Thanks to everyone for joining us today. For those that don't know me, my name is Chuck Nabhan. I lead the Payments and Fintech practice here at Stephens. Joining me today from Flywire is Rob Orgel, who's the COO, and Akil Hollis, who runs IR. Again, gentlemen, I appreciate you joining us today. I wanted to do a couple things with our time today. First, I wanted to start with an overview of Flywire, for those that are new or newer to the story. And secondly, there's been a pretty notable decline in the stock following your 3Q prints. So I wanted to walk through that as well with our time today.
So just as a starting point, Rob, Akil, could you just walk us through the Flywire business, the verticals you serve, as well as the competitive advantage there?
Yeah, absolutely. So hi, folks. Chuck, thanks for hosting us and hosting the session. So for those of you new to Flywire, kind of the North Star thesis for the company is software drives value in payments. So our view of the payments landscape is that there's been sort of this incredible innovation across e-commerce. We can click and buy, we can tap and pay. Like, we can do all these things in e-commerce, but there's a whole bunch of industries that have not been sort of brought along into this modern digital experience, and therein lies a big opportunity for us. And the distinctive thing about our capabilities is around sort of solving for the complexity that is inherent in these other industries when you go broader than e-commerce.
So that complexity may be because they have larger payment sizes, and so a credit card isn't necessarily the right way to think about that payment. It may be cross-border, something that we're certainly known for, as a core capability of the company. It may be around a workflow. There's something about this. It's more than just a pay button. It's a pay button attached to a more complicated set of processes or thoughts that our software can help drive value. So the four industries that we target are education, healthcare, travel, and B2B, and maybe we'll talk a little bit more about those in a little bit. But those are the four, and we target each of them with what we call the Flywire advantage. So think of there being sort of three distinct components to this advantage.
So the first thing that we developed, and this is over the course of the company's 10-plus years, was a payment platform that is way sort of more sophisticated than the typical payment platform that you'd see for sort of a straightforward card processor. So because we're dealing with the complexity of these other industries, you can imagine a platform that can support an FX transaction, a platform that can support a recurring payment plan or even a uneven periodic payment plan. Obviously, you can do all the basic stuff, sort of send a message, send a receipt, 3DS, all these kinds of things.
But, overall, the ability to handle the asynchronous nature of bank transfers, alternate payment types, as well as all the card things, and do it all around the world, means a very sophisticated core platform, and that's horizontally serving each of the verticals. The second piece we did is we spent 10+ years building a global payment network. So that payment network was built by payments experts around the world, understanding what does it take to get the right payment capabilities in countries like China, India, Korea, Vietnam, Mexico, sort of going around the world for the major markets and the ability to serve those markets, the way to be not just enabled for those payments, but tax-compliant, regulatorily compliant. It's an important capability of the company around the proprietary payment network.
And then the third piece is we build software and capabilities specific to the verticals. So if we talk about education, the idea of being able to integrate into the environment that is typical of an education client, right? So their positioning for us is almost always gonna be in between their system of record. That's a student information system inside education, but a health record system, an EHR, inside healthcare, and we're gonna sit in between that system of record and their payers and digitize this complete experience, and in doing that, make sure we can handle the subtleties of that experience. So a payment plan in education will feel very different than a payment plan in healthcare. And by the way, when you move over to travel, it changes again.
If you've done a trip and travel, you get it, that, hey, there's a deposit payment, maybe there's a payment at 60 days, a payment at 30 days. We're helping automate, and simplify all of, all of those sort of payment types. So those are the verticals that we serve, and the final piece of all of this is our expert teams. So, we target those four verticals, we make these great experiences, and we present them to the clients with a team that is expert in those industries. We don't send an education person into a healthcare client, vice versa. None of that would work. Most of our folks have long tenures in the careers. They have expertise in, in those industries, and that's part of how we drive the value for the clients.
Great. That's a great starting point. We get questions about addressable market occasionally. I was hoping you could just maybe talk about that, as well as how penetrated you are across each vertical, just, you know, to level set the opportunity you have.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, I think the best way for me to probably tackle that is to go market by market. So I'll start in education and work my way through the list. Four huge, great markets that are notable for their size. They're also, I think, often called out for their resilience, the sort of countercyclical nature of the markets we serve. So education, first one, biggest piece of the company's business. Call it a $660 billion TAM on a global basis. Just wanna make sure people understand, like, education isn't just higher ed. For us, it's not just a U.S. kind of a business. Picture everything from universities, colleges, community colleges, vocational schools, language programs, training programs, summer camps, K-12 schools, boarding schools in Switzerland.
