Greetings, and welcome to the Euronet Worldwide third quarter 2026 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will 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 then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, press star one one again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Ms. Stephanie Taylor. Ms. Taylor, you may begin.
Thank you. Good morning and welcome to Euronet's third quarter 2026 earnings conference call. On the 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 will 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 our presentation. In addition, the PowerPoint presentation includes a reconciliation of the non-GAAP financial measures we will be using during the call to the most comparable GAAP measures. Now I'll turn the call over to our Chairman and CEO, Mike Brown.
Thank you, Steph, and good morning, and thank you all for joining us. I'll begin my comments on slide number four. Before discussing the quarter, I want to acknowledge that 2026 has been a more challenging year than we anticipated. We continue to experience significant pressure in our cross-border payments business, driven primarily by U.S. immigration policy changes, along with pockets of broader macroeconomic uncertainty that have impacted all three segments to varying degrees. As reflected in our earnings release this morning, these headwinds have been more persistent than we expected when we gave our outlook earlier this year, leading us to revise our full year guidance. While the current environment is challenging, it's important to keep it in perspective. Throughout our more than 30 year history, Euronet has successfully navigated periods of external disruption, including the global financial crisis, India's demonetization, and the COVID pandemic.
Those events were outside of our control, just as today's immigration and macroeconomic factors are. What remains within our control is how we execute, and we remain focused on serving our customers, investing in our strategic priorities, and positioning the business for sustainable long-term growth. We remain confident in the direction of the business. Our global network, loyal customer base, and geographic diversity represent valuable assets that are difficult and very costly to replicate, providing a strong foundation for long-term growth. The strategic framework we outlined in our Investor Day in May has not changed. We continue to see meaningful opportunities to expand our digital capabilities, grow our participation in key payment flows, and leverage our global network. While current market conditions have created pressure, they do not alter our confidence in the long-term growth opportunities ahead of us.
While the earnings results for the third quarter did not meet our expectations, the progress we are making across the business is evident in both our operating performance and strategic initiatives as we continue to bring them to market. To that end, our digital accelerator revenue grew 30% in the quarter and 33% year-to-date, underscoring the momentum of these initiatives. They are further expanded by several recent announcements, including our white label stablecoin-funded card program, our partnership with Diebold, and the introduction of OLON. It is important to highlight that Euronet remains a highly profitable and cash-generative business. Although performance is below the levels we have historically produced, we continue to expect full year revenue and earnings growth and strong free cash flow generation. Our strong financial position allows us to continue investing in our growth initiatives while returning capital to shareholders through disciplined share repurchases.
During the quarter, we repurchased approximately 690,000 shares for $50 million. These repurchases reflect our confidence in the long-term value of the business and our commitment to shareholders. With that, I will turn the call over to Rick, who will provide more details on our third quarter results.
Thanks, Mike. Good morning, everyone. I will begin my comments on slide seven. For the third quarter, we delivered revenue of $1.2 billion, operating income of $171.6 million, adjusted operating income of $169.9 million, and adjusted EBITDA of $226.1 million. I think it is important to understand the components that drive this quarter's operating results, so I will provide more additional context in the segment discussions on the coming slides. Adjusted EPS was $3.55, a 2% decline year-over-year. The third quarter share repurchases had a minimal impact on this quarter's adjusted EPS but will benefit future quarters.
As Mike mentioned, the pressure on cross-border payments from the U.S. immigration policy has been more persistent than we anticipated and further compounded by macro uncertainty and weakening of most foreign currencies compared to the U.S. dollar. As such, we are revising our 2026 outlook we provided in our Investor Day in May. We now expect approximately $4,375,000,000 of revenue, $725 million of adjusted EBITDA, and adjusted EPS growth of approximately 10%. Slide seven presents our results on a reported basis. Most of the major currencies we operate in weakened compared to the dollar. To normalize the impact of the currency fluctuations, we have presented our results adjusted for currency on the next slide. On slide eight now.
