All right, guys, thank you for joining us again. Day Two of the Wolfe Fin Tech Forum. Really just a couple of sessions to go on the day, so thank you for staying with us today, guys. Really happy to have Tom with us, the CFO, for another day or so of Corpay, and so really happy to have you with us. Like I said, this should be a memorable one, right?
Exactly. It's almost my last official act as the Corpay CFO, which has been a great run for me, but I've really enjoyed it and glad to be here, Darrin.
Thanks. We are happy to support you guys and learn more from you today. I think maybe just for the audience, just starting off back from the fourth quarter again, and total organic growth 12%, 26% in Corpay, 8% vehicle, 5% in other, and I mean 1% in lodging. Really just thinking about that in context of the guide, right? You had 10%-12% in 2025. Just start off by what gives you guys confidence that these revenue targets are achievable beyond the period of what I know has been relatively easier comps going up all the way through the third quarter this year.
Yeah. We exited the fourth quarter quite strong, 12% organic revenue growth, 21% earnings growth, really solid fourth quarter. With that, good visibility into 2025. In our algorithm, we think about the growth model based on what are same-store sales, what is our attrition, and what does our new sales look like. We have good visibility into those. Each of the businesses, while performing at different growth rates, were all performing at levels that I would say were at elevated levels relative to those near-term quarterly run rates. With that, we felt we had good visibility into what the guide is. Also, when you think about our business, it is a bit of a momentum-based business and one that is not overly sensitive to economic cycles. With that, I think we felt pretty good about how the core businesses were performing.
If there was one bit of twist associated with our final guide, as we did see between our November earnings release and our February release, some deterioration, particularly in the FX markets, particularly the Brazilian real, where the USD just strengthened significantly over that period of time coming out of the election. That costs us a little bit of what we call print results, print revenue, print earnings. On a macro-adjusted basis, felt good about organic at 11% and earnings on a print basis also at around 11%.
Under the surface, I mean, again, we get this question a lot, but your growth rates have accelerated, right? I mean, at the end of the day, some of it is hard to distill what's actually just really the underlying drivers of the business and the sales organization kicking into gear in some of your categories and what's just comps, right? Or even macro to some degree. Just to make sure we're on the same page, I mean, your conviction in that sustainability remains as high now as it did when you gave guidance, I suppose?
Yeah. Yeah. Businesses continue to perform well. Trends remain encouraging. The sales engines are performing quite well. I actually got an opportunity to look at some sales results before hopping on the plane to come up here yesterday, and they continue to be on a consistent trajectory. Sales is, despite maybe sometimes the comp or the macro or some of the various moving parts within the numbers, kind of the holy grail. That is the DNA of the organization. It is what really fuels that consistent 10% organic growth. We have continued to see healthy sales, which is nice in and of itself from a financial perspective. From a business perspective, it is the best proof point validation that you have advantage products, that customers of all sizes and payment sectors are buying your product. What better way to validate that what you are doing is working?
We've had some fits and starts on sales, actually, if you go back a couple of years now, right? That impacted growth, to your point. It seems like it's on a much better trajectory. I know there's been a new sales org under CRO Mike Jeffrey. If you just help, what exactly do you see in terms of change in the business under his leadership? What's really going to happen?
Yeah. The issue in the past was we, particularly in the U.S. vehicle payments business and even within that, the local fleet business, we pivoted to predominantly a digital-based channel. It created a lot of micro clients coming into the organization. We realized, no, we still needed to be multi-channel and have digital, have field, have onboarding. What Mike has done is picked up from that and really has come in and brought his sales expertise. He's a purebred sales executive. He's been doing it his entire career. He learned the hard way by knocking on doors and pounding pavement. He came out of the payroll business, which is a model that's not too dissimilar to ours in terms of just how you think about growth and customer relationships. He's brought his sales expertise in. With that has been a variety of things.
We've done some reorganizing of people, not just consolidating the US sales group across lodging, payables, and vehicle, but actually moving people around, sometimes expanding scope, sometimes shrinking scope. He’s altered incentive plans. Ultimately, salespeople tend to be motivated by how they're going to get paid. They kind of see a job, do a job kind of person, and how they get paid has a big impact on that. He’s modified some incentive plans. He’s created consistency across the sales process. I’d say each of those three segments had their own way of doing things. In some cases, they had their own instinct of salesforce on how they tracked things. He’s brought consistency across that. At the end of the day, it’s just hardcore accountability. What did you do today? How many calls did you make? What were those results?