Like, all of that is the global TAM that we're talking about. So just the universe of colleges, or higher ed around the world is something on the order of 18,000 institutions. You know, we've only, across all of our businesses, at sort of 3,000 to about 3,700 clients these days. And so we view that as sort of you know, when you look at it, at the sort of this global opportunity that we have, very lowly penetrated in it. I think it's probably worth me mentioning, Chuck, 'cause, like, a lot of people, as they're asking me that question, are more focused on the U.S. I wanna make sure we address sort of this U.S. market penetration.
The offering that we have in the U.S. is a very full suite, fully capable offering, right? It's not just for international students, it's for all the domestic students. We seek to move all the tuition on behalf of all those students, and we even have more modules on top of that. We've got e-stores, we've got a collection management module, we've got other things that we're presenting as offerings to those schools. At this point, we are single-digit penetrated, even in our own installed base of these schools. So like it's a revenue multiplier for us every time we convert a school from just being cross-border to the full suite. We could grow our business something like 5x, more than 5x, just from penetrating the products into our existing customers without signing more customers.
Of course, there's a lot more customers out there to go sign.
Right.
So that's education. Healthcare, rather different business for us. That's a much more domestic-focused business. It's really about sort of the U.S. healthcare system. We've got 80+ hospitals that are part of our platform, served by our platform, and that's 80 integrated networks that cover many, many hospitals per network. There are about 800 of those, so we talk about ourselves as being sort of sub-10% penetrated as we define it for the healthcare hospital-centric market. But in fact, our platform makes more sense or makes lots of sense, and we are targeting that platform for additional segments, right? So there's specialty pharma, there's specialty medical, there's lots of places that the platform makes sense to go, and that's all part of our expansion plan.
That would be on top of the sort of $500 billion TAM, that's the healthcare world. If I keep going here and talk about travel, travel's also north of $500 billion TAM. We play in a focused part of the travel segment, and that's what's associated with that $500 billion plus. We work with travel operators, we work with the DMCs. You can think of a DMC as almost being the modern travel agent, right? Which is, you want to make a cool trip to Iceland, Africa, whatever it might be, you work with one of these entities in the region you want to go. They put together a great trip for you. I have the good fortune of having done this with one or two of our clients.
At the, you know, point of having confirmed your trip, you're now gonna make a payment in whatever currency it is, Icelandic, South African rand, whatever it may be, you're, you're gonna make that payment. And in that market, even though that's one of our very fast-growing and a super business for us, we are barely scratching the surface of, of, of that market. And you can, again, think of it very broadly, right? It's, it's, you know, everything from, you know, mountain biking, to skiing, to wine, to wellness, to, uh, birding, you know, destination weddings, small river cruises. Like, there's a lot of travel out there that is not United.com, JetBlue.com, and the kinds of things that, that we would probably stay away from. And the final segment, uh, for us, is B2B, so that's our newest segment, emerging segment for the business.
Very, very exciting growth area for us. Lots of people talk about sort of different numbers associated from a TAM perspective. We view our serviceable market as 10 trillion. There are numbers out there that are probably two or 3x that for the B2B market, but that's how we view our accounts receivable-centric version of the B2B market. On that, we're not even scratching the surface penetrated.
Got it. And just in terms of pursuing that market opportunity, there's obviously an organic and an inorganic aspect to your strategy. You recently announced the acquisition of StudyLink. Can you talk about how that acquisition complements your existing product set in the Australian market, as well as the revenue model?
Yeah, yeah. So StudyLink's a super exciting deal for us. So it's our third deal as a public company. We had done two prior, along the way, and this one was just announced last week. So, StudyLink is a platform that helps schools and agents manage the application and admission process. So their market focus has been in Australia. It's an Australian company. They've done very well sort of helping shape the formation and structure of the Australian market with this platform. And the way to think about it and understand it is, these are markets that have a significant component of international students, and they have an agent ecosystem that is helping counsel and guide students to where they're going to attend. They're helping them through the application process, the testing process, to get the visa, make the payment.
All of this is sort of the role of that education agent. And what StudyLink did is they built a piece of software that essentially faced the three key audiences. It faced the schools, so the schools now have a platform from which they can sort of gather all the applications, they can manage the applications, they can manage the agents that are submitting all of those applications, make the commission payments out. From the agent perspective, you have this population of students that you're trying to serve. You can enter the application once into this core platform, and you can then submit that application across a range of schools.
So in all of what I just described, obviously, huge efficiency for the agent population, huge efficiency for the school administration, and there's a third view, which is for the student, so the student obviously can understand what's going on. And so it's, you know, it's a cloud-based platform that does all of that. And for us, there were three key synergies. I think the three key synergies in all of this were, first of all, they sit adjacent to a very significant flow of money. So our acquisitions have tended to have, as an element thus far, the ability to monetize flows. And so if you look at WPM, you look at this, they sit adjacent to the movement of money. But unlike Flywire, they weren't moving the money to the same extent that we see the opportunity to do that.