Payments infrastructure revenue grew 9%, primarily driven by growth in our merchant acquiring business and contribution from the acquisition of CoreCard, partially offset by continued economic pressures on discretionary travel spend, which pressures international ATM cash withdrawals. Adjusted operating income was flat and adjusted EBITDA grew 4%, reflecting the ongoing impacts of global cost inflation. Adjusted operating income includes a $1.7 million reduction in the third quarter of 2026 due to a timing difference between the estimated annual cash rebate payment associated with a previous acquisition and the expense recognized under U.S. GAAP. Adjusted operating income also includes a $4.7 million increase in purchase price amortization associated with the CoreCard acquisition. Excluding this non-cash charge, adjusted operating income would have grown 4%, consistent with adjusted EBITDA. epay revenue and operating income each grew 5%, and adjusted EBITDA grew 6%.
This growth is the result of continued demand for higher-value digital content, merchant acquiring growth, and from B2B promotional campaigns executed during the quarter. Cross-border payments revenue declined 4%. Operating income declined 35%, and adjusted EBITDA declined 32%. These results were impacted by immigration-related pressures in several key corridors and broader global economic uncertainty, partially offset by a 34% increase in digital transactions and continued momentum in the Dandelion business. Operating income and adjusted EBITDA declined more than revenue from the flow-through of the revenue declines and approximately $6 million in incremental advertising spend to accelerate digital transaction growth. On a sequential basis, third quarter constant currency revenue declined 4%, a slight improvement from the 5% decline we reported in the second quarter. During the quarter, we saw stabilizing trends in many of our international markets.
There was continued pressure in the U.S. outbound market from U.S. immigration policy, but the last few months have shown stabilizing to subtle improvement. While these trends are positive, we remain cautious given the ongoing geopolitical uncertainty and continue to view the operating environment as fragile. Now let's go to slide nine for a few comments on the balance sheet. We ended the quarter with approximately $1 billion in unrestricted cash and 913 million of cash deployed in our ATM network. Total debt was $2.2 billion at quarter end. Changes in both cash and debt primarily reflect the benefit of $139 million in cash generated from operations, the intentional upstreaming of cash to reduce debt, and seasonal cash return following the peak ATM season, partially offset by $50 million in share repurchases.
As we look forward, we will remain disciplined in our capital allocations, managing our leverage ratios to maintain our investment-grade rating while also continuing to repurchase shares, which we believe is an important tool to drive shareholder value. With that, I will hand it back to Mike.
Thanks, Rick, and I will continue with slide number 11. One of the key messages we shared at our Investor Day was that Euronet's long-term growth profile would increasingly be driven by our digital businesses and other higher-growth payment channels. What we are seeing this year reinforces that strategy and gives us confidence that we are investing in the right areas of the business. Despite the pressures we have experienced in certain portions of our cross-border payments business, our digital accelerators continue to outperform expectations. Through the first nine months of the year, digital accelerators grew approximately 33%, well ahead of the growth rate we outlined for 2026 during our Investor Day. Growth was broad-based across Ria Digital, Dandelion, Merchant Services, Payment Processing, and CoreCard.
I would note that this growth number will begin to moderate over the next couple of quarters as we anniversary the fourth quarter 2025 acquisition of CoreCard. As you can see, these businesses are becoming an increasingly important part of Euronet's revenue mix and growth profile. In 2025, digital accelerators represented approximately 21%, that is last year, of the payment channel revenue. Today, they account for approximately 26%, demonstrating a continued evolution towards higher growth, more scalable, and increasingly digital revenue streams. As we look at the components of the revenue on this slide, the trends we are seeing within cross-border payments also highlight this transformation. Card-paid transactions continue to significantly outperform cash-paid transactions, reflecting both ongoing customer migration towards digital channels and changes in remittance behavior following the immigration-related enforcement activity in the U.S. and the implementation of the remittance tax earlier this year.