It's just, at the end of the day, I've been in organizations where you see very disciplined sales functions. Disciplined sales functions result in good sales results, especially when you're selling what we're selling, which are attractive products in large markets with low penetration. It's different if you're trying to sell something that's a tough putt. We like to think that we're selling things that have a lot of value proposition associated with them. If you create those rhythms and you do the things, inputs are equal outputs. He's very focused on the inputs. It's been gaining traction.
Just quickly, the freight market, I mean, it's largely lapped the pivot away from micro clients and leafy headwinds. So just what drives transactions from here? Is it largely a function of just waiting for the freight market to turn more positive?
The freight?
Yeah.
No, I'd just say it's sales in general. I mean, we aren't overly tied to the freight market. Our over-the-road business is relative to the overall vehicle payments business. The vehicle payments business is a little over $2 billion. Freight would be $250 million-$350 million of that, $250 million-$350 million of that. So the freight is performing adequately. It grows in kind of the low single digits. Really, the turnaround associated with the vehicle payments is that local fleet business. And that's particularly within the SMB space. The enterprise customers within that local fleet business, think like an Amazon, performing extremely well. It's the local, the smaller ones, the SMBs that we've just got to get the sales back. We got to just refill the sales funnel.
Just shifting gears now to corporate payments, which I know has been a topic of focus for us and investors. When you think of the growth there, I mean, it's been very strong, 26% organic growth in fourth quarter. And you have about a third of that business now cross-border, right? A third AP, full AP, and some channel partners. If you could explain the benefits and financial impact of offering this multi-currency accounts of the next B, early signs of demand, and maybe even just take it a step back and just talk a little more about the cross-border differentiation. What are you doing for the market that's resonating so much and allowing that growth? Because I think B2B as a percentage of Corpay in general is a big percentage of the is a big part of the story.
Yeah. No, absolutely. You summarized it well in terms of, call it a $1.6 billion business. Call it a billion of it is cross-border, and $600 million, just to make the math simple, is that payables business. On the cross-border side, as you said, we do spot payment transactions. We do hedging transactions. One of the things we are particularly excited about is we introduced, in an upscaled way—we had already had this in a smaller scale, but we upscaled it—to where we offer what we call the multi-currency account, which is basically being able to be the international bank for our customers. We have it across 12 different currencies.
I can go to a CFO and say, "Do you want to have an account by the end of the day in XYZ of the 12 currencies?" We can generally open up that account literally within a business day. You try to do that by opening up your own account in a bank of choice within that particular jurisdiction. I've done it as CFO. It can literally take three months in terms of all of the AML, KYC that has to be done. We partner with other financial institutions that serve as custodian. We do the subledger accounting on behalf of our customer. It allows us to have a two-way transaction with our cross-border customers.
Now we have accounts that can not only receive funds through their multi-currency account, but then it can then use as account disbursement as they pay for whatever their cross-border needs may be. It creates a much stickier relationship. Our customers were already sticky as is, but it just further deepens your relationship with them when you are all of a sudden now part of kind of their overall core nucleus of cash management. We are really excited about it. We have several hundred billion already under custody. We see that growing significantly over the course of 2025.
That's amazing. I mean, when you put that together with the AP opportunity more broadly, number one, I mean, what kind of cross-sell opportunity is there between the two sides? Then we can go further into.
Yeah. I'd say some, but our AP business is heavily domestic. Even there, many of our customers, because we focus on the middle market, call it $250 million-$750 million, and being in the U.S., where the U.S. market is so large, generally they do not have a lot of international payment needs. You go up market, and we do have customers, call it 20%-25% of our customer base is $1 + billion . There, there are some international payment needs. The cross-border business can be quite helpful. There is some cross-sell opportunity, but I would say that would be more icing as opposed to something that is core to those kind of growth numbers that we have been printing.
The differentiation that you offer, going back for a minute again to cross-border, is, I mean, obviously it's a version of something that a business could use that's probably much better than what a bank gives them, right?
Exactly.
Explain why. I mean, why is it so much better than what they can already?
Yeah. It's customer service. It's product in terms of we'll sit down with them with a R isk Visualizer, and we'll help them understand their risks. Customer service isn't just meaning answering the phone. It means sitting down with the Treasurer, sitting down with the CFO, and educating them about FX and derivatives. Some of these don't have a financial markets background. FX and derivatives can be scary terms. They are uncomfortable walking down the hall and talking to their CEO or sitting across the boardroom table and talking about these things. We help demystify those types of things associated with the derivatives and FX market. That is helpful. We also can provide terms that are advantage to some of our customers. At the end of the day, we have proprietary rails. Over 55% of our businesses' transactions run across our rails, not the SWIFT rails.
