All right. We have made it to the end of the Deutsche Bank Tech Conference, and of course, we saved the best-performing stock in my coverage, at least, for last. We are very happy to have Peter from Corpay here. Thank you very much for making it. We are excited to wrap things up with you.
Great to be here.
Thanks, Greg. All right. That threw me off a little bit. No, just going to start off, talk about two key results, right? Really strong momentum across each of your businesses, able to raise the guide above and beyond some of the macro tailwinds that you are seeing across the business. Maybe just taking a high-level step back, tell us what you are seeing across the business that gives you confidence that this momentum is going to sustain into the back half of this year and then beyond that as well.
Yeah, happy to. The underlying drivers of the business are strong. We talked about them on the earnings call, right? In terms of sales, retention, same-store sales. We are pleased with Q2 results, but it is obviously our fourth quarter of beat and raise, so consistent strong performance, and our fifth quarter of double-digit organic growth. As we look in the back half of the year, it is about continued execution. We have a lot of insight into that, so really feel strong about what we put forward in terms of 2026 and our midterm guide.
Great to hear. Before we jump into trends in each of the segments, anything you can share in terms of macro trends or what you are seeing across your businesses quarter- to- date? This could be areas like cross-border FX demand, Brazil, all of the fun stuff. But anything worth calling out that you would point investors to?
Yeah. I would say things are tracking exactly as we expected from the assumptions in our guidance. So, nothing material that I would share. I would say, customer activity continues to be strong, sales continues to be strong, and retention. So again, feel good about the quarter and the rest of the year.
That is good to hear. No changes is good thing.
Yeah.
Diving into the segments, I think we should start with corporate payments.
For sure.
Given the importance of that segment to the overall business, organic growth remains very, very solid, 16% in the most recent quarter. Can you just talk about the underlying drivers of growth across the various aspects of that business? So spend management, cross-border, AP, w here are you seeing the most demand in recent quarters? Where do you expect the most demand to come from in the near term over the medium term?
Yeah, great question. Really pleased with corporate payments performance for the first two quarters of the year. We delivered 16% organic growth. What we shared in the call, as we expect to deliver similar in the back half, if not a little bit above that. We're seeing strong performance across all three of the solutions you mentioned, right, s o spend management, commercial card, AP automation, cross-border. What we're really focused on, right? I love being the CFO of this business because I'm the ultimate customer of our products, right? We're very focused on serving real-world problems for CFOs and their teams, so we're having a lot of success doing that. The other thing that really excites us when we look at the three solutions going forward for the business is this is a huge TAM, a $600 billion TAM for us.
The main competitor that we're facing is the regional and local banks, right? That's who has a lot of this business today. So we believe that we really bring an advantage product, and at the end of the day, our goal is to help businesses save money, and we're having great success at that.
Yeah. You touched on what was going to be my next question, and you did this great cross-border teach-in a couple of months ago-
Thank you. Appreciate it.
Which was super helpful. You talked about the primary competition being these regional banks, right? I guess I keep going back to a question I get all the time is what is preventing the tier one banks, I will refrain from naming them.
Sure.
But the biggest players globally from entering this space. You guys are clearly growing super fast and it's a big TAM growing rapidly. So why aren't the bigger banks getting into this? Why aren't other fintechs getting into this? What is preventing additional competition from coming in and infringing on this great opportunity you have in front of you?
Yeah, great question. I think one of the key points of the cross-border teach-in that we did was really to explain this structural issue in terms of serving middle market clients that we are addressing with our cross-border offering. If we look at the enterprise segment, the enterprise customers are primarily served by the tier one banks, and the tier one banks are very happy to serve those customers. I am an enterprise-level customer. I am serviced by several of the tier one banks, and I get great service. When you move down to the middle market, the middle market does most of their banking with regional or local banks. They are not typically with the tier one banks. The tier one banks, they really lack the FX and global capabilities in order to service those customers. That is really the opportunity for us.