At the same time, activity within the IAD network has seen pressure from broader macroeconomic uncertainty. While trips to and within Europe increased year-over-year, airfare, lodging, and restaurant costs have all increased dramatically, causing travelers to shorten their trips and tighten budgets for on-the-ground discretionary spending. Moreover, we have seen fewer transactions from markets such as Australia and the U.S. driven by economics, where we have greater DCC opportunities. The businesses we identified as our digital accelerator are not simply offsetting a portion of the current challenges, they are becoming a larger contributor to the revenue, profitability, and future growth. The momentum we continue to see across digital channels, software-enabled payment processing, Dandelion, and merchant services reinforces our confidence that customer adoption has a long runway to go.
As near-term pressures within cross-border payments eventually normalize, we believe these growth platforms position Euronet well to deliver sustainable growth, expand profitability, and create long-term value for shareholders. Next slide, please. Slide number 12. Before we get into the segment highlights, I would like to provide some additional color on two of our more recent announcements. Yesterday, we announced our intent to form a strategic collaboration with Diebold Nixdorf, one of the world's leading providers of ATM technology and services. Together, we see an opportunity to leverage Euronet's global ATM operations, transaction processing, and back-office capabilities with Diebold Nixdorf's market-leading cash recycling technology, banking software, and their field service organization. Financial institutions around the world continue to look for ways to reduce operating costs, improve efficiency, and get more value from their ATM networks.
We believe this collaboration positions us to deliver a more comprehensive solution that helps banks simplify operations while creating additional opportunities for transactions and revenue growth. This initiative is a natural extension of what Euronet has been doing successfully for more than three decades. It leverages our scale, our Ren processing platform, and our experience managing complex ATM networks around the world. While we're still in the early stages and any collaboration remains subject to definitive agreements, we're excited about the potential and believe it can further strengthen our position as a leading ATM outsourcing and processing provider globally. Next slide, please. Last week, we also introduced OLON, the next step in our merchant payment strategy. The name comes from the Greek word for whole, which represents what the platform does. It brings all the parts of the merchant's business together.
Built on Euronet's payments infrastructure, OLON combines payments, business software, and value-added services all on one platform. Merchants today take a broader variety of payments across more channels under more local rules. OLON supports terminals, mobile, tap and pay, online payments, along with cards, digital wallets, and local payment methods. It also connects those payments to the systems merchants use to run their business. Beyond payments, merchants can add services from across Euronet, such as tax-free shopping, bill payments, epay content, and foreign exchange. We have a real advantage here. More than 30 years in Europe, connections to local banks and payment networks, and a modular platform we can roll out market by market. The rollout is underway with Greece among the first markets. We expect OLON will provide an opportunity to increase our revenue per merchant while also deepening those important relationships.
We believe these announcements are yet another growth lever as we continue to drive benefits for both new and existing customers across our global payments technology network. We look forward to updating you in the coming months. Now let's go on to slide number 14 and we'll discuss the payments infrastructure highlights for the quarter. Slide number 14. We continue to experience momentum across our payments infrastructure accelerators as we invest in capabilities that deepen customer relationships, expand payment acceptance, and create new growth opportunities. In merchant acquiring, we strengthened our market-leading position in Greece by launching Google Pay acceptance across our merchant base and expanding soft POS capabilities to additional payment schemes. We also added approximately 2,750 net new merchant locations during the quarter, further extending our reach and reinforcing our position as the leading payment acceptance provider in the country.
In Spain, we signed a strategic partnership with Getnet, Santander's payment solutions platform, and one of the leading acquirers in Iberia. Together, we will deliver an integrated tax-free solution that simplifies VAT tax refund processing for international travelers while helping merchants improve the customer experience and capture additional spending from cross-border customers. In India, we signed an agreement with Mastercard Payment Gateway Solutions to process online RuPay and UPI transactions, giving its bank and merchant customers access to India's domestic payment rails through Euronet. This adds transaction volume and revenue for Euronet in one of the world's largest and fastest-growing digital payment markets with Mastercard as a distribution partner. In Latin America, we signed BIN sponsorship agreements with Lafise in Costa Rica and Bancoomeva in Colombia.