That is something that is also advantageous to us. I will say just because of the whole stablecoin, I think during today, if we had 11 meetings, 10 of them asked about stablecoins. We view stablecoins as just simply another rail, a lower-cost rail for us to be able to transact. We actually have the capability today. We do very little volume over stablecoin rails just because there is not a whole lot of demand for it. If demand occurred, we would be there to support it. At the end of the day, the stablecoin still needs to be converted over into a fiat currency that needs to occur in order for that to be something that the end customer can use. We view stablecoins as kind of a neutral to small opportunity in that it would be a cheaper, less expensive way.
Okay. Going back to the accounts payable side, I mean, it sounds like your focus there has been on software and then converting more and more payments. Help us understand the focus from sales and the efforts on go-to-market around software ownership.
Yeah. We think of it as kind of full AP automation. We want to take a customer's AP function from what I call non-modern to modern. We can do that a variety of ways. We can take them along a product journey to be able to do that. At the end of the day, we're trying to transact and process as much of their AP spend as possible. Most of the time, we will go to them and say, "Just give us your whole AP file." No, we're not the BPO shop where we're going to become an outsourcer. We can take the AP file, and whether it's ACH or check or virtual card, we can process all of it.
We can do it using our proprietary merchant network, which I think is one of the most valuable assets that we have as an organization. It is a network of merchants that we have accumulated over more than 10 years because we have owned the corporate payments business for over 10 years. It was even started at the legacy organization prior to that. We have developed a proprietary network over an extended period of time. That is our deep and wide moat. I talk about it a lot in terms of a lot of people focus on the technology, the tech, the software. To me, the real value is having a significant customer base, thousands of customers, which we have, and tens of thousands, in some cases, hundreds of thousands of merchants that we have that accept virtual card.
We are simply sitting in the middle of these two flywheels with our technology helping fulfill the payments associated with those customers. What do customers like? They like ubiquitous networks. What do networks like? They like large customer bases. We offer both of those. We think that is one of the reasons why we stand out, just giving the scale, the size, the history, and the diversification of the business.
How are you trying to drive higher monetization on those AP accounts? I mean, at the end of the day, there's been some at least discussion of pushback on virtual card in the industry a little bit.
Yeah. We really haven't seen it. Sure, on a one-off unit of one, maybe a merchant here opts out, but three merchants over here opt in. Our tech is quite tailored, and it can be customized. We're not a one-size-fits-all shop. If a merchant wants to accept virtual card from you, but he does want to accept virtual card from Jim, we can accommodate that. If a merchant has a certain size transaction that works for you, but he wants a different size transaction for me, we can accommodate that as well. I think by being flexible and customizable to the situation, we've been able to maintain and actually see a little bit of card penetration and monetization creep up.
I'm focusing on this because you really hope this could be nearly 40% of your total company revenues. As we know, there are theoretically multiples for this kind of growth rate business. The market could be very strong relative to your overall 13x of your stock. It is an interesting dynamic. It brings to light just what's the next step. You continue to have strong growth in cross-borders, what it sounds like you think. AP has room, I suppose.
Yeah. So the sales engines in both of those lines of businesses are functioning quite well. Hundreds of people in each of those businesses, call it 200-400 people in each of those businesses selling every day. One of the advantages of cross-border, it's a business that never sleeps. It's got a trading desk in Sydney, a trading desk in London, a trading desk in Toronto, and a trading desk in British Columbia. It literally, and think about that, just the advantage of a company that always has salespeople working. They don't have to take eight hours out to eat and sleep. There's always an element of the company that's in motion. The sales will be a key to that.
We are also very focused on the inorganic growth as well because that is also a source of growth, not because of product capability, but just because of scale. We are able to deploy our capital, balance sheet is in terrific shape. We have the benefit of generating, call it $1.5 billion of free cash flow. That just gives you the wealth of opportunity to be selective and disciplined, but opportunistic about M&A activity.
On that note, I mean, I know 2025, I think, is expected to be a bigger year from an M&A standpoint relative to at least buybacks versus I think it was more balanced in 2024. I know Ron has also actually Ron's referenced, I believe, potentially larger deals coming up, or at least an appetite for potentially larger deals. I don't know how this compares to something like GPS in terms of framework, which was, what, over $700 million.
Yeah, a little over.
Just how do we think about that in terms of what your appetite is for and the size of deals? I imagine corporate payments is a piece of what you're looking at.
Yeah, totally. A significant piece of what we're looking at. That's not to say we wouldn't do something in lodging or vehicle. No, corporate payments is the focus.
The primary, yeah.
