Everybody, welcome back to day two of our Barclays Emerging Payments and FinTech Forum. I'm honored to have Alissa Vickery, Chief Financial Officer of Corpay, with us here today. Alissa, thank you so much for being here again. I think you were here a couple of years ago, and it's great to have you back.
Thanks.
Why don't we start with where I have been starting quite a bit at the conference, with just sort of your view, macro's top of mind, your view of sort of what you're seeing out there. What does the economy and sort of trends look like from your vantage point?
Right. I would say, obviously, a lot of ink spilled out there on this topic and a lot of chatter. I mean, quite frankly, I think for our business, what we're seeing is just not a lot there yet, which is obviously kind of a good, a good place to be for now. You know, we're all watching it. We're all keeping our eye on the horizon. The political environment obviously creates a little bit of churn, if you will, out there in the marketplace as well. Right now, our volumes and our trends are up. They're steady. They're right where we kind of expect them to be at this time of year. You know, regardless, I would say, of perhaps the broader news, media, and market, that exists out there on the topic, it's just not much, not much to say here.
You know, time will tell. But for now, we're kind of in a good place.
Yeah, that is a good place.
Yeah.
So I wanted to start with your corporate payments segment and maybe sort of more of a background question to kick off. Can you give us an update on the mix within corporate payments, virtual card versus cross-border/FX? Maybe we can start there. I also had something, you know, how much is direct versus indirect in there as well?
Sure. As a reminder to everybody, our corporate payments business is made up of two sort of sub-products, if you will. We have our Domestic Payables business, which you asked about in terms of direct and indirect. We have a bit of our international payments business, which is primarily the cross-border FX product slate. I mean, to say that we are thrilled with the performance of these businesses would be an understatement. We do think of it as one product offering because the same customer can participate in both the domestic payment as well as the international payment solutions. This business has grown rapidly, as hopefully most in the room know and you are aware of, over the past few years. It is interesting, even with their growth, because they have sort of maintained the growth together, there is a bit of a 60/40 split.
60% is cross-border, or those international payments, with 40% being more of the domestic. Then sort of double-clicking within, I'll call it the domestic payables, the direct business represents about 90% of that revenue today, which, we genuinely love, because that's sort of the bread and butter. It's where the higher rate, the higher touchpoint with the customer, we'll call it the stickiness that the customer tends to live, with the residual being sort of that channel or indirect.
On the international side of the business, you guys recently inked a deal with Mastercard, where you'll become the exclusive provider of cross-border services to their FI customers. Talk about that relationship a little bit, that deal and how it will work.
Yeah, just, I mean, we are super excited about this relationship. We've been partners with Mastercard in the payment space for more than 10 years now. As we've sort of grown up, if you will, as a public company and come to something that's of quite some scale, our interrelatedness, if you will, of some of our product sets and sort of where we're trying to go in the marketplace are clearly aligned. There has been a vision to try and figure out how do we work more together. What this transaction is, is Mastercard has agreed to invest around $300 million into our cross-border unit. Again, we just talked about payables as the domestic and the international. Just on the international side, for a little under 3% stake in that business.
You know, 3% isn't a whole heck of a lot, but what it does is sort of gives them some visibility into the space. It's something they're interested in. They've been clear with us that it's something they want to understand better. There are a lot of complexities to the business, and so, you know, they'll sort of get a look under the hood, if you will, to some degree. What we get in exchange is a great exclusivity partner with Mastercard backing us as we show up to financial institutions. We've signed a partnership commercial agreement where effectively we're their exclusive partner, walking into tier two, tier three banks.
where what we've discovered is, and it's sort of amazing to us, that most of those clients that are served by that tier of bank, now the room can correct me if they got better data, but about 50% of the international payments those banks make on behalf of their customers, they actually make those payments in U.S. dollars. They ask the end customer, "Oh, you want 100,000 EUR. How many dollars do you want?" It becomes this very, I'll call it inefficient payment, where you're giving all the spread in the economics potentially to that back-end customer.
Our goal is to partner with these banks, with Mastercard giving the very warm introduction, because oftentimes trying to get in the room with the right person, even though we think that we're a market leader in corporate payments, you know, that bank may be, "Well, who is Corpay?" "Oh, here's Mastercard." Mastercard says to that CFO or that CEO, "Hi, here's the corporate payments leader from Corpay. They're our partner. Here's what they do for us. You should consider them for your product." We're a bit bullish and excited, if you will, on the opportunities that the relationship may strike for the future.