These agreements are important building blocks in our strategy to expand our ATM and payment infrastructure footprint in attractive, highly cash-centric markets, creating additional opportunities for transaction growth over time. Finally, I want to touch on an exciting development that we recently unveiled at Money20/20. Through our expanded collaboration with Fireblocks, we introduced a white label stablecoin-funded card solution that enables banks, fintechs, and other financial institutions to launch their own stablecoin-linked card programs using Euronet's Ren and CoreCard issuing platforms. These cards bridge the gap between fiat currency and digital assets by allowing people to use stablecoins as a payment mechanism anywhere Visa and Mastercard are accepted. While stablecoins remain in early stages of adoption, we believe they represent a meaningful opportunity to improve the movement of money globally.
By combining digital asset custody and wallet capabilities from Fireblocks to our issuing, processing, and payment infrastructure capabilities, we are creating a simple path for financial institutions to connect digital asset ecosystems with everyday payment experiences. Ultimately, mainstream adoption of stablecoins requires ubiquity of acceptance, and we are pleased to be on the early end of designing a product that our partners can offer to their customers. Taken together, these initiatives demonstrate our proactive approach to identifying opportunities across payments infrastructure. Whether it is merchant processing, payment processing, ATM expansion, or emerging digital asset solutions, we continue to build scalable platforms that expand our addressable market, strengthening recurring revenue streams, and position Euronet for the long-term growth. Overall, we are pleased with the progress we made during the quarter.
We have some exciting new partnerships, initiatives, and products coming to market, which combined with our digital momentum, will further diversify our revenue and result in long-term earnings growth. Now let us go on to slide number 15, and we will talk about epay for a couple of minutes. Epay delivered another quarter of solid execution across our branded payments, merchant services, and digital content businesses while continuing to expand our distribution footprint in several key markets. In merchant services, we signed a point-of-sale acquiring and processing agreement with Norma, one of Germany's largest discount supermarket chains. Norma already distributes content for epay, so this win demonstrates our ability to leverage our retail relationships to provide additional payment services and further monetize our existing distribution network. We continue to broaden the reach of our branded payments products across Europe.
During the quarter, we launched branded payments in approximately 700 locations of Tisak, which is Croatia's largest convenience store network. Also, in Europe, we rolled out Sony variable load gift cards, giving consumers greater flexibility on how they purchase credit. In Asia Pacific, we expanded our video gaming portfolio through new partnerships with Riot Live in India and Epic Live in Brazil, further enhancing our content offering in two large and rapidly growing gaming markets. In India, we also signed a strategic distribution agreement with NODWIN Gaming, a leading esports and youth entertainment company. We continue to build momentum and direct-to-consumer distribution by establishing a presence on Amazon India's gift card marketplace. This provides an additional digital sales channel that complements our existing retail distribution network and positions us to participate more directly in the ongoing growth of digital commerce.
Finally, I would like to provide a couple of updates on the gaming front. We have been notified that Steam will discontinue sales of physical gift cards at the end of October. We expect this decision will be a headwind for epay's fourth quarter numbers. However, as we mentioned last quarter, we also expect Grand Theft Auto VI to be released in mid-November. Take-Two, the game's publisher, has estimated that the game will be the primary driver of their $1 billion-$1.5 billion revenue growth during 2027. While we are not forecasting revenue growth based on this one title, we do anticipate benefiting from increased sales in gaming content that will gradually offset the gap from Steam. Overall, the quarter reflects our continued focus on expanding distribution, adding premium content, and enhancing our payments capabilities. Now, let's move on to slide 16. We'll talk about cross-border payments.
