Okay, I think we can get started with the next session. Welcome back, everyone. My name is Ken Suchoski. I'm an on the payments and fintech team at Autonomous Research. We're excited to have Flywire back at our conference this year. And joining us is Cosmin Pitigoi. Cosmin joined Flywire earlier this year as CFO. He spent twenty years at PayPal and eBay prior, where he served in various finance leadership roles, overseeing operational finance and investor relations. Cosmin, welcome, great to see you again. Thanks for doing this.
Awesome. Thanks, Ken. Thanks for having me, and great to speak to all of you.
All right, great. And if you have a question for Cosmin, feel free to use the Q&A box on your viewing screen, or you can email those to me at ksuchoski@autonomous.com, and we'll do our best to get those answered. So with that, Cosmin, why don't we get started? You know, you've been in the role for, you know, call it six, seven months now. I'm interested in hearing your reflections on your early experience. What aspects of the role have proven to be, you know, more or less challenging than anticipated? And are there any new insights or developments that have influenced your approach?
Yeah, no, great, great question, and yes, I think first just coming into the role, what was great is, you know, you hear a lot about culture, but after being 20 years at one company, you always wonder, you know, coming into a new place. That's been one of the things that's been great, is just the culture of the team and the willingness to share and really be open and very quickly gain a lot of relationships across the business. Which, as I think about the role that finance plays, it's such a critical part of kind of integrating very quickly into a culture. And so that's been great coming in, being able to kind of ensure that we have the right, sort of finance, you know, involvement and influence in the business.
So that's great. Second, the team has done a great job building a very unique value prop. I feel it's great that we almost have to sometimes explain it, you know, but I think the unique nature of a global business, and it's both software and payments, which I think is quite different, and the fact that we're focusing on accoun=ts receivable is also unique to us. So all these types of, you know, initial kind of ideas around kind of how it's been growing over the last decade plus. I feel like bringing in that perspective of twenty years, seeing PayPal basically scale a hundred X during that time, it brings a great connection between what I've done there and what I can help do here.
You know, some of the examples that I talk a lot about is just simply thinking... If you think about data or platforms and how you scale, how much you can do in terms of driving productivity and insights, you know, just from building that data and insights, but also from a disclosure standpoint, in terms of how we can help all of you better model the business, understand what the key drivers are. And so we talked. That's the other piece of it, is just more and more disclosures are certainly around. You know, we do a lot on the top line. I'm thinking also more about sort of how do we help with disclosures on the bottom line, so understanding what's driving all that great sort of margin that you're seeing, especially as we're going into, you know, pivoting to profitability.
That's an opportunity for me to help drive some of that insight also.
Yeah. No, absolutely. I think you've done a good job and, you know, more disclosure is always welcome by the analyst community, investor community, so, that would be very much appreciated. Maybe we can dig into some of that growth. I mean, the company's been growing organically, FX neutral, on a revenue basis, mid-twenties, despite absorbing the impact from Canada. So maybe you could talk about what's driving that growth, how much is coming from education versus some of the emerging verticals that the company has scaled more recently.
Yeah. So yeah, let's split it out that way. So start with education, and then we can get into the other verticals. So within education, one thing, you know, everyone, you know, we've talked about Canada, I think, more than everyone wants to hear, but Canada was a drag on growth. So taking that out, if you look at the rest of what we call higher education, you know, as a vertical in itself, you sort of split up U.S. versus international. And we do have that disclosure. You see it in our Q4 earnings deck from last year. The way to think about it is, you know, we've talked about the four largest education markets outside of Canada, so U.S., U.K., Australia, and sort of think about mainland Europe.
Those are growing faster than the rate, kind of the corporate growth rate, so that would be above that 25% rate, and then within U.S. education, which last year you saw we disclosed around 25% of the business was U.S. education. Last year was growing in the high teens. Still, we see, you know, solid growth there because of that domestic cross-sell opportunity that we see kind of continuing to play out. So that's a good way to sort of split up the parts on the education side. On the emerging verticals, as you relate, as you talk about them, I think travel, we disclosed, you know, growing 55% now, second largest sort of vertical in the business, with APAC even faster than that.