We don't see the tier one banks coming down to compete with the tier two banks and take these middle-market customers because they have got such an opportunity in the customers that they serve today. I think that is a really important distinction to make. When you look at the overall market of this, right? We believe in the middle market is about a $160 billion revenue TAM for us, whereas you look at the enterprise, and it is about a $700 billion TAM. The enterprise is the largest piece, and that is what they have today. We are really focused on the middle market.
Yeah. The last specific question on corporate payments, it will come up again.
Yeah.
You did an acquisition last year, Alpha Group, and I think a big topic that you have talked about on earnings calls, investors ask about all the time, is the integration efforts associated with Alpha driving some earnings accretion this year. You have made substantial progress, maybe some things a little faster or larger than we had previously expected, but maybe you can give us an update on work you have been doing, what is to come with regards to Alpha integration. Is it work on the Salesforce side of things, expense side to realize these additional synergies? Just an update there.
Yeah, happy to. I think we shared at the beginning of the year, really the end of last year, that in terms of integrating the Salesforce, that that went faster than we expected it to. We saw a benefit of that in the last back half of last year. Just in general, as we go through the integration, it has been quite successful. We are not new to this game, right? This is our fourth cross-border acquisition that we have integrated. In terms of recent milestones, we shared on the last call that 80% of the corporate business has now been migrated onto our one global platform, so that is super important. There is about 20% to go. That is all with the tail. We expect that to happen in Q4, and then that will be fully integrated.
As a result of that in the corporate business, that will allow us, obviously, to realize synergies as we are only supporting one system going forward for the overall corporate business. Equally as exciting, I would say on the global bank account product, obviously we had our own product called the MCA product. Alpha had a global bank account product. We are bringing those products together in what we are calling Global Bank Account 2.0. We did mention this on the earnings call, and we expect that all to come together end of year this year. What we are really excited about with that is, when we purchased Alpha, one of the deal hypothesis is we could take their product, their global bank account product, sell it into the same clients in the U.S. and in Asia, where they were not licensed and we were.
We are realizing some of that benefit today, but because we are not in one system, it is not fully realized. That should give us some additional tailwinds as we go into next year.
Yep. That is good to hear. Maybe turning to vehicle payments next. Did see a little bit of a deceleration in growth to 8%, still really strong.
Yep.
In the high single digits, I think you had pointed to high single- digit growth for the rest of the year on the most recent earnings call. I think a topic that comes up all the time is you and Ron have talked about reallocating some of the investment dollars away from vehicle payments and into other areas with higher return, namely corporate payments. Could you just talk about that philosophy there? I know this sort of capital allocation decision is something you do as a normal course of operating.
Yep.
Maybe just color on why you are shifting dollars from one segment to the other, why you think that is the right decision both in the near term and the long term.
Yeah, happy to. We delivered 8% organic growth for vehicle payments in Q2, still in line with our expectation of, call it, high single digits. Our Brazil business continued to perform really well, so call it mid-teens growth there. Our Europe rest of the world business, call it 9%-10%, so call it around the line average. It was really U.S. vehicle payments that we defocused on from an investment perspective. Really the view there is that incremental spend within U.S. vehicle payments, we can get a better return on it in corporate payments. That was really the driver of it. As you know, we have announced two divestitures this year. We are really focused on the future of the portfolio, right? We are focused on fewer, bigger, more advantaged business as we go forward.
I would say the U.S. vehicle payments business doesn't fit squarely within that framework, so that is not going to be something that we are overly investing in.
Yeah. A lot of threads there I want to keep touching on.
Sure.
Maybe just first one, just in terms of the outlook for the rest of the year in vehicle payments. You talked about the growth profiles in Brazil, Europe, U.S. Is that kind of the same ballpark that we should expect for contribution from each of these segments, or is there anything to call out? Again, get asked about Brazil all the time. I think there was some issues with search engine optimization. Just wondering if you could give an update if those issues are behind us.