So that's sort of opportunity number one, which is building a better experience for the schools, a better experience for the agents, where that payment and application process are better integrated. Second, it gives us access to a whole bunch more agents and a whole bunch more schools. So makes us way more. We believe it'll allow us to move way faster in the Australian market, capturing schools and bringing them onto the platform. They also had, call it, 20,000 agents on their platform. A good many of those are gonna be new to Flywire, and so we'll want them using the platform, not just for what they've been using StudyLink for, but also using it for Flywire to help drive those payments.
And then the third part of what makes StudyLink so interesting, and ties back to the strategy, is that they've really been very Australia-centric. Like, so I happen to have been in Canada a couple weeks back. We had a group of our top clients there, and what's clear in countries like Canada, countries like the U.K., there hasn't yet been a way to organize the community to sort of simplify and streamline this whole process. So the opportunity for us is take this thing that sort of helped organize and streamline things in Australia and bring them to these other major markets. Probably be the U.S. as well at some point.
The U.S. is a little less far along in this agent ecosystem and the use of the agent ecosystem than the others I mentioned, but it'll make sense for the U.S. market as well.
Got it. Okay. Switching gears to financials, you laid out some financial targets, which at your Analyst Day last year, which, quite honestly, are well above what we've seen from other companies in your peer group. Could you remind us of those targets as well as the key drivers associated with them?
Absolutely. So, at Analyst Day, I guess it's going on a year and a half ago now. W e, we outlined a couple key targets. So the first thing we did was, sort of lay out our expectation of being a 30%, annual compound grower of sort of our key financial metric, revenue less ancillary services. So 30% annual grower. We laid out an EBITDA margin expansion objective, so 300-600 basis points expansion, of our adjusted gross margin, on the way to 10%-20%, margins in the medium term, 25%, margins in the longer term. So that's what we laid out. That's the plan. That's what we're, you know, still focused on as a, as a group. And yeah, the second part of your question, sorry, was the drivers. So I'll start first with revenue, then I'll get to EBITDA.
On revenue, you know, the key thing for us has always been this growth algorithm for us. So for those newer to hearing from us, our growth algorithm has three elements. First, founded in an NRR that has been exceptionally strong and consistent over time. Second piece is that we have sort of the clients signed in the prior period, don't fit the definition of NRR, but contribute to that next year revenue growth, so the full year effect of those clients. And then the third piece is clients signed in the year delivering revenue in the year. So those are the three. The foundational part, we think quite distinctive about Flywire, has been the strength and consistency of that NRR. So we've talked about it on a one-year basis, a three-year basis.
When we talk about it, most typically on the one-year basis as being in sort of the 123-124 range. We've seen that for a good period now, and that's sort of the foundational element of a 30%+ grower. That second piece around in your period, like, every year for us, we're signing a lot of clients, right? We just announced 185+ clients in this Q3. I think we've been in the sort of the 150 range in the prior quarters. That's a lot of clients, and a lot of the sort of ARR that has the will have a contribution to the full Year effect for next year. Final piece, obviously, you can see the pace of client sign-ups has been very strong, that in-year revenue is growing year-over-year in terms of the contribution from newly signed clients.
Got it. That's great.
Do you want to cover EBITDA quickly?
Yeah.
So just on EBITDA, if you look at Q3, it was a very strong period for EBITDA growth for us, and we grew 50% in the adjusted EBITDA. If you look at our margin, EBITDA margin, we kind of called out that 300-600. If you looked at our guidance at the beginning of the year, we were just over the three, I call, I think, around 310 basis points, and it's grown over the course of the year. If you look at sort of our guide for the full year, this ending this quarter, now it's in the 430 basis point range. So, we're seeing scale in multiple lines of the business.
If you go through the P&L, you'll see a lot of efficiency coming through in R&D and scale coming through in G&A-
Yeah
and all of that's helping drive the drive that margin expansion.
Got it. That's, that's super helpful. And, and if we think about that 300-600 basis point range, I know part of it is a mix shift in revenue, the other part is investment spend. Could you maybe talk about what could sway you from one end of the range to the other?
Yeah. I mean, we, as a group, believe there's an incredible opportunity ahead of us. Like, we do not want to constrain the business's ability to go invest in sales and marketing, invest in developing our opportunities, and we think that 300-600 is kind of in the sweet spot of what allows us to continue to invest, continue to grow, the business, but continue to march up the overall EBITDA margin of the company steadily over, again, this idea of getting. You know, we're actually gonna be in the 10-20 range already this year with assuming our-
guidance. You know, you can picture us adding, you know, in that 300 range plus over the years ahead, and we kind of liked how this year went in terms of being able to march it up over the course of the year. So again, not guiding anything more now, but as a way of managing things, we like that.
Got it. Okay. Well, why don't we dive into the third quarter? Can you talk about the performance just on a high level and how FX impacted results? And I guess from there, we'll use that as a starting point. Obviously, there's specific areas we could dive into, but-
Yeah
just a starting point.