And so travel, really strong performance for us. B2B, also well above the corporate average, but it's on a smaller base, for now. And, you know, we're excited about the Invoiced acquisition there to continue driving growth. And then lastly, vertical. On the vertical side is the healthcare- which, you know, it's been roughly flat or, you know, lower, a little bit lower last year. But, you know, as we exit the year, we're expecting that to start growing again, which is exciting sort of, you know, coming out of the, a lot of the work we've done in that vertical.
Yeah. No, great. And maybe we could dig into some of the key debates on the name and I apologize in advance, but we're, you know, we'll have to speak about Canada just because-
There we go.
It comes up in conversations. Maybe we'll get it out of the way first, and then we'll move on to other things. But the company's most recent outlook assumes a larger impact from some of the regulatory changes in Canada versus prior. You know, it's been a little over a month since you reported earnings. Maybe just give us an update on the latest trends that you're seeing and maybe touch on the visibility you have into recovery in that region.
Yeah, I feel, I feel like after this last earnings, we finally sort of, I would call it, almost reset the expectations to some extent on Canada. And one of the principles that I feel very strongly around guidance in particular is providing visibility. So adding a couple of slides in the earnings presentation that you saw us around just the profile of the business and certainly going into second half, so you can kind of see that it's... You know, we've saw that recovery. So Q1 was really tough. That's when everything sort of stopped in Canada. Q2, we saw a bit of, you know, recovery, and just not as much as we expected. And then you can see Q3, Q4, relatively flat after that.
So, the way we think about it is with now this year being kind of a reset year, we can start to look at, you know, look ahead and start building on that story. So, you know, the narrative to some extent has changed about, like, what are the growth drivers? So, you know, I can think of several things. You know, for us, it's one, we know the schools had some open slots that they want to go fill. Two, certainly, you know, lapping that Q1 drop, you know, we expect that the government's now been relatively clear about the visas, and we don't expect another reset there.
I think the only piece that they're still discussing right now is the postgraduate study permits, but that's kind of a smaller part of the business, and we've already kind of accounted for most of that in our numbers already. And so it's a longer-term sort of demand side of the equation. So what do you do as a student once you graduate?
so that, that part is still out there, but again, smaller part, and we feel like we now can build on that base that you see in the disclosures and start to think about, you know, we've been adding new clients, we've been adding product. So we're kind of excited about that going forward.
Yeah, totally. And that's a good segue into my next question, Cosmin. Just when you and the team talked, I think you mentioned the uncertainty in Canada is being driven by the ambiguity around the work permit status post-graduation, and I think the working assumption is that that's gonna be clarified by year-end. I mean, what exactly is the uncertainty around the work permit status, and why does that have an impact on student decision-making?
Yeah. So maybe I'll start sort of bigger picture, 'cause even for myself, I've, you know, learned a lot about the business and about this dynamic. However, even as an international student myself, I've studied in three different continents. A lot of this is sort of, kind of intuitive, but maybe not to everyone. The graduate or postgraduate kind of path, and this is kind of a topic in the UK and Canada to some extent, is the way to think about it is the students, you know, go to study, sometimes to stay in the country, other times just to go study in the country and then go somewhere else. For the students who want to stay after they graduate, this is, you know, it could be one of the decision factors for them to go study in that country if I can stay longer.
So many countries have that debate going on around how do we enable those students to come? And by the way, in the U.S., I think even in some of the current presidential discussions, maybe not the one this week, but in the past, have been discussions around, you know, how do we treat graduate students, knowing that's an important factor that comes into the decision-making. So that's the importance of it. In Canada, they're. So what they've done is they've allowed graduate students to stay, some, you know, sometimes, you know, longer term. And what we've seen earlier this year is that they announced some reduction in that. We've already accounted for that in what we've given as guidance.
We've accounted for some of that initial, kind of, you know, increased limitation in how many sort of graduate students they allow to stay. But I think what we're looking now for them is to clarify longer term, how will they think about that? And that's an ongoing discussion right now. But again, within this year, it's, you know, it's captured in our numbers, and for next year, again, it's a smaller impact in the short term. It's more of the nature of like, are you going to stay or not? You know, how many people does that actually impact?
