Greetings, welcome to the Euronet Worldwide First Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there'll be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one one on your telephone. You will hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. It's now my pleasure to introduce your host, Mr. Scott Claassen, General Counsel for Euronet Worldwide. Thank you, Mr. Claassen. You may now begin.
All right. Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Euronet's First Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. On today's call, we have Mike Brown, our Chairman and CEO, and Rick Weller, our CFO. Before we begin, I need to call your attention to the forward-looking statements disclaimer on the second slide of the PowerPoint presentation we'll be making today. Statements made on this call that concern Euronet or its management's intentions, expectations, or predictions of future performance are forward-looking statements. Euronet's actual results may vary materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements as a result of a number of factors that are listed on the second slide of today's presentation. Except as may be required by law, Euronet does not intend to update these forward-looking statements and undertakes no duty to any person to provide an update. You should avoid placing undue reliance on any forward-looking statements.
In addition, the PowerPoint presentation includes a reconciliation of the non-GAAP financial measures we'll be using during the call to their most comparable GAAP measures. Now, I'll turn the call over to our CFO, Rick Weller.
Thank you, Scott. Good morning. Thank you to everyone who's joining us today. I will begin my comments on slide five. For the first quarter, we delivered revenue of $787 million, operating income of $45.6 million, adjusted EBITDA of $93 million, and adjusted EPS of $0.87. These results were produced by strong double-digit growth rates driven by improvement in all three segments, but with a particularly strong contribution from high-value cash withdrawal transactions in the EFT segment as a result of the continued recovery in the travel industry. Next slide, please. Slide six presents a summary of our first quarter balance sheet compared to the prior quarter end. Here, you can see that we ended the quarter with approximately $1.1 billion in unrestricted cash.
The decrease in cash is largely from 112 million of cash moved into our reactivated ATMs in preparation for the summer travel season, together with approximately $28 million in share repurchases during the quarter. These uses of cash were partially offset by cash generated from operations together with working capital and foreign exchange rate changes of approximately $75 million. Next slide, please. Slide seven presents our as-reported results for the quarter. When we spoke with you in February, we were seeing some strengthening of our major currencies against the US dollar. As we moved through the quarter, those currencies followed several roller coaster patterns, but the net result of the movements produced virtually no impact on our reported results versus our early February guidance.
However, when comparing currencies on a year-over-year basis, we saw our more significant currencies decline in the mid-single digit to lower double-digit range versus the dollar. To normalize the impact of these currency fluctuations, we have presented our results on a constant currency basis on the next slide. Slide eight. EFT revenue grew 40%, operating income grew 224%, and adjusted EBITDA grew 98% as a result of improved domestic and international withdrawal transactions driven by continued recovery in travel and the POS processing from the March 2022 acquisition of the merchant acquiring business. I'd also like to highlight that we saw a nice improvement in our newly deployed ATMs in the Asia Pac region.
The ATM transactions in Asia have not yet reached half of the pre-COVID levels as Asia Pac is nearly a year behind the recovery rates of the rest of the world. We are pleased that these machines were producing positive contribution profits in the first quarter, and we expect them to contribute profits for the full year. Revenue and gross profit per transaction for EFT segment remained consistent on a year-over-year basis. EPay revenue grew 5%, operating income grew 11%, and adjusted EBITDA grew at 10%, driven by the expansion of mobile and digital branded payments together with growth of the digital distribution channel. Transaction growth outpaced revenue growth due to a stronger mix of lower-value mobile transactions in India. The ePay business produced both gross margin and operating margin expansions over the prior year.
Money transfer revenue, operating income, and adjusted EBITDA grew 9%, 2%, and 1% respectively. This was a result of 13% growth in U.S. outbound transactions, 16% growth in international originated money transfers, which included 14% growth in transfers initiated largely in Europe and 18% growth in transfers initiated in the Middle East and Asia, and 28% growth in Xe transactions, partially offset by a 17% decline in the U.S. domestic business. These transaction growth rates included 38% growth in direct-to-consumer digital transactions. On a year-over-year basis, we saw a constant dollar decline in revenue and gross profit per transaction. This decline was largely the result of a shift towards lower average send amounts per transaction, particularly in the Xe side of the business, as higher-end customers transferred fewer funds due to economic uncertainties.
