Okay. Mic on? Can everybody hear me? Okay, everybody. I'd like to welcome everybody to our Lightspeed's Capital Markets Day. We have a pretty full agenda for everyone today. Thanks, everyone, for joining us live here in New York and also on the webcast. For those of you on the webcast, a reminder that you can ask questions, so please feel free to type the questions into the dialog box during the day. We will take questions at the end with the senior management team answering any of those questions. Of course, we have our disclaimer. I'm gonna read a brief version of it. We will make forward-looking statements during our presentation 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 to 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 on November 4, our capital markets day presentation available on our website as well as in our filings with U.S. and Canadian securities regulators. Also, our presentation 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 capital markets day presentation, which will be available on our website after the presentation, as well as on our November 4 earnings press release, which is available on our website, on sedar.com, and on the SEC's EDGAR system.
In addition, our presentation today will include key performance indicators that help us evaluate our business, measure our performance, identify trends affecting our business, formulate business plans, and make strategic decisions. Such key performance indicators may be calculated in a manner different from similar key performance indicators used by other companies. Final note, that because we report in U.S. dollars, all amounts discussed today are in U.S. dollars unless otherwise indicated. This is the agenda for today. JP and Dax are gonna kick it off by recapping the quarter, and then Dax is gonna give you the Lightspeed story. Later on in the day, JP, Mike, and JD will give you the state of Lightspeed's business, both present and future. Then Brandon Nussey, our CFO, will wrap it up with our business model.
As well, for those of you in the room, there is a live demo of the new flagship Lightspeed restaurant product, so please take the time during the coffee breaks to view the product. Aside from that, I will turn it over to JP.
Thank you. Good morning. Does this work? Yeah. I can put aside this. Hi, how are you? Welcome. We're super excited to have you today. My name is JP Chauvet. I've been at Lightspeed, and Dax and I have been working at building this wonderful company. I've been here for nine years, and I joined, we were slightly over 40 employees, and now we have offices in three continents, and super excited to be here today. I kind of, you know, with Dax, have been running the company. I focus a lot on the internal, on ensuring that the teams are aligned, and that as we grow, we continue to have this very strong vision and this strong alignment between go-to-market and product. Yeah, super happy to be here today.
Before we go into the vision, I think it's worth for us to just look at how far we've come since we did the IPO and just wanted to recap a bit where we are and where we're heading. I think when you look at the numbers, they're just outstanding, and you look at the growth that we've gone through, very exciting to watch, and we really are where we wanted to be at this stage. If we look at the key numbers, we were 47,000 customer locations when we went out, and today we're 156,000, so pretty substantial growth. If you look at the GMV, it was $13 billion. Today, we are $55 billion, and this only in a few years.
Our revenues were $72 million, and today we have $389 million in revenues. We had just launched Lightspeed Payments. You know, I'd like to recognize a few faces here, but for you, for those of you who, you know, listened to our pitch when we did the roadshow, we had just launched Payments. The whole conversation in the company was, are we capable of launching Payments and making Lightspeed not just a software company, but an integrated business with software and payments? Today, the last quarter, we announced more than $2 billion in transaction volume. Again, huge progress.
When I look at this, today, we know how to sell payments, we know how to attach payments, and most of all, the customers see a lot of value of integrating payments and software, which was what we set up to do when we went out. Finally, our revenues, our growth when we went public was about 36%, if we looked at the compounded CAGR. Yeah, proud to say that with everything we've done and all the modules and payments that's been launched, our growth has accelerated, and our organic growth in the last quarter was 58%. Brandon's gonna be sharing also historical growth, so you can see that we really are in the right direction, and very pleased.
I just thought I'd take a moment to look at this because sometimes, you know, when you climb a mountain, you know, it's tiring, and once in a while you turn around, you look at the view, and the view's pretty good, and Lightspeed is in a pretty good spot. I wanna, before we go into today, review Q2 because I wanna be sure everybody understands where we are and what's happened, and, you know, there was a lot of questions, so we'll talk about them. Again, let's look at the quarter in review. $133 million, and our guidance was $120 million-$125 million. I think this is the eleventh quarter since we're public, and we've always, you know, expect...
We exceeded the expectations, and we're very proud. You know, we have this internal message: "Do what you say you're gonna do." I think this drives the entire company and how we operate. We're very pleased with the results here. The organic growth, of course, you know, the absolute growth with 193%, that's because we did acquisitions. For us, we stare at organic growth every day, and we stare at the funnel. Here, organic growth was 58% on the quarter, excluding the acquisition. Very proud of that number. Payments. Payments is now 11% of our GMV.
I think, you know, the way you can look at this is, wow, that's great progress, but the other way you look at it is there's so much opportunity and there's so many drivers of growth there. 11%, and if you look at a year ago, we were 5%, so really good progress. I think where the progress is really on a number basis. We processed about a year ago, $500 million, and this year, we processed about $2 billion. Huge growth from the number standpoint too. ARPU.
I remember also when we did our initial IPO, everybody was like, "Oh, you know, is the ARPU gonna grow?" We were very, you know, confident saying that the ARPU would grow because two things, we have a number of modules, and if you look at the attach rates over time, customers buy more from Lightspeed because they see value in having the integrated products. We do more by integrating than if you're buying the products individually. The other reason why we said ARPU would grow is we have strong confidence in payments. Here, very happy to say that just in one year, we went from an average ARPU of $170 to $270. Finally, I think this is the engine of the future growth. We're very pleased with the progress in payments.
You know, we acquired a number of companies. We had this vision that we would, you know, put components together and create a much better application. I invite you to go at the back of the room and see a demo of the product. Here, we're very proud of a few things. The first one is we launched Lightspeed Restaurant (K-Series), and this is the aggregate of all the acquisitions that we've put. We've worked at it really hard for a year now, and we've launched this product, and we're very confident it is the best product on the market with regards to hospitality. We launched it in Europe. It was a great success, and as you might have read in the press releases, we're launching it in the U.S. now. It's in private beta.
It's gonna be very soon available, and before the end of the fiscal year, available to the entire market. Not wanting to do comparisons, we're very proud with that product, and we know that it does more than most of the competitors in the market. We announced the acquisition of Ecwid, and we said that because the view of Lightspeed for the future is not so much bring customers to your website and transact on your website. Our view of the future is embed commerce everywhere and enable your customers to sell on any platform. Here, Ecwid was a very big component that we wanted to add to our family. This was the latest of the acquisitions, and it's already now available in beta to all of our customers in all regions on all products.
Huge progress there and very pleased with the outcome. For us, that was the way of saying, though, it's not just physical first if you wanna build an e-commerce site. In the industries that matter for Lightspeed, digital first is very important for us, and digital only is very important to us. We'll be talking about this quite a bit in the coming hours. Finally, very proud of the progress of payments. You remember we said we'd start in the U.S., we'd move to Canada, we'd move to Europe, and then we'd move to Asia. You may have read the announcements, but you know, we launched Europe a quarter ago. Very pleased. 800 customers have now signed up in one quarter. It's gonna take time. They're gonna now become transactional in the following quarter.
Very pleased with the progress. We now just launched Hospitality Australia on payments. Progressing well there with the objective of having all products in all regions on Lightspeed Payments for one and only one good reason. ARPU of a customer. Net ARPU doubles when somebody buys payments from Lightspeed. The attach rates on new customers are very strong, and that's what the market wants, we are laser focused at delivering this globally. Cool? Now, few questions came out. We try to kinda summarize the questions that we had when we did our earnings call, and I
Before we go into the future, I just wanna take a little bit of time to go through these three question marks and kinda share with you in a very transparent way where we are and what, you know, what are the underlying reasons for this. First question was net customer locations. Everybody felt that it was not as strong as it used to be. Here's the reality. The reality is, if you look at the funnel, you look at the close rates, you look at the intake of gross customers, it's been one of the strongest quarters we've ever had. We're very pleased. Again, you remember this whole mission around one Lightspeed globally. We said we wanna be that go-to brand. That is working. We're very happy with that.
Now, the reality is, because we're a global business, and it helped us quite a bit during the pandemic. Because we're a global business, we have a large piece of our customers who are in Australia and New Zealand. Here in Australia and New Zealand, you might have heard, but there was a shutdown that was the most severe shutdown in what we've seen everywhere. What happens when there is a shutdown, the monthly customers churn because they can't operate. What happened then, and we've seen that everywhere else, those customers churn during the pandemic lockdown, and then when the lockdowns are removed, we see a lot of that churn turn into you know customers resubscribing to Lightspeed, which has the opposite impact.
That's actually what happened when you look at Europe, not this quarter, but the quarter before. We had a lot of net new customers. That's because Europe went back out of the pandemic, and all of the customers who had churned came back as new customers. Really what I'm here to say is, what we can control, the funnel, the close rates, you know, the organic growth, we're very happy with that. The reality is the majority of that discrepancy between gross and net was due to Australia and New Zealand. The rest of the churn in the business was very much planned, was in line with what we had planned.
Here I think the takeaway on that one is whatever we control, we did well, and we're very excited where we are. Second question we had, and I have a little slide for this one, is we had a lot of questioning around, okay, yeah, you guys seem to think, you know, payments is going well, but it was from 10% to 11%. Why? Here we wanted to kind of give you a bit of an understanding of what happened. Numerator on the left, very easy. This was on a dollar basis. We grew quarter-over-quarter on Lightspeed Payments by 19%. Okay? Very much in line with what we wanted actually, and we're very pleased with that.
On the right side of the screen, this shows you GTV, and it shows you GTV by segments of products. Here, what you can see from this slide is the two drivers of the growth of the GMV. The strong drivers in the quarter were EMEA Hospitality and Hospitality. But if you look at retail and you look at the total, that was in line with the expectations. But the reality here is the segment that grew the most, EMEA Hospitality, was the segment where Lightspeed had no payments. You understand now that on an aggregate level, it looks from 10%-11%, but on anything again that we control, it's great. Actually, this is really good news.
EMEA growing really fast quarter over quarter means that once the lockdowns are out, the business is driving again. The other good news is we just signed 800 customers on this in the quarter, so this will have a very strong impact as we go. Again, we're very pleased with the progress in Lightspeed Payments. In the areas where we have Lightspeed Payments, the growth is exactly in line with what we wanted. There's good news here. EMEA is growing much faster than we thought. What does that mean? That means that now that we've launched payments in EMEA, that's good news for the future growth of the business. All right? I wanted to cover this very simply put, try to disclose a bit more, try to share as much as possible. Again, what is the takeaway?
Whatever Lightspeed controls, really great quarter, payments in line with where we want it to be, and revenues ahead of guidance. Last question we had was around the forecast, and everybody wanted to understand why the last quarter of the year we didn't forecast as much growth as we as the market wanted. I think also a lot of questioning around the next quarter. What I wanted to share with you, and I'm just gonna describe the slide, this is actually Lightspeed Payments. The reality is almost 50% of our revenues now is Lightspeed Payments, and Brandon will be sharing the data with you later on. Because of that, we need now to educate you and share with you what really seasonality looks like for our merchants.
Here, this slide, basically, the first assessment, it's growing. That's good news. You can see that quarter-over-quarter, and here, Q2, Q3, I just wanna maybe point out these are Lightspeed calendar. Q3 '20, where the spike happens is Christmas season. Okay? The Q4 of Lightspeed is the Q1 calendar year. Here, what I just wanted to share with everyone is the graphs look pretty similar, but all you see is growth. What you have to see is Q3 is an extremely strong quarter, and Q4 is always the lowest quarter in the year. Here, again, you know, if you look at 2020, you go into 2021, last year, spike, Q4, decline, and then we see basically all of the new customers that are growing.
Here, what I just wanted to share with you is when we did our forecast, there was one real question we had, and we're not the only company that had that question, is like, there's a supply chain issue. Actually, we have 3,000 brands working with Lightspeed with NuORDER now. We aggregated all the data that we could find. The question is, will the merchandise hit the store of our customers in time for us to see the usual Christmas spike? That's the fundamental question we're wondering.
That's why we were fairly conservative in our forecast because we are hearing the brands worried that because of the shipping issues and supply chain, they are worried that the merchandising will not be at the stores. This has nothing to do with Lightspeed ability to sell, nothing to do with our hardware, you know. All of that is secured. It's the real fundamental question, and I think if you look at Amazon, and everybody is basically questioning, will supplies hit the stores in time for the spike during the holiday season? Now, we have forecasted a spike, but the question is it gonna be as strong as last year? Nobody knows. That's why we were fairly conservative in our forecast there.
Then the second question that I wanna answer is, yes, of course, we now have to take into account that Q4 is the lowest quarter of the year for Lightspeed, which is Q1, so post-holiday season. As we go forward, because payments is successful and because payments is now almost half of our revenues, there is gonna be seasonality as we do. I think for us now, we just wanted to share, and we just want you to understand now how it works and how these quarters work at Lightspeed for our merchants. All right. I hope we put to bed, you know, the three main questions that came out. Fundamentally, that's why we are so happy with where we are. Fundamentally, everything we can control is exactly in line with what we wanted. The business is good.
The one Lightspeed brand is great. This whole thing about being the global go-to brand, everything around our products that we wanted to launch that are, you know, the aggregate of all these strategic acquisitions we've been doing are exactly in line. Payments is launched as we have planned. Happy days at Lightspeed. We feel really good at where we are. Now, there are factors that we can't control. You know, we've done 11 quarters in a row of exceeding expectations, and maybe we are a bit conservative, but we'd rather be conservative than to not guide in the right way. We did what we thought was right, and we wanted to guide in the best of our knowledge on what the market's gonna look like.
I think for us, 11% penetration payments, launching payments globally, I mean, the runways are everywhere, and we're very excited about the future growth of Lightspeed. All right. Cool. Now, we're gonna invite my partner in crime, you know, I know it's not a good term, but my partner in crime in this is Dax. We've been at it for many years. Our Founder and CEO. He's gonna talk to you about the history and where we came from. Thank you very much.
All right. Thanks everybody for joining us here at NYSE. It's amazing to have all of you with us today. Thanks JP for recapping the quarter, great explanations and a great walk through of the numbers. These are results that we're all really proud of. The team, as you can see, has been working super hard to capture market share in economies that are reopening all around the world, and also releasing innovative new solutions and really, actually really. I'm personally really proud to be showing you guys the new flagship and restaurant, it demoed super well. We're gonna be talking about that throughout the day, and all the other flagships that are coming to market.
Before we get into the vision for the future, which JP's gonna walk us through, I wanted to talk to you about where we've come from and the journey this company has been on since it was founded in 2005. Almost a decade and a half in a second floor apartment in Montreal. I also wanna speak about our mission, and that's the mission that gets Lightspeeders and all the exec team up in the morning. That's the mission to build the tools that are gonna power those businesses in our neighborhoods and our communities and our cities all around the globe.
What drove the company from an early stage was the belief that the small and medium-sized businesses in retail and hospitality, in our cities and communities, they were a source of great richness for our societies. That they gave the cities the uniqueness and the texture that we all really value. That they should really have the tools to compete in a rapidly changing consumer environment. That there was an increasing complexity of doing business, and that could be simplified by software, that could be simplified by technology. I think that's really at the core of the mission of what we do. Personally, I've been building software since an early age.
My dad was a graphic designer. He used to bring home a Mac, and I pretty much geeked out in my early days. By age 13 I was working for an Apple developer and building software on the Mac. I was building software in my teens and twenties for a lot of businesses. I guess my credo was UI and UX and simplifying the complex, and a lot of that software was for retail. You know, that was where the original Lightspeed came from that interest in building software and solving those problems. I built the original software for that retail segment.
The first two years of Lightspeed were just programming from four till four in the morning to create that original product, which is now called Lightspeed OnSite. What's remarkable is that the original profile of customers that used that original Lightspeed, that hasn't changed. We're still serving that complex segment of the market. We're still serving those businesses that have those deeper operations, those neighborhood businesses. What's really changed over the years is the consumer behavior and the market has radically changed over the decade and a half that Lightspeed's been around. The way that consumers shop, the way that they dine, the way that they discover businesses, the way the businesses expand, the way that they have to compete has radically changed, and that's what's fueled this company.
It's fueled our mission, that's what's fueled also the growth of the company. That original Lightspeed, it had the depth and the breadth of features to fully serve the operations of this business, and we've had to continue to evolve, and I'm gonna show you that evolution over the years. What remains consistent is that we are building the software that SMBs need to be able to compete against those big chains, those big box firms, and those e-com giants, and give our customers, our SMBs, that technological edge, that competitive edge, to be able to differentiate on experience. We're proud to be powering the businesses that are the backbone of the global economy.
As I mentioned, we had an amazing start on the Mac, and the Mac in 2005, remember this is about 2 years before the iPhone. Steve Jobs was at the helm, and the Mac represented empowerment. That's why small businesses were super attracted to it. Not to mention that all the new Mac products were super beautiful and everybody wanted them on the counter of their retail store. It represented empowerment, it represented ease of use, and the original Mac Lightspeed OnSite was all of that. It helped you manage a very complex retail business with tens or hundreds of thousands of SKUs in the segments that we currently serve.
It was so popular that a lot of our early customers became our resellers. That's why Lightspeed has such a strong international DNA because, you know, I remember in 2006, we had 40 different resellers from all over the world as far away as Australia and Saudi Arabia come one year into our business to learn how to resell Lightspeed. That's why we have such a global streak to our business, 'cause it's from the early days. The next stage was really exciting. You know, around 2009, 2010 is when Amazon declared that retail was dead. At around the same time, Apple just basically flipped the script. They just said, "That's not true.
We're opening Apple Stores, and we're gonna bring the experience onto the showroom floor with mobile units." They had this new Apple Store experience which totally reinvented retail. Basically, Apple came to Lightspeed and said, "Well, we're not gonna ever deliver this system for SMBs, but everybody wants this." That's where Lightspeed brought out Lightspeed Mobile and followed up with Lightspeed on a tablet, Lightspeed for iPad. That's where we really started on this journey of first empowering on the Mac but then totally reinventing retail as we went, starting with that mobile checkout.
We realized very, very quickly that as these businesses were moving into, you know, into 2010 and beyond, that they were really starting to need to connect all the pieces of their business. There were apps that they wanted to be able to add to the business, like things like loyalty and accounting and all of the things that were interconnected, but one of the main areas was online buying, e-commerce. We had an e-commerce solution from an early stage. We had things like multi-store, but what was really needed to bring all of these things together was cloud.
We were one of the very first to bring cloud to retail for a retail package that had the full depth of functionality that Lightspeed had. We're one of the most powerful retail systems in the cloud from an early stage. What that really enabled and unlocked was our omni-channel vision. Omni-channel meant that what was important in the store or in your chain of stores in terms of selling was mirrored by being able to sell online in just as powerful a way and be able to run that all from one system. That's where we started to not just match what the legacy systems could do, and we're gonna talk about TAM in this presentation.
Legacy systems, you know, from a lot of the bigger players were very powerful. They had all of these deep analytics tools. They had all of these, you know, strong inventory management tools, and we were starting to get there. Once we got into cloud and once we got into omni-channel, that's where we could really supersede them because now we could interconnect things. We could get data from across different systems, and we could bring in all of the digital sales channels. That was super powerful, which leads us to the next stage. Yeah, we lit up things like delivery and e-com and loyalty, but that brings us to the next stage of our evolution, which was payments.
