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FinTech Conference

Jun 11, 2024

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Well, thanks everyone for coming back post-lunch. My name's Dan Perlin. If you haven't heard me before, I head up the fintech practice here at RBC, and I'm delighted to have Cosmin Pitigoi here, who's the chief financial officer of Flywire. I should say, the newly appointed chief financial officer of Flywire. Thank you so much for being here.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

Thanks, Dan.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

It's, it's an exciting time at the company. There's lots of things to talk about. But before we delve into kind of all the topic du jour, because you are new to the organization, you had a really successful career prior to coming here. You could have gone to a lot of different places. Why Flywire?

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

Good question, and thanks. Thanks for having me, Dan, and I appreciate all the conversations I've had with investors here today.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Great.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

It's been great. So let's see. I've been sort of in financial services for about 25 years, but the last 20 years, to your point, was I started at PayPal just as they got acquired by eBay. So I worked between PayPal and eBay in a lot of different kind of operational, commercial roles. Deep sometimes in the data and operational side. You know, worked on investor relations and strategy and other areas. And I was able to sort of see things, you know, at scale, and build that scale from early, early days, whether it was at PayPal or eBay.

I was actually sort of fortunate to be there through a lot of the different big milestones that those companies went through, whether it was early days at PayPal, building the FX capabilities-

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Mm.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

-which, you know, I know it's a topic here too, and...

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Yeah.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

or the cross-border capabilities that both eBay and PayPal had, and which is a key component of kind of the business models. Certainly, you know, a lot of integration between the companies and going sort of, you know, taking PayPal, separating the two companies. So a lot of different milestones along the way.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Yep.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

So as you said, great, great time, and so as I sort of hit my 20-year mark there, I heard about a company that can do cross-border trade, not with, you know, $100 or $50, but with $50,000 tuition payments.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Mm-hmm.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

That piqued my interest.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Yeah.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

'Cause it's not easy if you understand the components of being able to do that, the global payments sort of network you have to build, the banking infrastructure, then the software that you have to actually build. So the idea of the software and payments combined drive value, it's a very powerful combination. But then, what really attracted me is, you know, I started talking to the team, the team there, and, you know, met Mike and the others, and it's a great team.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Yeah.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

And so that really was kind of the combination of a great business that was built over a decade plus, that is clearly showing now that sort of getting to that scale that I remember seeing early days at PayPal. That's, it's really great to see that scale kind of and the desire and the capability to grow even more. And we have very low penetration. If you look at the TAM, I know a lot of the questions are around these short-term kind of headwinds that we're talking about, but we're early, I think, very early stage in terms of our ability to penetrate in each of these verticals. So as you think about building a business that has great horizontal and vertical capabilities-

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Mm.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

-that enables you to both kind of grow but also create scale over time, and so for me, that's a unique thing. But the culture, the culture is very unique. It's a, it's a team that can get things done at a speed that I've not seen in a while. So,

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Yeah

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

... it's great to be part of that, that earlier stage and that excitement where you can truly say we're gonna do something, and suddenly you can get a group of people together and make it happen. That's, that's an exciting time-

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Yeah.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

It's an exciting time at the company.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

That's pretty interesting to think about, like, you know, when you were at PayPal and the parallels of how that was scaling out on its own relative to where Flywire is today, but also understanding the importance of the complexity of that payment network that they built.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

Yes.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

So-

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

Yeah, it's a very complex... Arguably, it's—we're solving a very complex problem.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Yeah.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

But it's a very simple business. That's what I love about it, too, is that, you know, very consistent kind of growth and margins, gross margins over time. And so even though the complex issue is there, and these verticals that were, that Flywire in are, are those verticals that were sort of ignored by the legacy players and 'cause it's not easy to just put a button on a- I have four kids, so if you put a button on, you know, an education website, it's not gonna really solve the problem that we're trying to solve.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Yeah.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