Yeah, it's interesting. We offer 10 lines of business in Brazil that was related to one line of business, and somehow it was unfortunately a runaway train in terms of, I think, a much bigger deal out of it was made. When you go to market and how you go about sales, you always find a way to work around things. I'd say the issues we identified earlier, we've worked around those issues. See Brazil continuing to have strong growth in the back half in terms of, call it, mid-teens organic growth. We expect the same performance that we have from Europe and rest of world. So, kind of the 8% that we delivered in Q2, somewhere in that range, give or take, would be a reasonable assumption for the rest of the year.
Got it. Makes a ton of sense. You also mentioned the divestitures, right? You did PayByPhone earlier in the year. You just announced epyx as well. Maybe you could talk about the characteristics of these divestitures that you were doing. What sort of makes these assets, you think, a better fit outside of the Corpay portfolio than within it? Obviously, I think you've been pretty clear on using the proceeds of those divestitures to buy back stock. Does that calculus change at any point with the price of the shares going up? So one, generally on divestiture philosophy, and then two, how we should think about use of proceeds going forward.
Yeah. I think this is the most active we've been in divestitures with the two that we will have completed this year. We haven't completed the second one yet. The philosophy, right, here is we're really focused on the corporate payments business. So assets that don't fit squarely within that I'd say are TAM-constrained assets in terms of they're already at the max size that they could grow to, or lower- growth type businesses. They could be highly profitable, just lower growth, that don't fit within corporate payments. Those are the things that we're interested in kind of pruning the portfolio for going forward. I'll never specifically comment on which assets we're in market with or not because it's a disadvantage for me, obviously, when I'm doing a potential transaction.
But I would say, as we talked about on the call, you could probably expect over the next 18 months, there's probably three or four additional businesses that we'd be interested in divesting. You're absolutely right that when we make those divestitures, we'll use the proceeds for share buybacks, and that's really because we're focused on minimizing the EPS dilution from the sale of these businesses.
Makes a ton of sense. I guess just to clarify, so I think PayByPhone was an asset that was growing pretty-
Yes.
At a pretty healthy clip, right?
Yes.
Something you had talked about. So that seems like it fits more in the TAM-constrained bucket rather than-
Sure.
The low-growing asset. I guess just in terms of epyx, would you say that's more TAM-constrained, more low growth, or somewhere in the middle between the two?
Yeah. I'd say epyx is more TAM-constrained within the U.K. That being said, I think epyx has opportunity to grow outside of the U.K. But the question is, if you look at the business, it's a really interesting, cool business, right? It's basically the software that sits between the garages that are servicing the vehicle and the lessors of the vehicle, right? So great business, great margin business b ut you've really got to take it to another country in order to grow that business. So the thought is, do you want Ron and I spending our time on growing a $100 million business, or do you want us spending our time in cross-border growing a $1.5 billion business?
I think that's how investors should think about it, as we have limited resources, not in terms of capital necessarily, but in terms of our own time, and we really want to be focused on those businesses that can have the biggest impact on shareholder value and growth going forward.
Yeah. I think it's a great point, and we'd like to have you focus in on corporate payments, too. Maybe just one on lodging.
Yeah.
I think that I'm stealing Ron's phrase here, but had been a problem child for some time, right?
Yeah.
It seems like we've started to turn the corner.
Yep.
Got back to flat growth, a little positive growth in 2Q. I think you've been pretty consistent on the messaging for acceleration into the back half. Maybe you could walk us through some of the drivers that led to the return to growth in the first half of the year, whether those are going to sustain into the back half, and then how we should think about your confidence visibility into sustaining growth in 2027 and beyond within lodging.
Yeah. Lodging is really coming in for the first half of the year, and what we're seeing for the back half of the year, right in line with our expectations in terms of we expected it to go flat flat and then improve in terms of the growth rate throughout the year, kind of ending, call it mid-single digits in terms of growth rate. So what we saw in the first half of the year that was beneficial is we didn't have the overhang of emergency volume from FEMA that was a tough comp in the prior year. We also started to see some of the sales in the back half of last year come online, but that was more in Q2.