Yeah. No, it seems like short-term noise. And maybe last question on Canada, Cosmin. I mean, what's the thinking behind the assumption of no capture recapture revenue this year? Is that just, you know, that gets pushed out to twenty twenty-five, or is the thinking, you know, is that a lost revenue opportunity that's permanent? And I guess, is there any reason students wouldn't be able to relocate to other markets later this year? Is that just, you know, it's a tight turnaround, you only have so many months to find a school, you know, submit-
Yeah
applications, that sort of thing?
I do think there's a bit of timing, 'cause I think if you are planning to go to a certain country and, you know, suddenly, and this is one of the things that, you know, Australia was helpful as far as telling us information earlier, so you can actually plan. Canada, I think, surprised everyone earlier this year. I think for those who are planning to go there, to now pivot and say, "Okay, I'm not gonna go to Canada, I'm going to go to U.S., U.K., or somewhere else," it's, you know, timing is tough. So I would say there's a timing aspect of can they fill those slots this year? I think it'll be tough, but it's, you know, sort of a question of when and where will they go.
So I think most students, again, myself included, there was not a question of do you go? You definitely go. It's just a question of when and where, I think is the main question. So we'll see kind of how it plays out. This year, I think, again, a little bit of surprise for everyone, but long-term, I think we feel like international students as a broader theme and trend will remain something that, you know, will continue to grow and be an interest for countries.
No, absolutely. And it's probably hard to tell what exactly is recapture revenue, right? Because you might have a student that studies in another country, and it's actually hard to measure that and track that. So there probably is some recapture. You might not even know it.
Yeah. Yeah, and we have good visibility because of the agent, you know, sort of insights, plus kind of the footprint we have on school. So we do have some visibility, but yes, it is tough to know. The person who decided to go to the U.K. earlier this year, they may have made that decision already, and it's hard to know exactly where. Because we did see, obviously, we have, as I said, very strong growth in U.K., Australia, the other kind of English-speaking opportunities.
Yeah, totally. And that's a good segue into the next area I wanted to focus on, which was Australia. I know there's been some regulatory news in Australia. I think that was last month that they talked about limiting the number of international students allowed to study in the country. You know, there's a lot of different numbers being thrown around. It's across different segments of the education market, but how should we think about the potential impact to the student population there? If you could just give us a lay of the land and the potential impact to Flywire, that'd be great.
Yeah. So let me start with the market and then talk a little bit about the numbers on our side. So the market itself, the way Australia to think about it, is different than Canada's. In Australia, their focus is really around the perceived high immigration that was coming through, especially through some of the education channels, such as trade schools or vocational schools. You know, so they, so that was their focus as far as trying to limit those types of, kind of entrants into the country, where there was driving what was a perceived high immigration. So it's less about the higher or larger higher education, opportunities, both public and private, is really that focus. Whereas in Canada, the focus was on the high real estate costs that, and, you know, again, perceived that international students were driving.
What you saw on the announcement, and it was last week, late on Monday night, was that at least. So they said around, you know, 200 and, I think 270,000 or something, there was the proposed cap on what they called as commencement, which is somewhat of a new term that everyone's sort of working through still. But it, it's really meant to cap some of the number of students coming into the country, but really at the sort of the traditional vocational side, not so much in the higher education. And, you know, from our standpoint, one is I love the fact that we actually have visibility now as opposed to surprising us later, so that's actually good news.
Second, it is that it's focused actually on those tier kind of educational opportunities, whereas our business leans more towards the higher education tier. That's where we play mostly, and so less of an impact from that perspective. The other thing to consider is even within that higher ed, there's public and private schools. Our mix also leans more towards public within that higher ed mix. Again, that's where the big debate right now. In terms of the timing, everyone's sort of, you know, they're very kind of outspoken, I would say. If you read some of the headlines from the Australian education sector right now, they're not sort of, you know, necessarily welcoming any impact here. There's going to be more discussions going forward.
In terms of the sizing for us, just to sort of end on that, it's much smaller than Canada, so high single-digit % of revenue in total Australia. But you have to remember that within that, we have both StudyLink and Cohort Go, which you have those numbers from our 10-Q, 10-K results, so you can kind of back those out, and you can see that the actual higher ed number, the legacy kind of higher ed cross-border is even less than that high single digit.