It's receiving those, you know, the accounts receivable view that we have when we look at solving that specific problem requires more complex software solutions than I think provided by the legacy part-

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Yeah.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

payment providers.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Totally. All right, well, let's get into the nitty-gritty, right? We'll start with the education vertical, and we'll go through the others, but the question that keeps coming up on everyone's, you know, top list is obviously the Canadian visa limitations. I know you've probably been answering that question in meetings all day today-

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

Yes

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

... but it would be good to kind of, kind of get it out in the open and say, based on what you're seeing, how you're thinking about it, what is it doing in terms of impacting your business? I mean, I know you've given some framework, and so maybe you might want to reiterate that, but it's a bigger question, I think, that's out there in terms of-

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

Yeah, yeah

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

... what does it mean?

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

So, we've talked a lot about Canadian sort of the Canadian impact and immigration kind of dynamics there. And the way to think about what was done there is, which is different than maybe other markets that we may talk about. So in Canada, they basically shut off all the sort of visa applications in Q1, which was the biggest impact for us that we laid out. It was a single-digit, high single-digit impact in Q1. It literally is, I describe it as you sort of stopping the Titanic. And so what we're now seeing is in sort of early Q2, they told every university, "Okay, here's your allocated slots that you need, that you are now allowed.

We have an allocated number of visas for each of you, and you can go fill those spots with international students." And so what we're now seeing is all these educational institutions are basically ramping back up... the question we got around Q2 was: Well, you know, why was the impact bigger than you thought? Well, it's because to get the Titanic moving again, it takes a bit of time. These educational institutions are working to fill those slots, but it takes time. So it's-

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Mm-hmm.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

So to some extent, that Q2 impact that we had, which was a single-digit impact, part of that is sort of pushed into second half as the sort of enrollment kind of goes through. But it's what we call a rolling-

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Yep

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

kind of enrollment, so it's sort of starting in May, going through June into Q3. So some of that revenue out of Q2 went into second half. And so that's kind of driving that dynamic. So now we're watching this kind of, you know, slowly come back up as universities are filling those slots. Obviously, they have every incentive to fill each one of those spots, and students are, you know, obviously want to go get a quality education. The last piece, somewhat related to Canada, but related to other countries, is this idea of recapture.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Right.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

Where we have the assumption that some students may look at that and go, "Well, maybe there's other countries I can go to." And we work with agents, our agent partners, to help them place them wherever they want to go. And so, stepping back just to frame up the size of the Canada business for us, it's. We've said it's about 14% of revenue this year. And we've discussed basically a roughly mid-teens negative impact from Canada on our business this year.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Yep, yep. So it's interesting, that recapture rate is, when you think about the agent network that you have, help us understand the visibility that you actually get from that,

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

Yeah

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

... in terms of the placement of the recapture rate, because it feels like you guys have a better sense than I think a lot of people want to give you credit for. And I think a lot of that, maybe not all of it, but some of it seems to stem from the agent network you have.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

It is. So, the other thing, maybe it's a broader point about Flywire. We work with a lot of partners, and our partners in education are the agents who actually help, especially for international students. And I myself am one. I've studied in three different continents. You need help to navigate that.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Mm.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

So the agents help, especially international students, navigate that complex environment, especially as it relates to these three or four big kind of regions. So we work with them and build up a model that is basically at a university level, bottoms up, based on input from the agent saying, "Okay, I think, I think, you know, my student is going to go to this school or this school, and then or, or this region or that region." And so we have folks on the ground, whether it's in Canada, Australia, or other markets-

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Mm-hmm

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

... where they work with, these agents to try to basically build out that model. So we have an estimate that's kind of a built-up, bottoms-up, that helps us get probably, yes, a much better idea of what the impact is.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Mm-hmm.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

It still is, you know, a bit of art.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Yeah

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

... and science because it is human behavior, so you can be-

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Yeah.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