As we look in the back half, we see more of those sales from the back half of the year and the front of this year come online, and that's what gives us confidence in the organic growth rate improving there. The thing about the lodging business, that's different, for example, than our spend management business, is the time to implementation is longer, right? When somebody buys a spend management program from me or a cross-border program from me, right, implementation can be very very quick. I don't want to say immediate, but very very quick, where lodging is much more client-specific in terms of what they're looking for and how we implement. So it just takes us time to ramp.
Yep. On that implementation, is that more sort of like a technology integration, beta testing, that sort of work? Are there macro factors where it's like, I don't want to say like, "Hey, there's a conflagration in the Middle East, oil prices are going up, I'm going to take time to decide on that," or is it more just on the tech side of things with regards to that end?
It's much more on the front end, right? So we're meeting the clients and their needs, so we're adjusting what the implementation is. Typically, they want to make sure that it's do it in a pilot phase. Is it working? Okay, now we're ready to go live. So if you think about that business, for example, airline is a portion of that business where we serve distressed passenger and we serve crew. When you're making that changeover, the last thing a large brand-named airline that we all know would want to do is not make sure things are well tested and vetted-
Right.
Within their specifications.
Yep. Makes sense. Before we talk about some of the long-term targets that you and Ron have laid out, maybe we just wanted to ask on the M&A environment, right. You have done some pretty sizable ones, Alpha being the most recent. Maybe given where leverage is, what is your current appetite for more acquisitions, particularly within corporate payments that we've been talking about? To the extent that you do deals, should we expect a focus on tuck-in acquisitions or anything more chunky? Just how should we be thinking about M&A going forward here?
Yeah, great question. I would say we are size-agnostic, return-disciplined. I would say we are open to tuck-in capability or larger, right? We' ve got the capital in order to do that. We will produce $1.8 billion of free cash flow this year, right? Every year, I get topped up and decide how am I going to use that. I think it really goes back to what is our capital allocation philosophy, and how will we deploy that versus buybacks versus accretive M&A. If we do M&A, you are going to see us solely doing it within corporate payments.
Got it. Maybe I could also use this opportunity to ask for an update on AvidXchange. I think it is a company a lot of investors know quite well from its time as a public company. Now, You have a stake. Any update you can give on sort of how that business is performing, how you are thinking about the connection with the rest of the Corpay ecosystem as we go forward?
Yeah. I think it's been a really successful partnership. We bought AvidXchange along with TPG. We obviously have the minority stake. They have the majority. So between ourselves, TPG, and Avid management, really been focused on the next turnaround of the business, so to speak. We have been sharing in earnings calls, Ron and I have both been sharing kind of updates on the business, because what we wanted investors to know is, "Hey, so far, so good. We're pleased with what we're seeing. We're seeing sales increase. We're seeing profitability increase, et cetera." Two reasons we didn't buy Avid outright is their organic growth would have been diluted to our corporate payments, so we wouldn't have wanted to do that, and their financial performance would have been dilutive to our adjusted EPS.
We needed time to work through improving the business overall, and I think that's going really well. I would say also, we've learned a lot from Avid. I'd say they really have some really strong products out there and have done really well with products. So those two coming together is going well. What we were really focused on in the budget process was reducing focus on, call it non-core projects, and reallocating resources to sales. So we've significantly increased the investment in sales, and that's why we're seeing the return on sales. So I'd say get to the end of the year, let's see what their exit organic growth rate is. As we see that kind of lift to our line average, it becomes much more attractive that we would pull the trigger on an acquisition of the rest of Avid.
Now, we could buy a portion of it to gain control, or we could buy all of it. It'll just be a capital allocation decision and performance decision when we get there. But long way of saying we're encouraged by what we're seeing.
Yeah. It's great to hear. Maybe we can lead that into some of the long-term targets that you've talked about-
Yep.