The lower send amount ultimately results in a lower revenue per transaction. We were able to offset some of the lower send amounts with higher gross profits per transaction on the Ria remittance transfers, which resulted in higher margins. Before I close, I'd like to give you an update on our expectations for the remainder of the year. You likely saw in our press release that we expected our second quarter adjusted EPS to be $2 per share. For the full year, we continue to expect to see the business producing year-over-year earnings growth in the mid-to-upper [tens]. To that end, it looks like the analyst consensus outlook is directionally aligned.
Accordingly, after walking through, after working through the disruption brought about by COVID and with travel on a path to recovery, we expect that 2023 will be a record year of revenue and adjusted EPS for the company, assuming there are no significant changes to FX rates, interest rates, and the global economy, and other unforeseen events. I am pleased that we are off to a strong start for the year with near double-digit constant currency revenue growth from all three segments. With that, I'll turn it over to Mike.
Thank you, Rick, and thank you everybody who is joining us today, and I'll begin my comments on slide number 10. Let me start by just saying that I am pleased to be talking to you about what feels like relatively a normal first quarter, first one we've had in three years, one that feels very similar to our pre-COVID narrative. We delivered strong year-over-year performance in what is our seasonally slowest quarter in all three segments, while making moves we think will position us to continue our momentum throughout the year and beyond. We continue to be encouraged by all the commentary in the news around the upcoming travel season. As Rick mentioned, we saw nice performance from our ATMs in Asia during the first quarter, as COVID restrictions have now been fully lifted.
In Europe, which has historically been our primary market, we continue to be optimistic about recovery. EUROCONTROL recently updated their base case of flight movements in March. They now expect 2023 to improve to within 93% of 2019 levels. We expect our transaction recovery trend largely in line with those improvements. Further, Expedia has reported that interest for international travel from the U.S. is up triple digits from the same time last year, with additional good news that the average price per ticket is down $125 for the peak months of July and August. As you might remember, last year that was a problem. There were fewer seats available on airplanes. The prices were kind of through the roof.
The optimism about travel, together with the good performance of our POS acquiring business and our expansion into new markets, give us some confidence that we could experience a very strong year in the EFT segment. Let's go on to slide number 11, and we'll talk about some of the EFT specific highlights. Slide 11. You may remember that over the last several quarters, we have continued to build our ATM deposit network across Poland and several other countries. This quarter, we were able to further expand the network in Poland by signing a network participation agreement with Millennium Bank. Millennium customers can now deposit cash into any participating Euronet ATM across the country, significantly expanding deposit convenience for Millennium's customers. We signed 10 new merchants to participate in our deposit network in the same market.
In Romania, we launched multi-currency deposit processing for the ATM deposit network of First Bank. In Singapore, we expanded our relationship with Development Bank to provide ATM and card processing for their recently acquired bank in India, Lakshmi Vilas Bank. We continued to be pleased with the performance of the merchant acquiring business that we purchased from Piraeus Bank a year ago. This quarter, we added AllWeekPay functionality for all POS merchants in Greece, which allows the merchants to collect and use their revenue earned via card payments in their bank accounts the very next day, 365 days a year. Additionally, we added approximately 5,000 new merchants in Greece. Finally, we were able to renew several nice agreements during the quarter, including our ATM deployment agreements at the airports in Copenhagen and the railway stations across Italy. Next slide, please.
Slide number 12 provides you with an update on our ATM portfolio. During the quarter, we continued to evaluate our ATM network in order to make it as strong as possible. This evaluation led to a decrease of approximately 150 of our own deployed machines, most of them in the Philippines, as we reviewed ATM performance in our first real travel season in that market since 2019. Despite the reduction in the number of machines, the business performed in line with our expectations, and we now have a stronger ATM estate for the remainder of the year. We also reduced our outsourcing machine count, but this is largely from the removal of the remainder of the ATMs for our bank in Poland that we mentioned last quarter.
Additionally, we added more than 950 low-margin ATMs in India, and we reactivated almost 1,650 devices that had been closed for the winter season. Finally, with these stats, you're likely to ask about our ATM deployment plans for the remainder of this year. We still believe that we will be able to deploy approximately 3,500 machines in new and existing markets by the end of 2023. To close my comments on EFT, I'd like to reiterate that this was a really great start to the year for the segment. We see the macro travel landscape continuing to improve. We had a very good initial travel season in Asia. We have strengthened our ATM portfolio and our POS acquiring business is performing very nicely.