Yeah. Okay, yeah, and, and I think the latest on Australia, the transaction revenue is still, I think it was up, like, 50% or maybe north of 50%.
North of 50, yeah. Really strong growth there, for sure.
Yeah. Okay, that's great. So you guys still have a lot of momentum in the market. And then just in terms of next steps and timeline, I think it requires parliamentary approval, and the Senate needs to pass legislation. So are those sort of the next steps that you and the team are hearing any sort of sense on the timeline around all this?
Yeah, I mean, so, one thing for us is we do actually have a lot of products in Australia versus Canada and other markets. So we have the, like I said, the StudyLink and the agent network that places almost three-quarters of the international students there, in Australia. So it's a very strong, kind of capability that we've built. So we have that visibility from their perspective, and we are boots on the ground. So we're very much, I'm talking to the team there almost daily, so I know as of, you know, yesterday, you know, a lot of conversations even, you know, in, in the government, a lot of, the Senate hearings that are going on, we're attending some of those in person.
Our team there are attending that, and what they're, you know, hearing obviously is that kind of a very outspoken view on international students being very important to not just the broader economy. Education, by the way, is one of Australia's largest kind of exports, but also for those. So I think the timing is they're going to have several more hearings over the next few weeks, and somewhere in early October, they'll start to clarify, one, if this actually happens, so if the 270,000 goes live next year or not, that that could get pushed out, depending on kind of these conversations, or if this number stays where it is. Obviously, the educational sector feels like it's limiting, you know, even in the vocational and sort of trade sector side.
So I think that'll be interesting to see how it plays out. But certainly, it's not an easy slam dunk for the government to put this in place. It's clear.
Yeah, totally. Okay, look forward to following that. And then, so outside of Australia and Canada, I mean, how and you sort of hit on this a little bit earlier, Cosmin, but how are those education markets, such as the U.K., U.S., Europe, performing? You know, any signs of increased nationalism in these countries?
So it's U.K. and U.S., for the most part, the other two that are kind of the larger ones for us. And in the U.K., you know, the good news is that, like, you know, at least we have clarity as far as elections. You know, one of the things that was a lot of noise this year is just, you know, it's a big election year cycle, it seems, for the whole planet. So, there's a lot of headlines out there. In the U.K., you know, we know the Labour Party has prevailed in the election, and the, you know, early indications from them, it seems like they are very open to international students. There was, you know, to the Graduate Route point, there was some debate earlier on about not allowing those students to bring their families.
That was clarified and, you know, sort of reaffirmed their intent to allow them. And then on the U.S. side, actually similar kind of debates, but it seems like both parties... And what we've seen in the past, too, through, you know, most of the political cycles, 'cause we've been through, you know, through them as a company, both parties are, you know, understand the critical role and the benefits of having those students. And we've heard from both sides, I think maybe to some surprise, that, you know, they, they're welcoming to graduate students and international students, realizing the importance of those. So we feel U.S. will be a healthy market for us, regardless of which party kind of prevails in November.
Mm-hmm. And maybe sticking with education, Cosmin, I mean, excluding some of the noise around Canada, how do you think about the normalized growth in that business? And maybe you can quantify the drivers, because obviously you get some tailwind from signing up new schools, more students paying through the Flywire platform. You have new products that you're introducing. So maybe just help us better understand how this business is growing as quickly as it is, and the drivers of that growth.
Yeah, so we disclosed this last quarter that even if you take out Canada, NRR, or what we look at as sort of same store sales, if you will, the growth of existing clients was in our +120 kind of % range, excluding Canada. So really strong performance in that metric, which just highlights, as you point out, that we are able to cross-sell to grow within that existing client base. You hear us talk, you know, Rob, our CEO, talks about the land and expand strategy. That is the starting out with one part of the school and growing to other parts of the school, adding more product and adding more capabilities over time. That's been consistent.