Of the, you mentioned some, you know, growth acceleration in terms of cross-border revenue growth. You also called out the investment that Mastercard is going to make in you guys. What is the, is there an integration process or what do those dollars get allocated to? What's the path to that acceleration?
Right. I would say the dollars are sort of a mere valuation mechanism more than anything. If you want to be in our house, you must contribute. Obviously, the partnership that from a longer-term play, especially as we enter 2026, we believe those FI, the financial institution partnerships that are going to come to fruition as a result of our relationship should lend itself two to three percentage points on cross-border revenue into 2026. Now, the ramp, you asked what work exists that will have to be accomplished to be able to get there. It is mainly getting our teams aligned, figuring out how we go into market together, who are the right parties. I would say it is probably not a lot of homework as much as getting ramped and getting going together.
Two big companies, you got to get aligned, you got to understand what you're saying, and then show up.
I see. I see. I wanted also to ask about a recent announcement about the minority investment in AvidXchange. You guys have a lot going on. Could you provide a little more color on what Corpay is bringing to Avid in terms of synergies, distribution opportunities, and vice versa?
Right. I'll just double down on what you just said. We do have a lot going on. It has been probably one of the busiest quarters that I can remember in some time, especially when Ron asked me to step in. I was like, he said, "It'll be quiet." I'm like, "There's nothing quiet. There's never quiet." Again, super excited here as well. What we've done is we've invested $550 million approximately. It'll all play out at closing, probably sometime in the fourth quarter for about a third of the AvidXchange business. We've partnered with a private equity group, TPG, who will be the majority owner.
Obviously, before we agreed to sign a deal, trying to come to sort of a meeting of the minds around what is it that we're looking to do, what are the growth strategies, how do we think we should go to market? You know, ultimately, the things that we bring to the table are, we already have scale in the space. We already have, I'll call it some know-how around how to win and then how to win in a profitable way. We'll obviously share that view and that mindset and help define with TPG as the controlling partner, if you will, how we go and execute on this thing. Now, they are the controlling partner. They will lead the charge. You know, these private equity guys tend to be a bit mercenaries. I'll repeat Ron's words.
We expect that if we're able to execute on the plans that we've sort of mutually come together on, that we have a real opportunity in the longer term to win here.
Another news item that caught my attention, there were some rumblings about an acquisition of Alpha Group, a U.K.-based company, the board rejecting the initial offer. Do you have, can you comment on that? Do you have any expectation to continue bidding on the asset?
Unfortunately, I cannot comment on this any more than the press release that is on our website, and I think that they put out as well.
Okay. Fair enough. You have to say that and I have to ask.
That's fair. That's fair.
I guess then kind of taking a step back, there's a lot of activity here. You've made a lot of moves kind of on the chessboard. In terms of M&A, how should we think about your sort of future appetite for M&A? Is there still plenty of dry powder and appetite to keep expanding in that way, or do you need to pause and take a beat, or how should we think about it?
No. I would say our appetite is high and we are not pausing. You know, we've talked about it a lot internally. You know, the pipelines can come and go, as we all know. Right now where the prices are and the quality of the assets that seem to be available in the marketplace really, I'll call it, put fuel to the fire, if you will, around sort of the classic Corpay mentality. We are going to put capital to work and we're going to put it to work in the most effective and efficient way, both from an investor perspective as well as for the future of the company. We're not going to go buy things just to buy them. We're going to buy the things that make the most sense. We talk about it a lot, trying to make sure we go deeper, not wider.
What are the things that bring scale to the businesses we have today and introduce us to incremental verticals or clients that perhaps we have not played as much in in the past, but really do contribute either from an infrastructure, a customer, a scalability perspective, and quite frankly, are accretive to earnings. I think we, for a little while, we were in, let's go buy capability. We have done that. We feel good about where we are at. The future really is, how do we put our dollars to work and buy things that really propel the company forward. Probably a lot in the corporate payment space specifically is where you will see us focus.
What are you seeing out there, just very broadly speaking, in terms of the M&A environment? Are sellers kind of a little more reasonable with their valuations? It feels like some things are clicking and popping, not just for you guys, but across the board. Is that, you know, have things changed over the last couple of years in terms of the bid-ask on these assets?