Yeah. So I know we're gonna get to those other areas here in just a minute. I've spent a lot of time talking about India and so on over the last few days, so I suspect we'll get there shortly here. Look, we always talk about our business in terms of revenue less ancillary services. That's the key metric for those that kind of are newer to us. There is a GAAP revenue number, but it has some other things that sort of really are ancillary to the business, and so we spend less time talking about it. So when you look at that revenue less ancillary services, it was $116.8 million for this past quarter. It was 31% growth in what is not normally our growth quarter, right?
Third quarter is our biggest quarter, but it's not our high-growth quarter, based on the size of the business. You know, it was a great quarter in the form of a really good year, right? 43% revenue growth year to date, 40% revenue growth forecast. Sorry, revenue less ancillary services forecast, if you think about it in terms of the full year guide that we've given. So a lot of good things going on in the revenue line. I talked just a moment ago about the EBITDA delivery and the EBITDA margin expansion. In terms of the business itself, UK was particularly strong and good for us. China was strong and good for us. Client signs were strong and good for us, with 185 new clients that I mentioned.
Biggest quarter in the company's history in terms of the deal value of all those deals signed. So anyways, just a really strong quarter all around. All, there's even more details in the supplement if you want to go learn more about our travel business and such. There's, there's even more there. And you asked about the FX part, so Akil, if you want to jump in on FX here?
Yeah, sure. Just to clarify, since there's a few FX concepts around our business, we're talking about garden variety translation in this, which is to say we're an international business reporting in U.S. dollars. And so we have in our supplement a pretty detailed disclosure. This quarter, Q3, that we just passed we had actually a tailwind that helped us for growth. But versus the time we were giving our guidance, there was a reduction in that tailwind that's pretty material, and we estimated $1.4 million of less tailwind.
Right.
That was a big part of our bridging.
Got it. Okay, so as many of us know, the mix shift in India that was mentioned on the call was a significant focal point coming out of the quarter. Can you maybe talk about what happened?
Yeah
the volume contribution from India, and how unit economics vary between U.S. dollar to U.S. dollar transactions versus, rupee to U.S. dollar transactions?
Absolutely. So there's a fair bit to unpack here, so let me start at the highest, highest level here. So first of all, want folks to understand that India is a very good market for us. It's a growth market for us. It's growing even in Q3, as we talk about the subtleties or details of Q3. It grew in revenue, it grew in FX volume, it grew in total volume. It's always been a top two market for us and continues to be a top two and very successful market for us.
So the only reason we ended up talking about India at all in this last earnings call, and certainly wish we, perhaps had presented a little bit more of the detail that I'll, I'll share here, is that we knew when we presented the results that, the investor community has become accustomed to Flywire delivering, you know, at the top of the range, above the top of the range. And we knew that essentially bridging to the midpoint of our guidance, which was only after the FX stuff, an $800,000 delta, wouldn't be satisfying to the investor community. So we wanted to provide a little bit more explanation of, like, what would have allowed the quarter to perform at the level of what we think many people's expectations or models would have said.
And so, you know, just to be clear about what our references were, and I think you kind of said it in the question, but what we called out was that there was a couple percentage point shift in that FX volume. Sorry, single-digit percentage point shift in that FX volume, and that FX volume translated into single-digit millions, low single-digit millions effect on revenue for the quarter. So we're not talking about a big shift, but in the context of trying to bridge a handful of millions of dollars, like, that was one of the main factors that was, you know, appropriate to call out. So it's fair to say, we did not expect this to create nearly the level of anxiety or discussion that it did in the industry.
And I say that because for us, this kind of movement happens a lot. Like, if you look over the history of the company, there's something like 50, maybe 100, maybe more, of events that we've had to deal with, adjust to, in continuing to grow the business. And so for us, this is a relatively normal thing of having to handle adjustments in the ecosystem, whether those are competitive items, new payment types that emerge. We've dealt with things where, you know, there were two rates in Nigeria, and how do you manage sort of this rate challenge in Nigeria, which turns out to be an important market for the UK. Issues in Argentina, changes of rules in China or India or elsewhere.
All of this stuff happens kind of all the time, and so for us, this was not quite the notable event, that perhaps people have, have started to assume into it. And in fact, if you look in that. Just to give another example, a little more detailed example, in the same period that we've kind of called out all this attention on India, we didn't talk as much about China. In China, during the same period, we actually saw, FX mix improvement, right? Single digit FX improvement, you know, revenue improvement, from that FX in China. And all of that, to us, again, reflects what we do to adjust to market conditions, right? So if you look at, us as a company, we are investing a good bit in the India experience, in the China experience.