You know, notice now we knew we partnered with payments, different payments providers, but we knew that there was payments touchpoints along all of these elements in the omni-channel journey, in-store, across different locations, online, and things like curbside pickup and delivery and loyalty. We knew that managing payments across all these different elements was suboptimal for the business owner, that they needed to have one back office. They needed to have one payments experience, and that's why in 2019, just ahead of our TSX IPO, we rolled out Lightspeed Payments. As JP showed how powerful that's been for our business, but it's also been a game changer for customers.
As we look into the future, we're seeing even the potential for even more financial services from Lightspeed, like Lightspeed Capital, and beyond. The other theme that we're really excited about and we're gonna be talking about throughout the day, JP, Mike, and JD are gonna go into our supplier strategy. Supplier network is an element of our strategy that's had a really amazing response and that I think we're...
I believe that's where it comes from is the fact that we've been so close to this complex segment for so long, and we know what is really going to move the needle for them in terms of a competitive edge, and optimizing supply chain and bringing those merchants and those suppliers closer together, is going to completely change their competitiveness. As you can see from what's happening in supply chain, if they had more control over those relationships and there was more data being interchanged between suppliers and merchants, they'd be in a much better place. We're very excited about that. I think that one of the things I'm the most excited about is the new flagships.
The fact that we've been able to bring together the top teams from around the world, companies that we've competed with for years in the complex segment, many of whom have execs that are now a part of our team and that are actually in this room, bringing together those companies with the Lightspeed teams, with our UI expertise to roll out the flagships in retail and hospitality, I think is gonna be a watershed moment for Lightspeed. If you look at the restaurant product that we're demoing today, that is the best of Lightspeed. It reminds me of the tightness of UI and interface back in the day when we were crafting that original Lightspeed UI.
It's crisp, it's tight, it's fast, and put it side by side, and we have some side by side comparisons with anything, and you'll be impressed. Can't wait for you to see that. Yeah, I think it's gonna be a major piece, a major player in the market. You know, where we get with all of these omni-channel native flagships and our work in payments and suppliers, that really strengthens our position as that one-stop commerce platform.
In our complex segment, the belief is that the main components that these businesses use should all come from Lightspeed, that because they have this complexity to their business, they want to be getting more components from us, that we want to be building the most powerful components, and tying it all together with payments and with all the supply tools that we're gonna bring to it. You know, we see ourselves as that trusted vendor, the vendor that's gonna roll out new financial services that are really tailored to that customer, and all the new software tools. We're that, we're the center of their business. We're at the core. We're their operating system, both online and in store.
Of course, we always keep it sophisticated, yet intuitive, powerful, yet simple. Part of the journey to realize this ambition is to have the scale and the global reach. Like I mentioned earlier, we've had that international DNA from the beginning. And now we've brought the best technology and the best teams from all over the world, and what that amounts to is that scale. We've got 156,000 customer locations in over 100 countries. And that scale has allowed us to really execute on that payment strategy, that software strategy, and that supplier strategy. And it's given us a company that's fared well during COVID, it's diversified and it's really resilient. Which brings us to why we're here today.
You know, our TSX and our NYSE IPO, which was last September, about a year from now, you know, a year in the past. It gave us the capital and the profile and the connections and the level to realize our ambitions, to execute on our growth strategy. That's I think has been really great for the company to be able to do all of the things that you've seen us do, to expand rapidly in this period, to really capture the market.
That leads us today to Capital Markets Day, where we are excited to be able to deep dive with you into our vision, into our products, which we're ultra-excited to share with you, and into our business model. This is just the beginning. I'm gonna pass it back to JP for a vision of the future, but I thank all of you for joining us today. Thanks.
Thank you, Dax. Dax is a very humble man, but the story of Lightspeed is very simple. It's the story of a company that started with a crazy good mission, helping the small against the big and helping small independent retailers compete with the large big box players. It's the story of a company that has always been ahead of the game. You know, when you look at it, we were one of the first doing mobile, you know, checkout when nobody was doing mobile checkout. We were one of the first to do omni-channel when nobody was doing omni-channel. We were one of the first companies to have this vision of integrated commerce with all of the, you know, essential components. Today, that's why we're so excited to be showing and sharing with you the next steps in this vision.
I think I believe we've earned, you know, the trust of the market and to say, "Okay, this is where we think we're heading." One thing is sure, we're obsessed around executing the next step of our journey. Before we talk about the product, I wanna talk about the market. You know, there's a lot of questions around this market. It's one of the largest markets out there. There's 47 million retailers and restaurateurs on the planet. I say the planet because Lightspeed is truly a global business. You know, workflows in Paris versus workflows in Germany versus the workflows in Australia are completely different. The integrations, the fiscal integrations in all these countries are completely different. Lightspeed is the only player on the market that has a true global footprint.
Here, what is the difference between 47 million and 6 million? What we look at is inside of the SMBs, we wanna work with the more sophisticated SMBs. The way we look at this grid here, the difference is that 6 million is more than 5 employees, restaurateurs and retailers, and I think that's a good differentiator. The more you go in complexity inside of the SMB market, the more we shine. You know, there's a huge difference between 1 location and 2, and all this logic of centralized inventory, centralized menu management. Also the other thing that matters for us, and I always used to say, we're not interested in small, medium, large coffees or small, medium, large T-shirts. We want people that have really sophisticated needs.
You look at our customers, they are Michelin star restaurants, they are fine dining, they are retailers with hundreds of thousands of SKUs, and that's where we shine within the SMB space. The market is so vast that it's not one player takes it all. Even though from the outside, and we'll be talking about this, it looks pretty similar to everybody, there's a big difference between Lightspeed and the rest of the market, and it really maps to the market we're going after. The other way to look at it is really when we think about the world, we think about channels and, you know, from pure e-commerce to physical, and we strongly believe omni-channel. You know, even before COVID, five years ago, we were saying omni-channel.
I think we were right there, and COVID had a really accelerating impact on adoption of solutions like ours. Our view is you need to remove the silos, and the only way you're successful if you're a retailer or restaurateur today in our segment, you need to work across channels. We see ourselves really in the middle and regardless if it's e-com first or if it's physical first, you need to be in the middle. The other way we look at it is simple merchants versus complex. The simple, we talk about the copies, you know, and there's a few players in that market, or, you know, the simple, you know, 5-10, you know, size of T-shirts and colors and grids. We are really on the more sophisticated side.
You look at some of our merchants, you know, a bike store, you know, pet stores, electronic stores, apparel. These are normally stores that have quite a bit of complexity, and that's where we shine. Not to say that we don't do, you know, small, medium, large, but that is not the big differentiator with Lightspeed. The big differentiator with Lightspeed, and that's where most of our customers need us, they couldn't operate without a platform like ours. Here, I think the most interesting piece is really the dotted square underneath Lightspeed. That's, let's not fool ourselves. That is the majority of the market that is still on legacy systems that are on-premise, non-connected, not open, and those platforms in today's world are more and more difficult to operate. Naturally, that is the market that's up for grabs.
That is the market that's gonna come to platforms like ours in the coming months and years and quarters. Here, that's where we have a very strong opportunity for Lightspeed. This brings me to the next slide. Why? I always call this the hidden side of the iceberg. It's a bit confusing 'cause everybody, you know, has an iPad or some kind of mobile device or a cash register, a scanner, and a payment terminal. But the reality is not all of those are similar. They all have the same front end. Arguably, some are more pretty than others. But what you do that nobody else does is this depth of complexity and that's where I think we're in a really good spot for the legacy system. Those legacy systems are very rich.
Even if you look at our latest product that we just released, K-Series in the US, it can bend in any way you want, and it's one of the only POSs on the market that can really accommodate the transition from a legacy system to a platform in the cloud. That's why we're so excited about this. Again, 6 million potential buyers, and we have about 156,000 customers. There's a ton of runway there. Okay, it's not because we handle complexity that our platforms are difficult to use. This goes back to what Dax was saying. Since day one, the obsession of Lightspeed is take something really complex and make it as simple and as pretty as possible. I you know, the word I think about is elegance.
Even again, inviting you to come and look at our new product, this is the most elegant platform you can find. You look at how we handle, you know, the checkout, how we handle the split bills. I mean, the platform is just pretty and elegant and very easy to use, and it's flying fast. That's why now, you know, I mean, I like to say, you know, hospitality was a hobby for Lightspeed until this new product. We are now very seriously going after the market. We just launched this product in beta. We have customers on it, and now we are really going after this big market in the U.S. But don't forget that this platform is being released in Europe, we are the leader in Europe, and we've had incredibly good feedback on this.
I invite you today to have a look at it, but I just wanna show a few interfaces because it's really pretty and it works really well. All right, let's talk about where we're heading and what we think are the big next steps. We started talking about this at some of our earnings calls, but today we wanna go into details on where we're heading and where we think the market is heading and what is the next big stepping stone for our customers and how are we gonna help them in the future.
Before we talk a bit about the past, I mean, nothing too, you know, uncommon here, but the world started on-premise, and then it was the rise of the payment terminals, and that's when you started seeing connection and, you know, recognizing the user across the stores through the payment terminal. Then the whole POS went into the cloud, and we've been, you know, saying for five years now, omni-channel, omni-channel, omni-channel. What was a nice to have has become a must-have in the last year. I think that's why we are more relevant than ever, and that's why we're so excited about where we stand as a company.
That's why when I was describing the quarter and where we are and we look at the funnel and we look at the close rates and we look at the intake of leads, we're really in a good spot right now. Because omni-channel is the only way you go forward, and Lightspeed has the best omni-channel offering on the market. Now, this is where we are today, and if you look at the solutions that we offer today, we are mainly focused on the merchants. What have we been trying to do over the years? We've been trying to actually look inside of the merchant and say, "Okay, let's make it as efficient as possible.
Let's enable, you know, real omni-channel where you enter your inventory once and then you can sell it across channels, you recognize your customers across channels, you can recognize your data and the behavior across channels." We do a little bit with consumers and with suppliers, but the reality is, no matter how hard we work at automating inside the store, if we don't look at how the store works with their suppliers and how the information flows between the suppliers or the brands, the stores, and the consumers, you can't help them go better. That's why when we look at the future of Lightspeed, we are now trying to triangulate the data and triangulate everything between the brands, the merchants, and the consumers.
It's really important because when you ask our customers, "Where do you spend a lot of time?" you will realize that most of their time is spent working with the suppliers and the brands, and this is all manual. It's Excel sheets, it's pen and paper, it's back and forth. That's because the brand has no visibility on sell-through, and the store has no visibility on inventory levels at the brand. What happens very frequently is the store is running low in inventory, and they're like, "Oh, I need to order 100." They do a purchase order. They actually email that purchase order. What happens, the brand comes back saying, "Oh, I can't allocate that much. Please redo a purchase order." They're gonna redo a purchase order with the right levels.
Then finally, when they get the goods, they need to manually go into the system and start typing the description, start putting in the images. The reality is because of omni-channel and because that they now need to engage with COVID through multiple channels, a lot of their time is spent preparing the descriptions and the pictures and everything to be able to automate. The problem is, unless you start looking at how do I integrate the description from the supplier directly into the store, how do I integrate the ordering from the store to the supplier, how do I help the supplier see real sell-through, you'll always have problems with supply chain and complete disconnection between what the supplier or the brands are producing and what is actually selling in real time. The last piece of the equation here is Lightspeed.
You know, we are starting to build a lot of concentration within verticals. We have extremely strong visibility on what sells in industries. That information today is completely locked within Lightspeed. Now we need to make this available to the brands that work with us so that they can actually see what their consumers are buying and what they like and what they dislike, and help them actually guide new products and guide production so that everything is always produced just in time. Very exciting world. At the core of all of this is data services, which we've started building now for years. We have a pretty large data pipeline. At the core of this, as Dax was saying, is financial services. We are in a really good spot to propose all types of financial services to everybody within the triangle.
I think that's what you're gonna see. We started by focusing on the merchant, where we offered payments mainly to the merchants on the sell side. We're now gonna do payments on the buy side. Now we just launched capital, so we're enabling our vendors to access money. Here now, we're gonna also be doing this on the supplier side. Over time, there's a lot of things we should be doing. Great? Why is this so important? I started talking about this, but let's talk about the merchant. Well, you know, it goes back to our vision. We need the merchants to be successful. It goes back to the mission, David against Goliath. We need to enable them to have as much technology as possible so that they can compete.
For them, if we do this right, what is that gonna mean? That's gonna mean they're gonna spend way less time back office handling all of this manual stuff when they order their supplies. We're gonna help them understand when they should be ordering what. We're also gonna help them identify new goods that they do not have in their inventory today. Because with the data services that we have, we can very easily see what is the outlier in store A that is not selling in store B and enable store B now to access distribution or to access new brands. We're gonna help them provide a much better experience, be much faster at omni-channel. Ultimately here, we're gonna help them also providing them financial services. Imagine this world where we know that they don't have a certain supply that they should hold.
I'm gonna lend them money so that they can go and get that supply. They're gonna use Lightspeed Payments to order that supply. I'm now gonna help the brand identify new stores, and I'm gonna start taking a cut of distribution also. It's a very exciting world ahead, but the value proposition for merchants is pretty straightforward. Brands, value proposition, the main one is brands have zero visibility on what's selling where at what price. If you ask the brand, they're the most important thing for them is, okay, I wanna be sure I understand at what price and where my goods are selling. What happens today, there's a real disconnect. The only time they know that they need, you know, they need to sell some of their goods, it's at the order point. They never see what's selling.
They don't even know what discount levels. What happens with the high, you know, the highly valuable brands, they hate it when their goods get discounted on networks because the stores cannot sell them. Here, enabling the store to understand exactly what levels of order they need to do so that there's no goods that stay in dusty inventory, enabling the brands to have the sell-through so they can see on an aggregate level what sells inside of the Lightspeed network, and then also providing them trends so that they can adjust their product offerings is very important. Here, I think that there's, you know, from all the brands we've spoken to, you know, we announced the acquisition of NuORDER .
I mean, almost every single brand we're talking to is like, "When can we get the sell-through?" That's really the value. I think that's why we're so excited about where we're heading in the future. Well, first of all, nobody's done this. This is not about drop shipping, you know, a good from Asia. This is really helping a network of high-value goods. Here we're very excited to be bringing this to market because we're in a position now where we've gained a lot of concentration in verticals, and you need that for those network effects to work. Value proposition for consumers, very simple. You're gonna go to stores, you're gonna discover brands in stores that are in line with what you know, what you want. We're gonna provide a much better experience.
Ultimately, what we're gonna be doing here is as consumers inside of verticals go from stores to stores, we're gonna be building profiles of consumers that will then in return ensure that when the consumer goes to a store, they have an incredible experience because all of that aggregate-level data will help the store identify what the customer should be consuming. So imagine, you know, you'll know the size, you know how they fit based on, you know, everything they've been buying, you know the brands that they like, you know the colors that they like. From that, we can basically build beautiful personas that we can share across the network to provide a much better experience for the consumers. All right. This is only valuable if you have concentration. What do we mean by concentration?
You need to have enough stores within geographies for hospitality and within industries so that these network effects work. Good example I can give you, if I'm going after the vape market and I only have 10 stores, nobody within the supplier market is gonna care about me, and none of the stores are gonna care about the suppliers because I don't have enough critical mass. Here, when we look at this, hospitality has to be around geographies. You know, no matter, we have a beautiful chain in Spain called Goiko Grill. They were acquired by LVMH, and they do deluxe burgers. No matter how much I love those burgers, I won't have them shipped to Montreal. That's why for us when we think about the hospitality market, it's really around geographies.
Here, we need to build concentration within cities and regions. When I think about retail, it's a completely different thing. It's a global market, it's not a perishable good. In retail, it's really the industry that drives the suppliers. If I'm strong in golf, if I'm strong in outdoors, if I'm strong in bikes, if I'm strong in electronics, there's often a handful of suppliers that really matter in each of those industries that every store holds, and those are the ones that are really valuable to Lightspeed, and those are the ones we wanna work with to build basically the flywheel. With this in mind, now I hope you've understood the strategic moves we've been doing across the last few years. We wanted to get to this point, and this has always been in our mind.
Now, when you look at the history here, we've gained concentration. You know, I love to say, if I'm looking for schnitzel in Stuttgart, Lightspeed has a restaurant there selling it. If I'm looking for a gourmet burger in Spain and any of the big cities, Lightspeed is there. If I'm in New York and I'm looking for sushi, Lightspeed is there. We have absolutely gained concentration in all the geographies. We're the only player on the market in hospitality that has a true global footprint. Same thing with retail. Now, if you look at the big markets where we operate, we have concentration within the large verticals and not the small, medium, large coffees or the small, medium, large T-shirts within the industry that hold a lot of inventory.
Lightspeed has now gained concentration in the industries that matter. That's why if you look at the last two deals we did, these two deals are not around concentration, and these two deals are acceleration of roadmaps. Acceleration of roadmaps because the time is now, and we wanna get to market with a full complete solution as soon as possible that triangulates suppliers and brands, stores, and consumers. NuORDER, as you know, worked with 3,000 luxury brands, and they have the capabilities now to support all the verticals we're going after. We're now hard at work integrating all of the marketplace, basically the NuORDER marketplace into the Lightspeed world. The deal we did was Ecwid.
Ecwid really was to support stronger capabilities in e-commerce and accelerate basically our roadmaps in telling the market it's not physical first anymore at Lightspeed. Even if you're digital only, if you're in one of the verticals that matter for Lightspeed, we want you as a customer. Cool? All right. I mean, there's a lot to talk about here, but there's a few concepts I'm gonna pull out of this. I talked about it. Digital first, digital only or physical first. What drives Lightspeed's roadmap now is verticals. We are very confident in our ability. As you know, we launched a press release where we now have launched a new Lightspeed eCommerce based on, you know, of course, a piece of that being Ecwid.
The great news here is we can now go face-to-face on digital first within the industries that matter for Lightspeed. I would argue we can do more. We can embed commerce anywhere. I don't know if you read the announcement with TikTok, but we can even now sell Lightspeed or build a cart within TikTok to enable people to buy goods. I think that's the big change in philosophy. We're no longer in this world of you need to come to our website to sell. We're in this world of embed commerce everywhere so that the merchants can do well. That's really, again, the big learnings of COVID. You need to embed commerce everywhere, and that's what Ecwid does. Actually, Ecwid came from e-commerce widget that would just be embedded in all those platforms.
Okay, of course, there are network effects when you have those suppliers. Suppliers can be drawn to the platform and bringing a lot of their stores to the platform, and the stores are gonna be driving suppliers to the platform, yeah? Here we've seen this. You know, bikes is probably where the most advanced, with 60%-65% of all bike stores in North America. Here what we see is everybody within the, you know, we see the best CAC to LTV inside of bikes. Here we're very excited to be bringing this to all the verticals. Thanks to NuORDER, we can now accelerate our roadmap there. We have this, pretty exciting one, endless inventory. It's our term, and we're very proud of the term.