100%. I mean, I think Avid is the perfect example. And, you know, I'm not sure if we ever publicly said it, but it was a very different price a couple of years ago when we wanted to first look at acquiring it. And quite frankly, it was dilutive to our earnings. And so, you know, two years down the road, even as an equity method investment, you know, this thing will be accretive to earnings going into next year. So it's just a different ballgame today.
That makes sense. Changing track, so to speak, over to vehicle payments. Maybe you could give us kind of a status report on the North America fleet business. You know, kind of what your guidance implies, where you're at now, your confidence level about getting from point A to point B.
Right. I would say a lot of focus on this business. I do not think that would be any big secret in this room. You know, I will do a little bit of a history lesson. You know, three years ago when interest rates went from zero to something other than zero, where we are today, we made a purposeful shift in our business model to focus more on upstream. A slightly larger customer, more healthy customer. We had previously spent a lot of time and effort focused on a micro SMB. Think one to five employees. Very small businesses. What we learned is those businesses really do operate a lot more like a consumer, especially in market downturns. We pivoted and we pivoted hard.
I think when you pivot a large business, in terms of the sales engine specifically, the math has to work. If you attrit at a certain rate, then you have to sell at double that rate to maintain, you know, potentially a higher growth rate than perhaps where you have been historically. As we have done the pivot and gone more up market, as well as hiring in, I know we talked about this a little bit, a Chief Revenue Officer who is hyper-focused on US vehicle payments, as well as some lodging and payables where we think there is a bit of the overlay, if you will, customers who would likely benefit from multiple offerings. We do see some positive trends. He has been in the seat now, actually I was talking to him yesterday, a little over seven, eight months now.
Enough time to where he's starting to make some headway, starting to streamline some of those back office infrastructure processes, people, just how people think even and having a common leader. I would say same source sales trends are solid. Five quarters running, we are dead on where we expect to be. Retention has gotten incrementally better. Year- over- year on Q1, we are 200-300 basis points better on the retention line. To us, that says we're doing some of the right things. We're not churning the customer as quickly as we were. And PS, when we say churn, like we have less than, I think it's less than 7.5%, churn rate. That's pretty doggone good on an annualized revenue basis.
With that math, as long as you can then go sell, assuming your same store sales do not go too negative on you, somewhere in the realm of our 20% goal, which we openly say, "Hey, we are going to grow sales 20%." We had churn around 10%. 20% minus 10% contributes to 10% organic growth year- over- year. The TAM in the space is huge. I think the combination of the sales focus, the improved retention, and then quite frankly, just rolling the ball forward, right? This is a big business. You do not turn it around overnight. I think the results have sort of dictated that, combined with some of the customer wins. You know, we talked a lot about an enterprise win over in our corporate payment space.
We also had a couple of large enterprise wins in our vehicle payment space that really are implemented and starting to ramp now in the second quarter. I would say it is the combination of all these things together that really do give us confidence as we move into the middle and back half of the year that our trends and our metrics imply that our results are achievable. We feel pretty good about it.
Good. I wanted to revisit something that you said just now about exiting the micro fleet category. Does that, and this kind of dovetails into a question about kind of the macro resiliency of the fleet business, does that put you in a better position now? Or is your book, and from like a credit perspective, you have a bit of a better credit overlay because you've kind of exited some of those riskier customers? Is that a fair characterization?
I think that's totally a fair characterization. I think one thing I meant to say earlier was, you know, our product's really non-discretionary. And if you have businesses that are a little bit higher quality and more stable, who are going to just withstand, we'll call it the economic ebbs and flows, because again, back to recession, who knows? Ultimately, those customers are healthier, better quality. They pay their bills. And when you really focus on that micro SMB, you're just another form of credit for them, you know, especially when credit markets are tighter and interest rates aren't zero. Effectively, you become a lender of last resort. That's not who we're interested in being. We have a nice product that provides control, that provides oversight for those businesses on the spend category.
Ultimately, it becomes much more, I'll call it, stable in those environments when things maybe do get a little tougher.
This is a bit of a redux of the macro question that I asked you, but I wanted to ask specifically about your fleet business. Not seeing any kind of, in the OTR business in particular, not seeing any kind of pull forwards or tariff-driven, you know, gyrations in demand there.