If you talk specifically about China, we've done things over recent months to, for example, improve the UX experience for payers. We've done things to make sure that the schools are communicating clearly, "Hey, Flywire is the way we want you to pay," because Flywire is the best way from the school's perspective for those payments to be received. And so you look at how we did our marketing, our messaging, specific to Chinese payers, all the things that we do to make sure we are targeting that market effectively, and we're very satisfied with those results. So all of this is to say, there are always these dynamics in the market, new payment types, new competitors, new whatever, and, you know, our track record is that we've been very good at dealing with those.
Now, what I've found in talking to a good number of investors over the last few days, is that it was actually helpful to go back to kind of the core Flywire proposition and remind people, why are these payers using Flywire in the first place? Because we've, you know, created this whole discussion about, you know, what do people want to do going forward. And the key point on this, and we believe strongly in this, is like, we believe Flywire is the best way to pay for all of these payers. And again, why do we say that? We've done an incredible amount of work to tailor our experience to the local markets. And making a sizable tuition payment out of India is a complex interaction, right? So you have to satisfy a whole bunch of KYC-type obligations to do a currency conversion.
There's a tax regime that has to be complied with in order to do all of this. A payer paying via Flywire gets the benefit of all the investment we've done to make that experience way simpler, and they're not out having to fill out forms manually. They're not taking on the burden themselves or through some third party to figure out how to be, you know, calculating the TCS tax properly, submitting the paperwork and the tax properly. Like, all of that is managed in our platform. So in addition to having the school say, "This is the way we want you to pay," we've made it simpler. Now, of course, we've also made sure that the price is appropriate, and the value is there for the payer for the service we're providing.
You know, we believe it's a premium service, but we understand it has to be priced fairly, reasonably, and appropriately for those markets, and that's what we do. But make no mistake, like, the other ways of doing this have not made the investment in the market and the experience that we have made. So just to give a couple specific examples of that, we have announced over a recent period a series of banks that we integrate with, and when you integrate with a bank in India, you create this experience where instead of having to run around and do this whole process, you can go through all of it in the Flywire experience. You essentially get logged into your Indian bank. You can authorize that payment, and that will drive an FX transaction on the Flywire platform.
And so we've done that with ICICI. We've done that with another second very big bank in India, HDFC, and we are just now in the early stages of the rollout of what is the largest Indian public sector bank, SBI. And all of this is an example of not just creating a better experience, but creating a better experience that's oriented around driving the FX experience. We also do a big investment in the agent platform. That's a little bit of what I talked about just a second ago with StudyLink. We can kinda come back to all that. You know, the second point that I think is helpful, given the set of investor questions and conversations lately, is sort of understanding this economic decision for the student payer, right?
And so, we've always offered the choice. As Flywire, we've always offered the choice, pay USD to USD from India, or pay via INR to USD using our FX. You know, the revenue is a flat fee. You know, it's in the $20-ish range for doing that transaction, on a USD-to-USD basis. But I think that people have not properly understood the way Flywire ensures that our pricing doing FX is fair, appropriate, reasonable in the market, and that's what's driven, you know, majority of payers certainly to use our complete service. And that is the key detail that people haven't understood is that our pricing has multiple elements to sort of the pricing algorithm, but the key one for this conversation is that the pricing is tiered, right?
So when you make a much bigger payment, sort of the way that spread works is it will essentially tier down to make sure that the value is appropriate for the value that we're providing—the price is appropriate for the value that we're providing. So that's a key point that I think people haven't understood. The way they've been doing math has sort of led them to very different conclusions.
Got it.
The final point, biggest point, most important point that I hope you'll sort of take away in all of this, is that India's a huge market opportunity for us, right? So it's still a opportunity to penetrate the market much more, significantly than we have. If I had sort of the scale, and I got to say, "What's more important to Flywire, being effective and successful in penetrating the market or this mix piece?" Clearly, the side of the scale that matters is penetrating the market. Now, we're gonna do our best, and we have, as I've just described to you all, a bunch of strategies to address mix as well. In terms of the big opportunity for India, it's penetrating the market.
Could we double-click on some of those strategies?
Sure.
The question I do get is, you know, it sounds like some of this behavior and this commonplace FX fluctuations are going to happen, but nonetheless, I get the question of: "Is this gonna last into the first quarter? Does this impact the medium-term revenue target?" So if you could touch on those topics as well-
Yeah
as some of the strategies you have in place-
Yeah
I think that'd be helpful as well.
Yeah. So one thing I'd say on this is like, we always have competition, right? It'd be great if we didn't, but, like, there's competition on the payers. There's competition on the schools. Like, there's always competition. The fundamental way that we have won and we will continue to win is having a great payer proposition, right? It's kind of all those things that I just talked about a few minutes ago in terms of the value, the simplicity, the compliance, security, speed, you know, and all of those elements of the core service. We have to get those right. The next two elements really do focus around the bank aspect and that I talked about a minute ago, and I think it's worth double-clicking on the agent piece of what we're doing.