Yeah. I think one, first and foremost, will be financially disciplined. It is not like there is a size level that is a knockout factor or not. I think given the size at which the business has grown, what we see out there is potential opportunities. We think we have the appetite if the opportunity presented itself with the right financial returns that something larger than GPS could be something we would look at. We did Paymerang on the payable side, was a little under $500,000. As I said, the balance sheet is in great shape. The leverage is under 3. We will continue to lower leverage just as we print cash flow and EBITDA. I think we have an appetite. As you know, it takes two to tango. There is music playing.
We will see how it plays out over the course of the year. We are essentially, from a bandwidth perspective, because human capital is almost equally as important as financial capital when it comes to these kinds of things, we are essentially done with the integration of Paymerang . We finished that by the end of the year. We did that in six months. At the end of this month, we will have migrated all of the GPS customers onto the legacy Corpay platform within four months. That gives us then the human capital bandwidth to then take on the next transaction should it present itself.
Within corporate payments, I mean, when we think about what you might want to have to even round out what you already have in terms of cross-border and AP, what types of assets make sense? Is it something that's capability-oriented? Is it something that's geographic-oriented?
It's really scale at this point. We really feel good about our capabilities. Yes, we get a few bells and whistles when we find a transaction like the GPS had a treasury pooling transaction that allows CFOs like me to move money easier across jurisdictions and things like that. I think generally, from a capability standpoint, we feel really good with how those look right now. It's really about scale. The sales engine, we talked about that earlier. This is a lot of direct-type selling. It's relationship-based selling. We do some branding to try to soften the beaches and make people aware of the Corpay name. At the end of the day, it's a human-to-human transaction. Many times what we're getting is not only customers, but we're also getting salespeople. We might be building out that network.
Do not underestimate the value of that network because it's impossible, I think, nearly impossible for somebody to kind of replicate that from scratch, at least not quickly. If we get network, whether it's more merchants in the payable side or additional banking licenses on the cross-border side, those are things that can be a real accelerant to our growth.
Okay. It certainly seems like with the dislocation in the markets these days, there may be both private and public, I think there could be some more opportunities in corporate payments.
Yeah. I mean, valuations, I think 2025, 2026 is set up well. I do not think we will be out of the buyback game. I think as we look at what our bias is, we like the bias toward M&A. Ron will many times joke, "Okay, I bought back 25% of the company and my multiple went down." Okay. I am not stupid. He is pretty good with math. Yet I spend money on buying companies in 2015 through 2019. I spend money in 2024 buying real companies and my multiple goes up. Okay. I can learn this. I can learn that maybe buying companies is rewarded more than buying Corpay stock. That is not to say we are out of the Corpay stock game. I think we will be mindful about it.
Got it.
Before we leave, because I get a sense that you may be leaving cross-border and corporate payments in general, I at least want to hit head-on the bit of hysteria about tariffs.
Sure.
Just as that has made news, we've gotten a lot of inbounds and things like that. I would just say that we view tariffs in the cross-border business as a near-term opportunity. Long-term TBD, if tariffs turn into deep recession, then that's a different ballgame. That's not my expectation. I think it's more of a negotiation ploy than long-term economic policy. Tariffs in general have been beneficial to the business. One, it's created volatility. Volatility gets CFOs off the sidelines and executing with us. Two, it creates the opportunity for businesses to potentially pull transactions forward, buy things that they may have had out into the future. Three, it's inflationary. Assuming it does not go inflationary to the point where the volume dries up, we're actually getting more spend. The revenue model is tied to spend value.
While we're in the middle of the first quarter, not going to comment on it specifically. Overall, on the near term, we view tariffs as something that's kind of net positive for the overall cross-border business and neutral for the other segments. Again, it's only if it resulted in kind of a cliff event on recession and, as you said, well, demand destruction.
Okay. To your point, I'm switching to the next segment. Just quickly on vehicles.
I knew you had a plane to catch. I'm kind of hurting myself.
Vehicles and fleet. I mean, just a reminder of the mix of the business for us for a moment. Then we'll go into what some of the opportunities are across the segment going forward.
Yeah. Yeah. If you think about vehicle payments, as I said earlier, about a $2.1 billion business, 700, 700, 700. 3 x 7 = 21. Brazil, U.S., and international. It is basically that's the pie chart of the overall vehicle payments business, all with kind of different places of where they are from a product and growth trajectory perspective. That is the pie chart.
Just to that point, I mean, the growth rate of the overall segment is supposed to be low double digits, right?
I think vehicle payments is high single.
I'm sorry. I think I wrote down low double from last time.
That's just you guys are always kind of.
We're trying. We're trying. Just the expectation for North American fleet.