And the reason for that consistency, as I looked at it myself coming in, was that just the diversity of drivers. There's not just one thing, 'cause if it was just one thing, you know, we would've told you, it's like, "This one is the biggest," but it really is all those combined, and, you know, they're slightly different every year. And in addition to that, which is obviously the big discussion, is you have some external growth drivers, including, sort of growth international students, so that's one piece of it. Tuition continues to grow. I know from personal experience, having four kids, tuition continues to go up, and that's probably not going to stop for a while.
And then the third thing, which is interesting for our business, is we have very high retention, 95% plus retention of these clients. So once we do get a client in, they stay with us, they love the product. And so we see that desire for the cross-sell and sort of expanding with us once we actually go in and, you know, with one of these. And so again, the diversity of growth drivers in that existing kind of client base is very strong. And you've heard us, you know, we keep adding every quarter, you know, in total, 200 clients plus, some quarters it's travel that has the most, you know, a quarter ago was education. So we continue adding new clients, too, 'cause we're not obviously fully penetrated anywhere.
Mm-hmm. And maybe digging into that expansion within the schools, I mean, is there a rule of thumb for how penetration changes within a school over time? Meaning, if Flywire captures, say, 10% of the international student payments in the first year of working with the school, does this go up to 13% in the second year, you know, 15% in the following year? I'm assuming capturing more students over time would be a nice tailwind to revenue growth.
Yeah. One of the things that the team has done great is disclosing the cohort growth and talking about that. And so I think the way to think about this, and it's actually again in our Q4 2023 earnings presentation, is a cohort view over time, and you can see how incredibly consistent every one of those cohorts, even the very older cohorts, many years back, has been in growing in that sort of high, high teens range, you know, over, you know, over time. Mid, mid to high teens, basically range, in the even in the older cohorts. So again, I think it's that consistency shows that you know your math is roughly right, where you start with a percent of the international students, and then you keep adding that.
And now, of course, increasingly, we have other things playing into that, but that's one component of that algorithm that's really key, is the growth penetration and with international students.
Yeah. No, it seems like a good growth opportunity. I wanted to dig into the domestic education opportunity, Cosmin. You know, I know the company has had some success there over the years. I mean, who do you mainly compete against in that business, and what's driving the wins? What's driving the success?
Yeah, I think the way to think about the domestic side is, as we initially started as a company, sort of the origin story around the cross-border, what we heard from our clients many, many years ago, that, "Hey, you're doing this. You're doing such a great job innovating, and you're sort of in the international student space. Can you help me with some of the domestic side?" And so out of that was born sort of our domestic product, which we've now been competing with that for a while. It's not sort of new. We've been competing. And the way to think about the opportunity is out of, call it, you know, sort of 4,000 schools in the U.S., in particular. It's a little bit different U.S. versus kind of international.
But in the U.S., out of sort of 4,000 schools, we have maybe just under 1,000 that have our cross-border product, and we have less than 10% penetration within those of the domestic kind of product. So, you know, so we have a number of schools that you can reference, you can look at sort of where we have that domestic product. So the opportunity is to continue cross-selling that domestic product, in addition to the cross-border. And with that, we've said, you know, think of it as we can 3-5X the business just with existing clients. And that's an important kind of metric and focus area for us.
I would say, if you ask me longer term, that's one of the key areas that I, you know, we can continue growing, but it takes time to continue chopping that wood, obviously, as you, as universities move a little bit slower than others, and so finding opportunities for us, which we do, as you've seen us consistently, we give examples almost every quarter of yet another school that's kind of shifted over, and the difference is, it's really in the, you know, we have a very modern platform. You know, if you're familiar with kind of the, it's very mobile, it's very flexible. We continue innovating, so, that's something that we hear a lot about.
So it's not a complicated sort of, "Do you want the solution?" As you know, so more, "When can you implement it?" 'Cause it is, you know, it's more like a sort of software implementation process.
Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Maybe we could touch on the non-education verticals. I mean, you guys have done a good job growing in some of these verticals. Maybe we'd start out with travel, which grew, I think it was over 50% in the first half of this year. You mentioned it's now the second largest vertical. Can you just talk about what's driving the success across the different geographies and different subsegments within travel?