Yeah.
So agents are a big deal in India. They help guide and inform the whole journey, including the payment choice of the students and their parents, and we've built a platform specifically for those agents, right? So those agents inside the Flywire experience can essentially, when it comes time to the payment, they can initiate an email that goes to the student. That student- it has a link back to essentially the Flywire set of assets to help drive that payment experience, and the agents wanna see the student make the payment that way. Obviously, the school wants to see the student make that payment that way, and that's where obviously Flywire drives the most FX opportunity. So that investment in agents is probably in its second, third year now.
We've significantly expanded our team in India that helps service and support this agent ecosystem, and we kinda just doubled down on that, because with StudyLink, we now have the platform that is in front of agents for all of this application and admission process. And what we'll do is make an integrated experience of all of that, that will provide sort of that next-level experience. Again, we would've said we were happy with our strategy just with the agent platform we had, the strategy we had penetrating the agents, the growth in our coverage footprint of those agents, but StudyLink brings us even the ability to go faster on that strategy. And so, again, I come back to the key point, like, that's how we're gonna penetrate the market.
You know, we monetize all forms of transaction on our network: domestic, international, card, bank transfer. We monetize all of it, and we'll continue to do that, in India and everywhere else.
Got it. Okay. That's, that's helpful. The other focal point from the quarter was some of the delays in implementation. Could you talk about that, how that was spread out, what verticals that was specific to?
Yeah
and, you know, the impact, how we should think about that going forward, I guess?
Yeah, yeah. So, first, and again, just, just for context, you know, we've got 3,700 clients, you know, almost all of them live, almost all of who have gone through a successful implementation process that was both satisfying and cost-effective. We're very good at doing implementations. We have a great team. We called out in Q3 implementation delays because think of about six clients, six notable clients, did have implementation delays that impacted their ability to contribute revenue to the quarter. So they were split across education and healthcare. I'd probably focus on the education ones because Q3, as you all know, is the big quarter for education, right? You see that in all of our, our seasonality.
I have in mind, you know, one of the ones that's a college in Canada, pretty significant revenue opportunity for us, and, you know, they made the decision to push the go-live. And if you push the go-live past Q3, you do miss the Q3 opportunity to catch that student intake period. You know, they'll still be a client going forward, but you can imagine, kind of like a bank or an e-commerce provider, all has a code freeze before Christmas 'cause nobody wants or before the holidays, 'cause nobody wants to be making big, big changes to their systems right before a peak. Schools have that dynamic, but they just have it a bit earlier in the year 'cause it relates to the student intake period. So we had a couple of those.
That sort of added up to $1 million-$9 million impact as well. If those same delays had happened in Q2, probably wouldn't have talked about it, but because they happened in Q3, they're part of sort of that same bridge, that I described before. One thing that's come up in a bunch of investor conversations, they said, "Hey, like, did you lose any of those clients?" The answer is no.
Do you have capacity to deliver clients?" The answer is yes. And so, you know, we view that as just part of the dynamic of the Q3 conversation. What I'd leave folks with is, in our view, the fact that we do these deployments, the fact that we take on the complexity of integrating into these environments, is one of the core advantages of Flywire. Like, in the big picture, that's what serves the longevity of our client relationships and what's, you know, software drives value and payments, fundamentally hinges on the ability to integrate into their systems and do stuff that a simple payment company couldn't do. So, you know, we do see these kinds of coming and going in terms of the delays, but in the big picture, you know, we're big believers in this being a core, core capability of the company.
Got it. And there was an impact on the healthcare vertical as well, if I recall.
Yeah.
Could you touch on that as well?
Yeah, probably smaller in dollar value as part of the Q3. You know, healthcare is probably our most complex environment, like the hospital IT infrastructure system is complicated, and we did have several of those where the dates, had they been earlier, would've helped contribute to the quarter.
Got it. Okay. So taking all that into account, you know, you still increased the guide on an organic basis during the year-
which I think is a point that was lost on investors. Could you touch on the key drivers of that guide increase?
Yeah, sure. So, Rob talked about puts and takes, and what we just saw is a lot of those puts are impacting Q4.
Yeah
and going forward. So, just to give folks some grounding, in Q4, we guided to $86.5 million-$90.5 million. $88.5 at the midpoint, which, if you don't look into it, is just a push, the same that we had implied in our prior guidance. But when you take into account the $2.5 million of incremental, I should say, less FX tailwind than we thought, then actually it's a $2.6 million plus increase in our constant dollar guidance, right? That come from three sources, so strength in China that Rob talked about strength into the U.K. that we talked about. Those aren't necessarily unrelated. But, the third factor, I would say, is our travel business, right?
Yeah.