I'm a bit of a sort of machine learning data guy, so there's always a range of possibilities when you're talking about forecasting human behavior. But we feel based on the input, on the payer side and behavior and history and agent input, along with the bottoms-up build, 'cause we work, of course, with the schools, we have, you know, probably better visibility than most around, you know, kind of how this is going to play out.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Okay. And then just maybe more broadly, you know, your conviction in this not being a bigger issue, like, you know, the political angle of immigration policy and this being a tool in which to kind of broadcast it, whether it is truly an issue long term or not. How do you think about that in terms of playing out across your, your entire portfolio? I mean, you had a little bit in the UK earlier first, and then it's come to Canada, so how do you address that?

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

Yeah, look, a lot of headlines, I think, this year, and probably more just from, as I think many parts of the world are going through an election cycle.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Yeah.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

So of course, you're going to get a lot of headlines. How many of those headlines actually turn into action, I think remains to be seen in many, in many ways. So for us, you know, we obviously try to focus on what we can control versus the uncontrollables. But within those ranges, there's different scenarios kind of playing out in different countries. So Canada was sort of the extreme example of sort of shutting down its spigot entirely. I think we're seeing different sort of countries take different approaches, whereas in the U.K., you know, we've seen some initial an approach around graduate students and their ability to bring families in, and sort of they decided against that. Australia is a little bit different.

And again, I think students have the ability to have choices to go in other areas. So we work with that agent network to say, you know, where do you see that opportunity, if not in those countries, maybe in different countries? So when you step all the way back, what we need—you know, we try to remind everyone is that we, you know, 'cause even in the U.K., our growth was much-

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Yeah

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

... much higher. It was basically doubled in size in Q1, and that's because we're starting from a very low penetration. So the sort of maybe the missing component of the story is we have very low penetration in all these markets. We keep adding new clients, and also we have cross-product cross-sell for new products in a lot of these markets that help us kind of get to get to sort of higher growth rates that are not necessarily impacted simply by the number of students, you know, over time.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Yeah.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

So that's, you know, maybe less of an impact than if it was just based on student growth.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Yeah. So, like, let's take those issues off the table and now talk about the growth opportunities that actually are

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

Yeah

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

... available to you within kind of both cross-border education payments, but also domestic-based education payments. So thinking about that more, more holistically, where are we in that journey? You talk about penetration rates-

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

Mm-hmm

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

... and penetration within the TAM, but then there's also, like, what's the cycle for a university that maybe signed up with you guys but doesn't have all their international students yet on that? It feels like, not to use the Flywire, but there is this like opportunity still left ahead that is underappreciated as well. So maybe if you could talk about some of the opportunities.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

Yeah. I think the best way I've described it as of, again, sort of three months in the role, the way I look at it is separating U.S. education versus international. And we've disclosed, I think, in Q4, that U.S. education is around 25% of the business.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Mm-hmm.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

International is actually the bigger, over, you know, 50% of it, of our revenue. And the cross-sell approach is a little bit different. What we see in the U.S., if you recall, we started with cross-border.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Yeah.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

So, out of the 4,000-5,000, you know, universities and colleges out there, we have about 1,000 of them on this cross-border product. And of that, we've said we've got a, call it, high single-digit penetration with our cross-border product. So there is what you've heard us talk about as land and expand, which is we have the cross-border product. Universities have come to us and said, "Hey, you already do the hardest part, which is the cross-border part, the most complex part." You know, we have a product that does all the domestic and competes quite well with the existing incumbents there, which are sort of about 3 of them that, you know, known names have been around for a while. We've competed with them for a long time.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Mm-hmm.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

So, you know, we're able to then come and sort of chip away at that block. You know, it's obviously a longer cycle, but there are also situations like we called out in the earnings call, where we had a large university that basically said, "You know, if you can get us live in 30 days, we'll go with you with the domestic product." So my point earlier, the whole team came together, and we got it done in 30 days, even though