Here the logic is to say, "I will enable a merchant to sell a good that I do not hold in store as if it was in my warehouse, because I will have access to inventory levels at the suppliers, and I will enable that store to sell the good and have it drop shipped from the brand directly to the consumer." Again, working hard at this, but we think that is also incredible because when we look at Lightspeed, we have the highest users in the world, 156,000 stores. There's one model, but then we can also have the model of, I'm gonna have all the brands working with Lightspeed that have now the drop shipping capabilities to the consumers, and I'm gonna use the network of consumers that go to stores to have those brands ship to consumers.
Obviously, we believe that over time, this brand awareness is just gonna drive network effects, and we're gonna go just much faster in the verticals that we operate in. All right. What is the endpoint of all of this? We want the merchants on the Lightspeed platform to have a higher chance of success than on any other platform. Hopefully, by integrating and triangulating all this data and enabling the stores and who are the ultimate customers of Lightspeed, enabling them to do more, you know, to be much more efficient, to have much more visibility, it's gonna drive them to be more successful. As I said, digital first, digital only or omni-channel, we want you as a customer within the verticals that matter for Lightspeed. That's the last.
The third, I think, is one of the very exciting ones too, the way it works today, a brand. How does a brand discover stores? They normally have agents, and those agents work with stores. There's a pretty large disconnect between the brand and what's actually selling inside of the store. Here there's a lot of fees that are siphoned throughout distribution.
here. What's exciting with Lightspeed and with the data set that we're aggregating, I will be in probably the best position within the verticals that matter to tell the brands, "Here are stores that could expand your distribution network in a very controlled way." Today, I could see very easily if two stores have 80% commonality in inventory and store A has an outlier that's selling like crazy, there's a high probability that store B could sell that good and could make a good living with it. Lightspeed is now gonna start putting in contact or in relationships with brands, with distribution and new stores that are gonna be good for them. Here, you know, I'm sure you're familiar with companies like Faire. There are companies out there that take a distribution fee.
I think Lightspeed, because we have the sell through all the way and we know everything about the stores and the consumers within those verticals, we can do much more there. I think that's a very big piece, and that's actually what's very exciting when we talk to our brands, is they all want to do more, but they wanna do it in a very controlled way. Because the fear is that the brand ends up in the hands of the wrong store who's not gonna represent them well. Of course, everybody in the network, suppliers, merchants, consumers, gets value from Lightspeed. That's the endpoint here, and that's really the network effects we're trying to build. Really ultimate point here is help the small compete against the big.
You know, in the early days, we used to call it back Saving City. They were, "You're trying to sell save cities?" We're like, "Yeah. You know, nobody wants to go to cities without the texture of these small businesses that, you know, that make cities different one another." Nobody wants kind of globalization in a sense that in every city you have only exactly the same brands. Our mission here at Lightspeed is to ensure that we help the small restaurateurs and retailers in every city in the world, you know, keep the texture of the city. This goes back to our initial mission, and it will always be there. All right. Let's talk about the money now and why this is really important. Of course, if we put this in place, there's a lot of drivers.
There's even more drivers for growth. Not that, you know, with 6 million potential buyers, we have 158. There's a huge runway there. I think putting in place these network effects and putting in place this triangulation is gonna drive even more growth to Lightspeed. The first one here, with the flywheel, because everybody within the network in the verticals gains value from Lightspeed, the net result is the cost of acquisition of a customer goes down and the lifetime value goes up. You know, we see this in the industries where we're very strong, where we have, you know, the beginning of catalogs. We see it. Everybody within the vertical want Lightspeed to succeed.
Here, because we'll triangulate even more and because we'll automate even more and we'll make those merchants more successful, CAC to LTV is gonna, of course, go into the right direction. The second thing, spoke about it a lot, financial services. We are gonna build financial service for everybody in the network. Today, we're focused on the merchants. We launched, of course, payments. We're gonna launch it globally. The next step after this is gonna launch capital globally. We've now launched it in the U.S., and we see good traction there. But we're gonna do more. I think we'll be in this world where I will be providing capital for specific inventory. I'll be going to a store. I...
You know, imagine this world of a store logging in in the morning, the store owner, and here you're like, "Hey, here are five items you should sell to the network because we know other stores wanna buy them and you're having a hard time selling them." Second line is, "Here are five goods that you do not hold in inventory today and that you should hold in inventory. And by the way, here's $50,000 to go and order this inventory because we know it's gonna sell." And finally, use Lightspeed Payments to order and use Lightspeed Payments to sell. There's a whole world of building on Lightspeed financial services that is ahead of us and all of this triangulated by strong data. Data services, I think will be an offering by itself.
When we talk to all of the big brands in bikes, the only thing they want is they wanna buy from us the aggregate level data because they know that we know trends better than anybody else within the industries where we operate. Here, I think you can expect a world where we will be selling aggregate data on industries to players inside of an industry and making a good living out of this. Then finally, distribution we talked about is a very exciting one, enabling brands to expand their distribution and actually introducing brands to new stores without the middleman. I think that's very exciting too. That was my high-level view. I hope you sense the excitement.
As I said, you know, Lightspeed, for all of these years, we've always been, I think, ahead of the trends. We listen to our customers. We know our industries very well. We were just super excited to share this with you. Today, throughout the day, we're gonna be going into details. We'll have more information on the supplier network, more information about what we're doing in hospitality also with suppliers. Yeah, beautiful world ahead, and I hope you're enjoying this and have a great day. Thank you.
We're gonna take a ten-minute coffee break. Just a few questions from online. The presentation will be available at the end of the day after all the presenters are finished. You can download it then. For you and for those of us who are here in the room, please go with Evan at the back there. He can show you the demo of the flagship Lightspeed Restaurant product. It's actually quite cool. Again, we will be taking questions at the end of the day with all the presenters. We'll take a ten-minute break, and we'll be right back. Thanks.
I launched The Souk to connect Montreal's finest designers and makers. Change is not easy, but with Lightspeed, it was easy. They literally came in, took care of all the training, whether it was with the designers, with the clerks at the cash register, the volunteers. It became clear on that. By the end of the event, the designers were looking forward to using more of the platform on the next event because they realized how easy it was to use it.
Peggy Porschen isn't only a brand, it's also my love, my wife and my business partner. It's a family business, so it's a little bit more than just a business for us. It's a lifestyle and a passion. My greatest success other than my son, I think is probably opening the shop here, which is our second shop in the King's Road. Whatever Peggy could do in life, if it was cakes or design or anything, I think she'd be really good at it. But she excelled more with cakes, and that's what we've really excelled in. One of the biggest challenges as a restaurateur is most probably staffing and trying to keep your consistency up even as you expand the brand. The deciding factor that made me choose Lightspeed was its reputation to be a solid, stable solution for my restaurant.
Before Lightspeed, it was two different till systems, trying to look at two different reports and trying to add them up to see what I did for the day. It's changed. Lightspeed now, it's just one look on my phone. I can see at any time, real time, exactly how my business is doing. We've just opened this new location and added the two-floor feature, and now we have an oversight through the kitchen and through the management upstairs as to exactly what the two floors are doing. I found the onboarding process with Lightspeed really good. One thing, they're open 24/7, and even at 10:00 P.M. when I was the only time when I had the restaurant free to myself, there's somebody on the end of the phone who could help me out.
If I was to recommend Lightspeed to a colleague or a friend of mine, I'd tell them to get it straight away, and I'd help them set it up.
My mom is really the one who pushed me to start my own business. I had the concept. I knew it was different. I knew that it was kind of a niche thing. I said, "Okay, find a location and open a store." She's a different person. She needs that push, and I think every kid needs the push because I was not able to do what she can do now at her age. I would never be able to do what she does. It was a different time, though. Back in the day, people struggled because of who they were and where they came from. I think today I don't have to struggle. The whole concept of natural and organic skincare or whatever it is can be costly. These are traditions from my family that are now mainstream now. Even threading. Threading is Indian.
I've been threading my eyebrows since I was 12 years old. I started this business, and I had no idea what I was going to. It was really difficult keeping up with the day-to-day and products and doing everything. It was overwhelming. Lightspeed really helped me with that. I can see everything. I can see, you know, the products that sell really quickly, the products that don't. I have loyalty with them. I have Lightspeed in my second store expanded into e-com. My first year with Lightspeed, we grew 130%. Besides any other platform I can't compare. There was pressure to have my own business. I was 23 when I started. When I was 22. I needed a mentor, someone strong, someone that, you know, truly believed in me. I definitely owe all the confidence to my mom. Alyssa is the essential part of this business.
This business cannot succeed without her. She is smart. Her thought process is different. Alyssa has something about her.
I launched The Souk to connect Montreal's finest designers and makers. Change is not easy, but with Lightspeed, it was easy. They literally came in, took care of all the training, whether it was with the designers, with the clerks at the cash register, the volunteers. It became clear on that. By the end of the event, the designers were looking forward to using more of the platform on the next event because they realized how easy it was to use it.
Peggy Porschen isn't only a brand. It's also my love. My wife and my business partner. It's a family business, so it's a little bit more than just a business for us. It's a lifestyle and a passion. I love this other than my son. I think it's probably opening the shop here, which is our second shop in the King's Road. Whatever people are doing in life, people with cakes or design or anything, I think she'd be really good at it. She's fallen in love with cakes, and therefore, that's what we've really excelled in . One of the biggest challenges we've gone through is most probably staffing and trying to keep the consistency up even if we expand the brand. The deciding factor that made me choose Lightspeed was its reputation to be a solid, stable solution for my restaurant. .
Before Lightspeed, we had two different POS systems trying to look at two different reports and try to add them up to see what I did for the day. Since Lightspeed now, it's just one look on my phone, I can see at any time, in real time, exactly what we're doing. We just opened this new location, and there is a two-floor feature, and now we have an oversight through the kitchens and through the management upstairs of exactly what the two floors are doing. I found the onboarding process with Lightspeed really good. One thing, they're open 24/7, and even at 10:00 P.M., it was the only time when I had the restaurant free to myself, there was somebody on the end of the phone who could help me out.
If I was to recommend, Lightspeed to a colleague or a friend of mine, I'd just tell them to get it straight away, and I'd help them set it up.
My mom is really the one who pushed me to start my own business. I had the concept. I knew it was different. I knew that it was kind of a niche thing. I said, "Okay, why don't we do this and open a store?" She had never heard [inaudible] , and I think every kid needs a place like that. I was always dreaming of cooking. I did. I would never stop. Why not just have it all? Back in the day, people struggled because of who they were, where they came from.
Okay. If everybody could take their seats again, we'll get things rolling again. Okay, we're gonna have Mike DeSimone and JD Saint-Martin take you through our retail, hospitality, and payments business. I'll call Mike up. Mike.
Thanks, Gus. Hi, everybody. I'll give you a minute to take your seats and hope you got a good sense of why we're so excited about the release of our new Hospitality flagship. I'm Mike DeSimone. I'm the Chief Business Officer at Lightspeed. I'm based here in the New York City area. I joined the company about a year ago. I came over with the ShopKeep acquisition. As Gus just said, JD and myself are gonna go into a bit more detail about our business, what's happening currently on the ground, and how we're bringing the strategy that JP and Dax talked to you guys about earlier to life. Before we get started, I thought maybe I'd share, since I'm fairly new, I'm almost up to my first year at Lightspeed.
I thought I'd share a story about how we put the companies together, and how we came to the decision to do it. Prior to COVID, ShopKeep's recurring revenue was growing about 25%, and we were EBITDA positive on an annual basis. Like Lightspeed, we were recovering quickly from COVID, from the initial impact of COVID. Fundamentally, we had a lot of options in terms of what we could do with the company.
I met JP about two years ago, and the more time I spent with him and the more I got to know how he would think, thinking about the business and then met Dex, and started to really see how we can change commerce everywhere in our local markets and in the local communities in which we operate. Got us so excited that that's actually the primary reason we did the deal. We saw the potential of bringing these companies together and establishing an absolutely globally dominant player in the markets in which we choose to target. Just quickly, and you've heard it all day, and you're probably gonna hear it some more today, just to give everybody a sense of our business lines.
I think you guys know we started in retail, and you've heard a lot about the type of retailers that we work with, and we're gonna go into a lot more detail about that. We also have hospitality, which is restaurants, and hotels and really just the hotel industry. We also have golf, which is a newer business for Lightspeed. It came as part of an acquisition of Chronogolf, was founded by my colleague, JD, who's gonna be up here in just a minute. That's a business that we started in North America but have now expanded into the U.K. and to the E.U. We also have a financial services business line. The reason it's kind of wrapped there is it's not really an industry vertical.
We think about financial services literally as a service that we plug into the other each part of our business. I'm gonna talk more to you guys about that today and kinda how we can think we can leverage that. I think just to frame the day and frame what we're talking about, we're gonna spend today this afternoon focused mostly on hospitality, retail, and financial services. I'm going to start my timer. You know, I think it's a theme again you're gonna hear today that I think we all think is just a massive differentiator for Lightspeed, which is unlike some of our competitors, Lightspeed's a truly global business. We believe that gives us major advantages. The regions and countries that you see here are really where we have the most material presence of our customers.
We also have merchants in Latin America. We have merchants in the Middle East. We also have merchants in South Africa. You know, we believe that the geographic diversification really helps amplify the existing diversification in our business line. We focus on different verticals. We focus on different ways to monetize those verticals, and now we can focus on that globally around the world. At the same time, although we think globally and we operate globally in terms of scale, we also can bring a local execution to that, and that's a pretty big advantage. JP told a story this morning about the schnitzel restaurant in Leipzig.
If you think about it, in a country like Germany, if you think you're starting to run a restaurant and you're thinking about upgrading your system because of all the challenges that we just talked about for the first part of this morning, how different, how special is it to be able to call a German number, speak to a German salesperson, and ultimately get a system with a global sort of viewpoint scale built really to handle anything but localized specifically for your market. Germany has some pretty complex fiscalization rules. They have different payment types. They also are able to get support locally in German. Makes a massive difference in terms of how we can leverage the investments that we're making in our global platforms all around the world. You probably recall this slide from the strategic overview that JP shared with us this morning.
I think it's worth maybe just doubling down a bit on it and how we think about building or leveraging our global presence by building critical mass. The areas we're building critical mass are in data, suppliers, consumers, and distribution channels. Really, it's important when you think about our acquisition strategy and kind of the journey that you saw in JP's slides earlier today, how we built that concentration through our M&A strategy, we looked at it a little bit differently for these two business lines. For hospitality, we wanted to build a geographic concentration for exactly the same reasons that JP shared. Supply lines are different. You can't order a cheeseburger to be delivered from Spain overnight.
You might actually be able to do it, but it may not show up in really good shape, and it's certainly not gonna be as good an experience as if you ate it there. Really what we wanna do is go deep there, understand the local markets, understand how customers and restaurateurs operate, understand the challenges that they have, understand the supplier landscape and how we're gonna build into that. In retail, it's a little different. We go deep into verticals. As JP said a bunch of times this morning, and Dax mentioned as well, we focus on retail verticals that have a significant amount of complexity in their business. We generally throw around terms like inventory. Okay? That's a pretty generic term, but you have to think about that the inventory of an apparel brand, how different that would be from a bicycle.
Bikes have thousands of parts. I'm a cyclist. Each part has an individual serial number. It is treated in different ways, where obviously apparel has completely different considerations. The awesome thing about our platform is that we built to be able to work within those verticals, and it's just as applicable to a bike shop as it is to a home furnishings business. Because we've built that flexibility into the platform while keeping the interfaces, as you saw in our case series demo in the back, elegant and simple. By building these businesses along these vectors, building our business along these vectors, we think Lightspeed is able to go incredibly deep into serving the needs of independent businesses, their brands and suppliers, and the consumers that both work there and interact with their businesses.
We've been talking about our flagship, and I wanna spend a little bit of time talking through kind of how our core merchant platforms are kind of coming together and where we are with each one of them. For each of our business lines, we're bringing together the best of our acquisitions, from technology to talent to know-how, and we're combining that with the DNA, the commerce DNA of Lightspeed, which is incredibly powerful. That's allowing us to deploy these new best-in-class flagship products across each of our business lines. You just saw the demo in the back of Lightspeed Restaurant. We're super excited about rolling it out, and we're also super excited about the fact that. Is this gonna build that? There it is.
That we've been able to leverage different aspects of the companies that we've partnered with and acquired into it. Upserve drives the analytics engine, which hopefully you got a chance to see. Evan, I hope you showed that, right? Drives our analytics engine specifically into the different quadrants and shows restaurateurs what their best items are, not just the best selling, but the best items in terms of return business. Kounta. We leveraged the ingredient management elements of Kounta to really beef up what we put into the Lightspeed Restaurant flagship. We're also building a new Lightspeed Retail platform, a new flagship, which is we refer to the restaurant internally as an X. It's called K-Series. Retail is called X-Series. And again, here we're incorporating elements of these acquired companies.
Ecwid, JP mentioned earlier, it's already integrated to our flagship. Can we make it better? Absolutely. But it's already integrated, and we expect to really enhance our digital and multi-channel capabilities significantly with Ecwid. Vend, elegant self-service. Elegant, I like to use that word. Elegant self-service and how merchants can start with us onboarding themselves and then grow into the overall platform. Must be blocking when I do that. Financial services, very focused on payments. We've talked a lot about payments. JP says, believe it or not, it says payments, payments every day at almost every single team meeting. We see the massive and transformational power that payments has had in our business. We're also now starting to think about how to expand that. As we've been talking a little bit about is the expansion of Capital.
ShopKeep had a pretty involved capital business where we built a underwriting models and how the risk flows should work, and established a small but decently sized business with really nice margin characteristics. We're now taking those learnings and applying them all the way across our financial services business as we roll out Capital and expand it. Lastly, NuORDER, which is actually allowing us to think differently about payments in terms of instead of just a credit card or a consumer payment, now we think about B2B payments, and we're starting to think about trade finance and other things that we can leverage based on the data that we have and understanding of how our customers' businesses operate and the trusted position we have with them in their ecosystem. Let me drink of water. As we close out this overview.
Sorry, it's a bit warm up here. As I close out this part of my presentation, I wanna make it very, very clear, Lightspeed is not a roll-up. This is a true integration play. We are bringing all of these amazing organizations, capabilities, and platforms together under a single brand with a single go-to-market flow. We're building everything into the Lightspeed go-to-market flow. We're building global platforms where all the elements work together seamlessly to deliver an expanding value proposition to our customers over time. This is about building one Lightspeed globally. If you don't take anything else away from today, I really hope you guys get the message that we're bringing all of this together into an absolutely best-in-class platform. I just wanted to take a minute to introduce you to our general manager team.
This is the team that leads each of these industries. Ana Wight, who is our general manager of retail, comes to us from Vend. Ana was the CEO of Vend for 2.5 years. She came with the acquisition, is now running our retail business and has held senior roles with McKinsey, Microsoft, and also New Zealand Telecom. Unfortunately, because of the situation in New Zealand, the travel restrictions, Ana couldn't make the trip here, and she sends her regards and hopes to come and be able to talk to you soon. Next up is Peter Dougherty, who's here in the room. Peter, if you could just raise your hand. Peter's at the back. Peter's our general manager of hospitality.
Pete's been with Lightspeed since 2011 and has done a number of different initiatives within the company, including standing up our account management team, establishing our global partnerships program, and launching several of our platforms that we brought to market. Last up is Jona Georgiou, who's also in the room. Jona, back there. Jona was our prototype general manager. Jona was the first general manager in the company and has been with the company since 2018. Jona runs our financial services business and brings 16 years of expertise in fintech companies, a deep expertise in payments and financial services. I encourage you during the Q&A, Jona and Pete will be available. I encourage you to ask questions.