Yeah. So, yes, travel now our second largest vertical, growing over 50%. And the way to think about travel, and it's really for us, it's luxury travel that we focus on. So sort of a bit more niche from that perspective, although it's still a very massive market. And the value prop really goes back to our origin story of you have large, complex payments, and the sort of similar to the education providers, a travel operator or provider has the same issue of: help me obviously reconcile all these payments in the back end. It's that software driving value and payments that basically is one of the big benefits.
And think of it as the value prop being that level of operational efficiency, where we've seen things like, you know, a 50% reduction in their payment processing costs, or, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars that they can save in terms of back office costs. And so our software and our capabilities help them do that. They help them accept payments in different countries and create a seamless experience from a traveler perspective when...
many of, you know, some of the, some of the clients that we've heard of just from, you know, our own experience with travel, clients coming to us and saying, "Hey, I've, I've struggled with this one client," and they basically were saying they couldn't accept this payment in this one country, "Can you, can you help them?" and so it becomes a very organic, easy kind of approach. And we separate that market, by the way, the same as everything, you know, into specific focus areas. So we have the kind of travel operators and DMCs, or destination management companies, and now this year we have the ocean experiences. So we're very diversified, too, by the way, from a travel footprint. You have the, you know, African safari kind of experience. You have, you know, cruises.
You have sort of, you know, skiing in Japan and Asia and Europe. So there's a lot of different areas that you can imagine there. So we're sort of diversified from that perspective, not just, kind of from a broader point.
Mm-hmm. Okay, great. Maybe we could touch on healthcare. I think the company saw some impact from the Change Healthcare issues. You know, maybe talk about the performance in healthcare over the last few quarters. You know, I think, was this business down? Was it flat? And I guess, what drives the confidence, Cosmin, in the healthcare accelerating when you think about the growth in the second half of the year?
Yeah. I mean, we've gone. So last year, healthcare was 8% of the business. It was down slightly. First half was still kind of under pressure, I would say, and but we've been working on a number of levers. One, we've sort of, you know, brought in new sales leadership. We've been working to improve the platform. Some of that was causing some of that pressure on the top line, and we've now moved a little bit more down market. So we have a lot of the large hospital providers, but now we're also able to cater to some of the smaller surgery center, or that type of smaller client, where maybe the ARR is a bit smaller, but the go-to-market cycle is much faster. And so, we've got new products.
The third-party sort of, you know, financing that our focus on in healthcare is around that payments and patient affordability, where we can provide an experience that's very unique. And we integrate well with all of the existing providers. That's another unique sort of aspect of the business, is that integration to existing ERP systems and software providers. So with all that said, you know, what we have in the second half as far as in our guidance embedded, is that healthcare now begins to grow. And so, look, long term, you know, we expect healthcare to grow maybe in the mid-teens plus or something in that range.
It may not reach the total sort of company growth rate ambitions, but what we do have there, though, is a high gross margin because it is a software, software-like gross margin, so it's a very high gross margin business for us.
Yeah. Okay. All right, so that makes a lot of sense. And maybe just sticking with the gross margin discussion, I mean, travel and B2B obviously growing faster than some of the other verticals and becoming a larger share of revenue. I mean, how do you think about, you know, this mix shift impacting gross margins for the overall company?
Yeah, so what we've said, and I think remains consistent as far as gross margin, is because travel and B2B have, what we started out with these verticals was mostly a card processing use case, where the client was asking, and say, "Look, help me, you know, process cards, from an AR perspective in this one region." So starting with that, as you can imagine, the gross margin profiles of those businesses is lower than the total, and certainly the legacy kind of cross, you know, cross-border education business. So... And they're growing much faster. So it's a mixed effect, which is the reason why we talk about some of the decline in the gross margin %.
And so over time, what I would say, a good rule of thumb is to assume that, you know, gross margin goes down about 100-200 basis points every year because of, you know, as long as these two verticals are growing much faster than the rest. Now, offsetting that, there are a few things. One is, you know, as we generally shift to, you know, are able to, you know, change our payment mix and improve kind of payment mix, that could help. But also think of it as the more platform revenue or software-like revenue we have, that is much higher margin than the average right now. So that would. So things like, you know, adding Invoiced acquisition is all sort of software, so it sits in that platform revenue for us.