The EFT team really seems to be hitting on all cylinders. We are excited about the rest of the year. Let's go on to slide number 13. We'll talk a little bit about ePay. Our ePay team continues to deliver strong results by expanding its content portfolio across more retailers and, of course, more markets. During the quarter, we added Microsoft 365 renewals with new retailers in Spain, Netherlands, Germany and Australia. We launched Alipay+ in Australia, Disney+ digital in Austria, and Airbnb in Belgium. In New Zealand, we added our Prezzy Mastercard into Foodstuffs South Island and Countdown grocery stores. We signed bill payment services with FamPay, India's fastest-growing neobank for students and teenagers. It's worth repeating that it was a great first quarter for our ePay business.
Before we move on to Money Transfer, I'd like to give you a bit more insight into what we expect for ePay over the next several quarters. You are likely familiar with the lumpiness in our financial results that the promotional activity in our consumer rewards business creates with an outsized impact on revenue. As we think about the second quarter, we expect to see some favorable results from the wrap-up of some of the prior year promotional activity as well as a new campaign which will occur during the quarter. However, you may remember that we had a very strong promotional activity in the third quarter of last year, which will create a tough comp on a year-over-year basis.
While the results may be lumpy in the next couple of quarters with a very nice second quarter and a more difficult third, we expect to see low double-digit operating income growth from ePay for the full year. Now let's go on to slide number 14, and we can talk about Money Transfer. Our Money Transfer network now reaches 528,000 locations, 3.6 billion bank accounts and 1.7 billion wallet accounts across 190 territories and countries. The increase in wallets was driven by the launch of wallets in 4 new countries and was significantly influenced by the addition of Alipay to our wallet network. In Malaysia, we appointed APX, an aggregator of payment solutions for small merchants, as a cash-in, cash-out master merchant.
This partnership will allow us to more rapidly expand our network across the 1,500 locations in the country. In Lebanon, we launched cash payout services at more than 550 Whish Money branch locations. Remittances to this nearly $7 billion market grew 7% in 2022 and represent nearly 40% of its GDP. We are excited to partner with Whish to bring Ria Money Transfer to this important market. The agreement covers inbound and outbound cash pickup and bank deposit, Ria service will be available on Whish's mobile app. We plan to add B2B service in the coming quarter as well. We signed 24 new correspondents across 19 countries, which will launch in the coming quarters.
We continue to see strong transaction growth across most areas of money transfer business, driven by a 38% growth in our digital channel and strong execution across nearly all of our physical send channels. Ria continues to deliver strong account deposit growth, with transactions growing 38% and principal transfers to bank and wallet accounts now representing 32% of total cross-border principal transfers. While Q1 is a seasonally soft quarter for our money transfer segment, we expect double-digit bottom-line growth for the segment for the full year 2023. Let's move on to slide 15, and I'll give you a little bit of an update on Dandelion. During the quarter, our active Dandelion partners continued to leverage our money transfer network by expanding payments to 21 new countries, which resulted in a 57% year-over-year transaction growth from our existing partners.
This growth is made possible in part to the enhancement of our network, particularly our mobile wallet coverage mentioned on the previous slide. Additionally, we continue to innovate this technology that powers Dandelion with the addition of several new features in the first quarter. You may remember that when we launched Dandelion, we offered our partners the ability to query a payment status at any time. We have now enhanced our offering to proactively provide customer notifications on the payment status, much like when you order a package on Amazon and they tell you when they receive the order, when the package is shipped, and when the package has arrived. Our Dandelion partners can opt in for proactive transaction tracking to several key destinations in the world.
For partners who are not ready to integrate with our real-time API, we now offer batch processing capabilities but with the same real-time payment delivery and compliance monitoring as our API solutions. In our experience, larger banks in particular often prefer to start with batch processing via their traditional SWIFT operations and then evolve to the dynamic API in a second phase. We also continue to advance the conversation for partners within our robust pipeline of banks, payment service providers, and fintechs. Please keep in mind that as we go to sign and implement these deals, because of the nature of the business, there are heavy compliance reviews by our banking partners and other steps that we must complete before a deal is finalized. Occasionally, like this quarter, these reviews can cause a delay in a deal being officially completed.