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Yeah

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

... they hated it 'cause they said that this usually takes longer, but they loved the fact that you get to work with, you know, everyone in such an agile way to solve a unique and customer problem.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Yeah

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

Like in such a sort of, you know, collaborative way. And it was great to see that. And so there's that opportunity in the U.S. In international, it's different 'cause you're going in with the full suite of products, so it's not the sort of two-step process. You're kind of going in, and there's not a ton of sort of large competitors that are sort of spread out 'cause it's just more, it's more of a segmented market there. So there. And again, the other thing that I hadn't mentioned, but maybe a little bit, is just the fact that we are integrated with a lot of the back-end systems providers. So then, we come in, and we can then actually integrate into the system of record for that university.

So it helps to kinda have those partners kinda going with us in these.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Got it. How do we think about the growth, like, algorithm or trajectory in just education in aggregate from here?

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

Look, if you were to break up NRR for just education in particular, I think you kind of have to take three different components up. And the way I've talked about it a bit is, first is what you also mentioned a little bit of international student growth, which-

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Yep

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

You know, again, we look at it long-term. Open Doors, I think, .com, has an estimate of the last 10-20 years of sort of low single-digit growth. Then you have tuition growth. I joke, and I have four kids, four boys. I wish my tuition bills would go down. They're not going to, so I think tuition will continue to be a growth factor, in there. So that's sort of secular growth. Then what we talk about is the fact that we have actually 95% retention, so we have very low churn-

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Yeah

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

and that's on a client basis, on a TPV basis, it's even higher than that. So we have very low churn, so you don't have to subtract a lot of that initial number.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Yep.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

And then the growth drivers are actually multiple drivers, not just one.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Yep.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

Which, you know, if it was just one, you know, I'd, I'd be more concerned. But you have, you know, you, you go into university, you start with the undergrad, then you go to the medical school, the graduate school, maybe the, you know, some other office outside. So there's geo expansion, there's product expansion. We have StudyLink and other capabilities that we, that we bring in on the agent side, and then on the university side, we have the 529 plans that, you know... So we continue to innovate, even as we've competed, by the way, over the last decade plus, with all these existing providers in EDU. We continue to innovate, like with the 529 plans, which-

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Yeah

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

Again, it was a... So all these levers then get you to that 120+ NRR that we've seen pretty consistently over the-

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Yeah

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

You know, basically pre-IPO, since IPO, you know, very high, and it's because it's not just one thing, because it is a number, you know.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Yep

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

multiple things, so.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Yep. All right, let's pivot a little bit for sake of time over to healthcare, which, you know, it, it, it used to be kind of like the sleepy part of the story, and maybe it still is relative to all this other stuff, but the reality is, it's, it's kind of having its renaissance moment, right? It's seen a lot of improvement. You've got a pipeline that's growing, I don't know, over 100%. I mean, these are pretty big numbers.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

Yeah.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

You're dealing with very large institutions, so it's not like you're seeing a pipeline of 100% growth on a teeny little institution. I mean, these are massive healthcare organizations. What's happening in that segment now that maybe wasn't transpiring, let's say, a year ago or so?

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

Yeah, I think there's about three things that have sort of been part of the turnaround story, if you will. One is we've changed the leadership team, the sales team, and so we brought in some folks focused on that enterprise segment. We have four of the top 10 kind of, you know, hospital systems out there, kind of, that we work with. Second, we've got this product, you know, integrated financing that allows you to sort of finance, you know, as you start to get larger and larger bills. And then third, we have an opportunity to move, so as we go, we're sort of enterprise-sized to go down market to smaller, kind of, ortho centers or sur-

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Mm-hmm

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

You know, surgical, where you would have kind of a larger dollar amount.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Yep.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

Again, kind of plays into that idea of being able to split up the payment in many customized ways. So that, those three things are what is driving some of that second-half acceleration that you see built into our guidance for the year.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

... Yep. So that's good to consider that, that piece of the business is actually a big contributor now as you're going into the back half, as opposed to-