As you see that platform revenue start to recover, that should offset some of that pressure on the top. But again, we'll see how it plays out, but that's a sort of one way to think about it right now.
Yeah. And just a follow-up question, as I think about, like, if the mix of verticals, I guess, wasn't changing, is the right way to think about it that the margins would be, you know, fairly stable from a gross margin standpoint? Like, is that a good sort of rule of thumb?
If they're all growing the same, then yeah.
Yeah.
But yeah, if there's a change in, you know, again, in the mix, it's really a lot of it is mix effects. Yeah.
Yeah. Okay. Maybe a high-level, higher-level question, Cosmin. I wanted to ask about just the organic FX neutral revenue growth rates normalized for the Canada impact, and I think the second half revenue guidance, so ex Canada, ex FX, ex the acquisitions, your guidance implies roughly 30% revenue growth in the second half, and that's fairly consistent with what we saw in the first half. And I think the team called out at the Investor Day a couple of years ago that you expect 30% plus revenue growth over the medium term. So can you talk about your confidence in getting back to that 30% growth rate and the timeline to return to that level of growth?
Yeah. So, I know we're sort of reaching our three-year anniversary, and what we've said, I think we've exceeded expectations versus what we said back then, and I think as I look forward, I think a good way to look at it is just the second half exit growth rates that we have right now. You know, with the dynamics that we just discussed as far as kind of macro and other effects, but with the opportunity that you've seen us continuing to add new clients and add capabilities, and so putting kind of new clients in its own bucket, which has been driving some of the growth. Majority of growth is with existing clients.
So within that NRR kind of long-term view is, you know, again, continuing to see that even with the law of large numbers, if you will, kind of working there, we've been able to add a productivity into our sales team to continue growing at a solid pace. Feel good that, you know, we'll see once we actually exit second half, and we'll see where we are and, you know, but feel good kind of that we're gonna be able to continue building on that. The teams will continue executing, not just on the top line, but also and like I said, on the bottom line, increasingly around profitability and free cash flow.
Yeah. Great. And there was one question from the audience, Cosmin, just on this, kind of touching on this point, and they asked: "Is it fair to think about the 4Q exit rate as a decent starting point for next year?" And I think they're talking about revenue growth. And then they're also asking, you know, just on Canada, like: "Does this headwind this year create easy comps as you think about growth for next year?
... Yeah. So, yes, I think if you look at the mid-twenties growth rate that we're exiting this year, and you have the Canada split out, so I think that's a good starting point as far as kind of where to exit in terms of growth. And then for Canada, in terms of lapping, I think the main item I would think about, again, we talked about a lot of the dynamics there, and we'll have to see how those play out. But certainly for Q1, in particular, where you saw that larger than expected dip, that would be, you know, one way to think about the lapping benefit would be primarily, probably a Q1 type of dynamic, given that lapping. We'll see. But again, we'll see how all the other kind of levers and dynamics play out.
Maybe last question for you, Cosmin, then we'll let you go. I mean, what excites you most about the opportunity for Flywire over the next few years, and what should we all be paying attention to?
I think we sort of touched on that, but it's the opportunity with existing clients is bigger than I think people realize. I think we're able to continue cross-selling, that we can continue growing the business without adding, you know, a lot of new, even though we are adding a lot of new clients, and that's exciting. Second, I think it's the diversity of the business is great, and I think it's a huge opportunity. And then for me, coming into the role, I think the opportunity then to talk about what does that mean on the bottom line, and not just EBITDA, but also, you know, EPS in the future, and free cash flow.
Those are things that I'm excited that I can start to unpack the value and the sustainability and the consistency of the growth rate on the, on the EBITDA, but also specifically on, free cash flow, as cash is king many times. So I think that's a opportunity, in itself. And, of course, lastly, I'll just end the way I started, which is, you know, a great team that's very agile, always looking to innovate and push, push beyond. So it's great to be part of that team. Yeah.
Great! Well, it's a great way to end, Cosmin. Thanks, thanks so much for doing this. Always good to catch up and see you, and we'll chat soon.
Thanks a lot, Ken, and thanks, everyone. Appreciate it.
All right, thanks, everyone. Bye.