We thought that we could get a couple of nice deals to tell you about and finish this quarter, but those have slipped into the second quarter. We have some pretty cool names close to the finish line, so I look forward to updating you more on the progress of our Dandelion business during our second quarter call. Next slide, please. Slide number 16 shows our Ren highlights for the quarter. While the U.S. has not seen a significant adoption of real-time payment processing and settlement of funds, across Southeast Asia, we continue to see a significant shift towards real-time payments and settlements. Ren is positioned to help banks with this transformation. During the quarter, we launched person-to-merchant real-time payments with Security Bank in the Philippines.
Now, Security Bank customers can pay merchants directly from their account simply by scanning a QR code at the merchant's location or by pushing the payment to a merchant via an app. All of these transactions will be routed through the real-time domestic payment scheme in the Philippines. In Latin America, we are now onboarded as a Mastercard Engage partner. The Mastercard Engage platform connects businesses with qualified technology partners. Through this partnership, we can now work with fintechs and others by onboarding them as an affiliate and sponsoring them under our scheme membership. We can then provide processing services through a compliant infrastructure connecting Mastercard network for their card programs. Finally, our pipeline of signed Ren deals is strong, and we expect these deals to deliver approximately $143 million in revenue over the next six years.
We continue to see strong interest in our Ren technology across the globe, and we expect to see some nice contributions as we roll out more deals in the coming quarters. Finally, let's go on to slide number 17, and we will wrap up the quarter. As I said when I began my comments, it's nice to share with you some good news for once. In a more normal quarter, we continue to believe that EFT will be on a similar trend line with EUROCONTROL recovery reports. ePay continues to add more products and markets, including some exciting new products we are preparing to launch.
Money Transfer continues to expand its physical, digital, bank, and wallet networks with transaction growth in nearly every aspect of the business. I'm extremely excited for 2023 as we intend to move into our post-COVID growth cycle as a stronger, more nimble company, and we expect to deliver record revenue and adjusted EPS for the full year this year. With that, we'll be happy to take questions. Operator, will you please assist? For each of those who are calling in, let me limit you to one question before we move on to the next person, because there's a whole bunch of people in the queue. Then we can, you can get back in at the end if there's time. Thank you.
Thank you, Mike. At this time, we will conduct a question and answer session. As a reminder, to ask a question, you need to press star one one on your phone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please stand by while we compile the roster. Our first question comes from the line of Andrew Jeffrey with Truist Securities. Your line is now open.
Hi. Good morning. Appreciate you taking the question. Mike, the color on the APAC ATM recovery is helpful. Can you talk generally about your beyond Europe EFT expansion ambitions and just how big that TAM can be, and if we're gonna be hearing more about non-Europe ATM revenue and EBITDA drivers over the next several quarters?
Yeah, it's not just several quarters, but several years. You know, it took us eight years to really develop the network that we have in Europe. Europe was $295 million in EBITDA or something like that in 2019. It'll take us a little while to get there. The nice thing is travelers go to places other than Europe. Our experience with both the Philippines and with Egypt before and during COVID gave us a lot of confidence about these new markets. In the Philippines right now, Kevin's listening, we have about 850-900 ATMs. Now their travel season is kind of the flip of Europe.
You know, Q1 is the tail end of their travel season, starts back again in October. We'll see kind of a lull for the next couple of quarters, just like we do in the winter season for Europe, and then it'll kick back in. We've got a lot of ATMs there. Our ATMs there in 2019 were just screamers, throwing off over twice the profit per ATM as our European ones. We're excited. In Egypt, which I don't hardly even understand why, even in the middle of COVID, we were profitable in that market, people were going there. I thought all the airplanes were canceled, they weren't. Somehow somebody got there, they were profitable. We're also have opened up in Malaysia and in Morocco. You'll see us in more countries this year.
Each of those countries, remember, Andrew, they're kind of a booger to get started. I mean, you've got to have sponsor banks and central bank approvals and lots of bureaucracy and markets that have never seen a non-bank own an ATM. It takes a while to get going. Once you get going, we found that these markets, because they're primarily cash-based when it comes to travelers, are extremely lucrative for us. We will tell you more and more. The total TAM of that wouldn't surprise me to at least equal what we have in Europe and all these other markets combined. I haven't talked to you about south of our border. There's a lot of opportunity there that we're trying to open up as well.