I'm happy to answer questions on retail, but take advantage of the team. They're happy to be here, and they're pretty excited about what we're building. With that, I'm gonna turn it over to my colleague, JD. I'm gonna step off for a minute and let you take things on, and I'll be back up to talk to you about our retail business and financial services business shortly. Thank you.
All right. Thank you, Mike. My name is Jean-David Saint-Martin. I would like to bring simplicity to complexity, so you can call me JD. It's much easier. I lead our go-to-market teams globally. I joined Lightspeed back in 2019 via the acquisition of Chronogolf as co-founder and co-CEO. You'll see me twice today, but in the upcoming slides, I'll be covering how we are building the global leading commerce platform for the serious restaurant operator. You'll see a few iterations of this slide throughout the deck, but if you look at this slide in the context of our hospitality business, what I want you to retain is that we're truly building a global business and is already a global business.
We have significant concentration in EMEA and APAC, and across all the markets where we operate, we have local feet on the ground and offices. We have incredible upside ahead of us, and we'll cover that in the upcoming slides, but there are two things that are flowing in motion and in parallel. On one side, you know, we talked about this already on a few occasions, we launched our new Lightspeed Restaurant flagship product in North America. This is a product that is coming from EMEA, but we're extremely excited to bring it to North America. It's fully embedded within our payments platform, and we see tremendous upside. As JP highlighted earlier, we're just getting started. It was really a hobby before.
We're really, really getting started with this really strong product in North America. In parallel to that, we're also bringing our Lightspeed payment solutions across the globe, and more specifically in EMEA and in APAC, we were not present on that front. On the payment side, we see tremendous upside with our existing strong base of customers. Now, when we think about our customer characteristics, I wanna make sure I leave you with one comment. We are not a Square. Lightspeed Restaurant is a commerce platform for the serious operator. Our restaurateurs work with Lightspeed because we provide a solution that is built for scale. While other players focus on low GTV merchants, our solution can really flex with the depth that you need.
From single location bars, restaurants, high volume QSRs, fine dining, and we'll give you some really strong examples of that, but you can imagine fine dining is very complex, particularly around all the table service side of the business, all the way through to multi-location groups and even hotels, which are also very complex and require deep integrations with their property management solutions. We have a great customer quote here, but, you know, a few weeks ago, we announced the launch of our North American flagship product or that flagship product that we're bringing to North America from India. We're extremely excited. You can hear in the tone of my voice. We truly believe that this product is gonna be a game changer, and it's built with foundations to build on for years and years to come.
This is precisely what impressed Tara Morrow at Cafe Lola, who sees Lightspeed Restaurant not only as a future-proof and elegant solution, but also as a product that already outshines the depth of on-premise platforms like Aloha and MICROS. As you can imagine, COVID has absolutely accelerated the digitalization of restaurants. Today at Lightspeed, there is no compromise. With our solutions, our customers are able to operate across in-person dining, curbside pickup, deliveries, multiple ordering services, selling not only meals but also merchandise, all through one single commerce platform. In the context of COVID, our customers' guests or our customers' customers also expect a VIP experience. Our technology allows you to deliver on that promise by tracking individual food preferences, leveraging loyalty programs and member benefits, capturing unique customer data to really optimize your menu and offer customized experiences to your most valuable customers.
Now, when we talk about COVID, we also talk about labor shortages in the hospitality industry. With labor shortages, automation is the only way that our operators, having to often wear multiple hats on the facility, can really continue to find success. Our deep inventory and ingredient management module, as well as our analytics module, allows these operators to save precious time to accomplish more with less. Lastly, our solution not only drives top line, but also gives our operators visibility into margin expansion and cost reduction opportunities across their entire business, all the way through to the menu item level.
You know, again, if you had a chance to spend a bit of time with Evan, hopefully he has a few minutes to show you our Magic Quadrants 'cause that's absolutely spectacular from an insights perspective, and we'll talk about that in a little bit. As we said before, this is our beautiful new Lightspeed Restaurant flagship product. We're extremely excited about it. As you will see when you look at this product, and for those of you that are tuning in online, we'll also have a video showcasing the product during the coffee break. We believe at Lightspeed that this product is miles ahead of the Toast of this world. First of all, our new product is already built for global markets, and it combines the best-in-class technology of all our acquisitions.
Mike highlighted that before, but our ingredient management module comes from Kounta, our advanced analytics comes from Upserve, and the core technology of the POS comes from MICROS O2. This allows us to bring a solution to market that has unmatched capabilities. Let's spend a few seconds on those unmatched capabilities. One, as I said before, we bring simplicity to complexity with our modern interface that handles all the complex flows that a serious restaurant operator needs with a modern, elegant, beautiful UI and UX. That's key. As you bring new staff to your facility, you wanna make sure that they can ramp up quickly and that they can use the tool with all its capabilities. The product is also built on a private blockchain technology, and this allows us to do a few things in this space.
First and foremost, the product is blazing fast. Again, I encourage you to test it out. You will see it for yourself. It's really, really impressive. When we talk about blockchain technology, it also allows us to address fiscal requirements that are a growing trend in the hospitality industry. This product is already available in Europe and is already fiscalized in Europe, but you can expect governments to be more and more present in that industry. With blockchain technology, we're already a step ahead. Blockchain technology also allows you to operate as efficiently offline as we operate online. Again, in the context of a restaurant or a fast, you know, high volume hospitality operation, being able to operate offline is absolutely key.
Third, we talked about the smoothness and the elegance and the, you know, the speed of the front end, but that front end is also matched with deep, deep, features that really impress at every single demo. Every time a prospect sees the solution, it really leaves these legacy on-premise solutions in the dust. Then four, as I mentioned before, it is a platform that is built for scale. A lot of our customers start with one location, but they grow, they find success. JP highlighted that we wanna make sure our customers find success with our technology, and we see it. As they grow, they add more locations, and then you wanna make sure that our solution can handle that.
What's unique with this platform is with centralized global menu management system, you're able to really see all your menus, all your locations in one central menu location. With Lightspeed, you don't rely on other companies to complete our offering. We talked about the fact that we're a one-stop commerce platform. We talked about the fact that we released our advanced analytics module coming from Upserve. We also talked about our ingredient management module. These are all things that are available to you. As you grow as a business, you can continue to work with Lightspeed to complete our offering. We bring all this data together in order to provide prescriptive recommendations to our restaurant operators, allowing them to continue to win in that space. Truly, from our perspective, using Lightspeed provides you with a competitive edge.
Let's dive into a few features of that new product, and this is on the B2C side. Providing exceptional guest experience, our Order Anywhere module allows our restaurants to provide contactless ordering, contactless dining for table-side pickup and delivery. You know, obviously this is a necessity in today's world. Not only did we release this module in the context of the post-pandemic era, it is already integrated with our payments platform, and it is also integrated with a wide range of ordering services. The closing point of every demo, and I talked about our Magic Quadrants, is when prospects discover the universe of Lightspeed Insights. With unmatched analytics, we are able to actually triangulate processing data, payment processing data, to triangulate unique customer behaviors. Our restaurant operators are able to make successful business decisions using Lightspeed Insights.
They literally look at their menu as a profit center matched with ingredient management and margin tracking. Now, we talked about the impact of the global pandemic on the hospitality industry, and frankly, with this pandemic, everything changed. To thrive as a restaurant, technology is not an option anymore, it's a must. Not any technology. Hardware and software that works for you by automating the complex tasks of your operations through a sleek, intuitive, and beautiful interface and design. That's the promise that we deliver on. Of course, we're not stopping here. We're only getting started. If you think about the operations of a restaurant, I like to think of it as a circular motion. On one hand, you start by interacting with your suppliers. You know, you find local producers, local food, and you build your menu.
You market that menu on multiple channels. You provide unique customer experiences, and you collect orders and payments. You turn around and you manage your staff, and you pay your staff. You reflect on the performance of your restaurant or your facility by looking at reporting, benchmarking trends. Lastly, you identify room to grow and seek capital to take it to the next level. That circle continues and continues and continues. At Lightspeed, we wanna continue to do more in that circle. These are two examples of upcoming modules that are in our roadmap. Lightspeed Suppliers, I mean, we talked a lot about the suppliers. We believe solving that complex equation on the hospitality side as well is gonna be a game changer for us, and then benchmarks, and trends.
What you can expect from Lightspeed is that we will be there at every single step of the operator's journey, and we will continue to lead with innovation so that our customers are always ahead of the game. Before we bring back Mike for the retail business, I just wanna leave you with just a quick summary, right? First and foremost, I mentioned this before, we are a global business. We are already a global business in hospitality. The reason why we highlight this, and JP touched on this before as well, it is really complex to sell in international markets, particularly in hospitality. Every single location, every single region, every single country is different. We talked about fiscal requirements, localization aspects. It's very different. You've experienced it before.
When you eat in a restaurant in Paris versus when you eat in a restaurant in New York City, it's a completely different experience, and our products are already built to handle that complexity. We talked about our customer characteristics, and I wanna leave you with this, and this is a constant across all our industries. We seriously focus on the complex operations. We focus on the serious business operators in the restaurant space, and we've really built a product to handle those complex needs. We also want you to make sure you remember, this is state-of-the-art technology. We are bringing all these strategic acquisitions together to build a very modern and future-proof product, and it again really shows in that demo, and we're super excited.
It's a product not only that fits the needs of the post-pandemic era, but it's a product, again, on blockchain technology that we can continue to build on for many, many years to come. Lastly, as I reintroduce Mike back to the podium, we're only getting started. We have tremendous upside ahead of us, and we're so excited for our future. Thank you, and we'll move on over to the retail business.
Great. Thank you. Thanks, JD. You know, clearly there's amazing opportunities ahead of us in the hospitality business with the launch of our new platform, with the expansion of our footprint. Now I'm gonna switch gears. I'm gonna talk about our retail business, and kinda get into that. Again, a theme you're gonna see all day is that we're very global. Like hospitality, our retail business is truly global. The countries here, again, where we have the largest customer density in our retail business, sorry, we also have retailers in other parts of the world, like I mentioned earlier, in Latin America. We have retailers actually scattered throughout much of the world in a number of different countries.
The concentration of our retail business has been, and it continues to be primarily in North America, which we believe balances nicely with our larger hospitality presence outside of North America. With the expansion of Lightspeed Payments into EMEA and APAC this year, Lightspeed Payments is now able to reach more than 70% of our global merchant portfolio. Okay. You're gonna be seeing a few quotes today, and I think while I give you a second to read it, there's just really no better way to hear about Lightspeed than from our customers.
For me, you know, in looking at this, and thinking about it, that first line there from Damon Gabriel, who operates a home furnishing decor retailer in Ellijay, Georgia, "Lightspeed is like the spinal cord of my business." That's a pretty dramatic statement, actually. As you can see from the store itself, there's quite a bit of inventory and different things here. Damon relies on Lightspeed to manage what looks like some pretty complex inventory. I think, I would imagine there's not much standardization or standard sort of SKUs in his shop. He also does a lot of customization and a lot of work orders and a lot of things that make that delivery of that much more expensive.
You know, ultimately, maintaining full visibility across all those workflows, making sure the work gets done on time, product's delivered, and you get paid. We'll keep an eye on his operating margin. It's absolutely what Lightspeed delivers, all of that. Ties it all together, whether it's really handling. Again, think about all the different kinds of inventory that might be in a shop like this. It's pretty vast. Having to customize that and manage all of that through. It's almost like your retail store is like a little factory in some ways. While we think about these businesses as independent or smaller, they do have, as JD alluded to just a minute ago, a lot of complexity, whether in hospo or in retail.
When I reflect on this quote, one thing that I really come away with is we're really deeply respectful of the trusted position we occupy with our customers. Our team of Lightspeeders around the world is working extremely hard to continually upgrade the value we offer to them every day across all of our platforms. Anyway, look, you're gonna see some more of these quotes, but I think it's just really powerful when we hear our customers talk about us. As we've been discussing, we probably keep continuing discussing, COVID has rearranged just about everything related to commerce. While we're all aware that sales have shifted online, we don't often talk about the level of complexity that shift has introduced to the operation of independent retail businesses.
When we say no compromise omni-channel, we understand that omni-channel doesn't mean just giving a merchant a website, right? Most merchants, most of these businesses don't get a lot of traffic or sales, not restaurants, but on the retail side from their website. However, they do get a lot of business from digital channels. They might sell via an Instacart, they might sell on eBay, they might sell on Amazon, they might sell all over the place, as well as their own website. Trying to manage all of that complexity from all those sales channels and trying to keep track of where the inventory is, and do I have enough of this and not enough of those? That is super complex, and it's only gotten more complex as the process of buying has been further disaggregated.
We've all seen the trend for the past 30 years, right? We've seen the rise of Amazon and online, all of those pieces. I think with the pandemic accelerating those trends, what you've really seen is the breaking apart of the buying process, how we select a product, how we pay for that product, and how that product is fulfilled, right? It used to be you go into a store, you pick out what you want, you pay for it, clerk puts it in the bag, and you walk out. Now, you might start on a web or a mobile app, you might pay for it on your way, you might do a curbside pickup, you might have home delivery.
All of those channels now have become disaggregated from each other, and the ability to offer technology that helps small businesses manage that level of complexity, and that's not just across really a single channel in a store or a website. You start adding in those other channels, it gets super complex. I think it's not just about, you know, the consumer access and giving them the ability to order multiple from multiple channels and in different ways. It's really also about making sure that everything gets fulfilled appropriately, that you maintain service levels, that you deliver the product on the date that you commit. Again, you can keep track of all of that and understand, am I profitable? Am I making money? Is my inventory costing me too much? All of that is embedded within our platform. Okay.
As JD clearly stated earlier, and it's probably worth stating again, we're not Square. Square is great for taxi drivers. You know what taxi drivers don't have? Inventory, right? They have time, and that's what they're getting paid for, and it's valuable, but they don't have inventory. They don't really have many sales channels. If you get in the cab and pay them, that's their sales channel, and there's not a lot of things that they have to manage across. We don't target simple businesses like that. As you can see here, Lightspeed Retail is built for established and complex retail businesses that typically have deep functionality requirements that are specifically related to the vertical in which they operate.
I made the point earlier that bike shops and an apparel store or a home decor store are gonna have the characteristics of their inventory are very different. The ability to handle those things and mix and match in some cases is pretty. Think about a bike shop. We do talk a lot about them, but they're a good example, and I'm a cyclist. So you might have a bike, which is made up of 1,000 parts that you have to keep track of, but you also have a jersey, which is small, medium, and large, right? So the ability to have all of that in your system, everything kind of fitting together, whether the sale happens online or it happens in your store, is a pretty dramatic level of complexity for these smaller businesses.
We're starting now to see the ability to sell across social channels. I mean, JP mentioned the partnership that Ecwid just struck with TikTok, and that's the ability really to have a TikTok post, click on the item, and buy it right away. You're not being transported to a website. You're actually doing commerce right on the social media platform. You can see, I think, how the fact that you have all of these verticals, and you have all of these sales channels, the in-store, online marketplace, and social, creating a huge amount of complexity. Now layer that across a global footprint, and you start to understand the intelligence and the sort of, I would say, sort of street smarts that we're building into this platform. Again, you get these merchants are physical first or clicks to mortar.
They're sophisticated merchants with thousands of SKUs, and again, that inherent complexity, which I probably spent a lot of time describing, maybe a little too much time. I wanted to give you guys a sense of how we think about our retail business, and how we approach the different elements of it, and the fact that we don't just deal with super simple businesses with small, medium, large copies that just need to take a payment. Love those businesses. They're well-serviced by others. This is the market we go after. This is the new retail platform. It's our new retail flagship. It's rolling out as we speak. It's currently in beta in the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand. It's not quite as far along as our hospitality platform at this point.
This platform has been built to really, I think, absorb that disaggregation of commerce, right? The whole breaking apart of the buying, payment, and fulfillment process. Specifically how today's consumers expect a seamless shopping experience regardless of the channel, digital, physical, or both. I think, you know, in light of that view, I think we've really designed the Lightspeed Retail platform really to be as omni-channel is really. I like to say multi-channel actually, at this point. I guess it's kind of the same thing, but omni kinda sounds to me like everything becomes one, and I guess that's what's happening. You know, think about the complexity that retailers deal with. To me, it feels kind of more of a multi-channel. We're really working hard to break all those pieces apart.
At the same time, all of that complexity we talked about in the inventory on the previous slide, we're maintaining the ability to manage that, and we're the only provider in the cloud who can do that. On-prem deep integration systems from Toshiba and things like that that were installed in Lord & Taylor 20 years ago, they have a huge amount of functionality. So does Lightspeed, but it's a modern operating platform built for a disaggregated world that enables the high level of customized workflows and the delivery against that complexity. We're gonna talk a lot about omni-channel. We're gonna talk a lot about multi-channel. You know, I think upgrading our omni-channel capabilities was a big priority for the company.
As we talked about a little bit earlier today, it's certainly been significantly upgraded with our acquisition of Ecwid. I'm so excited about Ecwid. ShopKeep actually worked with Ecwid for four years prior to our acquisition by Lightspeed. I know the company, I know the team, and I know the product, and I'm absolutely thrilled. You know, we looked at a lot of options to upgrade that e-commerce and digital commerce experience that we have, but Ecwid's ease of use, its deep feature set, and overall extensibility of the product were superior to anything we've seen in the market. We also love the way the team there thinks about digital commerce.
Having been pioneers in enabling a range of multi-channel headless commerce experiences, this idea of you sell through things that aren't your website or your storefront. It goes far beyond opportunities like far beyond the merchant's own website, and as I mentioned earlier, things like eBay being able to access that marketplace and extending into the concept of contextual commerce, so enabling it within social media platforms. All of that's already in the platform. The platform's already integrated to our retail platform. What we obviously need to do is beef that up and enhance it, but it's gonna give us killer omnichannel capabilities. The product's built to connect to a wide range of commerce technologies. As we've been saying all day, it's integrated to our flagship retail platform.
It's in part, it's being bundled on a beta basis to new retail customers in the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand. We're currently integrating Lightspeed Payments to this platform as well. You remember earlier I talked about the fact that Lightspeed Payments is built as a service and can be integrated very quickly into new businesses as they come in. Taking all that into consideration, we believe that Ecwid, which as JP mentioned a little while ago, is being rebranded Lightspeed eCommerce, is a total game changer for our business. I know you guys remember this slide from earlier. We spent a lot of time on it. What I wanna do is shift gears a little.
This is still about retail, but I think what we're so excited about is retailers. We think of them up here in the merchant services corner, and how they interact with brands. JP talked a lot about this and about what our strategy is and what we wanna build, and how we wanna really, I think, connect and automate merchandising and distribution for the brands, for retailers, especially with today's supply chain complexity, help them discover new products and get access to inventory that they can easily order and add to their assortment. One thing I really wanna emphasize, JP obviously was talking about our vision for the future, we're building this right now. This is happening right now as we speak.