On recent earnings calls. Maybe I'll ask about the 10% organic growth first. A question we get asked all the time is there the ability or I guess maybe the desire for Corpay to lean into certain areas of the business? Hey, we're really leaning into corporate payments. That's a faster grower than 10% organically. Is there the potential for that to come up from 10% to a number that's higher than that? Or do you really want to manage the business to 10% organic growth because that's more sustainable, something you control more, something you have more visibility in? Obviously, there's always going to be external factors, but how do you think about the balance between, hey, 10% is a steady number that we think we can hit consistently, or do we want to drive that higher?
Yeah, great question. I would say today we want investors to underwrite to 10% because it is repeatable and it is durable. We have delivered it five out of the last six years. We've delivered double-digit organic growth for the last five quarters in a row. I'd say that's the number that we want everybody to underwrite to. When we think about potential upside from corporate payments, I think you're absolutely right that as we rotate further into corporate payments, there's the ability to revisit that number. But until we get to that destination, we don't want to get over our skis. We want people to really underwrite to what we know we can deliver. I think it's important to step back and maybe look at our overall algorithm that we've laid out, which we've got a lot of questions about. 10% organic growth is super critical.
We've had a lot of generalists coming into the stock lately and asking questions. Let me just be clear for everybody because I think it'll be helpful since this is being webcast, is when we do organic growth, right, we're taking out the impact of fuel, we're taking out the impact of FX, and we're taking out the impact of acquisitions. As we looked into it, there's actually very few companies in the S&P that report organic growth. The question would be, well, why do you guys? Because it's a true measure of the health of business without these external factors. We did get some feedback. There was some confusion about organic growth. Just be clear about what the definition is. Hitting that 10% is a critical milestone in terms of achieving the overall algorithm.
The next piece of the algorithm is 13% growth of profit before tax. That's really driven by scale of the business. The next piece of the algorithm is 20%+ adjusted EPS growth. We're going to deliver 27%, 28% this year. We're able to do that not only through the business, but because of the yield of the business and our ability to create additional cash flow through yield and our ability to continue to borrow against the business but still maintain a 3x leverage ratio. That formula is what really drives us to the $50 EPS target that we've recently shared with everybody. Hopefully that's helpful in terms of your organic growth.
Yeah. No, it's helpful, and you preempted my next question on the $50 EPS target. I think that was a really helpful sort of framework on getting to the financial targets. This is maybe a little bit of an aside, but I had referred to this cross-border teach-in that you had done a couple of months ago. In your last answer, you mentioned that generalists were coming and asking for more clarity on certain aspects of the business. Is there a desire or willingness on your end to sort of recognize like, hey, there are a lot of moving pieces, a lot of different business lines within Corpay today. It seems like this cross-border teach-in was well-received.
Do you think you're going to give incremental disclosure, incremental teach-ins to help maybe that generalist population that may be less familiar with all these moving pieces, more color into how the business is operating?
Yeah, absolutely. We've made, I think, and hopefully investors are seeing it, we made a significant pivot in our investor relations within the last year. We've done the cross-border teach-in. We have a new investor deck out there, which really points to, hey, what is the future of the company? What's it going to look like as we rotate into corporate payments? We've had Ron on the road out talking to investors for several NDRs, which has been super helpful. It was super helpful, I think, actually as we continued to refine our story and think about how quickly we divest some business and rotate, divest businesses and rotate into corporate payments. We discussed all of that with some large long-only investors who've been in the stock for a long time and got their opinions on it.
That's been super helpful, I think, in kind of what you're seeing in our thinking today. Then we did our first investor perception study that we've ever done in the history of the company. One of the top things that came out of it, and it was great because it's validation, was, hey, the company is just complex. So corporate payments is where we're focused, but what happens is because there's complexity, we talk about things like lodging, which one could debate, is that a corporate payments business or not a corporate payments business. Or USVP, which is less of a focus for us, much more corporate payments. So, I'd say the complexity issue we're really focused on.