I think, you know, EFT, even though at some point in time, Europe's got to get to the point where we start to cannibalize our own ATMs and start to have some kind of saturation, the rest of the world is ripe for the picking.
Super helpful. Thank you.
Thank you, Andrew. Please stand by while we move on to the next question. Next question is from Andrew Schmidt with Citi Global Markets. You may ask your question.
Hey, Mike. Hey, Rick. Good morning. Thanks for taking my question.
Good morning.
I wondered, you know, good to see the enthusiasm about the normalized travel season. I share that enthusiasm. You know, given that it is kind of the first, let's call it normalized travel season sometime, what are you seeing, if you can comment, in terms of just the April to date from a high-value ATM transaction recovery perspective? Then, you know, how are you expecting that recovery to trend throughout the second and third quarter? Just curious if you could give us any sense of direction there. Thanks a lot.
Well, I think directionally, we're right there in line with EUROCONTROL. EUROCONTROL has an improvement every single quarter this year over the prior year, we will probably improve every single quarter as well. That's what's exciting. As, you know, with Q1 starting off nicely, you know, the big numbers are in Q2 and Q3. If you look at 2019, we did 70% of all of our high-value transactions in Q2 plus Q3 for the year. Q1 is only 10%, in 2019 Q4 was 20%. The big money and the big opportunity is coming now. It starts to ramp up right after Easter and just, you know, hits its apex in July, August. We're pretty excited.
Everything, you know, if everything just stays on board, you can go on the internet and find all these figures, they're getting better and better every quarter. You know, I like to remind everybody that prior to 2019, we had 10 years of bottom line growth where our EFT division grew probably no less than about 25% a year in profit for 10 years running, that's because we were able to expand into more and more new markets. Now we're back into the race. It's a little more difficult to get into these disparate new markets because you need licenses and so forth in each 1 individually, where the PSD license in Europe allowed us to have 1 license for all.
It made it quicker, but we're pretty excited about what we should see this year. Even this year, in our very best case scenario, we'll still be leaving probably 7%-10% on the table for next year.
Andrew, I would add, just a PS to Mike's comments. You may recall last year, it wasn't long after our first quarter concluded that you started seeing airport problems and airline problems, just handling the onset of the volume increases in these countries. It's good to see that the reportings that are coming out now that folks are prepared for that. They had, you know, essentially the off-season to kind of get their act together. We're seeing positive reports on the industry, if you will, being able to handle the logistics of the onset of these travelers. You know, hopefully that continues to be the case as we go throughout this next couple of quarters.
Again, it gives us an increased level of confidence that we'll be able to see these kind of numbers come home this year.
To add one last thing. Last year, we had kind of a half a year, pretty decent recovery, not nearly what we're gonna see this year. What was clear takeaway was that even though there is COVID and there's a lot of concern about cash-based payments versus physical cash, what we're finding for that small amount of cash that you need in Europe, because they do have POS terminals all over the place, we're still very relevant, and cash is still needed.
Got it. Thank you very much, guys. Very constructive. Appreciate the comments.
Thank you, Andrew. Stand by for our next question. Next question comes from Darrin Peller of Wolfe Research. You may move ahead with your question.
Thanks, guys. Rick, I don't know if there's any way to give us a hand with the segment level expectations for the remainder of the year, a little bit more detail on growth expectations on a segment basis. Mike, I also just want to help bridge one last time on the improvement in travel. If we were to bridge the puts and takes, remind us of what they are in terms of headwinds and tailwinds. That gets you back to where the EUROCONTROL data is, because we obviously have Croatia sort of as a headwind, but we have Asia reopening as a tailwind and, you know, and then some. Would you mind just walking us through those puts and takes one more time?
If you expect that to get to the 92% of 2019 levels by the end of the year. Thanks again, guys.
Yeah. Well, let's see. Let's, let's start with, you know, kind of puts and takes. You know, I think if we reflect back to, principally the 2019 era, there's probably, three or four that principally come to mind here. First one would be, Russian travelers, okay? We don't expect that they're gonna come back because of the conflict in the Ukraine, and the, sanctions that are there. You know, that's a piece that, we'll just have to grow over. The next one then is really, the knock-on effects of the, of the Ukrainian impact. We have seen that it put pressure on transactions in what I'd call the border countries.