We have engineers with hands-on-keyboards who are building this and connecting the new order platform, down here in this corner, to our flagship retail platform. Let me tell you a little bit about what we're building and why we're so excited about it. As we've been talking about, it's a core dependency for brands and retailers to interact, otherwise they wouldn't have any products. Within the industry they have to be able to connect, but their systems are completely different. I think, JP, you said they swap spreadsheets and things like that back and forth. Not efficient, doesn't connect, no visibility, and the description of the PO processes was disturbingly like you get that sense of, "Oh, now I want 100. Oh, can I have 80? Can I have. Oh, you have more than that.
Can I have 82?" It's kind of a guessing game on what you're gonna order. The systems are so disparate that they aren't. They don't run in sync with each other, to the point where we have this $ multi-billion-dollar industry swapping spreadsheets to manage things like assortment selection, merchandising, placing orders. It's a mess. It makes that process difficult just to do business. Imagine if you're a small retailer trying to find a new assortment, a new brand, access to more products. You're just jammed. What are you gonna do? Go to a trade show during COVID? Right. Like, you can't find these products. Once you do, you have to build a whole relationship with the brand and figure out how you're gonna pay them. It gets really, really complicated.
You know, we definitely see, for me, I've been in technology for 25 years, for me, when I see a mess like that's an opportunity to go after it with tech. As it said on the slide down there, I didn't wanna blow that line until now. That's the way it's been until now. I'd like to introduce you to Lightspeed's Retail Supplier Marketplace, which is a key element of the supplier strategy that JP shared with us this morning. The new product is being built, as I mentioned, on the new order platform and integrated into Lightspeed Retail flagship. When complete, Lightspeed Retail merchants, the guys here, will be able to easily connect to the brands that they already do business with and transact with them now right through the platform.
better yet, they're gonna be able to discover new brands, new products, new assortment items. Again, the key here, the data piece of this is we are gonna have enough information to be able to surface recommendations. "Hey, you sell these types of products." Just think of it kinda like the way Amazon does it, but for inventory ordering in that, say, other retailers like you like these brands. Do you wanna explore? Do you wanna connect to them? The retailers are gonna be able to have access to that. They're gonna be able to get new products, new assortment. It's gonna be super great for them. Obviously, brands want that. They wanna be able to connect to their existing retailers. They also wanna be able to expand their business, get more points of distribution.
Obviously all kind of that flows through here. Ultimately, again, kind of one of the holy grails here for the retailers is to get access to inventory. For the brands, it's to get access to sell-through data. They don't have visibility into who's buying their product, where they're buying, what the return rate is, what the repair rate is in a lot of cases. They don't have that information, but we do. Obviously all of this ends up linking back to the customer. That was a little bit about how it works and kinda what it is. Let's talk about what really drives the value here for both participants in the marketplace. From a brand standpoint, you're gonna be able to, just on day one, automate everything you're already doing with your existing retail outlets.
We can just take it from that ugly process of swapping back and forth with emails and paper and get on there and make it happen. Sales ordering, digitizing their catalog, virtual showrooms, the ability to merchandise, all of that comes onto the platform, makes life easier for everybody that's already has access to it from the standpoint of their retailers. As we talked about, though, getting more access to more retailers and then understanding more about what they're selling and to whom is an absolute game changer on the brand side. We believe that's gonna bring tons of brands to the platform more and more as we add more retailers. Obviously we're already coming in with 150,000 retailers. Integrated ordering with product data, automated replenishment, retail assortment.
Ultimately, as these retailers begin discovering new brands, I think the real magic really kicks in that with a couple of clicks, they can order inventory. They don't have to go offline now and go and find the brand, call them up, have lunch, talk about their product, go through all of these things before they can just place the order and pay without having an established business relationship using Lightspeed Payments and our financial services options. This is why we're thinking the trade finance might be an interesting part of this. Ultimately, does it really need to ever go into the merchant's inventory? If someone approaches a consumer through their e-commerce site or through their store and asks for something that the merchant doesn't have, they can use the network just to have it drop shipped directly to the consumer.
They never even have to bring the product into inventory. You can see, I think, why we're so excited about how compelling this is gonna be when we bring it to the market. We believe that the network effect of this is pretty massive, right? We have brands, they're gonna be able to connect to existing retailers. Great. Then they're gonna start to be able to find more retailers. That cycle is gonna kinda keep churning and growing, and we think this creates that network effect that just draws both more retailers to our platform and more brands.
Given the value drivers at work, what we're really trying to do here, if you can't tell by the visual, is get a flywheel turning, a flywheel of revenue that actually is built on the GMV that's being conducted between both parties in the network. It's the actual merchandise value that's flowing back and forth. That's how we're gonna monetize it. We believe we can charge the brand a fee for access to new retailers. Makes sense, right? We're giving them access to distribution. It's almost like an affiliate in an e-commerce deal. From the retailer's standpoint, we're gonna monetize all of this through Lightspeed Payments, but we also think there's money to be made in the trade finance piece of this.
I think all in all, this is a really good way that we've been able to, I think, kind of almost bottle up the connection between these. With the acquisition of NuORDER accelerating us into it, we think we can really get to market much more quickly. It gives us a ton of competitive defensibility, right? If you're not on this network and this network is a critical mass, you're really missing out as a brand and as a retailer. As I mentioned at the open of this section, this is not just slideware. We're actively integrating our retail platform to the NuORDER platform and standing up this marketplace around that. We do expect to make material announcements about the supplier marketplace in fiscal 2023. Stay tuned.
We're obviously really couldn't be more excited about what this is gonna bring for our retail business. How am I doing on time out there, folks? Thank you. Sorry you guys have to hear so much from me. I have a lot of slides, but I'll try and make it entertainment or entertaining. For the last segment of my time today, I'd like to turn our attention to our payments and financial services business. I know you've heard a lot about it, and I think, you know, it's payments is kinda just one of those things. It's the lifeblood of any business, but especially an independent business that has limited financing options. We introduced Lightspeed Payments in 2018, and like all Lightspeed products, it's designed to simplify the complexity of operating a small business.
You know, with the overall goal really of making our customers' lives easier and setting their businesses up for success, right? Being an expert in payment processing is probably not in the skill set of most merchants. I think that the principle here is captured really well in this quote from Jarred Drown, who operates Freshwater Tavern, which is in Michigan. Specifically, the part that reads, "It's just that little bit of extra support that helps the server handle a fifth table." Sounds nice, but actually, if you run the math on that's a 20% improvement in productivity, right? In a time when you can't hire staff in a restaurant, getting 20% more out of the staff you have is a meaningful difference. Why does it work so well?
It's just easy, and it's designed for restaurants. It understands that people tip in restaurants. Actually, it also understands that people tip in restaurants differently in different parts of the world, and in some cases, not at all. It's things like that where I think you have the kinda global perspective with the high level of regionalization that makes a huge difference, that delivers value like this to the Freshwater Tavern. My dad owned a restaurant when I was a kid, and if we could have gotten 20% more out of every server, I would have gone to a much better school. Look, independent retailers and businesses face a ton of complexity and challenges on a daily basis, and these are just some of them.
What's interesting is even when you look at the ones that don't say credit card, they still have a financial component, right? When you think about order ahead, the ability to place an order and say, "I'm coming to pick it up." Okay, I wanna have that. Well, somewhere in there a payment has to happen, and it's a whole lot better if it happens at the time the consumer orders because they've paid for it, they're probably a lot more than likely to come and pick it up. The timing of that and how it fits into your day-to-day process, all of that is pretty daunting, right? That's where the Lightspeed Commerce platform pulls those things together and organizes that.
This is not just what we do with payments, this is what we do with everything, so that you have that one window into everything that's happening in your business. That's exactly how the approach we've taken to our financial services products. The reason we're showing it this way is Lightspeed Payments doesn't have a go-to-market team, right? Lightspeed Payments sold through our retail go-to-market, hospitality go-to-market, and golf platforms. It's designed as a service, and I keep using that very specifically because that gives us the ability to go very, very fast. That's why we're gonna have Ecwid stood up really quickly on Lightspeed Payments. Subsequent acquisitions, we're also gonna be able to stand up really quickly. Other things we can do. We talked about our golf business. Well, golf uses retail and hospitality as part of the value proposition.
Our Chronogolf, the core of our Chronogolf operation has, like, a golf course piece. Overall, it works through if you have a restaurant, it works through our hospitality, it works through our retail. Why am I making such a big deal out of that? It's one merchant account, so you don't have to have different merchant accounts as a golf course for different parts of your business. All of those pieces, again, fitting together, and dramatically simplifying the kind of set up and reconciliation process to make all of this work. Could you imagine if I was a golf course and I had to have three merchant accounts that ran through three different banks because each one had a somewhat different characteristic?
The idea here is keep it as a service and work through the go-to-market structure, which JP is gonna be talking about in just a minute. Lightspeed Payments. This is specifically the payments product. You know, it's a flexible, designed for our customers, best-in-class payment services that allows our merchants to accept card electronic payments wherever their customers happen to be. That's really important, whether it's online, in the store, on their phone. And because it's integrated to and embedded within the Lightspeed Commerce platform, it streamlines all the processes of credit card acceptance, including taking a range of local and global payment types, automated reconciliation and reporting with what's happening inside of your POS platform, links transactions for returns, so you can come in and just return it without actually having to have the card there.
Enabling advanced transactional features, things like split tenders. Things we don't usually think about, but when someone comes in with a gift card, an Amex gift card, my kid used to do this all the time, there was like $3 left on it, but she wanted to buy something for $20. Sometimes that can end up in a big mess, depending on the merchant. The other thing I would say is that they really appreciate having a single point of contact for support.
I don't know if any of you have ever been in a small business, even just maybe when you're in college, but if your payment terminal goes down, you call the payments company, they tell you to call your technology company, your technology company tells you to call your payments company, and you're kinda caught in this finger-pointing war between the two of them. Meanwhile, you have a line growing out the door while you're waiting for this to come through. Again, these are the things that really drive the value for our merchants, and we offer all of this at a simple, easy to understand and predictable price. There is so much. I'm trying to choose a rude word.
There's so much messing around in the pricing of payments, especially for small businesses, that they get the statement at the end of the month and look at it, they have no idea what it says. With Lightspeed Payments, you know exactly what you're paying for. The other thing is, I love this image because of the shield. Look, all the advanced capabilities and ease of selling in the world work out great, but the thing here that I think makes a big difference is that we're shielding our customers. We're shielding them from the complexity and the risks. We help them with. We make sure they're PCI compliant. We protect customers from chargebacks and fraud. If we didn't do that and they ran into problems, their processing fees will definitely go up.
If they do it long enough, they will start to get charged fees by their processors. If they're a bad enough actor, they'll get dropped, and then they won't have the lifeblood of their business. All of that is protected by the way that we manage Lightspeed Payments. We do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to underwriting and risk, and all of those pieces sit with us so that our merchants can focus on doing what they love. Brandon's favorite slide. Mine too. When you think about the Lightspeed Payments opportunity, you know, we started in U.S. retail about 2.5 years ago, and it took us that long to penetrate 20% of our GTV. This is the penetration of our GTV. It took us that long when we started.
It was, you know, it was brand new for us. We launched in Canada, and it only took us 20 months to get to 15%. What's happening here is you can see we're lighting up these different countries, each in regions, as we've talked a lot about today. It takes a little while to kind of get everything, you know, situated, but from there, we're poised to grow. We've executed this plan very well in North America. JP's talked about the 800 merchants we added in EMEA last month or last quarter. We're, you know. It's. We have the playbook. We're just running it and it's happening. Now we're all the way up to a $55 billion GTV volume processed through our platform.
That's all of it, not all the volume we get, on the last 12-month basis. We're growing, so this number going forward should grow. We have 11% of that. I can tell you that these circles have been mathematically measured and it's proportionate to each other, that this ultimately represents our opportunity and that this continues to expand. It's so clear, and we've got the playbook. Like, it's really well set up. I don't know how else, how much more clear to make. We've opened up the countries, we know how to do this, and we're just getting started on execution against Webb's plan. I think it's the last time you have to look at this map, which is really to talk about. We talked a lot about where have you expanded?
In EMEA, these are the countries we're live, and looking to add a few more. Then in APAC, we're live in Australia, and we'll be launching, I almost said New Jersey, New Zealand, in early in the calendar year. Continuing to expand the footprint. I think we mentioned earlier at 70% we can currently reach 70% of our merchant footprint. We're still gonna go after and try and get as close to 100 as we can, but I think we've really set the stage here, and now we're just executing down this plan. As I mentioned earlier, we're starting to think more broadly about our financial services capabilities and what we can offer our customers.
One area we're pretty excited about is Lightspeed Capital, which is in the process of enabling across all of our verticals and platforms in North America and starting to look at how we expand it globally. To do that quickly and well, as I mentioned, we're just leveraging the learnings from ShopKeep, which launched its own capital products in 2019, and obviously, it's a business I'm very familiar with. We're taking that in conjunction with what we've learned from Lightspeed Capital and bringing it together. That's the theme, right? We're taking these companies, and we're bringing not just the technology, but the teams and the know-how on how to do these things together to really accelerate what we're doing in capital. As I can tell you from my experience with this product, merchants love it. They absolutely love it.
As you can see on the slide, look, we use proprietary data that we have in our customer's business to determine eligibility. We scan that database to determine their eligibility, and we establish an amount that they would be pre-approved for up to $100,000. When the merchant is interested in getting that capital, they let us know through the platform. Because the eligibility has already been determined, it's a pretty quick and easy approval process, and they have really quick access to funds that come in just a couple of days. It's a cash advance on their credit card receivables, so there's no fixed payment or timeframe. Repayment process is a set percentage of daily sales, and the cost of the advance never changes.
I think this is one of the things merchants really like about the product, which is it's based on how well I do. If I sell a lot, I pay you back more. If I close for a day because I had to take a day off, I don't pay you anything, and they're not getting a, you know, a dunning message from us. There's not a fixed amount with late fees and interest amount rates that keep going up as it goes longer. So the cost of the advance never changes while outstanding. And they can use the money for whatever they want. They typically use it to grow their business, and I'm gonna show you an example of that in just a minute. Look, at ShopKeep, this business scaled beautifully.
Our default rates were in some ways, I felt when I was running ShopKeep, as an independent, too low. Crystal's smiling at me because she remembers I used to tell you to lose more money or try and lose more money on the default rates. People, you know, these, it's so intertwined with their business, and the fact that we just have such good visibility into their business. We know if they're growing. We even know if they hire employees. We have such great data that it really allows us to make excellent risk decisions. I think for the sake of time, I'm just gonna kind of blow through this slide. This is a flow on how it works. Really the point I wanted to make. The real point I plan to make is after the merchant borrows the money.
Sorry, I shouldn't say borrow. Once we've advanced money to the merchant the first time, the renewal rate is massive. It's extremely high. I know what it was at ShopKeep. I don't wanna say it here because it may be different at Lightspeed, and Brandon will get upset with me or Dan will get upset with me. But it's very high. Very likely once the merchant takes it, they'll take another one. It sets up this flywheel effect of their business grows, they're able to pay us back faster, then they're able to take another advance. We do see it, and this is a good example. This is from a business called Waterlilly, which is in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.
Leanne Brown has taken three advances so far this year, and each one larger than the next one. One for $35, one for $10,500, one for $19,500. You can see, loves borrowing it, so much less paperwork. It's tied to my success. If you're wondering, and I'm not saying this is 100% because we're able to advance them some money, but their business this year is up more than 100% from last year. They're growing really, really nicely, and so we hope that the money we advanced them helped them grow. Also, certainly, as their business has gone up, we're able to advance more money, and we're able to monetize that. We monetize the product with a fee. It's just a flat fee on the total.
In wrapping up this section, I thought I'd share about how we're thinking about our priorities for our financial services business going forward. Number one, we're gonna continue to drive into that GTV base. We've talked about it probably tired of hearing that stat. I bet you all know that we now can reach 70% of our merchants, and we wanna make sure that that lands. Now it's just a matter of executing against that and improving that penetration, continuing to expand. We wanna get as close to 100% of our merchants, get to 100% of our merchants as possible, in store and online through Ecwid and in all core regions.
We wanna make sure that our payment service can be integrated like lightning fast, super quick, and be able to get us hooked up to new acquisitions and other technologies, partnerships. There's all kinds of ways we can leverage the technology that we built in here to be able to extend this financial services business. Then here's the new growth opportunities. We've talked about B2B payments. We've talked about trade finance. These merchants, we've talked about all the money going into our platform. Well, most of that goes out. If you've ever run a small business, you don't have a great profit margin. There's lots of opportunities to monetize the outflow of money from our customers as well.
We're really just getting started in terms of how we think about financial services for our customers. Oh, JD, I'm sorry. I think I left you last. Now I'd like to bring JD back up. JD's gonna take you through how we go to market and share some awesome customer stories. Thank you so much for listening to me. I'm sorry if I took a little extra time. Hopefully, it was worthwhile.
Oh. I'll borrow that while you're getting back to us here. Thank you, Mike. Okay. Thank you, Mike. Lots of slides, but it was so insightful and very well articulated, so hopefully, you took away a lot of really good data and a lot of information out of that segment. I'm back to bring all these industries together under our global go-to-market engine, which we believe is the best in class, and it really is a differentiator, and I'll highlight that in a little bit. Then, at least from my perspective, one of the most exciting segments, we will be talking about recent customer wins that we've brought to Lightspeed, this fiscal year.
That really paints, I think, a good picture of everything we've discussed today. One thing you'll notice at Lightspeed, we love flywheels and we love global maps for global domination. Here again with more flywheels. But we're extremely proud of our global go-to-market practice. From lead generation to qualification to closing to onboarding, we built a highly replicable go-to-market blueprint to land new customers that is consistent across our industries and across our regions. But once you become a Lightspeed customer, we also introduce you to an account management team that is equipped with add-ons to expand, as we mentioned before, with the growth of your business, allowing our customers ARPU to continue to rise while mitigating churn risk. Brandon will be going over those metrics in the coming slides, but you know, this model really works.
It works because it's consistent, it's standardized, and it operates very, very well. It also works because with this blueprint, we also benefit from an enhanced concentration in regions and in verticals. With an increased presence in a vertical or region, we are also able, as we mentioned before, to provide suppliers sitting at the beginning of the value chain with strategic sell-through data and trends. Why is this relevant in the context of our go-to-market engine? While those suppliers, now an integral part of our model, have a vested interest to refer and drive more merchants to the Lightspeed platform, further lowering our customer acquisition costs. Now, here's the global map again. We talked about our blueprints. We mentioned that, you know, we really have a consistent and standardized methodology across the board.
Our global blueprint also makes room for a very customer-centric and very local presence. You know, we discussed this as well before. If you're a German customer, you speak to a German team that speaks your language, that understands your reality. We have feet on the ground, and we really truly speak the language of those customers and the language of that industry. If you look at our go-to-market engine, Lightspeeders are specialized in one of our three industries, either retail, hospitality or golf. They're, you know, specialized and they work in that industry, but they're also very passionate about that industry. They truly speak the language of that customer, and they build deep, deep connections and understandings with those customers and that customer base. That we believe too makes us very unique and very different.