So in particular the destination management companies Rob mentioned, and what's exciting about it to me is that it's, it's not-- Last year, we tripled the business. We're lapping COVID. Our NRR, our same-store sales is, is elevated because of lapping COVID. This year, in particular, going into last quarter, right, that's normalizing, and you're still seeing this business double-
Yeah
because of the strength of our increased sales, right? A credit to our go-to-market capabilities, and so that's offset a little bit by what we saw in India, right? There's some U.S.-India corridor revenue in December that we'll keep our eye on, but these encouraging signs helped us to increase our constant dollar guidance.
Got it. So the momentum in travel has actually been a pretty big theme over the past couple of quarters, but so a couple of things I wanted to touch on there. First, the impact on gross margin, and then secondly, Rob, you talked about the countercyclicality of your verticals. I know when people hear travel, countercyclicality doesn't exactly-
Yeah
jump out.
Yeah, fair.
So with that in mind, you know, these are trips that, as we know, these are trips that are planned months in advance, probably skewing towards a higher-end consumer. So with respect to travel, I wanted to touch on the gross margin implications as well as who exactly you're serving and why it is you could characterize it as countercyclical?
All right, so I'll start, and then I'll probably hand to you for the gross margin part.
Sure.
So, let me dig in a little bit more on where we play in the travel vertical. So there's three key sub-segments that we play in today, right? So there's tour operators, these are the direct folks who provide sort of the experiences that you might have. You know, Heliski is the one that people are used to talking about, but I mentioned a whole list of other kinds of experiences earlier in the discussion. There are the destination management companies that we talked about a little bit earlier, and then there's an accommodation segment. So we didn't talk about that at any point earlier. So picture us working with a range of different accommodation providers. You can picture vacation clubs, where you have your annual fee associated with it.
You can picture various forms of corporate housing, student housing, accommodation providers of that sort. All that fits into our accommodation segment. And sorry, excuse me. The point you made around sort of countercyclicality is that, you know, this is not the same sort of Spirit Air lines, Delta Air lines kind of travel. These are, first of all, targeting a different demographic, and second of all, these are trips that tend to be long-planned further in advance, and they're sort of, you know, important trips to the audiences that get to take them. So I get it when you say our four verticals, of the four, travel would be the least countercyclical of those, perhaps.
But relative to the travel market at large, our segment we view as being significantly more countercyclical, in that sense. So maybe I'll let you cover the margin, and then if I missed anything, you can bring us back to it.
Yep.
Yeah, sure. So, yeah, we tried to illustrate the dynamic in our travel vertical in our supplement this quarter. You can see our volume growing. You can see the tripling and doubling we're referring to, but also higher cost of sales and a higher monetization rate, right? We're, we're a cost-plus model on transactions. We make sure that our spreads are very healthy across our verticals and across our payment types because we're providing a software solution, expect to be paid for it, and we have been. It just so happens that in our cost-plus model, that cost includes interchange in a, in a vertical that has a lot of credit card use. So our revenue is higher than it would be if they were using bank transfer. We're not gonna apologize for that, but it makes the gross margins a little bit lower.
As that business grows, that can bring down our gross margins. So we've continued to give you guys disclosure on our gross profit spread for total Flywire transactions. Even as this business triples and doubles, it's been stable because what we said was true, that our economics are healthy across all the verticals.
Yep.
The long-term plan, obviously, is to continue to sell in new software solutions into travel like we've done in education over time, and that may eventually, you know, inflect our gross margins. But, you know, we're focused on gross profit growth.
Got it. So I wanna switch gears to B2B. You know, obviously a huge opportunity, as many of us are aware, and it seems like most of the companies I cover play in that space to some degree. Could you talk about your specific role within the B2B market, where you're differentiated, and your value proposition to, to your customers?
Absolutely. So super excited about our B2B business and the opportunity there, and I think the right place to start is distinguish it from what is a lot of the noise and the companies that you see on the B2B payment side. So first thing to be clear is, consistent with the other parts of our business, we're primarily focused on helping our clients get paid, right? So there's an AP side of the payments landscape, there's an AR side of the payments landscape. We are serving on the AR side of that landscape, and we view that as the way more strategic place to play. The comment I've made on previous occasions is, you know, we don't know the CFO or the finance department that was really, you know, applauded for being better at paying the bills fast.
What we know is that CFOs and the finance function are applauded when they can help collect the money faster, when they can help, you know, drive down DSOs, when they can help expand to new markets more effectively, and so we play on that side of the ledger. We have a certain, what we'd call sort of the mid-enterprise size segment that we're playing for. So picture sort of $100 million-$2 billion in revenue, big enough to matter for us, but not so big as to have solved a lot of this stuff. Like, if you look at the really big companies, they've figured out a lot of their international playbook, but the mid-enterprise has not, and we target specific segments.