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

Yes.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Maybe something that didn't play as

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

Yeah, last year it was 8% of the business, and it was negative.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Yeah, it was a little bit more of a problem.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

Certainly, yeah.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Now, you did also talk about this new, kind of integrated patient financing option with third parties.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

Yeah.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

That seems like that's got real opportunity.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

Yeah.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Early days, but like, so talk about how that might be a way in which to energize growth.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

Yeah, look, that product came out of, again, patient affordability, kind of a desire to obviously, as you, you know, you're seeing these medical bills go up higher and higher. And providing an opportunity... And we play in that, you know, if you look at the entire journey from insurance to patient, we play in that journey where we interact with the patient. So our ability to help that patient be able to afford that, that bill, while working with the hospital and provider to integrate into the back end-

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Mm-hmm.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

is kind of where this product plays in, and it's, you know, zero-zero interest. You know, we don't have sort of aggressive tactics on collection, and so it is kind of a very customer- or client-friendly approach. And it's a third party that's doing it, so as the CFO, I'm, you know-

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

The balance sheet.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

... The rest, the rest, yeah.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Yeah.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

There's no balance sheet at risk, and so it is us just providing that capability, and along with the analytics and the risk profile. So we can look at your profile and say, "Based on what we know about you, these are the types of payment plans that may work for you." And so of course, hospitals love that, and it's a great product, and

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Yeah.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

Yeah, should be a big growth driver.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Yeah, I think, the team doesn't like when I call it the BNPL of healthcare, but it does have a lot of similarities, so... But

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

BNPL was off the table. If somebody else is handling, yes, make sense.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

It just kind of conceptually-

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

I like that, yeah.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

-isn't all that different. But let's get into travel, because travel's got some enormous growth-

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

Yes

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

that it's produced and continues to do so. So maybe walk through the growth algorithm there for the business, but also talk about, you know, you've got operators, you've got some of these specialty players, you know, you've got some bigger enterprise relationships. So maybe, decompose a little bit how that business actually works and where you're seeing all that growth come from.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

Yeah. So just to size up the travel business for us, so last year, what we said is travel plus B2B was around 13% of the business, growing at 120% year-over-year. Now, majority of that travel and B2B is travel. B2B is still a small portion of our business. So it is now, travel is our second largest, kind of vertical. And the way I think about it is, you know, I think we started out with luxury travel. That was sort of the early, And it was something that came out of that B2B sort of-

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Yeah

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

-you know, innovation lab, if you will, where it was something that looked a lot like education early, early stage, where we're seeing that kind of the similar product needs, where you're taking a large dollar currency kind of amount. You have, kind of a, whether it's a travel agent initially or more, you know, broader travel providers who are now struggling with the back-office integration with a large currency payment, and we can come in and help them both, both ends kind of manage that payment. And so we're able to kind of come in and, and grow that business from, I think pre-pandemic was, you know, $a few million, and now it's-

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Yeah

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

... it's a large business. But it's that luxury travel is the vertical generally. I think the way I prefer to describe it is more of a multi-day bespoke travel. So if you're thinking of, you know, a number of families getting together, and hey, we want to go do what we, you know, approached as, you know, Ocean Experiences.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Mm-hmm.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

Sub-vertical.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Yep.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

Which, again, the way we look at that is what is the TAM? And it's about $16 billion just for that part of it. So it's pretty large TAMs in each of these sub-verticals.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Mm

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

for these types of travel experiences.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Yeah.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

Huge opportunity for us, so growing really fast. Had the highest, sort of record ARR in Q1. So seeing really good, sort of performance there and, you know, continuing to invest in it, because we see that growth profile looking a lot like, like I said, early education days.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Yeah. And you're saying now it's the second largest piece of the business?