The other thing that we've gotten feedback around, which I think is totally fair, is, "Hey, you need to give us better information in order to underwrite corporate payments." When we think about the 10% organic growth, what we think about is, hey, we're going to do 20% sales growth, and that would be 20% of sales off of the base of last year. Our retention rate is 93%, so we're going to lose about 7% of business, right? Some of that is M&A, businesses going out of business, or in some of the other businesses where credit risk were not willing to underwrite the business anymore. Now you get down to call it 13, your same-store sales, which can be ± 1, and then a little cushion, and that gets you to 10, right?
I think what would be really helpful for investors if we provided more of that level of granularity, maybe at least on an annual basis came out. What I would say is we're focused on that.
Yeah. No, I think all of that would be really well-received. Like I said, the cross-border teaching, I think was super helpful from my perspective. I will ask two maybe more thematic questions given this is the tech conference, then I'll open it up in case anyone in the audience has anything. I'm going to ask you an AI question and a stablecoin question.
Before you go there, just one thing I meant to cover in the $50 adjusted EPS-
Oh, sure.
Question, then your thought about, hey, should the organic growth rate be higher than 10%?
Oh, yeah. Sure.
One thing that we've been talking about overall is, hey, as corporate payment does become a bigger piece of the business, the business should become more valuable. So we're trading at about 13x today. We do believe that that's going to lift as we further rotate into corporate payments. So the equal weighted S&P is at 16. So internally, we've been talking about 15 and $50. So 15 times $50 EPS is like a $750 stock price. By no means are we giving guidance on the stock price. I'm just telling you internally, as we look forward out the next couple of years, we're optimistic about the future and the valuation of the company.
Yep. $750 I think is a little higher than where we are trading now.
That is for sure.
Yeah. That is super helpful. I appreciate the detail there. Will ask on AI.
Yep.
I think every company that has been up here presenting has gotten the AI question. Maybe you could talk about your strategy, how you are using AI, both on the cost efficiency side of things, but maybe more importantly in terms of product development, where you are seeing progress in terms of rolling out new products, features, solutions to your clients across any of the particular segments, and how you see AI changing the structure of your business over the long term.
Yeah, happy to. So maybe focusing on the product side, where we've been focused on AI is an AI agent that can replicate kind of some of the core functions that we're selling into. So think of it as an AI fleet manager. Think of it as an AI AP manager. Because we have the ability to see across the best and brightest of the peoples doing these roles, creating an AI agent that can do some of the function for them and really create value for them. So those are products that are in some level of completion or innovation that we expect to roll out. We do think that there is value in the product. The next question would be, okay, Peter, you can roll those out, how do they monetize?
I think we've got to see what the reaction is to product before we see monetization, but I think you know us well enough to know that we'll be super focused on creating monetization out of those products. If I go over to the expense side, I'd say where we've been most focused on it is within our engineering teams and making those teams significantly more productive because of AI. What we've chosen to do within the current year is reinvest that money back in the business. We're about to kick off the 2027 budget process. Whether we decide to reinvest that money back into technology or to divert that money other places or take it to bottom line, we'll revisit it. But that would be the place I'd say we've been most successful in terms of expense reductions or productivity improvements.
Yeah. Super interesting. I'm sure you'll get many more AI-related questions going forward. I will ask about stablecoins.
Yeah.
It was interesting, I was going through with my team and going through our notes from the tech conference last year, and every meeting-
Yeah.
For every company, stablecoin came up a bunch, and I was going through my Corpay notes, and it was a ton of stablecoin questions. I do not know how many stablecoin questions you got today. I would imagine it is a lot less than you got last year. Jim is making the finger one at me. Nonetheless, you are going to get a second question here on stablecoins. I guess the question is, I do not want you to rehash what you are doing strategically within the cross-border payments business. Maybe I would recall a comment that Ron made, I think it was on the 1Q earnings call when he was asked about demand and what you are hearing from your corporate payments clients. I think he used the word crickets.
It is just not there yet. I am wondering if that is changed at all over the last six months. Are there any areas within your business where you are starting to see an uptick in demand, or is it still more just theoretical, something that could happen a few years down the line? Has there been any change in the overall demand environment with regards to stable specifically?