So, the two most notable segments early on were around tech and manufacturing, and tech companies are perfect candidates for us. Picture the California company or whatever, wherever it may be, but they've got clients all around the world. It's a digital good. They're trying to collect money from Brazil, Mexico, you know, Asia, whatever it might be. Perfect application for Flywire. Second was manufacturing. Third was we announced that we were being active in the franchising space, so picture international franchisees. And most recently, we've announced a series of wins in insurance, so insurance being sort of the fourth sub-segment within B2B. But, it goes back to the Flywire playbook, which is, we sit in between a system of record, which is very often NetSuite, Salesforce, systems like that, and the payment experience.
B2B is a great showcase for software drives value in payments because you start adding all kinds of complexity, right? You've got multiple invoices coming in. I'm trying to pay these two, short pay the third, and submit a payment that reconciles automatically back to NetSuite. Can't do that in the old world of putting wire instructions on PDFs. You can't do any of that and take the noise out of the system, without having the kind of digital experience and the integrations that software, Flywire software is especially good at enabling. So it's a great opportunity for us. Those are the sub-segments that we're playing in now. Those are some of the biggest of the ERP systems that we integrate with.
But really, you can expect this to feel like the other Flywire businesses, where we'll keep adding more integrations, we'll keep adding more sub-segments. Today, we're focused predominantly in the U.S. market. We have not taken this offering sort of affirmatively around the world, but if you look at Flywire's track record, we'll pick a second and third market. We'll start to put some go-to-market resources in those geographies, and take this proposition more broadly.
Got it. I have one more question, then we'll wrap up. The topic of competition comes up-
Yeah
frequently. So I was wondering if you could touch on who you compete against across your verticals, how you're differentiated, and if at all that plays, it could potentially play into your M&A strategy as well?
Yeah. Yeah. So, the way to think about competition for Flywire is to understand that it mostly happens at the vertical level.
Okay.
Like, it's not really sort of, there's not another Flywire-like company out there that we see that plays across verticals and talks about software drives value and payments as we do. But as you go to each of the verticals, you will for sure see competition within each of those verticals. So in education, there's sort of two classes of competitors, and the same way I broke it out earlier of thinking about the cross-border component of our business, there are a set of competitors out there. I think we've done very well distinguishing ourselves against them in terms of the payment network and capabilities, but especially in terms of the software that we provide.
So they can't come in and talk about sort of the level of integrations we have, and sort of the richness of our solution, the customer care that we provide, all of those things. If you look in the domestic space, and again, kind of assuming that that's more about sort of the U.S. domestic space, there are certainly competitors. There's a set of incumbents that provide those that provide a lot of schools with their domestic payment platform. And we continue to be on the mission of how we use our software, which, again, pound the table conviction, we got the best platform, and how to accelerate the transition for all of those schools from what is, we believe, very dated software to our modern technology stack. So that's competition on the education side.
Healthcare, probably, again, two classes of competitors. The main one is that there's a whole set of players out there in this, what we call sort of the revenue cycle management landscape. Like, these are companies that serve big hospitals, providing a range of revenue cycle. And a lot of them will say, "Hey, I got you covered on your digital experience as well." What we know, and we didn't have time in today's session, is to actually provide a great experience that really drives yield in collecting against this patient responsibility portion, takes all the sophisticated things we do. More intelligent payment plans, more effective omni-channel communication. All of that is where we go deeper than the competition, and that's what's distinguished us in being successful in that space. If you look at travel, travel's an interesting one.
The domain of competition is oftentimes, like, more like just the local card acquirer. But if you picture sort of what we're offering to a travel entity relative to a pay button offered by a card acquirer, we're bringing them the whole global payment network. We're bringing them the sophistication of payment experiences, do the split payments, do the scheduled payments, help you with. We didn't get to talking today about sort of commission payables and the things we can do on the payable side inside the travel ecosystem. So again, all of that's what helps distinguish us, and we actually called out on our earnings call just now
feeling, you know, particularly, effective competing against big card acquirer types that, again, great at handling the volume, great at handling a card, but not necessarily invested in the particular needs of that travel ecosystem. Final piece on B2B, like, it's so early in that space. Like, the main competition is really just keep doing it the way you're doing it. You got your bank lockbox. You're putting your wire instructions on a PDF. That really is the frankly, that's modern by many standards 'cause it means it's evolved from sending paper bills around, but, like, that is kind of the standard in most of the industry. So the kinds of digital experiences we're creating there, like, there's really not much out there, people enabling those kinds of capabilities for B2B.
Got it. Great. Well, I think that's about all the time we have today. Did you have any closing remarks for the audience?
No, I mean, obviously, we've talked a lot about India. We talked a lot about sort of, you know, this particular Q3 dynamic. I would just suggest we think we're building a great company. We think that company is founded on providing great value to clients, great value to payers. That's a global business with, you know, clients in 30-plus countries, FlyMates all around the world. We've got a track record for delivering for all of those stakeholders, and, you know, our intention is to keep doing that.
Great. Well, thanks again.