As I mentioned in my opening remarks, immigration policy and macro factors have continued to put pressure on the industry and our cross-border business over the last several quarters. Despite these headwinds, we remain confident in our strategy, and in fact, the evolving competitive landscape reinforces our confidence in the investments we have made over the last several years. Across physical and digital remittances, high-value consumers, SMEs, and financial institution partnerships, we have established infrastructure, distribution, and customer relationships in-market that many competitors are only beginning to develop. We continue to invest in capturing the significant growth opportunity in digital remittances while capitalizing on our leading position in physical remittances, where our extensive network and high barriers to entry provide a distinct advantage over a digital-only offering. Put simply, we not only play in both sandboxes, but we connect them and offer customers the best of both worlds.
Remember, the global remittance market is about $920 billion. Half of that is physical, where we have 650,000 locations, and the other half is digital, where we support 7.6 billion digital accounts, either a bank or a wallet account. Many competitors are focused on just the digital side of the market, and entrance to the physical space would require a significant investment and would face high barriers to entry. So they choose to invest in trying to move upstream into the higher-value consumers and small, medium-sized business segments, where we are also in the market with our XE and Dandelion offerings and dedicated teams with solid strategy. The highlights on this slide reflect the diversity of our growth opportunities and our right to win across the whole cross-border payment space. We continue to see positive momentum in our digital consumer business. Ria Digital revenue increased 30% and transactions increased 34%.
About 60% of our total volume and 50% of our total transactions land in a digital account, demonstrating continued adoption of our digital channels and providing another indicator that our investments are generating positive results. One of the more notable achievements this quarter was signing Taptap Send as a Dandelion partner. Taptap is one of the fastest-growing digital remittance providers focused on Africa, and their decision to leverage our network demonstrates the unique value proposition that Dandelion provides. Also in Africa, we signed Safaricom's M-PESA, which you may have heard of, the continent's largest mobile wallet with more than 40 million monthly active users as both a Dandelion partner and a direct network connection. This is an important validation of our strategy and further strengthens one of the key competitive advantages in our business, a global payout network that would be difficult, costly, and time-consuming to replicate.
Beyond network expansion, we continued to broaden our capabilities in business payments through XE. During the quarter, we acquired Sage Integration intellectual property and began incorporating those capabilities into our platform. We believe this enhances our ability to serve our small and medium-sized business customers and creates additional opportunities to expand distribution through software and business service channels. Finally, we launched our relationship with BSN Bank in Malaysia, representing our first banking partner in that market. Although still in the early phases of rollout, we view it as an important step in expanding our presence across the Asia-Pac market and creating opportunities for additional bank partnerships in the region.
Taken together, these accomplishments demonstrate that while the operating environment remains challenging today, we continue to strengthen our presence across the entire cross-border payments landscape, underpinned by the strength of our network, and we build capabilities that position the business for long-term growth. Now let's move on to slide number 17 for the quarter. Let me close by again acknowledging that these results did not meet our expectations, nor are they in line with our historical growth trends, particularly in the cross-border payments business, where the challenging environment has persisted longer and tougher than we anticipated. We are responding with disciplined near-term conditions while remaining steadfast in our strategy and positioning ourselves to outperform when market conditions eventually improve.
Our confidence is supported by the continued strength of our digital accelerators, which grew 33% in the first nine months of the year, together with the momentum that we are building in merchant services, payment processing, Ria Digital, and Dandelion. We are also expanding the reach and the value of our platforms through new initiatives such as OLON, our intended collaboration with Diebold Nixdorf, and our stablecoin-funded card solution. We have a profitable cash-generative business, a differentiated global payments network, and a growing portfolio of scalable digital capabilities. We believe these strengths position Euronet to navigate the current pressures and deliver sustainable earnings growth and long-term shareholder value. With that, we would be happy to take questions. Operator, will you please assist?
Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, please press star one one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, press star one one again. One moment while we compile the Q&A roster. Our first question will come from the line of Rayna Kumar with Oppenheimer. Your line is open.
Good morning, Mike and Rick. Can you elaborate more on the Diebold partnership? What prompted this, and how did the economics look for Euronet?