Now with our scale, we've built highly specialized and highly skilled roles across the customer journey. Our merchants interacting with Lightspeed will speak with the Lightspeeders that really master each piece of that value chain. We're doing this for a few reasons, but one, we believe that we bring a much better customer experience with this model, and it really is reflected in the CSAT and the feedback of all our customers. On top of that, by having these specialized roles, we're also able to build a go-to-market engine that is high performing and that drives strong and healthy unit economics. Lastly, our pricing framework is also built to support the previously explained model.
With that, what we mean is our customers come to us with already high ARPU at the first entry point, but then from there onwards, we have levers to pull from for additional expansion. New merchants are clearly incentivized to bundle software with payments for a few reasons, one being because our products, frankly, are better when combined together, but also because they have financial motivation to go with the two options and with the bundle option. Once a customer, our account management team, as I mentioned before, focuses on expanding your goals and is equipped with add-ons to continue to grow that ARPU. For all the existing customers that were there before that didn't have payments attached to the point of sale or to the commerce platform, they're also focused on expanding the payments adoption all the way through our base.
Then lastly, our bundled pricing strategy simplifies the decision process of our customers and our prospects, and we truly see a shortened sales cycle and life cycle across our go-to-market motion. Now, I'm super excited to get into this segment of the presentation. We'll be highlighting, you know, really across these customer wins, who Lightspeed truly is and who our customers are. We're starting here with AG Jeans. It's an American company making best-in-class denim. I own a pair of those jeans. Hopefully, some of you do too. The story behind this customer is really fascinating and interesting. They were using Retail Pro. Retail Pro is a, you know, sort of on-premise legacy solution in the retail space, and they were looking for a robust cloud-based solution to manage their very complex inventory needs. They have multiple locations, 19 locations, actually.
As you can imagine, from an inventory management perspective, it's very complex. They also needed an integration to the ERP. Through their research, they found Lightspeed, and they were absolutely blown away by the capabilities. Today, AG Jeans uses Lightspeed Retail, Lightspeed Payments, Analytics, Loyalty across their entire portfolio, so the 19 locations and their warehouse. Moving from retail to hospitality, this is The Indigo Road Hospitality Group. They operate 20 restaurants, mainly in the Charleston area, but also in Atlanta, Georgia, Tennessee, Washington, Raleigh, and Charlotte. You know, similar story, they really reached a sort of a crossroad using Aloha, their legacy on-premise POS solution, and they needed a modern cloud-based solution that really could match the future depth of Aloha, but that could really propel them in the future.
Interestingly, they tried Toast at a test location, and they quickly pivoted to roll out Lightspeed with payments across their portfolio. Our advanced analytics module and our OpenTable integration were the game changers in the decision process, amongst other things. It's also worth noting that Indigo Road here is an amazing ambassador for Lightspeed. They actually referred another large hospitality group in the Charleston area called Hall Management. All right, so we covered retail, we covered hospitality. We're now moving over to golf. Indian Wells is a famous name. I'm sure you're familiar with that facility. This is really the finest of Palm Desert golf. This 36-hole facility was actually ranked in the top 20 best golf courses in California by Golfweek magazine.
What's really impressive with this example is that using Lightspeed Golf, and Mike highlighted this earlier, Lightspeed Golf really brings the best of the best from a technology perspective on the retail side, on the hospitality side, and combines all that to a sort of one-stop shop golf solution for our golf courses. They are rolling out Lightspeed Golf across their magnificent property and more specifically, a 53,000 sq ft clubhouse. We're really proud of this one. Now we move from golf and sunny days to the snow. Here we are. This is Telluride Ski Resort. It's a modern alpine destination in Colorado. Again, what's interesting with this one is with their Wi-Fi capabilities expanding, they embarked on a search to find a solution that could manage all of their retail operations across the mountain.
What they were really impressed about when they looked at Lightspeed was, one, our ability to handle multiple sales channels, which obviously is a must in their context, our advanced analytics, and lastly, our ability to open a pop-up shop anywhere on the mountain, anywhere on the resort in a couple of seconds. Those were amongst others, you know, determining factors. Today, Telluride Ski Resort uses Lightspeed Retail POS, Lightspeed eCommerce, analytics, accounting, and payments across their 8 locations on the resort, including a warehouse. I don't know if you knew this, and I mean, obviously JP highlighted this and Mike too, but we have an impressive list of Michelin-star restaurants. The Dinex Group is a good example of that, or Daniel, in N.Y.C. But this is a recent one that we wanted to highlight.
This is Kei Restaurant in Paris, near the Louvre, and it's a three Michelin star ranking restaurant, so really the highest rank in the community. Kei here uses our new Lightspeed Restaurant flagship solution to provide exquisite dining experiences to their guests and patrons. If you think of a chef that is operating a Michelin star restaurant, you can be sure of one thing, they're obsessed about perfection. It means a lot to us when they decide to go with our solutions, and it, I feel, is a good testimony of what we can provide to that industry. All right, this is a cool one, the AFL, the Australian Football League, or Aussie Rules Football.
It's a sport, obviously in Australia, that is played across 18 teams, but is also a professional sports league that is using Lightspeed literally across all of their retail operations. All of the 18 teams are using Lightspeed technology. We've noticed over the past years that sports merchandising and sports merchandise is an increasing theme actually for us at Lightspeed. We have many other examples, and it's really driven by our ability to handle complex inventory management while also being able to perform across multiple channels of sales. The AFL here is a great example reflecting that growing segment. Switching gears back to hospitality. This is in Europe, the Varian Group. The Varian Group is a large German IT firm that specializes in the hospitality industry.
Similar to the stories that I've shared before, they went through a thorough research and thorough due diligence process to find the ideal restaurant platform that they could provide to their customers. Interestingly, they picked our new Lightspeed restaurant flagship product to roll this out for their table service and quick service customers. Bundled with payments, we love payments in Europe. They will start by deploying the solution across 320 locations, and this is only the start. This again, I believe, really articulates, you know, the ability to expand with Lightspeed across multi-locations. Then lastly, this is our eighth customer example. I think this one needs no introduction. Ralph Lauren, obviously global iconic brand, very likely that you have a piece of Ralph Lauren in your wardrobe somewhere.
We're really excited about this one. I mean, obviously, they went through a thorough RFP process before choosing us, and Ralph Lauren chose Lightspeed's brand and suppliers platform to streamline their B2B operations. With immersive virtual showrooms and digital trade shows, retailers are able to order from Ralph Lauren through personalized digital line sheets. You can only imagine Ralph Lauren's needs are very, very complex, right? You need to manage multiple doors with thousands of customer pricing combinations and extremely large orders. Solving this complex order flow, and Mike highlighted that before, through live inventory and ERP integration is a crucial component of the NeuORDER technology. We're so excited to bring this to the Lightspeed family and to the Lightspeed ecosystem because we truly believe that this is gonna be a total game changer for us.
Again, Ralph Lauren being, you know, an incredible example to highlight this. This concludes our last customer highlight. Maybe just before the coffee break, if you allow me, Gus, I mainly just want to leave you with a quick summary of all these customers. As you can see, you know, we're really not interested in sort of the part-time online sellers or the low GTV small coffee shops. You know, we're really building solutions here that are for the high GTV, serious retail, serious restaurant, serious golf operator. The merchant that, you know, is looking for a feature-rich environment that has feature-rich needs and is looking for a modern solution to bring it all together. That's what Lightspeed is all about, and we're really, really proud of these customer wins. Thank you.
With that, we'll move over to the coffee break.
All right. Thanks, JD. Okay, I can't believe I'm saying this, but we're actually on time. We're gonna take a quick 10-minute break, and then our CFO is gonna come up to wrap it up with our business model and plan. Then we'll go into Q&A, and we have quite a few Q&As from the online audience.
10 minutes and then we'll be back.
Lightspeed Restaurant (K-Series) is a versatile and user-friendly EPOS system packed with handy features to help you and your staff speed up service and provide a flawless customer experience. In this demo, we'll take you through some of the system's core features. Let's get started. Lightspeed Restaurant makes taking orders from a table a painless process from start to finish. Today, we're serving a couple at table 22. Select their table by tapping its number into the keypad on the left here. Another way to select a table is by tapping Tables in the bottom left corner and picking it out from your floor plan. Now that your guests are comfortably seated and ready to order, you can select dishes either by seat or by course using the dropdown menu beneath the table number in the top left corner. Ordering by seat helps staff to identify who's having what.
This avoids confusion and enhances the overall customer experience. If guests wish to stagger their meals into courses, then ordering by course is also an option, allowing waiters to indicate to the kitchen the number of courses a table has ordered and fire each course when customers are ready. The couple at table 22 have decided to order starters and mains. Select By Course in the top left corner. For their starter, the customer orders Caesar salad. Select this item by tapping on the Starters category in the middle column and then from the menu item shown here on the right. To add a course, tap Add a Course, shown here below the orders. Each order will now be divided into course 1, course 2, and so on. For their second course, they order fish and chips.
Again, look to the middle column, tap, then select the menu item on the right side of the screen. Now it's time for the other guests to order. To add their starters, simply tap Course One and select their starters. For their mains, tap on Course Two, and so on. Now they've ordered, you can send the full order to the kitchen. Each time the customers are ready for their next course, you can tap Bump a Course. This will send another ticket to the kitchen indicating that they can send the next course. At another table, a customer would like to order a gin and tonic. Here, you can use product sequences to mix and match menu items to personalize the customer's experience. Using product sequences, you can select from a range of specific products that together make up a single menu item.
In this case, you can give a customer a choice of gins and tonics you have available. Go to the cocktails in the middle column, select Gin and Tonic, and you will be presented with a broad variety to choose from so you can tailor to the guest's tastes. With Direct Sale Mode, staff can take orders without opening a table. The orders are then paid for directly by the customer. This setup works especially well for cafes, bars, and food trucks. Another couple walk in and order some beers at the bar. With Direct Sale Mode, this can be done in just a few taps. Tap on the Beer category. Tap Heineken on the right side, then tap the button once more. You pull their pints and it's time to pay. Tap on the green Pay button.
As you can see, Lightspeed Restaurant accepts a variety of payment methods, and our guests would like to pay with Mastercard. Tap on the Mastercard button and then the green button in the bottom right to complete the transaction. We'll discuss payments in more detail in a second. Now you've sent all the orders to the kitchen, you'll need a way to keep track of them. That's where the floor plan also comes in handy. Tapping Tables at the bottom here leads you to an overview of your floor plan. At the bottom left corner here, you have the Filters tab. You can filter your view of the floor plan to show specific information about open tables. The Covers filter tells you how many people are seated at a table. The Time filter indicates how long a table has been open.
You can compare this to your restaurant's average occupancy time. A green bar below a table on the floor plan shows that the customers haven't reached the table's average occupancy time yet. Once they've exceeded the table's average occupancy time, the bar will turn red. The Total filter shows the total revenue generated by the table so far. This helps track revenue against time spent on the table. If revenue from a table is low and guests exceed the average occupancy time for your restaurant, they can be moved along to make space for other guests. Using the Status filter, you can see what point a table is at in its life cycle. It shows how many courses the table has ordered, as well as the course that's being prepared. This updates when you fire a new course. Your guests have enjoyed their meal and now they're ready to pay.
Select the tables from the keypad or the floor plan to open their bill. Tap Pay at the bottom right corner here to arrive at the payment screen. On the left here, we're given the option to split the bill either by items, covers, or seat. Splitting the bill by items is handy for occasions like birthdays, where customers wish to pay for another's drink or meal. Splitting by covers is for when customers wish to split the bill equally. When you split the bill by seat, Lightspeed Restaurant (K-Series) calculates how much each guest has to pay based on what they ordered. Once you've selected the payable items, click on the desired payment method and tap the green Pay button. In a hotel restaurant, you can split a bill by covers and then send each guest's bill to their room.
Simply tap Cover one, two, or three on the left side, then Room Charge in the middle column. Customers can also pay with gift cards using a QR code scanner. To do this, tap the Gift Card Payment option. This will automatically open a camera with which a customer can scan their QR code. Speaking of QR codes, let's talk briefly about their capabilities in relation to Lightspeed Restaurant. With Lightspeed Restaurant, you can boost customer retention and loyalty with QR code-enabled digital loyalty features. Use them in any one of three ways. Offer QR code-enabled discounts to promote deals and products. When a customer orders, tap the icon in the top right corner. You can then scan the QR code the customer has received from you. You can choose which products these discounts apply to in the back office.
Using these same features, QR codes can be used as digital gift cards with money preloaded onto them. QR codes can also be used as punch cards. Let's say your customer is on your loyalty program and has a digital punch card that rewards them a free coffee for every three coffees they buy. When a customer scans the QR code on your EPOS, it shows which promotions and deals are included in the punch card's offer. Once they claim their award, you can deduct the price of the item from the customer's bill using a punch card button that you can make in the back office. As we've seen, Lightspeed Restaurant streamlines your table service with handy features like order by course or seat and product sequencing. It allows for quick and easy order and pay through direct sale mode.
You can get full control of your restaurant plan with our comprehensive floor plan features and handle payments with ease, no matter your business type. Lastly, QR code capabilities make digital loyalty programs more manageable than ever, helping you drive customer retention. For more information on what Lightspeed Restaurant (K-Series) can do for you, visit our website.
Okay. Could I ask everybody to take their seat again, please? Wrapping it up today is our Chief Financial Officer, Brandon Nussey. Then after Brandon's presentation, we'll go into Q&A. Brandon.
All right. Well, thank you, everyone. Thanks again for taking the time with us here today. Hopefully you've gotten a good sense as to some of the long-term opportunities that we see still ahead. For as long as I've known this company, it's been about the long term, and we continue to run this business with the long term in mind. I've met many of you in the room. I think everyone in the room. I'm Brandon Nussey. For those online, I'm Chief Financial Officer. I joined the company in 2018. Walk through some of the business model and proof points and direction we're headed from here.
While we've always thought about the long term, every now and then, I like JP like to take a step back and just acknowledge how far we've come in a short period of time since we've been a public company. We're certainly in no way claiming victory here. We are proud of the company we've built. We've been public now for 11 reporting quarters, and generally speaking, have over-delivered on our commitments for each and every one of them. This has helped build us a durable, scaled-up business that remains quickly growing and attacking a really big market opportunity, as you've heard today. For those of you who are shareholders, we thank you for your ongoing support and with us on this journey from here on.
When we took the company public, we talked about moving from a pure play point-of-sale software business to one that we felt could become a more fulsome commerce platform. One of the first steps in making that move was going to be to solve a major customer pain point, which was to better integrate payments and software together. We felt that this would not only solve that customer pain point, but it would also unlock a significant revenue opportunity for Lightspeed. What this chart shows is just how successful that has been to date. From basically a standing start when we took the company public in 2019, we just completed a quarter where our payment solutions processed better than $2 billion of processing volume, and payments now represents almost half of the company's overall revenue.
Clearly, this has been a great success story for us. It continues to grow quickly, and it's been one of the contributors to the strong organic growth that we've reported. You see those stats on the bottom right of this chart. Organic growth rates, as JP mentioned, have proven to be really strong on the back of just this business model working for us. Today, we sit here a well-diversified company, you've heard this today, across retail and hospitality, across North America and international as well. This diversification has served us well. It enabled us to weather a pandemic better than many in our space.
As we sit here today, we think creates a really enviable and differentiated situation for Lightspeed, one that has multiple growth elements now available to us to unlock, and many of these growth elements our competitors simply don't have. We're proud of the progress, but we recognize we've got a long way to go. You know, we've heard today 6 million merchants in our sweet spot around the world, and we're 156,000 today. While we are proud of the progress, we know we've got a lot of work to do, and there's a lot of growth available to us if we do our job right. As we thought about growth when we took the company public, for those who know us well, we've always thought about having multiple compounding elements, growth elements available to us.
We felt that the move from legacy solutions to omni-channel and cloud-based solutions was gonna enable us to continue to grow our customer locations. We felt that the increased complexity our customers were dealing with in solving an ever-evolving consumer at the other end would allow us to increase our software output, given the breadth of the solutions that Lightspeed offers. Of course, we've been strong believers that integrated software and payments is how this market was going to evolve, and that the software companies were gonna be in the driver's seat to make that happen.
We generally believed that if we could grow our customer locations about 15% a year or better, if we could grow our software ARPU about 10% a year, and if we could penetrate our GTV with our payment solutions, then we could achieve a sustained organic growth rate of approaching 40% for the business. Of course, what you've seen from us is we've actually over-delivered on that to date. Based on our current year guidance, our guidance will reflect us continuing to do that for the remainder of this year.
As we sit here today, we remain encouraged by these growth levers and the growth opportunities that lie ahead for us, such that we anticipate between all those growth levers of the things you've heard from us today, that we can sustain these growth rates, based on these things being available to us. Now, I do admit that this is with the current paradigm in mind. You've heard a lot today about a really, you know, ambitious vision that this company's trying to pull together of connecting merchants and suppliers and consumers. Should we be successful at that, I think that's a growth element that can allow us to do even better here. As we sit here today, this is how we're thinking about the business in our current paradigm.
As we go into each one of these levers with a little more depth, customer locations, you've heard at IPO, we were 47,000. We've grown that to 156,000 today. When we strip out the customers who have come to us via acquisition, we've grown our customer locations 13%, 21%, and year to date, 12% in the current fiscal year. As we think about looking forward, we're encouraged by the industry dynamics that still are in our favor, and we believe will lead us to continue to growth in this market position, namely the ongoing movement from legacy to cloud and merchants seeking more omni-channel strategies to meet consumer demand.
As you've heard earlier, should we be successful with our supplier strategy, we believe it will create a flywheel effect in the verticals we're targeting that will not only attract more suppliers, but will attract more merchants as well. We've said this often, but we've always felt that scale matters in this business. JP walked through the why earlier from a vision standpoint, but increased scale and customer locations matters from a brand presence perspective as well, and that influences our ability to win customers in an economical way, and I'm gonna walk through that in a little bit as well.
All told, as we sit here today, we remain encouraged by the macro trends that are in our favor as we look to continue to grow customer locations in the future. Looking at ARPU, this has also been a good news story from us. At our initial IPO, our software-only ARPU was around $100 a month. Today, we sit at about $130 a month and continue to be encouraged by the potential to grow this further. It's our belief that SMBs don't have the resources available to stitch together multiple point solutions, and if there was a vendor who could offer the core things needed to run their business, that they'd prefer to buy from that vendor.
The complexity of running a retail or restaurant shop has only increased in the past few years, and we think that, based on that sets us up well to continue to grow our ARPU given the breadth of our solutions. We're encouraged as we look at our customer base. Many of our customers today pay us better than $200 a month, that have adopted more of the solution footprint. You heard from JD moments ago how some of those customers have adopted the full suite of products and solutions from Lightspeed. Another growth lever for ARPU is gonna be as we migrate customers from some of the acquisitions we've done to our flagship offerings.
That provides us built-in ARPU growth, as the flagship products have more module capabilities than many of the solutions that these customers run today that came to us via acquisition. As we sit here, of course, the last point is we're not done yet. The red boxes connote that our teams are hard at work building new functionality that we think our customers will find valuable, and we expect that to contribute in our favor as well as we think about ARPU. Payments. When we brought Lightspeed IPO public in March 2019, we had strong conviction that point-of-sale software and point-of-sale payments belong together. The only reason they were apart is because the infrastructure wasn't available to allow them to operate as one.