I guess the good news about that is, you know, those aren't our real, you know, our heaviest countries out there. You know, the heaviest countries when it comes to the tourism are your standard European travel countries. The U.K.s, the Frances, the Germanys, the Italys, the Greeces, the Spains, the Portugals, and I would say also Croatia, okay? Again, as Mike said, we're seeing very consistent recovery in line with, you know, what our recovery numbers are versus the EUROCONTROL.
You, you know, kind of as a reminder, you know, going back to 2020, on the onset of COVID, we looked to see if there were, if there was third-party data that we could look to to try to track what we should expect to see in terms of our recovery. You know, what we found is that while it's not, you know, a perfect match, it has good correlation. We could find that correlation prior to 2019, and so we looked to see if that correlation would hold up after that. If you draw the lines on a sheet of paper, you can see that they do.
We continue to find that our recovery is in lockstep with what you're seeing out of EUROCONTROL. Then another one of those items in there, as I mentioned, was Croatia. As you recall, Croatia went to the euro, and what we said is that we find that there are other rate opportunities that we have availability to, that will largely offset that together with, you know, making the operational improvements by pulling out ATMs that, you know, would no longer be profitable under a higher rate structure. That we essentially have largely covered that as we said.
I think as we look forward in terms of, you know, getting back to, let's call it in theory, 100% kind of recovery levels of 2019, it's really going to be the improvement on the Ukrainian situation, how it resolves itself, then ultimately the total travel recovery. As I said, the Russian transactions, we won't recover those, but we'll grow over those through other initiatives. That's kind of what I would look at as the puts and takes. Then the final point is on what our growth expectations are for each of the 3 segments. We continue to have the same expectation, Darren.
We expect that we'll continue to see very nice, strong double-digit growth rates out of our EFT segment, that's driven by both, 1, the continued travel recovery, and 2, as Mike said, the other country launches and developments. As we've consistently talked about the continued sales of our Ren product that will continue to have enhancements. Not to mention, forget to mention the acquiring business that we picked up in Greece. As Mike said, we had nice growth out of it. Those all will really add to a nice, strong double-digit rate there.
On the ePay business, as we've said, we generally expect that the revenue growth rate will be kind of in the upper single-digit range with the operating income growth rate in the lower double-digit range. Again, you can see that that same kind of result came forward this quarter. As Mike said, we do expect a little bit of lumpiness as we move throughout the year. We'll have a really nice second quarter because of the completion of some promotional programs, the launch of some new ones, and then a tough comp for last year in the third quarter. Again, wrapping up the full year, again, we expect to see that low double-digit growth on operating income growth in ePay.
Finally, to round it out with money transfer, there, we believe that our revenue number growth rate would be in the lower double-digit kind of range, kind of, you know, put it in that 12-teen, 13-ish kind of range, with a little bit better on the operating margins, operating profit side. We as Mike said, our first quarter there typically is a little bit lighter. It always is in our money transfer business. We expect to see that start to pick up its pace here in the second and third quarters, you know, which will again, give us those overall numbers that I mentioned there.
That's, you know, kind of the rundown, of where we expect to see the growth rates in our segments.
Just to remind everybody too, on just two of the things that Rick mentioned, that we really didn't have in 2019, and that was Ren and also our acquiring business. You know, our acquiring business on a run rate probably grew 50% last year from when we bought it, for the prior year run rate. That's, you know, that's gonna have some good growth this year as well. You know, Ren wasn't available then. It's been almost doubling its revenue every year, since we started. We've got new endeavors that just add that much more momentum to our, you might call it business as usual. That's, that's what puts us in a really good mood as we move forward.
Don't forget that last year, we threw off roughly $100 million in EBITDA more than we did in 2019 when you add up the results of ePay and money transfer. Through COVID, they continued to grow very, very well. As we walk into this year, it's gonna be a little bit different distribution, where those two segments are gonna take a higher percentage of the total than they did in 2019, where we were mostly driven by the EFT segment and these high-value transactions. I like having that, you know, your business come from lots of different places.
Very helpful. Thank you.
Thank you, Darren. Please stand by while we get the next question queued. Our next question comes from Peter Heckmann with D.A. Davidson. You may move ahead with your question.
Hi, this is Alli calling in for Pete Heckmann. We were wondering if you're seeing any change in the opt-in rate for dynamic currency conversion on your ATMs in Europe relative to 2019?