Well, what prompted this is we are doing very little ATM outsourcing. Remember we bought Dolphin a few years ago. We are doing very little in the U.S. Diebold has a demonstrative, very strong market share here in the U.S. And we are thinking, we have 30 years of experience running very complex ATM networks, including recyclers, which are a real pain in the hiney to keep track of. So we decided to contact them, and we came up with this idea that they could help us sell into these markets because their customers are all the banks in the U.S. So this gives us a great entrée into a very large market that we have barely even tapped.
Rayna, we have had a long-term great relationship with the people at Diebold. As you know, we can process and operate any ATM, and they have certainly one of the leading products in the market. It is just a natural fit. So over the years, we have continued to grow and develop that relationship. As Mike said, it really allows both of us to take the banks a better product, a product that helps them improve their costs, helps them to be more efficient, and helps them make more money by some of the products that we have that can be incorporated into the ATM. As Mike said, we just see it as being a natural fit that we extend our relationship in a more substantive way than what it has been over the past years.
That is very helpful. Then just moving on to the 2026 outlook. Are you able to separate the outlook reduction into U.S. remittance pressure, broader economic weakness, and FX? Does the new forecast assume continued stabilization, or does it allow for another deterioration in cross-border volumes?
No, we've anticipated that based on looking at our recent trends, is that we will continue to see some subtle improvement. We're expecting that the fourth quarter, in similar regards to third quarter over second quarter, we'll continue to see some of those subtle trends. We've not seen anything in the latter parts of September or even as we go into fourth quarter that changes that trajectory. It seems like at least at the current time, there doesn't appear to be any greater degradation in the geopolitical environment. It's still a tough market out there. We hear from our customers consistently that, what I just call it, I call it more like the fear element that has customers apprehensive. Right now, as we've seen the trends.
Like we said, we're positive. We see that looks in the positive direction, but we've used the word delicate. We think it's kind of a delicate market, but we do expect to see some subtle improvement as we finish the year.
Thank you.
One moment for our next question. That will come from the line of Cris Kennedy with William Blair. Your line is open.
Good morning.
Hello, Cris.
Hey. Good morning. Thanks for taking the question. Mike, you mentioned the strategic framework that was outlined at the Investor Day is really unchanged. Can you just provide some perspective of the current environment relative to prior cycles that you've seen?
It's much like what Rick said. The only real change since our May Investor Day is we've seen a bit of geopolitical economic pressure just kind of across the board. It seems to have accelerated. The second thing is our cross-border remittances used to account for 38% of our company, of our revenue, and that's under serious pressure here in the U.S., and that continues. We thought perhaps that would level out or abate at some point in time because there's a lot of jobs that just aren't getting done. You hear that in all these political ads of farmers who can't get workers and blah, blah. So we thought that there could be a little bit of an abatement there. We have not seen that. So, those are the changes you might say since May.
Got it.
Yeah.
Thanks for that. Just as a follow-up, any update on the sales efforts at CoreCard, and how is that pipeline going? Thanks for taking the questions.
My goal for CoreCard was, we bought this knowing that half of the revenues of the company would go away when it is completely taken over, the Apple contract has been completely taken over by JPMorgan Chase. Our goal is by the time that that happens, wouldn't it be nice to have 90%-100% of those same revenues come in and be replaced by new revenues? In essence, refilling the bucket. That is our goal. Right now, we seem to be tracking on that. We do not quite have it all yet in the bag, but the number of sales that we are seeing and interest that we have is actually kind of amazing. We were told when we bought the company that we probably would not close a deal for 18 months, and I think we have closed six, seven, or eight deals since we bought the company.
All that kind of, that looks good. We originally thought we are just going to sell these things overseas, these licenses overseas. As it turns out, we are selling them in the U.S. and overseas and in LatAm. It is kind of exciting, but these close cycles take a long time. They just continue to accrue business here, and they are very, very sticky. We have also got this stablecoin product that we have that works in conjunction with both Ren and with CoreCard because banks do not quite know what to do about this stablecoin thing. People are asking about it. There is really next to no volume in it right now, but the banks, they want to have a product.