Yeah. What I would do is I would change the narrative, and I would say it is not about stablecoins, it is about blockchain. I think what got lost a year ago with any new technology, somebody gets really excited about it. People heard the word stablecoin, and they thought, "Oh, that is the solution for everything." Stablecoin is just the tokenized actual currency. It is not even the blockchain. The blockchain is what really creates the value. So what the blockchain allows you to do, really the two advantages of it, is to move money 24/ 7 and to move money to potentially exotic countries.
What we firmly believed, and now we have seen it played out, is there is no way that the major banks are going to see all their deposits leave and go to stablecoin providers so that they can mint a stablecoin and then destroy a stablecoin so they can move it over the blockchain. Rather, the banks are going to develop their own tokenized network. So no surprise, earlier in the year, JP Morgan announced Kinexys. Citi announced a competitive product.
Basically what they are able to do, and we have elected to go with Kinexys, is they have been able to say, "Hey, we can do a digitized token, and we will settle it 24/ 7." They are giving the things that stablecoin "said they would bring to the market." The cost of the Kinexys network is similar to what we are paying today to move currency on the rails. In the cross-border teach-in, we provided the four rails, but the cost to use SWIFT versus Kinexys is the same. The advantage of Kinexys is I can credit you on a Saturday for the money that I owe you. I think it is really important to peel it back and say what is the issue and how do we understand it. I do not see stablecoin as a threat to the business.
I actually see the blockchain and tokenized deposit as enabler of our business. Our thought is it will move a significant volume onto Kinexys by the end of the year. Whether our clients are asking for it or not, we are actually moving them in that direction within our cross-border business. I think the other thing that is important to understand, I have kind of used this analogy in the past. If you were sitting here today and you called Cartier, somewhere in L.A. and said, "Hey, I need you to deliver a diamond ring to me today because I have an important event tonight."
When they show up with that diamond ring, you do not turn, I am going to use a New York analogy, but you do not turn to the delivery person and say, "Did you take the train here? Did you take a cab? Did you take an Uber? Did you drive?" That is the analogy to what the rails are. It is just the mechanism of delivering the value. It does not create any of the value. It does not exchange the currency.
Yep. Makes kind of sense.
I am not passionate about the topic, excuse me.
Yeah, clearly not. Hopefully my wife is not in the audience and heard the Cartier comment.
Well, it could be her lucky night.
Speaking of that, I will open it up for questions in case anyone in the audience has any.
Yeah, I've got a quick one. Scott Barishaw from Deutsche Bank. I'm the financials and fintech specialist. Nate did a great job walking through a lot of the company and where we are, Peter. You said you redid the slides a little bit, and I looked at them when preparing for today. You've got that section of the solutions in there.
Yep.
And spend management has such a massive TAM.
Yep.
You've got less than 1% of it now. Maybe talk a little bit about how and what you're going to do to take advantage of that opportunity and the competition out there, because I'm sure the competition is diverse. There's other payments companies, there's banks. Talk about what you're doing to win some of that opportunity.
Yeah, great question. Really large TAM within spend management, right? When we look at spend management, we define that as commercial card, AP automation, et cetera, right? Those are the products that we have within the spend management space. What I'd say is we've seen others like ourselves move into that space and be innovators and capture really high values in terms of transactions for doing it. We love that because what that says is, "Hey, there's validation that the space needs to be disruptive and that there's value to doing that." The main owner of the space today is banks, right? Banks are primarily providing those services, or in the case of commercial cards, American Express.
We believe on the commercial card side that we've got an advantage product because we're able to bring our proprietary networks, either a virtual card or within fuel card into that spend management space. Then if we go over to the AP automation side, we're able to come in and provide a complete solution for a client, where typically the bank is able to provide a part of a solution. They may do the ACH for the client because the client can't do it on their own, but the client may use somebody else to print their checks. It's typically a mix of things there. That's how I think about where we are today. Something that Ron talked about on the last call was our thought process on moving left. What does that mean, move left?