No. We have not seen a change really in that opt-in rate for a long, long time.
I mean, for the, you know, broader point is we haven't seen a change in consumer behavior. As Mike said, you know, people continue to take out cash. We did see that they took out more cash following the COVID thing. Consumer behavior has remained very consistent.
Okay. Thank you.
Uh-huh. Thank you.
Thank you, D.A. Davidson. Please stand by for the next question. Our next question comes from Mike Grondahl of Northland Securities. Mike, you may move ahead with your question.
Hey guys. Thanks. Can you talk a little bit about the drivers that get the money transfer business from sort of 1% adjusted EBITDA margin growth in the first quarter to sort of double digits for the whole year? Like what's gonna happen there that drives that higher margin?
Okay, there's a couple of things. First of all, you know, you have a lot of overhead, so when you have lower transactions, much like EFT in the first quarter versus the third quarter, you've got all your overhead. When you're doing more transactions, you're gonna get more to flow, and you're gonna get a better margin in that particular quarter. Just as we grow, as we see the seasonality of that business, that would be helpful. The second thing is we are watching our expenses very carefully, and we should see our growth start to outpace those expenses as we move through the year because we still see good growth in the revenue line. I say another thing too, our digital business continues to be a bigger and bigger piece of that business.
I mean, you saw that we saw 38% growth in direct to consumer to consumer money transfers, digital money transfers. Xe is screaming as well. Those, both of those, cost us a little bit less per transaction to do because you don't have an agent involved. We have a little bit better margins on those. When you kind of add it all up, we see just plain revenue growth, trying to, you know, sit down hard on expenses, combined with seasonality are probably the biggest things.
Got it. Okay.
Thank you, Mike. Please stand by for our next question. Our next question comes from Ken Suchoski of Autonomous Research. Ken, you may move ahead with your question.
Hey, good morning, Mike and Rick. Thanks for taking the question. I just wanted to ask about the money transfer business. You know, when we look at that revenue per transaction in that segment, you know, the year-over-year growth was a little bit worse, this quarter versus last on a constant currency basis. You know, so could you talk about what's driving that? I know there's some competitors putting promotional pricing into the market, so I'm just curious, you know, if you're seeing any of that, and I guess how are you responding to that activity?
First of all, you gotta understand the money transfer business has been and probably will always be a bit of a street fight when it comes to pricing. We've had competitors, they try, you know, They have promotional activity in a given quarter for or maybe a given corridor for a month or 2 months, and then they, then they fall off of that and go to the next, you know, the next corridor. We see that all the time. There is really nothing new on a competitive front. People keep asking us that because one of our bigger competitors keeps talking about that, but we don't really see much of an impact at all. Because across the patch, you know, we pay into, you know, 160 different countries, so we've got lots of corridor pairs.
You know, like somebody might have a promotional activity from the U.S. to India and then this month, and then next month it might be, you know, Italy to Romania, you know. There's always these things going on. We counter those as we need to, and we do a pretty good job of it. Competition really is not the issue that bothers me. I just wanna make sure that we keep everybody fully employed. When it really gets down to it, if you have a huge recession like we had in 2009, that was really the only thing that really negatively affected our money transfer business because there were less people employed, less people working construction, et cetera. We don't have any of that. We're still in a world where we can't get enough labor.
They make up that labor with immigrants. That's great for us.
Okay. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Ken. Please stand by for our next question. Our next question comes to us from Rayna Kumar of UBS. Rayna, you can move ahead with your question.
Good morning. Thanks for taking my question. Mike, could you discuss your M&A pipeline and what deals interest you the most at this time?
Quickly, Rick, if you can just, give us the underlying FX assumptions embedded in your financial guidance. Thank you.
As you know, we're always looking at acquisitions, and we're looking at 2 or 3 right now, none of them particularly large. We're, you know, we probably sort through 30-40 acquisitions a year, and maybe we do 1 or 2, you know? We still have a pipeline. We're still looking at them. We're not gonna do an acquisition just to make my numbers look good for a quarter. We want an acquisition that will continue to grow and keep pace with the growth of the rest of the company. It's just hard to find those, but we're looking. The reality of the, of the financial sector right now is some of the prices are coming down, so that's good. Some other of these high flyers are running out of money, so that's good too.