We have incorporated that into our CoreCard/Ren offerings so that we can help banks then deal with those questions with their customers. We are pretty excited. These things take a while to build up. It is building up a little faster than we thought, so good for that.
Great. Thank you.
One moment for our next question. That will come from the line of Mike Grondahl with Northland. Your line is open.
Hey, thanks guys. With the cross-border money transfer business, can you just comment on maybe the most challenging corridors you are seeing that have the most challenges going forward?
Well, you could go ahead, Rick.
No. You go.
Okay. Basically it is U.S. outbound, and although Mexico was really challenged a quarter or two ago, it seems to be abating to some extent, so that is good. Basically, it is just all the ICE raids that you read about are sending people either deporting people back or making people afraid to go out and work because they do not want to get scooped up in an ICE raid. What this has done is the biggest negative is U.S. outbound. We also see softness around the world just because of weakening worldwide economic conditions, particularly in Europe, where another 40% of our business lies. That is nothing like what we see here in the United States.
Got it. On the European ATM fleet, it sounds like discretionary travel-related spending was softer too. What does it take to turn that around a little bit? Is there anything you guys can do to drive more transactions there?
I think the reality is we can't really do that much. What we will do and continue to do is make sure that all our ATMs are in the right locations because over time, sometimes the hot places are not so hot anymore and there's new hot places that pop up. We're continuing to cull the network and relocate the network. We can do that, but at the end of the day, it comes down to how much disposable income you have when you land on your vacation and how much money you want to spend. There's very little I can do about that. Now, we are expanding into new markets.
We just announced two of them on this call, and that's exciting because these markets that we have outside of Europe are very cash-intensive markets, and we find that those ATMs are quite a bit more profitable on a per ATM basis than our ones in Europe. We need to continue to expand outside of Europe.
Did the Europe fleet shrink, Mike, overall number of ATMs?
I don't think so.
Relatively stable, Mike.
Yeah.
Okay. Thanks, guys.
One moment for our next question. That will come from the line of Darrin Peller with Wolfe Research. Your line is open.
Hey, guys. Griffen Drebing on for Darrin. You called out profitability declines within the cross-border payments as a flow-through from revenue and incremental investment in digital. Obviously, digital transactions were strong, expanding 34%, but what underlying trends are you seeing on price and really how has ROI evolved within digital, given increasing competition?
We haven't seen any real change in our ROI on our digital consistent. On the pricing front, I'd say on a year-over-year basis, we were in about 2% to maybe 3%. But on a gross profit basis, it was even less than that, like maybe between about 1% and 1.5%. Looking back over the years, we've always anticipated and have generally always seen that there's been some reduced pricing, which is pretty common in a leverageable, scalable kind of business. But we didn't see anything extraordinary. Maybe pretty consistent with what we've seen in the past.
Thank you.
Just one moment for our next question. That will come from the line of Gus Galá with Monness, Crespi, Hardt & Co. Your line is open.
Hi, Mike. Hi, Rick. Thanks for taking our questions. I wanted to clarify on the Investor Day framework. Should we think of 2026 as a rebase year, or are we thinking the 10%-15% is clean for next year? I know that we might be getting a little bit ahead of the sheets there, but figured it was worth the ask. Within the cross-border, with the performance, I imagine most of the pain is in the independent agent channel, right? Is the assumption of that getting to 2% in that framework? How are we thinking about that? My last one, and I'll wrap it up there. In epay, am I reading correctly that the removal of the Steam gift cards will not be fully offset by next year with the GTA sales? What portion of the business was the Steam gift card sales? Thanks.