The thought is that we're going to move left across the value chain. We believe really the big opportunity there for our middle market clients is to come out with a procurement offering that again, focuses on saving them money and creates value from them. But really, we start further along in the process. Right now we're primarily on the payments piece, but we're going to go more to the beginning of the process and actually help them with their contracting. I think when you think about procurement, the places where we think we can create value is things like benchmarking, things like negotiation, things like running RFPs. If you're a middle market client, you typically don't have a procurement department. You don't have access to these things.
With the advent of AI, there's the ability for us to provide this, I think in a way that will be really helpful for the middle market.
Just a quick follow-up. I'm sure there's some other questions in the audience.
Yeah.
Is there more that you need in terms of is this a part, an area where you will look to acquire other businesses in here to have a more full offering?
Great question. I think when we look in procurement, I think there is two options, right? It is always buy, buddy or build. I think the question will be really what is the best option for us and what is the quickest way to market. Most likely it is kind of a buy or buddy I would think, just because there is a lot of great products that have been developed out there by companies that have no customers, right? So our advantage is we have got a massive customer base, let us partner with you and provide the solution.
Hey there. Zach Gunn, Avicene Investment. I wanted to ask first, I guess I will call it the trade war with Canada now. Obviously that is a pretty big deal just given your business and everything. So is there anything to call it there of risks that you potentially see with that? Then also I will bring the stablecoin question up again, take it to three total for the conference. Which is just looking at what the banks are doing and just kind of like Open USD. What do you think that they are looking to do with the stablecoins and how could that potentially impact your business? Do you think that they will also look to do kind of the cross-border side of things and just really focus on the enterprise? Or just where do you kind of see that fitting and what does it mean for Corpay?
Yes. So really good questions. Sorry, your first question was on? Yeah. So, is this a taco or is it not a taco, right? I mean, we see this stuff all the time, and the business weathers through it. So I would say we do not see a significant impact, right? If you go back to the cross-border teach-in, what we try to do within the teach-in is kind of provide you how broad the business is across the globe. We operate in five geographies, pretty distributed business, right? It is a very dispensable business in terms of one geography has something going on, you are going to sustain within the rest of the globe. So that is how I think about kind of the current conflict, and who knows, it may be all resolved tomorrow, right? And change and turn around.
In terms of stablecoins, I mean, again, I would drop the word stablecoins. The banks are not offering stablecoins. The banks are offering tokenized deposits, and it's money movement, and this is just an extension of what the banks do today, right? The banks move digital currency, and they have been for 20 years. Instead of digital currency, now they're moving tokenized currency across the internet, and the advantage of it is a 24 by settlement. We see this as the banks, the large tier one banks, really providing the capabilities of the modern day. We don't think it changes the view that they are focused on enterprise customers, and they're not focused on the middle-market customers. Just the cost of the acquisition for the banks in the middle market would be so different than what it would be for an enterprise.
I just don't think the economics are there for them, and we don't see any sign of that. It's mostly owned by regional banks today.
Any last questions out there? I don't see any hands, so I will wrap up with one maybe high-level one.
Yeah.
When you are back at the conference, hopefully in two to three years' time.
As long as you stay in this location.
Yeah, exactly. I think we will. You've successfully executed on this strategy, focusing on a bigger, more simplified business. What do you think will be the biggest differences between the company that investors are looking at today and what they'll be looking at two to three years from now? I guess really it wraps down to what is the last message you want people in the room, people tuning into the webcast to leave with today?
Yeah. I think there's really three things that investors should take away. I think, one, it'll be a simpler company that's easier to underwrite. Number two, I would say, is it will continue to have a proven track record of performance. So confidence in the algorithm of 10%, 13%, 20%+ that I spoke to will continue to be proven, and that'll give people more confidence. Then three, investors will continue to see that we've got multiple ways to create shareholder value.
Okay. That's great. Peter, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for coming out. Everyone join me in a round of applause for Peter for joining us. Thank you very much.
Appreciate it, guys.