You know, I was talking to this business leader two days ago on this topic. And so what I've learned is, you know, the sector really that's impacted is this intermodal sector of the freight and the fleet business, which is really rails, shipping. So where they're coming from the shipyard onto land. Most of those freight companies, the fuel product is managed internally. So that's not us. We're more OTR. The OTR products right now, or the OTR freight operators, they're really hyper-focused on making sure their payloads are full. What he's telling me is, you know, are they being cautious? Of course they are. Right now, we're not seeing any impact associated with tariffs related to those freight customers that are our customers. Time will tell. Right now, you know, no churn there, if you will, or no bring forward.
I will add, you know, we'll see how the summer goes, because that's something, you know, I think we're all looking for, especially with the good weather, the holiday season, people just generally being out and about more. More to come there.
Yeah. And then, again, in terms of you guys being active, Brazil, in the Brazil business, you've done a couple of deals down there, Gringo and Zapay. Talk about how those fit into your strategy and maybe just in general, your kind of evolving strategy down in Brazil.
Right. Brazil is an interesting place. If you haven't been there, I would say super fascinating. Our toll product, which is really where we started in this space, is really a bit of a subscription model, if you will. Over the years, we've identified incremental product offerings that really fit the needs of our over 7 million discrete toll tag app users on top of this. That country is extremely reliant upon vehicles. We learned it time and time again. Zapay and Gringo fit nicely into the suite, probably, quite frankly, more of a home run than we even anticipated. These companies are in what we call the vehicle debts business. What is that?
Effectively in Brazil, every municipality within major cities, and there can be, you know, 10-15 municipalities within São Paulo alone, each have their own ticketing. If you violate the parking, you get an auto ticket. If you run a red light, if you, you know, I'm trying to think, you speed, because there's speeding cameras. What ends up happening is you do not actually know that you've received the ticket, because it can take the government anywhere from 30-90 days to actually get the bill into your mailbox. What the app does is it enables you to see all of your violations in one place. Everybody has a violation. Even our CEO, which is amazing, because he talks about it, he's like, I had no idea I had three tickets.
Because, I mean, you're just driving down the road and probably, you know, Brazil has a lot of traffic. We'll just leave it there. Maybe you're driving in a way that perhaps you wouldn't otherwise. Anyway, what it does is it has enabled us to have an incremental product offering to our more than 7 million app users. With these two businesses, we gained another 20 million incremental users. I didn't explain the product quite well enough. You see it all in the app. If you don't pay your bill in Brazil within 30 days, it doubles. It doubles. People know this because they're waiting for the bill in the mail. If you can get in front of it and pay your bill within the 30-day window, you actually save a significant amount of money.
What we do is we, you know, we charge a fee for those savings and for that convenience, if you will. Now connecting that vehicle debts capability within our base software solution, if you will, within their cell phone, which I'm holding my hand up like I've got a phone in my hand, but it fundamentally changes the game in a meaningful way for these customers and just makes the product offering that much more compelling. It is pretty slick. I'm always impressed every time I go. I have the team always sort of give me, I'll call it the world tour where we drive in the car and we can see what all the toll solution or the RFID solution can actually do.
Do you intentionally get tickets?
No. You know, maybe when I show up, the president will have, you know, have a violation just so he can show me on the app.
That's interesting. Kennedy, I did not appreciate the depth of the value proposition. That's a pretty necessary service.
It really is. Back to, we sort of stumbled upon it and then we stumbled upon another and we are like, oh, this is great. It is, I know it is sometimes people think, oh, it is Brazil, it is far, but like what we are doing down there is super, super fascinating, especially in this vehicle payment space. It is the epitome of what it can be, if you will, across the market space.
Very interesting. And then on lodging, that's one where I think we saw a little bit of, a little bit of decline, organic decline in Q1. Maybe just talk about that segment. It's all, it's faced a little bit of headwind. What's going on there? What should we kind of expect?
Yeah, I would just say for first quarter, we did have a bit of a tougher comp, which I think is a bit of what contributed to our organic growth, which, you know, was effectively flat. Q1 prior year, we had a little bit of distressed passenger business as a result of the Mideast conflict, which, you know, when I go back and look at the calendar, I'm like, oh, I barely remember what happened last week, let alone a year ago. There was some volume spike that did not repeat just because that event did not repeat. I would just say more holistically, we've just seen a little bit of softness, softness from our customers. They are experiencing softness, which then we become the beneficiaries of to some degree to the extent that perhaps our client has lost a client.