We don't have anything pending for next week, that's for sure. I'll let Rick answer on the FX.
Yeah. I would say, too, Rayna, we always have something on the operating table. It's a matter of whether it makes it.
Yeah, sometimes we lose the patient.
I would add also that we do have things that we're looking at in each of our three segments. There's things out there and, you know, the easy part is to have them, you know, on the table. The hard part is getting through them and see if they make sense. As it relates to FX assumptions, generally it's about the average of the last week, you know? We take a look at what the currency numbers are looking like. I would tell you that, you know, there's not a whole lot of difference. Right now there might be just some slight favorableness on a couple of currencies.
We see a little bit of headwind on a couple other currencies. I would say for the most part, it looks like the currencies will be, you know, reasonably in line with what we had here even in the first quarter. We always take just what the most recent FX rates are, and we assume that they will remain flat through the rest of the quarter.
Very helpful. Thank you.
Thank you, Rayna. Please stand by for our next question. Our next question comes from Cristopher Kennedy of William Blair. Chris, move ahead with your question.
Good morning. Thanks for taking the question. Mike, you mentioned that you're pleased with the performance of the merchant acquiring business in Greece. Can you talk a little bit more about the strategy and what's driving the growth?
Well, for one thing is just when you just look at the Greek market, virtually all the POS acquiring was owned by 3, 4 or 5 of the largest banks. I really like competing with banks, because they, you know, they're risk averse and they're more conservative. We're nimble and aggressive. So there's better products to offer those customers and more ways to win. That's why we're doing better. Just the 365 pay-as-you-go, every night, feature that we added is something that nobody else has in Greece, where somebody can have access to the funds that they sold today, tomorrow, instead of waiting till it ends up in their account 2 or 3 days later, or wait even more if it's over a weekend.
We will continue to innovate there, and we'll continue to expand that to multiple markets. That's the nice thing. We're not doing just pure acquiring. We can sell ePay products there. We're gonna turn some of those, some of those sites into money transfer agents as well, so we can cross-sell our other products. Just in general, you know, that thing, it grew like crazy last year, and this year it's gonna grow very well too. It's gonna be a bigger and bigger piece of our business as we go forward. Really proud of those guys.
Thanks for taking the question.
Thank you, Chris. Please stand by for our next question. Our next question comes from David Togut of Evercore ISI. David, please move forward with your question.
Thank you. Good morning. I apologize if this was asked earlier, as I just joined late from another call. Rick, could you call out your 2023 EFT margin outlook?
It didn't. That hadn't been brought up, but I guess to give you a little bit of history here, in 2019, our EFT operating margin was around 33%, okay? Since then, what we've seen is we've seen a more shift towards more of our owned ATMs. In those owned ATMs, we make more profit per ATM, but we don't make as much margin per ATM.
The second thing is, we're clearly not at the 2019 travel recovery level, so, you know, that, you know, going from something less to 100, of something less than 100 to a full 100%, all that will be very enhancing to the bottom line. Finally, we've seen a fair bit of inflation come into the cost structure, whether it would be on headcount side or third party delivery, principally things like ATM maintenance and cash delivery. With all that being said, we don't anticipate that we'll be at a 33% level. Oh, and POS acquiring coming into our business, which is a lighter than 33% margin.
Those four things really kind of would on a long-term basis, I would anticipate that our margins will come back to being something in, let's call it the kinda high 20, okay. As it relates to this year, I would expect that we would be, you know, somewhere in the mid-20s kinda range, okay. And again, we'll see how that shapes out. That's kinda what we would anticipate this year would be kinda in that kinda mid-20s range.
I think. Yeah.
Understood.
I think that, you know, at the end of the day, what we're just trying to do is deliver more EPS. With more ATMs, more markets, even if it's a little bit less margin for all the reasons that the EFT segment has actually kind of evolved into, we're still very excited. I think that that'll be the last question. I think as I leave you guys and gals, I just wanna say that, you know, I think our company is kind of bucking the trend of Wall Street right now. I mean, we're looking at big growth this year, bringing ourselves back into in excess of the profitability we've ever had.
I kinda like it, that we're gonna buck the trend, we're gonna do well this year, and we're gonna do well next year 'cause we've got all the things lined up to do so. With that, I wanna thank everybody for taking the time with us, and we'll look forward to talking to you in about 90 days.
Thank you everyone for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect.