direction. The next steps for us are fully launching the U.S. for the hospitality, which is gonna happen before the end of summer. And the second step for us is launching hospitality in Australia and New Zealand, and that is well on track. We have our first alpha customer, so feeling really good there also. I think for me, there's no real surprise. I would say there's a strong operational focus here on launching these products, and we're satisfied with where we are.
Retail, I mean, we took the other route, so we've launched now in Australia and New Zealand, we've launched it in Europe, and now the final launch for us is the U.S., and that's because it's the largest market for us. And on that front, we're gonna be going, you know, every quarter we're gonna be deploying into new verticals and we're gonna be checking those close rates, and we're gonna be ensuring that ARPU is higher, attach rates on payments are good and close rates are good. We've started in the first vertical now, and we're seeing really strong signs, so we're very excited about it.
Great to hear. Maybe just to close out with an ARPU question. I think it was up about $100 year-over-year to the $270 level. You obviously have a very comprehensive platform at this point that spans back office, omni-channel, financial services, front office, et cetera. I'm just curious, like maybe if you look at, you know, your highest ARPU customers or maybe, you know, what a customer would be paying if they adopted all the services, you know, how should we think about a little bit of the ceiling in terms of, you know, where that metric can go?
Yeah. So I think I'll just start by when you look at adoption of modules, we are very, very far from the ceiling. And you know, I remember us sharing a lot of data about this, you know, at the earnings day. But for me, there's at least room to multiply by three, four, five easily this number if customers are fully penetrated with all the modules and payments. There's a lot of room for growth. There's a lot of green fields. We don't see any ceiling anytime soon on that metric.
Great. Thanks, JP.
Okay, I think we'll end it there. Thanks everyone for joining us today. Again, if there's any follow-up questions, we are around, so please feel free to reach out and we look forward to speaking to everyone again in the near future. Thanks, everyone.
This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.