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

Yeah.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

So it goes.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

Yeah

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

It goes education and aggregate.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

Travel.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

-now travel.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

And then health, yeah.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

And then healthcare. Okay. Yeah, so it's definitely overtaken that in a short period of time. And then there's B2B, which, you know, you definitely, I think it's interesting because you have so much success with just like the manufacturing and distribution side of it. I think it's like a quarter-

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

Yes

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

-of that. Why has that become like the de facto area where there's been so much success, just for you? I'm not saying it's not applicable to other areas, but you have had a lot of success there, so...

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

I think again, and maybe it plays to the CFOs, it's the idea that we can help you with your accounts receivable in particular. So we come in, and we attach ourselves to that invoice, and you're, you know, if you're in manufacturing or maybe even a large tech company, and you receive all these PDF documents with, you know, little tags at the bottom, you're trying to reconcile all these, and it's in a foreign currency. There's an opportunity for us to help with all of that, tie it back into your system of record, reconcile it to the penny, and be able to track it for you. And so, you can see where all of those look a lot... Again, look, if you think of that platform I talked about upfront and the product itself-

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Mm-hmm

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

Very much extensible to all these use cases. So the way we approach it internally and increasingly as I've come in, as I look at capital allocation and resource allocation, you tie in these sort of large TAMs for each of these areas, manufacturing, insurance, and others, like we did with travel. You tie it into the investment that you can make based on the same product capabilities that you already have, and you just like, you know, it's not a far extension of the platform to be able to provide the same service to that manufacturing company as it is to the kind of travel provider there. So that, that's the way we think about it.

I think of the B2B business as really a little bit of an innovation lab, where we can sort of have these pivots of interesting verticals that have that synergy with the rest of the business.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Yeah.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

So huge, huge growth right now off a small base, but excited about kind of having that sort of lever to be able to, you know, find other opportunities that organically you don't have to do a lot to kind of grow the business from there.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Yep. So we talked a bit about the attributes that drive the top line. Let's kind of funnel that down to the profitability and, and take into consideration that some of the growth in travel and maybe domestic tend to be higher carded. And so I wanna start with the gross margin dynamics that maybe are at play, maybe some puts and takes we should be mindful of and how that should settle. And then you've got built into guidance for, the full year, I think 320 basis points-

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

Yeah

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

of margin expansion for EBITDA. So, like, you're continuing to leverage even further, despite the fact that maybe there are some toggles that you've got to do with gross profit.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

Yeah. So the way to think about it, so our revenue is, is transaction revenue and platform revenue. The transaction is more tied into the volume, and what we look there is to ensure that the monetization rate, or take rate, as I used to call it in my past, is relatively stable-

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Mm-hmm

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

... over time, whether it's a credit card, or it's a bank. What we look at is that spread is relatively consistent. So we almost are indifferent how you pay, which, you know, wanna give people options and choice. So that's one piece. And the mix there of the business is yes, indeed, so credit card, would naturally have a, lower gross margin. But what I look at is the growth of profit dollars, gross profit dollars over time, year over year-

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Yeah

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

... as much as the percent, which may come under pressure. Now, the other thing to think about, though, is the platform revenue is all pretty much software revenue-

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Yeah

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

and that's very high gross margin. So, you know, in cases where we may have to see some pressure from mix, on the transaction side, it'll be offset to some extent, like, you know, talk about StudyLink and other sort of-

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Mm-hmm

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

... pure software, which is the more traditional software gross margin, which is much higher. So those kind of play into that 100-200 bps-

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Okay

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

... of gross margin, sort of mix, decline that we've talked about.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Okay. And then, you know, the go-to-market motion and improvements that you guys have been investing in, that was, you know, that seemed to be a pretty important pivot for you guys in terms of investments. I think you said fifteen percent or so in 2024 is what you're gonna do, and half of that's gonna-

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

Yeah

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Go-to-market motion. So maybe talk about the investment outlay, the expected kind of return on that, and maybe some of the initial proof points that you're seeing as you've put those dollars to work.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