Well, that problem's now solved, and we strongly believe that we have a great position to solve this customer pain point of having to deal with multiple vendors and move to being a payments processor globally for our customers. The benefit to Lightspeed is gonna be more compelling overall solution for our prospects, but it's also gonna unlock significantly more revenue per customer than we're otherwise achieving. More on that next. We're really proud of our progress here. As you've seen earlier, in the markets we first launched in, U.S. retail, we're now processing better than 20% of our GTV with our payment solutions. In Canadian retail that we launched next, we're better than 15%. Overall, we're at 11%, and while we view this as good progress, we're really motivated to go get the rest.
Key to that is unlocking new markets. You heard from Mike moments ago that with our recent launch in Europe, in Australia, we now have payments available for the customers that came to us via Vend in North America. We now have coverage for better than 70% of our customer locations for our payment solutions, and that's significant. At IPO, that number was closer to 25% against a much smaller base of customers. As we think about payments and payments penetration from here, hopefully you've gained confidence from hearing everyone today. This is a primary focus of the business and one that, with these recent market launches, we think we set ourselves up well to continue to grow our penetration of our GTV with our payments solutions.
All of this, from the beginning, has been about taking a point-of-sale software business and doing significantly more as we turn ourselves into a full-scale commerce platform. I think this chart really helps illustrate the impact of the business model working. On the left, you've got our gross profit per customer location. We felt like the opportunity was there, that for the same dollar of sales and marketing, we could drive significantly more gross profit per customer location. As this chart shows, from IPO, we were around $300 a quarter in gross profit per customer location. In our most recent quarter, that number is more like $430. That's a 40% increase in a short period of time, in gross profit dollars driven per customer location.
At the same time, since it's the same lead, the same prospect, the same sales team, we're seeing a meaningful decrease in the sales and marketing expense per dollar of revenue. This really illustrates the power and the leverage that's in the business model. When I get asked about our gross margin percentage and why, whether I'm concerned about payments carrying a lower gross margin percentage than our software business, this is the chart I refer back to. At the end of the day, we're focused on the opportunity to grow our gross profit dollars per customer location against the same dollar of sales and marketing spend. If we can do that, it's gonna give us tremendous financial leverage to reinvest in growth, blow it to the bottom line, or some combination thereof. Another way to think of this is customer unit economics.
We watch our customer unit economics closely. We do that by looking at the lifetime value of a customer against the cost to acquire that customer. These customer unit economics help guide us where we invest dollars, what our returns look like, where we can do more, where we should retool and think about doing things differently. This LTV to CAC ratio is the primary measure we use. We generally run the business with a 3-4x ratio in mind blended across the business. We know that if we achieve that, we're not only bringing in good, profitable customer relationships, but we're also balancing that with investment into future growth. We also know that for a net new customer, for that marginal incremental customer that takes payments from us alongside our software, drives significantly higher ARPU and a significantly higher resulting LTV.
The LTV to CAC ratio we see from that net new incremental customer in that case is more like 6x. That's simply because for that roughly the same CAC, the same cost of customer acquisition, we're getting a lot more ARPU, we're getting a lot more gross profit per customer, and that customer who takes payments versus the customer who don't, gives us roughly double the amount of gross profit per customer. Again, this sets us up for strong business model leverage as we think about the future. Now with payments available in more of our markets, we think the leverage in the model is really exciting from here. Of course, that also shows up in EBITDA margin.
To date, we've been balancing the leverage in the business model through incremental investments into the business to drive growth, and as well as showing EBITDA improvements year-over-year. Peering deeper into EBITDA margins, what may not be apparent is just how much progress we are indeed making on a path to profitability. Before I go deeper, I just wanna be clear, our focus is not on maximizing near-term profitability, but it is on winning this market opportunity that we feel is in front of us. Hopefully, as today has illustrated, we believe this opportunity is significant and our metrics are telling us to keep investing. We also believe that showing a consistently improving business is important to building a long-term winner. When we look at the adjusted EBITDA margins, should we achieve our guidance for the current year?
We'll move from a loss of about 10% of revenue last year to a loss of about 8% this year. What this chart shows is the impact that the acquisitions have on the current year's adjusted EBITDA margin. Because we've bought younger, growing, less mature businesses, they come with initial losses that we need to absorb before we fully re-realize the revenue or expense synergies that we plan for them. Additionally, you've heard from Mike and JP and everybody today, we're not running a holding company. We're not holding a portfolio of assets here. We actually spend money to integrate more quickly, and hopefully you've seen some of those proof points today as well. We spend money to integrate R&D and product more quickly. We spend money to integrate go-to-market more quickly.
We spend some money to make back office enhancements as well. That comes with a near-term cost. Nevertheless, we're still showing adjusted EBITDA loss improvements as a percentage of revenue. Hopefully what this chart shows is just how much more obvious that would be in a non-acquisitive year. All this gets us back to something we published about a quarter ago, where we believe we've got a company that we can drive to 20% EBITDA margins. We believe we'll get there when we reach a point where about 50% of our payments, of our overall GTV is being processed by our payment solutions. With all the growth drivers you've heard available to us today, we stand here confident in our ability to continue to drive towards this, and we remain really optimistic on the future.
Before I pass it back to JP to wrap us up and take your questions, I just wanna reiterate what I hope you can take away from my section, which is the business model is working. We continue to drive strong leverage in this business model. We've got healthy underlying fundamentals in this business. Gross profit per customer location is increasing. Leverage in the business model is there. We've got multiple growth levers that we're working. To date, they've all been working in our favor. We've got some exciting market opportunities still ahead. We'll continue to monitor our customer unit economics. Those will guide us in how we invest and where we invest. Overall, we remain confident that we're gonna continue to show the progress we have since being a public company.
With that, I'll let JP wrap us up.
Thank you very much. It's funny to look at these pictures. I think there's only JD that actually looks like the photo, but thanks, Brandon. All right, so I'm gonna close it. I think my first impression is we're really proud of Lightspeed. I mean, I hope you can sense the excitement. I hope you can sense how confident we are about where we're heading. I think for me, why are we so proud? It starts with the mission. Everybody at Lightspeed cares deeply about small businesses globally. Anybody who's been acquired by Lightspeed cares deeply about small businesses. I always say that building a company is like climbing a mountain. You know, every day you have to look at your feet and just continue going up.
Once in a while, like today, we just show you the view and we show you. I think just for us to look at this, it's like, wow, we've done so much and we're in such a good spot. I really hope you sense we're so proud of what we've built. Gonna go back to the market. You know, this is one of the largest markets out there. We like the more sophisticated SMBs. The most important reason is that they are less prone to churn, they're more established, and they need platforms like ours more than the simpler merchants who just need to sell a few items. I think we've proven to the market that we have what the market needs. I think that's what gets us excited.
6 million potential buyers in our bull's-eye, and the majority of the market, the vast majority on legacy systems. You know, in the context of COVID and post-COVID, this has made us essential. It's not a nice-to-have anymore. A small business globally that is running on a legacy system needs to replace it. Our quest is to be the partner for those businesses because we know that when they join our platform, they grow faster, and they thrive. That's what gets us excited when you go back to this mission of David against Goliath. We want our customers to succeed because we want small businesses to still be the texture and represent communities and cities everywhere. 156,000 out of 6 million, a lot of runway, a lot of room for growth, and the market is now.
We have the platforms they need today. Globally, there's no other player like Lightspeed. There's no other player actually that has put together software and payments on a global standpoint. That's what we've done. We have now all the mechanisms. We're launching this globally, and there's a lot of runway. Brings me now to payments. Payments is a game-changer. It's not a game-changer for Lightspeed, it's a game-changer for our customers. They need simplicity, they need one underwriter for all of the channels in which they sell, and they need to have a lot of transparency from the vendor. That's what we bring to the market, and we've worked hard. We've worked really hard in the last two years to get this to market and very proud of the progress, very proud of where we are.
Even though this represents almost 50% of our revenues, we're only penetrated at 11%, and we know that the attach rates on new customers are very high. For us, going back to what Brandon presented, we're very confident that we'll get to 50% in the coming years. That, once we get there, completely transforms our business, completely transforms our growth margin, completely transforms basically you know, the profits that we'll make as a company, and we're very happy with this. If we talk about the solutions, I think throughout the past, we've always been ahead of the game, and that's really the story of Lightspeed. You know, when I joined the company, we were the first platform out there to provide the Apple Mobile checkout on an Apple or on a mobile device. Everybody then was like, "Wow, that's incredible.
How can you do this?" I think today, where we're heading and what we've tried to show to you today, what we're doing with the suppliers and how we're gonna integrate now suppliers and consumers and triangulate the data and offer an incredible experience for everybody within the flywheel, I think is truly game-changer. We're working and committed to making this happen. If you were inside of Lightspeed, every day you'd see a lot of people completely dedicated and committed to our success. For that, I really wanna thank our employees. We are very proud of what we've built, and I wanna thank everybody for the hard work because it is hard work. Supporting small businesses globally with one platform is hard work. Integrating businesses is hard work.
We're so happy to see the results because it fulfills what we're trying to do, which is help these businesses globally. Really, that's my closing. The closing is simple. You know, customers wanna buy more modules from Lightspeed, and we're giving them more modules. Customers wanna buy more payments from Lightspeed, and we're giving them payments globally. Ultimately, there is room for one very large player within the more sophisticated SMBs, and we wanna be that. That's what we will relentlessly work at, and we'll probably be standing here, all of us, and this is a long-term play. We'll be standing here next year and the year after, continuing to plow through our mission with a lot of great progress. Thank you very much for being here. We're super thrilled to have you as investors.
Thanks for your support, but we're even more excited about the future, and we're just getting started. Thank you very much.
Okay. I'm gonna ask the presenters to come up on stage. We're gonna swap back and forth from the questions online and here in the audience, but we will start with an online question. Pete?
Yep. Thank you very much. Our first question from online is from Richard. The question is: Can you provide some color on the timing of the growth opportunities, specifically, one, financial services, two, data, and three, distribution?
Do you wanna start, Brandon, or?
I'm interpreting that question to be the growth levers that come from the supplier strategy. Yeah. I mean, look, we're putting something together that does not exist. Cool? We're trying to set something new. As Mike said, we're hard at work doing this. Really, the way you should look at this is NuORDER, I mean, just accelerated our capabilities. It's much easier for a company to work on integrating microservices that are in the cloud than to build a platform like NuORDER that does, you know, marketplaces, showrooming, pricing world. I mean, this is a huge, you know, a huge industry to be in. I think for me also, what I'm very happy with NuORDER is they come with 3,000 brands that are in apparel and that are very tightly linked to our network of distribution. Very happy there.
I think for us, the steps, one, get NuORDER integrated to Lightspeed, and Mike described this, where you're inside of Lightspeed, you can order from NuORDER, and you make an order in NuORDER, and it's immediately in Lightspeed, and you don't have to rekey in anything. Number two, we're gonna put Lightspeed Payments. When people order, that's a very simple next step, is to say, "Okay, I'm ordering now. Let's use our payment provider, and let's use our solution to order with a credit card, and we can now monetize the ordering side." I think step three of this is gonna be distribution, which is really now that I've plugged in everything and I have full visibility, I'm now gonna help brands identify new stores that are using from Lightspeed, and that's where you'll have capital.
Again, we are expecting to have a lot of progress next year. You'll see a lot of announcements in the following, you know, in our next fiscal year, so from March onwards. From there, we're expecting to have a lot of this starting to be in motion and starting to work. As I said, it's a lot of work, and it's again redefining an industry that doesn't exist and putting together things that don't exist to create a lot of value. There are gonna be bumps, like everything, on everything we've undertaken, but we're very confident that we will get to market next year with this and we'll provide some value.
Okay. Anybody in the room have a question? One sec.
Hey, thank you for the presentation. It's Tien-tsin Huang from JPM. Just you built a very strong merchant platform, and I totally appreciate the gravity of going after the suppliers and all the network effects around that. How about on the consumer side, JP? I'm just curious to get your thoughts on the consumer platform and the forces that you can get from that if you were to build that out. 'Cause you have a lot of content right across retail, restaurant, and golf. Just how can you better engage with the consumers to get some gravity from that?
That's a really good and strategic question, actually. It's an idea we've been toying around for years, and we kind of know the steps. I think, yes, we need to provide more for consumers. Yes, we need to try and provide more kind of customer-facing or consumer-facing products. I think in the steps, step one is you build concentration within a vertical. Today, there's probably 10, 11, 12 verticals where we're starting to build some real concentration. The step two, once you have that concentration, is you, of course, need to recognize the consumer from one restaurant to the next or from one vertical to the next. Now we're starting to have a ton of visibility there.
Just to answer your question, there are some products where we have some real consumer-facing products. I'll give you a good example in my mind is golf. Golf today, we do have booking portals for tee times on golf. You could argue that we have probably one of the largest set of consumers inside of golf. We have today platforms that are generating a ton of traffic that are basically enabling a golfer to book a tee time in any golf club inside of the Lightspeed network. Of course, that's in our strategy, what's gonna happen with all the other verticals, but I'm just gonna go into details on golf 'cause it's pretty exciting.
On golf today, if you book on a Lightspeed platform a tee time, you can pick the golf club, and when you get to the golf club, the actual history of that golfer is now brought to the golf club, which means they know what's your handicap? Are you a lefty? Are you a righty?
Even if they've never golfed there before.
Sorry? Even if they've never golfed there before. Again, that shows the value. Once you have the network, it's much easier to go to the consumer than to start from the consumer and go and try and get the network. Give you another example, in sports goods or in bikes. I mean, we have probably the largest concentration of consumers in those industries. Now, of course, we need to start triangulating the consumer across, and we need to start building platforms for consumers. Today, when you look at, and if you listen to our customers, they have to give up a lot of margin to sell on marketplaces. Yeah?
They would see incredible value add for Lightspeed to build a marketplace that goes directly to consumers, knowing that we triangulate the consumers, and we have already the eyeballs inside of the platform. The last thing I wanna say with golf that is very interesting for the other verticals is when we sell the golf platform, it's an option. We tell the club, "Hey, do you want to have your golf clubs or your golf course available on the Lightspeed marketplace?" The way we present it to them is like it's a value add. There's no cost to it, but it enables you actually to have more eyeballs to your club. Most of them, the vast majority say yes because they see this as a value-added service. There's no reason to not do exactly the same thing.
I mean, we talked about hospitality. Look at, you know, online booking platforms, online review platforms. I mean, I'm just gonna give you a, you know. OpenTable is the number one, you know, platform out there or, and. It took them years and years and years to build 50,000 restaurants. Today, we have 80,000 restaurants on the Lightspeed platform. I mean, it's a much easier step to try and get to consumer than if you're starting from scratch and you're trying to go and connect all the restaurants. I would say the last thing that we do that nobody else does is we are the only one who holds the information all the way.
This means if I'm doing a consumer portal, I can hold all the information, all the sell-throughs, the discounts, and I can build a loyalty platform across. Again, there, that's why we put the blocks of loyalty inside of Lightspeed. Loyalty gets us closer to the consumer and enabling, why not? You know, as we go forward in a few years from now, we've gained the concentration. Why not having a loyalty program across stores, which inside a vertical? There's so much to do. Our view, just answering the question, is we think it's much more complex to work on the back office and to get all of the vendors within a vertical and then ignite a consumer platform than to go the other way around. I think it's a bit.
If I had to make a comparison, it's a bit what we did with payments. In the early days of the company, everybody was like, "Why aren't you doing payments?" We're like, "Yeah, the payments is the commoditized piece we'll do after." The most complicated is to actually build value at the merchant level and to build the eyeballs there because then it becomes a very simple thing to ignite. I think our view on the consumers and providing services to the consumers and providing portals for consumers is exactly the same as payments. It's a much easier add-on once you have the network.
Maybe I can just add one thing.
Yeah. Which is, at the same time, when you consider that we have 170,000 touchpoints around the world of ways that we can where consumers are doing business with our merchants.
We have data on tens of millions of consumers. We're just starting to look at that. To your point, JP, we're building that list every single day. We need to understand the assets we have for consumer, but it's kind of clear that when you complete that triangle, it really sets up a massive network effect. For me at least, when it comes to our customers, the holy grail for me is to be able to drive customers into a business, kind of like the golf example you use, that have never been there before, and actually be able to prove to the business with full attribution that that came from Lightspeed. Those are the ways that we're thinking about it.
We definitely have more work to do, but I think it's everything that JP said. I think we're building the critical mass around the businesses, the verticals, and also tens of millions of consumer transactions are happening with quite a bit of information, email addresses and like things that we can at least look at to even just understand who those consumers are and how we can target them. We're building the asset. We're absolutely gonna get after the strategy. It's just that, as JP said, we've got to get these other pieces in place that'll really be able to leverage that asset once we have it.
Okay. Pete?
Yep. Another question from our online audience, from Daniel. How is the customer retention of acquired customer bases? Have the acquisitions helped drive lower CAC now that you've removed some of the competition?
Want me to go?
Yeah.
Go answer that.
I'll let you handle the CAC.
Maybe you start.
Look, churn. To answer the first part of the question, which is, do we see a difference in churn from some of the acquired businesses? Generally speaking, no. I mean, we do take some very intentional decisions when we acquire these companies as to, you know, whether we sustain them from a go-to-market perspective, whether we redirect that sales and marketing to our flagships, just depending on the product and the market, specific case at the time. All that's with the intent of course growing our business in totality. When we make those decisions, yeah, we might see some near-term blips in churn, but in aggregate, as we take a step back, our churn rates have been holding steady.
Yeah. Maybe I'll just add one thing. The objective of those was to become one global go-to brand, which is happening. What we're seeing here is that we now have a brand everywhere, which is driving, of course, organic customers, which is what all of us in the software industry are trying to do, and especially in our space. There's so many people who are after this market that of course, you know, cost of acquisition will go up over time as more people come into this industry. I think what's offset by that is that the brand is becoming a go-to. In our industry, word of mouth is the most important. You know, JD gave a good example of a large customer who brought another large customer.
I think when we look at this, we need to provide the best customer experience because that's ultimately what's gonna drive long-term growth. We're seeing this. I think overall, just going back to Brandon's slide again, if you look at the cost of sale, it's gone down for a dollar of revenue over time. That's again because of this strategy of, you know, one brand globally and one go-to market product globally.
Okay, we'll take a question from the audience.
Thanks, guys. Martin Toner from ATB. Is there a bit of a land grab amongst the modern POS players? If so, does that inform your go-to-market strategy?
We have never been a growth at all cost company, and we will never be a growth at all cost company. It goes back to how we operate. I think a good business needs to be good on a unit basis, and you have to be profitable on your unit economics. We've never been this company that's like, oh, let's just land grab, bring them in at loss, and over time we'll build. That's not our DNA, and we will never go into that. Now this being said, the reality is when we have a product that is super competitive in a market, generally speaking, all the indicators show a good CAC to LTV and show good close rates.
That's more how we look at the business. It's like, okay, I'm gonna go back to the U.S. now. Until now, we didn't spend a lot of money in the U.S. in hospitality because we didn't believe we had the right products and we didn't wanna compete on a price basis. Now that's why we're so excited about hospitality that we're showing in the back, this product is competitive. This product is best in class. This product is, does more than the Square and the Toast of the world. This product can bend in any possible way to accommodate the workflows of the legacy system. Now that we're at this, of course, we wanna try and understand how we're gonna go after this market.