All right. Well, let's see. A bunch of them in there to try to remember, Gus, so you may have to come back and-
Sorry
Help me. No, that's okay. Let me first take Steam there. I think our impact is probably going to be a little bit more as we said in the fourth quarter because Steam is changing their strategy. But as we go throughout the year, as we said, we don't necessarily try to predict our revenue numbers based on a particular title. We would expect that we will see that offset that, but I think it'll be a little bit of a ramp-up in some of the other recently announced gaming products that come in and backfill that for epay. Let's see. I'm going to have to have you go back. You rattled them off there pretty quick and.
Yeah. So calendar 2026, it's still in that 10%-15%. Should we treat it as a rebase at all or is it just next year kind of expect it within that framework and tied to the framework? Yeah. I'll hold for that.
I would say based right now, I don't see that the 10%-15% is out of question, but I would be on the lower end of that range. I think as we've said here, this cross-border has been kind of a persistent nagging kind of an impact. We're glad to see that it appears to be, let's say stabilizing, hopefully moving in the right direction. Certainly, we will get to the point that we will lap most of that and like I said, we've not seen continued deterioration. It was nice to see that third quarter sequentially did a little better than second quarter and as I said to Rayna Kumar, we anticipate that fourth quarter would again be a little bit better than third quarter. So I think that there's an element of what you say is kind of consistent. It's a bit of a rebasing, if you will.
Right now, I wouldn't get tremendously aggressive on it. I think we need to kind of see how things settle down. Obviously, there's a midterm elections here in the U.S. See what impact that brings. It's kind of difficult to outguess what that might be. As Mike mentioned, you see a little bit more unrest in Europe. That is, again, a little bit of a wild card, but it's nice to see and feel what I would just say stability. It's feeling more stable. I wouldn't get deep into that range. I'd probably be on the lower end of that, as we look to what we might expect for 2027.
That was all very helpful. Thank you very much. The last one, it was embedded in the framework. As we think about, I think the number was a 2% in the IAD channel cross-border, right? I think it was like a 20-ish number on digital. Do we think about the dollar content? I think that's a volume series. Do we think the revenue content maybe in the next couple of years being able to offset that? Is that how we're thinking about that? The margin in those kind of reducing?
Yeah. Right now it's a little hard to anticipate what we think next year's travel season would be, because obviously it depends on that. It's kind of hard to outthink what you think the economy is going to do, because as Mike said, what we've seen this year is that there were more travelers to Europe, but they were at reduced stays and most of their money went to cover transportation, lodging, and restaurant. So, right now I wouldn't anticipate that there's a dramatic shift in the economy and all of a sudden people around the world will have a lot more disposable income. We also see that inflation, especially with things like energy prices, fuel prices, continues to be pretty challenging on people's budgets. So, yeah, I think we'll probably see a little bit of a similar trend on that IAD. As you said, maybe a 2% improvement.
I wouldn't get more aggressive than that. There again, I probably feel stability is more of anything right now. We feel pretty comfortable about kind of continuing the stableness that we have seen in the business here lately.
Thank you.
Thank you.
One moment for our next question. That will come from the line of Josh Levin with Autonomous Research. Your line is open.
Good morning. I have two questions. Going back to what is baked into the revised 4Q outlook, does it require an improvement in underlying cross-border activity, or can you deliver it if the recent run rate simply holds? Which assumption carries the most downside risk? On digital customers, are they genuinely incremental? With digital transactions growing while total transactions declining, how much digital growth represents new customers or market share gains, versus existing retail customers migrating online? Thank you.
About three-fourths of our digital customers are new to the franchise. We certainly see some migration, but we've also been happy with the attraction of new customers into the franchise. As it relates to fourth quarter, as I said earlier, we expect to see some subtle improvement in the fourth quarter, kind of consistent with what we saw third over second. So, we're not expecting to see deterioration in the fourth quarter. Again, more along the lines of consistency to just some subtle improvement.
Thank you.
All right. I want to thank everybody for joining us on the call today, and I'll look forward to talking to you in about another 90 or 100 days. Thank you very much.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for participating. This concludes today's program. You may now disconnect.