Yeah, I mean, in quick terms, the team, you know, as I've come in, they're extremely disciplined, as you know, and so I didn't have to do a lot of CFO kind of finger-wagging.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Right.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

They're already very disciplined. So, you know, we look at investment in sales and marketing in a very targeted way. So for sales, some of that would go into sort of geo expansion, like South Africa, which is, you know-

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Mm-hmm

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

... huge, huge growth opportunity, or travel vertical, which is growing really fast, like to open up the Ocean Experiences. But you don't always have to place salespeople. You can actually start some of these geos, you know, with actually nobody there, with just sort of, you know, talking across from, you know, with the provider locally. So there's ways you can go, but, you know, those are some of the investments. It's very, very targeted, very sort of ROI driven, which is, which is great to see.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Yep. You know, your pace of new wins continues to be kind of going at record levels. I think it was 200-

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

Yep, 200.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

You know, new clients.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

Yeah.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

So, like, maybe characterize what those clients look like, and are they- do they tilt towards travel? Are they in education? Like, how does that client pool or that cohort of new clients coming in compare to maybe what you've already got in the portfolio?

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

Yeah. So new clients is an important... Although it's a smaller part of our growth algorithm, every year, it's an important one. And in Q4, it was education that was actually larger than travel. And the travel and education teams, you know, there's a healthy kind of competition internally, which I, which I love, to see. And then in Q1, actually, travel beat out, with, in terms of those 200-

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Okay

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

... actually more, more of them were travel than EDU. Of course, the other vertical is also growing, as we talked.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Yeah.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

And then for travel, again, as I said, you know, record ARR. So, travel tends to be a little bit smaller, so in terms of size versus a large, you know, EDU client, but still, again, growing and starting to increase in terms of going upmarket.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Yep

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

... there's larger and larger clients there.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Okay. We've got 45 seconds here, and you've got $600 million of cash. What are you gonna do with it?

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

Well, so, look, we obviously raised some money last year, and, you know, part of being a larger company, obviously, to manage between operational needs, which are not huge, but also there's a huge opportunity around M&A.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Yeah.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

The team is very disciplined. I've talked about sort of geo expansion and growth within the verticals. So you have that opportunity. I think as we look ahead, as I've come in, you know, I come from a background where I put in the first buyback in back at eBay, you know, back before it was cool to have a buyback.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Yeah.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

I was one of the first in the Valley to put that in, and that was with the thought in mind of, at the time, to offset some you know, some stock-based comp dilution.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Yeah.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

And so there's an opportunity to do a lot more with capital structure as you become cash flow positive, as we look ahead. So, but we're gonna remain focused on, you know, adding inorganic growth where we can. And, and so that's going to be a focus in addition to kind of some of the organic investments that we've talked about.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Yeah. Does the environment for doing that type of investment feel better or worse than maybe you were thinking about it a year ago or six months ago, or whatever-

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

I mean, it's still, it's still challenging, right? 'Cause if you, if you take a disciplined approach and you try to match our own profile, finding a company that is-

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Yeah

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

... growing at our rate of revenue, high margins, great culture, technology, that, and, you know-

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Yeah

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

... there's obviously a, you know, a high bar with a reasonable valuation.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Yeah.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

So obviously, those are, that's a high bar, which is okay. Obviously, we wanna be responsible, you know, with our shareholders and capital. So for us, it's important that we obviously look at all those opportunities along with, like I said, sort of what do we do internally with the, with our own- with the cash-

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Cool

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

... and balance those out, so.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

All right. We'll be watching.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

Thank you.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

We can't wait to see what you do with it.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

Thank you.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

But, the story's coming together again. I think it's had a little bit of a bump, but I'm excited to see what you're able to do. So thanks so much for being here. Really appreciate your time.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

All right. Thanks, Dan.

Dan Perlin
Managing Director and Head of Fintech Practice, RBC Capital Markets

Awesome. Thank you.

Cosmin Pitigoi
CFO, Flywire

Great.

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