Yeah. I think North American fleet, within that has been, we coined the term problem child. Within that is that SMB local business, call it a $250 million-$300 million business, that's been a little bit of a drag. That's the one that got too close to the digital fire and just did way too much digital and kind of got rid of some of its multi-distribution channels. Overall, if you look at it in total, we see that business flat-ish in 2025, slight growth overall for the year. Hopefully exiting the year, if the sales momentum continues and the realization of those sales builds, we see it exiting the year, call it in the mid-single digits. That is really, a lot of this is formulaic. Could we pour more money in? Sure, we could pour more money in.
It is probably at the sacrifice of corporate payments that is growing 20%. Would you make that trade? Probably not. Some of this is a bit by design in terms of the slow return to mid-single digits growth.
Maybe going a little further into the Brazil area, just because it's definitely an interesting one and you've done more deals there. If you could take a moment and just set the stage around the competitive landscape of your products there, where you stand in terms of market share.
We've created a vehicle payments ecosystem predominantly for consumers. It's 75% consumer-based, $700 million. The business side is more just a toll tag type business, helping trucks move across the country through their tolling and ports. What we've created there, it started with the anchor product of the toll tag. Just think of an RFID barcode stuck to your windshield, but put a whole suite of products around it that reads off of that toll tag: parking, drive-through restaurants, fueling. We've added insurance. We've sold 3 million insurance products. We also, over time, said, "Okay, we don't want to be bound to the vehicle as the kind of POS system, if you will." What did we do? We implemented an app.
We have the app that has 3 million-4 million users on that app every day transacting with us, which has been super, super helpful. Of recent, what we have done last year in March and this year also in March, because we had mentioned that Gringo, which is another car registration vehicle licensing compliance company, the Gringo transaction just recently closed. We had anticipated closing in Q1, and it did. That is a car registration business also done over an app where if you are registering, doing your annual car registration, or if you get a parking fine or you have a driver's license that you have to pay, you can do all of this on the app. It is hooked into banking network s. It is hooked into all 27 DMVs across Brazil. It is not five of them. It is all 27.
All 60, what we've done is we've expanded the TAM threefold because before the TAM that was tied to the toll tag was generally vehicles that drive through tolls. That's predominantly in three cities: São Paulo, Brasilia, and Rio de Janeiro. Now all 60 million plus vehicles in Brazil need to register their vehicle. And so we've expanded our addressable market there. We're super excited about what that can be. The other point I'll make that over time I've realized gets underplayed about Brazil and our business down there is the brand in Brazil is equivalent to Uber. Who hasn't heard of Uber? If I said, "Who's heard of Uber?" Every single hand would go up. If I was sitting in São Paulo giving a conference, first, I'd have to speak Portuguese.
If I could, if I said, "Who's heard of Sem Parar?" every single hand would go up. It is that kind of brand recognition in the market. When you're dealing with a predominantly consumer-based product, the power of the brand, a lot of times we get caught in this whole B2B world, but the power of that brand in Brazil is incredible. It has given us a lot of tailwind so that we can sell this ecosystem to their consumers.
I still think that's an area the market probably can use to do more diligence on from the perspective of assets you guys really have there. Just last one is just for on the lodging business. I mean, is that an area that you want to keep or you want to divest?
Yeah. No, no, no. We still think the.
You're doing quickly.
It's complicated. We think the lodging business and its technology is quite proprietary. It's extremely unique. How many companies can log into an airline's pilot and flight crew manifest system, know when the Delta flight is delayed because of rain and whose pilots are moving where and 40,000 hotels and all of those kinds of things? While it's a bit niche and it's serving a select segment of the workforce, there's not another solution out there that can handle all the way from booking to check-in to control. In the workforce business, when we have workers, not necessarily you and I, but people out there repairing telephone lines and cell towers and laying asphalt, the employer wants to kind of control where those individuals stay, what they spend their money on, and all those kinds of things. Our product also provides spend.
It also does the payment. It does reporting and all those kinds of things. There is not another solution that does that. The 40,000 hotels that we have give us significant banking networks. I'll finish where I started. The 40,000 hotels that we have give us incredible economic advantage that we can pass discounts on to our customers.
Any other flight to catch?
We do have a flight to catch.
Are you ready for your next step in life and retirement?
Not retirement.
Not retirement.
Moving on.
Good luck in the next stage. I know it actually sounds like a really cool place you're going. So all the best.
Thank you. Appreciate it. Thanks, Darrin.
Take care.
Thanks, guys.
Appreciate it.
Appreciate it.
For everyone here, we have a really cool panel up next on macro discussing both macro.