Their freight volumes on a plane would be lower. They do not have as many loads that they are running. If they have two less loads a month or two less loads a week, then it has contributed to a bit of that of where we are today. I would also say from a sales perspective, it is a bit of the same story. These businesses are also falling under our new Chief Revenue Officer who has taken these teams and tried to bring them under the fold, re-envisioning how we execute as a team, and just doing it in a very deliberate way. What we know about our product set is it does provide cost savings. It is a better product for our customers than just going to the market and trying to solution set their own room rates.
It provides, I'll call it, the oversight and the ability to control that spend in a managed way. We fundamentally believe that as we continue to execute in the back half of the year, there's the opportunity to move sort of to this mid-single- digits.
You guys do a little bit of business with FEMA in that segment too. That causes a little bit of variability.
That's a fair statement. I think what that does is you end up with higher volume, but at a lower rate on that FEMA business. It does provide the incremental, I'll call it, if you will, volume in the networks, which, you know, we obviously like. They are a good partner.
Ron on the Q1 call also mentioned quite a few non-core divestitures, I think totaling $2 billion. Can you give us a little more color or commentary on what that means? Where in the business should we be thinking you might?
Yeah, so I think he, yeah, he gave a little bit of color. And obviously we did mention that I think he said three. And so two in the vehicle payment space, perhaps one in lodging. Oh, yes, in lodging. Thank you, Jim. But yeah, at this time, you know, it's very early days. So we haven't hired bankers. We haven't done anything other than we've identified things that potentially are non-core, and trying to think about what our next steps are.
If our goals as a company from an M&A perspective, and quite frankly, as a strategic perspective, is to be focused on the things that drive growth and drive shareholder value, it feels to us like things that are growing rapidly that achieve a higher multiple for all of us, but then quite frankly, are just a more valuable and profitable business in the long run, that's probably where we're going to focus our efforts, corporate payments. We just talked about two deals, in particular. I think if it gives us the ability to leverage some of the working, some of the liquidity that might be derived from those dispositions, we would consider doing that. You know, we're not, this isn't a fire sale. This is going to be at the right price for the right buyer. These are good businesses, quite frankly.
Time will tell, but it just gives us another lever if in the event that we want it and we think it makes sense.
One kind of thematic idea that seemed to be a little more present, just in terms of people's conversations around Corpay, was electric vehicles and that sort of, you know, the evolution of the economy and of the automotive industry towards electric vehicles. I know you guys have done some work there. Can you give us kind of an update, not only on what you guys have done in order to be ready for that, but also just sort of like what you're seeing out there? It feels to me like the whole narrative has kind of slowed down a little bit, but, you know, you tell me.
Yeah, I would say very much so. I mean, this is a space where we absolutely went out and acquired and/or built the functionality that we needed to be able to service our fleet customers, primarily in Europe, where this was more of a thing, right? Their adoption of EVs has been at a higher pace, and then specifically also in the U.K. Trying to figure out how we served our customers who actually already had the demand, and had the desire to start mixing their fleet. We effectively just bought the things or managed and grew the things that made the most sense for our business. I think your read is right. Like this is not the hot topic anymore. If anything, I think Europe in terms of regulation has sort of backed off more recently.
I think you see it with other regulations like CSRD even, which is driven towards this whole, it's the equivalent of ESG here in the U.S., right? They said, oh, maybe we've overstepped. I think the combination of sort of taking a step back by the governments along with, quite frankly, the cost of adoption for EVs, we're well positioned should it become a more meaningful thing in the future. We really do think this is a decade's thing, not a year's or even certainly not months. This is a longer-term play. We're well positioned to serve our customers. Again, just to repeat what we were saying, historically, and it continues to be true, we really are agnostic to what the fuel type is, whether it's petrol or electricity. We're ready to serve.
Quite frankly, in the electric charging market, whether it's your consumer or a commercial business, the ease of use that we are able to deliver through the solutions we have developed just quite frankly make a very complex thing way simpler. We are ready to serve. We are already serving, but, you know, it's very early days and it's small.
Fantastic. I think we're out of time. Thank you so much for being here. Great conversation.
Thank you.