Now, the good news is because Lightspeed Payments is on this, and we all see that as soon as Lightspeed Payments is bought, and we know hospitality in the U.S., I mean, the market is now acquainted to bundling payments and software, we're now gonna double down. We're now gonna take the same strategies as the other guys. We're gonna have people with foot on the ground because we know that on a unit basis, it makes sense. So not sure I'm answering your question, but there is a market grab, and the market grab for us is the sophisticated because we don't wanna be going after customers and having them churn. We wanna go into a segment of the market that doesn't churn a lot, which is the one we're after. Now we do feel now it's time for us to double down in the U.S.
If you were, you know, inside of Peter's meeting in hospitality right now, it's probably 80% of our focus is like, okay, now we have to go after this thing. What are the strategies we're gonna put in place? For sure, now in our mindset, we have the right product, we have the right unit economics, we're now gonna double down.
Yeah. Go to online questions.
Yeah. Another question from Anmol. What's stopping the brand from taking that data, which is generated from SMBs, and marketing directly to the customer?
Okay. Very good question. I think ultimately it's a network, so everybody needs to benefit. Of course, you can't swing the pendulum so too much on one side. I think here we're gonna have to figure out what information do we share, what information do we keep, and what can be shared on a macro level, always taking into account. I think for us, it's again the philosophy here is who are you trying to help? Ultimately, our customer is the store, is the merchant. We have to be sure that we don't develop something that actually ends up hurting them at the end. Very good question, Peter, on this one.
We are gonna ensure that we ring-fence whatever can be shared and whatever can't be shared and ensure that the stores continue to own their customers. Because ultimately, that's kind of, you know, what Amazon did, is they took all the data on the consumer, and now they're going directly off the consumer. I think we need to be sure that when we do this, we understand the stakeholders and we understand the mission and ensure that we don't harm the mission by helping the brand sell more.
I also think the brands have, you know, they've lived this for however many years. They have channel conflicts, right? They have distribution partners, and so they've built their systems in order to be. They'll have policies about what you can do and what you can share, and we'll have to figure that out between, as JP said, the brands and the retailers. You know, in some cases, we can think of models where if we could attribute the consumer. Just to give you an example of how deep we can go with the data, we could attribute the consumer, and every time that consumer ordered direct from the brand, because we've managed this contractually, we could make sure that the retailer gets part of that sale for a period of time.
We can build all of that into the contracts that we have on the supplier network. To JP's point, we're gonna have to kind of see where the biggest sensitivity is. Yeah, we don't wanna create. We wanna create cooperation and that flywheel effect. We don't wanna create a competition, a competitive dynamic on that marketplace.
Maybe if I can add a few things, just to tie that question back to also your consumer question earlier, and we talked about it too, with the gentleman in the room during the break. You know, if we expand on the golf example, if you're a golfer today and you use Lightspeed Golf and you create a profile online, we ask you if you're willing to share that information with our network. That's the beauty that we're also building. That golfer showing up to one location to another and another has already accepted to share that information with the network, and then that data can flow over across our platform. The next steps that we're building, obviously Order Anywhere, on our hospitality platform.
Similarly, as a consumer, you know, booking at a restaurant or ordering, you're gonna create a profile. We'll also have the opportunity to allow this consumer to determine if they wanna share or not, it's not necessarily an obligation across that network. Then lastly, if you think of Ecwid and the ability to sell anywhere and everywhere on all channels, there again, there will be more opportunities to provide that option to that consumer. Tying the full triangle together, that's how we bring it back to the consumer.
Hey, this is Robbie from Barclays. Thanks for taking my question. Maybe just thinking about the B2B payment side that you touched on a couple times today, maybe you can walk us through how that's typically done by a lot of your customers today, and are there any specific pain points that you can solve for either near term or thinking about a little longer term? Thank you.
You want me to do it? Yeah, sure. It's as we discussed in my segment, and it for the most part all happens sort of offline. We talked about how they're swapping POs back and forth and spreadsheets back and forth. Well, finally, at some point they agree on what they're gonna order, and they have to pay them. Typically, it's done through an invoicing process with terms. The brand would invoice the retailer. Via an invoicing, it may have terms, it may not. Generally paid by ACH debit or a credit push. For big orders, like when you think about a big department store ordering from Ralph Lauren, first of all, there's gonna be terms, obviously.
That might get settled either over time, but usually if it's up over a certain amount, it might be a wire transfer payment. Pretty bread and butter, vanilla kind of payment options. That's one of the reasons that that business sits at that level right now, because it only makes sense if I don't know the exact breakeven, but these orders are gonna be not going to be thousands of dollars, right? They're probably going to be hundreds and thousands and millions of dollars. There you've got the scale, and you don't have a lot of frequency of the transaction. I guess it works okay, but it's not that elegant. What we're thinking about doing in terms of putting into the marketplace, the first thing we're gonna do is enable just a credit card.
If I'm a buyer, a retailer, and I wanna buy it, but I've never talked to this brand, I can still buy because I have a credit card, and we provide the ability to capture that and make sure that the brand gets paid. That's still pretty vanilla, I get. But then what we wanna do is take the next step now and introduce terms and almost standing in between the brand and the retailer in terms of giving the brand, sorry, the retailer, pay the brand today on the order, give the retailer time to pay. When you think about our capital model and how we might be able to fold that in, like ideas like a merchant could repay us out of the sales they make with the inventory, right?
Angles like that, where it starts to get, have the data, have to be able to understand the risk you're taking with the customer. All these kinds of ways just to make it super flexible. As they grow and as those numbers go up higher and higher, eventually they may move into that world we talked about where we started, with the big transactions going back and forth. We have a lot of room there below that level, and lots of ways to monetize it, obviously. If we're providing financing, there'll be a cost to the merchant for that. We've talked about our payment processing model. Don't forget on the brand side, we intend to charge them a fee as well for access to new distribution.
Yeah. Thank you.
Go back to online.
Next question from Scaria. Is Lightspeed targeting large retailers like Walmart, Home Depot, et cetera?
I think it's obvious from the presentation. Here's where it's slightly evolving, on the brand side. You gotta understand the dynamics. If you start on the brand side, there are big department stores that order from brands. I think that's actually the beauty of the model, is we now are selling to those big department stores, the platform, so that they can replenish and order from all the brands. What's great there is, let's say, Saks is going to force all of the brands onto the platform to run their business. That is incredible because what happens is all of those brands are now connected to that platform, and we use that same platform now to enable any small location or any store to order from that brand.
What I guess I'm saying is that the department stores drive the brands and those brands drive all of the small businesses and help the small businesses. That's why, you know, Ralph Lauren is a good example. Ralph Lauren now is using our platform for all of the sales of throughout the network, but it's mainly for the department stores. Now what this enables is all of the Lightspeed's network can now order from that same platform from the same brand. It's kind of again, it's another network effect where you have to get the big box multi-brand department stores that then drive the brands who drive the stores. Ultimately, the mission is the same. Nothing has changed.
We want to help small businesses globally, and that's a way for us to help them, is to enable them to completely automate how they work with all the brands. Because a lot of our customers are multi-brand stores. They will hold, you know, a lot of luxury goods. They're not single brand. Even though we do have, I mean, a lot of brands now that are opening their direct stores. As an example, in New York, Bang & Olufsen, they have a store where they show everything, and that's running on Lightspeed. Or Harman Kardon, you know, which is a direct brand to consumer store. It's all on Lightspeed, also selling the Lightspeed goods within the POS. I think there's a lot of things to do there.
Ultimately, the mission of the company is to help small businesses globally with the platform. Now, the last thing we also didn't talk about is we have some of the stores that started with 1 or 2 who are now hundreds of locations. You know, Goiko Grill has more than 100 locations. You know, 4 years ago, they had 10 locations. We're helping, and we're very proud of that. We're helping those independent retailers and restaurateurs grow and thrive.
I think perhaps that question came from the confidence that they're a proven example where they're rolling out Lightspeed Restaurant, our flagship product to those 320 locations. One thing to keep in mind, sorry, I'm hearing a bit of echo on my setup because I'm close to the mic, but one thing to keep in mind is the solution that we built allows you to scale to those 320 locations, but at the end of the day, it's the same instance. If you think about a Walmart or a McDonald's and so on, they will require very, very custom dev and custom engineering to fit into their model. The beauty of our products is that you can flex from one to 300, but without having to build all that very custom and cumbersome engineering.
Perhaps that's where the question came, but ultimately it's the same instance, it's the same product. We just allow you to flex.
Sure. Anybody from in the room?
All right. Thanks everybody. It's a great presentation. Thanks for taking our question. I have one on the financial projection for the organic growth, rev growth, revenue growth of 35%-40%. Could you talk about the timeframe for this growth rate? Is that a range for each individual year, or do you think of it as an average throughout the period? I also have a follow up.
Sure, yeah. To date, we've been doing. When I talk about that approaching 40% growth rate, I sorta anchor back to how we would've talked about the business almost at IPO, you know, we saw all these converging elements that were gonna enable us to drive strong and sustained organic growth. What I hope you took away from that slide is we've actually done better than that to date. I think if we were to achieve our guidance for the current year, it would imply that we're gonna continue to do better than that. That now as we sit here today, there's lots of growth levers still around us, and we think about that as being, you know, a sustainable growth rate for us.
There'll be periods where I hope we over deliver on that. I hope everything we're talking about in the supplier network and this triangle comes to amazing fruition where I think it can be even better. Based on the current paradigm, that's how I think about that growth rate.
Oh, that's super helpful. That's awesome. Actually, answered our second question on the upside on the supplier network and e-commerce and all that. That's super helpful. Thank you.
Okay.
Another question from online from Alnor. With a lot of brands going direct to consumer, how does Lightspeed see themselves continuing to help the SMBs in remaining relevant?
You want me to go?
Yeah. I got a thought on that. Actually, it's a core part of our strategy. We kinda talked a little bit about this before. Yes, brands go direct. JP and Matt was talking about the Bang & Olufsen store, and they wanna sell direct, but they also sell. As I said before, they manage this in terms of a channel conflict. I think we'll have to go on a. I think the sort of permissions that both customers get, so there's the brand or the retailer, and that we can manage that as we talked about before.
At the same time, I think there's a very clear case to make that we're helping the SMBs by giving them access to these brands, by giving them access to this inventory. Actually, if you think about it, everybody's worried about drop shipping, like that's some kind of big competitive issue for these stores. They don't have to buy the inventory. That's a really big deal when you're a small business. You don't have the money. I mean, you know, if you just don't have the money and you don't have access to financing tools, some of the reasons we like capital to be able to buy the inventory that you need. The point here is that you can if someone walks into your store, you now just became a point of distribution for that brand.
It's them working together. Yeah, there's always channel conflicts. There's always some level of disintermediation that people worry about, and we're gonna find our way through that, but it isn't really like it's not happening today. Yes, we're gonna provide information back. Whether or not we would actually provide the actual identity of the consumer, that feels a little PII. We probably wanna take a really good look at that before we wanna do that. If we can tell who the customer is, some level of demographics, where they bought it, what was the return rate on that product, what price did it sell for, how much was it discounted, those are things they have no visibility on. I don't want everyone to get too hung up on the fact that we're gonna share all the consumer information back to the brands. Right?
We have some more work to do on that. I think that the machine works, and I think that balancing those things are things we can do while we tune the business from the launch. If you wanna add.
I think for me, the big thing is why do you still go and shop at your local store? You go and shop at your local store because you like the human contact. I think for us, the way we're looking at this is if I can now go to my human store, my human store has more inventory in line with what I wanna buy, I'll have a better experience, and I'll go back sooner instead of going online. I think that's ultimately what we're trying to do. We're trying to enable stores and restaurants, in the case of a restaurant, to provide better menus with ingredients that we know are selling. In the case of retailers, we're trying to help them identify new brands and provide a better experience for the consumer.
I think going back to what Dax said, you know, we don't believe in black or white or it's the end of retail. I think the nuance is the most important. Ultimately, you go back to the store because you like the experience. I think I'll just put it in your hands is, why do people still go to Apple stores? Because the person they're talking to provides value, understands their needs, gives. That is exactly what we're trying to do to small businesses globally, is enable the experience to be amazing so that ultimately we can fulfill our mission. I don't think we're that worried by it. We're actually more obsessed around helping, you know, those small businesses thrive.
I think that's the data point we're very proud of, and I know we've shared this many times before, but customers, when they use Lightspeed, within the first year of using Lightspeed, they see their revenues grow very well. I think that tells us, okay, we're doing something right, we're helping small businesses globally, and we're giving them the right solutions to succeed.
Yeah, one more note on that. These independent stores now have access to brands that they may not have had access to before. I mean, the system doesn't automatically enable all those brands. We need to get an agreement. There needs to be a contract between those stores and those brands. But now it's possible. Now they can have more differentiation, and those brands can have high-quality, premium, local stores with local relationships. That's, I think, a win-win for all of them, and that's enabled and powered by Lightspeed.
If you have some other questions, sir.
Thank you. I'm [Margaret] with KeyBanc. Thanks for taking my question and great presentation so far. It seems like the value proposition around cloud point of sale has risen with merchants revamping and launches of new business post-COVID. I was wondering if you guys could talk about any trends that you're seeing in terms of payback period. Then if you could describe the impact around new business formation at a macro level. Thanks.
I'll start maybe with the macro level and then, Brandon, you can
Sure.
Make sure we give the right data points. On a macro level, what we see is what happened during COVID. I'll just give you the. It's a funny one, but you know, before COVID, we would talk to restaurateurs and retailers, and we'd be like, "omni-channel." They're like, "Oh, yeah, cool. Love the vision. I'm gonna buy the POS." Here's what happened when COVID hit was the actual opposite. Like, I don't care about the POS, just help me sell online or. I think what we've seen on a macro level is as the shutdowns happened, the business grew very strongly online. I think that's why we were so happy with the balance that we had as a company, and we always used to say, no matter where you wanna sell, we wanna be there.
We've actually proven what we said, which is, okay, COVID hits and we see this transfer. I think that's why the opposite happened now. Now what we're seeing is we're seeing that, you know, markets are reopening, and we're seeing a thriving business in markets that reopen in the physical world. We're seeing concepts reopen. We're actually seeing restaurants that have shut down that rebrand themselves and create a. It's actually the kind of call it the traditional dynamic with the ifs that happens again, is like now we're seeing everything go back to the physical world. We're seeing a ton of demand. What happens is when those markets open, let's look at a few profiles of customers.
Those who have legacy systems who were forced to close have this in mind, it's never ever again. Now please help me be sure I'm ready for the next, if there is a next. What we're seeing is that those who actually closed, those free spaces are now creating new concepts. Again, I'll ask the question, who wants to buy a legacy system, you know, when you reopen a restaurant? They're technically drawn to Lightspeed. Then what we're seeing is that we are still seeing a few of the old habits remain inside of consumers. It's not like it's all or nothing. We're seeing it go back to physical, but the habits remain.
People are still, you know, doing pickup and order ahead and home delivery more than they used to 'cause they've discovered, hey, it's kinda cool to have your friends at your house and you're cooking for them, or they think you're cooking for them. We're seeing this in a less kind of black and white way. Actually what it just tells us is having a well-diversified business is amazing because it really reduces risk as you go forward. Maybe the last thing we're seeing through this is that the successful model, and I said it a few times today, is not so much around selling on your website. The successful model is embedding everywhere, you know, reservations, order ahead, transactional sales everywhere.
I think that's the other big trend that we're excited about, is we think that merchants now have kind of evolved very rapidly, and consumers have evolved very rapidly through COVID, which needs actually more complexity, which means that we need to make it even simpler for their overall more relevant than we ever have been.
Yeah. The world is definitely reopening, the business is coming back, and obviously, there's, you know, depending on what's happening regionally when it comes to lockdowns and restrictions, which Brandon talked about some of the things that we were talking about in Australia, all of that is absolutely real. The one thing, in other words, it's not to your story of people were like, "Yeah, online is nice. I just need the POS." Then we saw the complete opposite. What we're really thinking here is, even though physical is coming back, consumers, the way they buy have changed, to the point JP just made.
That's really, we think, just an awesome dynamic for us because we are so omni-channel, and we give them the ability, if they need to, God forbid, hope they don't have to. If they had to change their operating stance because of something like a pandemic, they can easily do it. The scramble that happened last year was just really hard on these folks. To JP said it, I'm gonna shut up after this. You know, never again, right? You're in business and you're out of business because you can't flex the way you operate. That's a big moment that opens up a lot of opportunity for companies like Lightspeed.
Let's not forget, someone who uses a legacy system needs to be in the restaurant to run analytics. Imagine a world where you can't be at the restaurant, they would show up at the restaurant just to run their analytics and manually key in whatever order they took online into their POS. I mean, it's just not adapted to the world we're living in.
Thank you.
Another question from online from Richard. Thanks for providing the perspective on acquisitions and how they tie into your roadmap. Looking ahead, are there any more opportunities that need to be filled from a tech perspective that you may need to acquire, or should we expect a pause in M&A?
Look, ultimately, we know the companies we like, we know the companies we don't care about. There's still a lot of things we need to integrate inside of Lightspeed, and I don't think it's changed. We're gonna continue to be opportunistic. We're gonna continue to look at, you know, geographic concentration. We're gonna continue to look at technologies that we think will take too long to build and integrate them into the business. Yeah, not to say more on that subject, but, you know, we were well capitalized. As you know, we have, you know, more than $1 billion in our bank account, and we do want to be the global go-to brand within the more established SMBs. Nothing will stop us at being that.
Maybe when you think about the gaps. Sorry to interrupt. I just was thinking. I really love everybody. There's a few things when you leave the room. Remember that triangle and think about the customer segments now, merchants, suppliers, consumers. I think those are the things that are informing kind of the way you're thinking about stuff.
Yeah. I think we'll take one last one from online, and we'll wrap it up.
This one from Mishan. When will this new Lightspeed Supplier Network launch?
Next year. Look, we don't wanna overpromise anything, and we're working hard at it. You'll hear a lot about us within the next 12 months on launching. It's not base switch all or nothing. We're gonna try and create value every quarter as we go forward.
Yep. Okay. Actually, I think we have time for one last one, because that was quick.
Another Daniel. What is the path to bringing capital in-house versus leveraging the Stripe platform?
I'll go. We've always felt capital has been a relatively new product offering for us. We always thought that it would be well received by our customer base. To get launched quickly, we partnered with Stripe to help us get that product in the market. Of course, ShopKeep and Mike and his team come on board and help us move even more quickly to doing this ourselves, which is what we always felt we would end up, that the economics were gonna push us to the point where, you know, having our own capital offering under our own control, much like we did with payments, was gonna be important to us. Fortunately, Stripe's been a wonderful partner in helping us move to that model as well.
Look, we always intended to have this as our own offering. It will be our own offering, but that doesn't mean we won't partner with partners like Stripe to help us enable that in the background.
Okay. With that, I think we'll wrap it up. For those of you in the room, there will be lunch served. For those of you joining us online, thanks for joining us today. If there are any questions, feel free to reach out to Investor Relations and we'll get right back to you. Thanks again, everyone.
Thank you.