All right. Terrific. Thanks everyone for joining. Good morning. My name is Tien-Tsin Huang. I cover the payments and IT services sector at JP Morgan. Really happy to have the Flywire team back at it, back here with us. They've been a great supporter of the conference over the years, so thank you for being here with us. Mike Massaro, CEO, great to see you. Thanks again for being here.
Thanks for having me.
We've got Cosmin and Masha also in the audience. We'll go through a quick fireside chat. I've taken a lot of questions from the investment community, and hopefully we'll get through this, Mike. Yeah. Is there anything else you want to talk about? Just be sure to flag it.
Sure.
Again, thanks for being here. I thought I'd kick it off just asking, because we talked about it last year even, thinking about the strategic review that you went through, and it does seem like it's yielded some very good results.
Yeah.
I think with the remix and the performance being better, the team seems quite happy. We can actually feel that. Give you a chance here to talk about what's worked and what's left to do at this point.
Yeah, sure. Obviously, as we saw some changes in some of our industries, we went to, really, it was a three pronged approach. First, you're looking at streamlining an organization, right? I think any company that's not looking at that in this day and age is probably missing a turn. We also look to optimize, right? You could see organizational changes we made. You can see ways in which we were cutting different geography performance, product performance, just getting better data to our team, transforming backend systems, all of those things that just put us in a better position. Reinvesting. Some of the reinvestment went into doubling down on certain regions, certain products, expansion of our team in some areas, reorganization of our team.
You could see a whole series of those changes, and I think you saw them play out in the start of the year, right? In some of the results that we put up there. We're really excited about it. I don't know that anyone's ever done reviewing their organizational structure or their processes in this day and age, but we feel really good about the work we did, and I think we're in a great position to scale.
No, hats off. I know it's not easy to do, and yeah, the execution's been great. A big theme, Mike, I know you've been paying attention to the group. You've always been a student of the industry. There's always been a remix, a push towards value-added services. There's sometimes a push towards breadth, sometimes a push towards depth. You've got a really interesting collection of verticals that you're in, right? Education, travel, healthcare, of course, B2B as well. Can you just share with us?
Sure.
What the synergies are.
Yeah.
Right across the four. I feel like it's important, especially in this environment. The mix, how do you see that evolving? We've seen a lot of change already.
Yeah.
Where do you see it going?
Obviously, for us, we have a series of verticals. They all center around this complexity narrative. If you think of us, we like to run in towards complexity as a team, so we're using software to help our clients get paid. It's typically clients that have some type of complexity in their payment volume. It's either a billing process that has multiple iterations, some level of international flows that, again, make it more challenging to get paid. We use software that's industry focused across those industries and tailored for the systems of record in those industries. Then we have a shared set of platform and payment infrastructure that gets leveraged across those industries. As we identify new, complex use cases in our existing industries, we'll add them and go after them and build new solutions.
As we look at other potential industries, we'll even consider expanding into those if, again, they're focused on something challenging, where most payment processors are trying to find a simple credit card capture e-commerce experience to solve. We're typically looking for something that is much more complex. Those companies would run away from that type of complexity. We're running towards it. I think time and time again, you're seeing it in our business, whether it's winning a big educational institution like Cornell or Penn State, whether it's the Cleveland Clinic deal we've talked about numerous times. Those are great examples of the kind of problems we solve for our customers.
Yeah. No. Complex payments is the common theme. Let's dig in on some of the pieces here. I thought we'd lead with travel.
Sure.
It's been a big topic with being at the conference. There's some worry, especially around cross-border travel, Mike, given the Iran conflict, higher oil prices, airline capacity is changing. I know I asked about a main call. How exposed is Flywire travel to that?
Yeah. We have two parts of our travel business. We have a hospitality business, which is really heavily U.S.-centric with international expansion planned for the end of this year into next year. Part of the core strategy when we acquired the Sertifi business was to take that product global. Again, that's focused on typically hospitality backend flows. You're maybe hosting a wedding, you're hosting a corporate event, you're hosting a conference like this at a hotel. There's a whole series of paperwork and documentation that goes with that and payment processing that is all back office inside the hotel. That's one area of our business, relatively insulated, I think from some of the international conflict right now. We have a luxury and experiential business, and they're about equal in size, both growing quite well inside Flywire.
That luxury experiential business, we never really brought it to the Middle East. It was always a regional expansion opportunity for us. Obviously not a focus area for us right now given the conflict. You definitely have to keep an eye on the international flows, right? Especially when you start hearing jet fuel. We've tried to be very prudent in how we looked at the year and how we guided the year, especially after Q1. Again, we haven't seen actually any impact yet. We've heard various anecdotal stories. I actually heard of a family friend who got moved up. Their flight got canceled for an African safari that was a 10-day trip, and they had to reroute two days earlier.
Again, in the luxury experiential space, if this is a trip you've planned for maybe a year, if you get that heads-up, you're going to go ahead and try and find another alternative way to get there. The payers, the people we're processing payments from typically have some level of affluence. They're going on these kinds of luxury trips. If they can make it there, they're going to come up with creative ways to get there. We haven't seen any impact yet. Watching it closely, obviously hoping the resolution comes as quick as possible in the Middle East. Eventually, we think it turns into a growth region for us, both in education and in travel B2B payments.
Yeah.
It's a huge geographic expansion opportunity in the future for us.
Yeah, that market makes sense. Should be more resilient, less cyclical. Thanks for going through that. Maybe just remind us then, you talked about Sertifi. I do want to dig into that.
Yeah.
Just the growth algorithm around travel. I know same store is probably not a big part. You're expanding into a lot of geos.
Yeah.
There's a lot of bookings with new clients. What's the growth algorithm?
Yeah. A couple of things. On the luxury experiential side, it's geographic expansion, and it's sub-sector expansion, and it's software-level expansion. Those are three ways in which we can grow that business for years to come. If you look at new geographies, you could look at some of the expansion we've done in Southeast Asia, Australia, and New Zealand, where we actually, with relatively small investments of go-to-market teams, you can actually bring on luxury and experiential companies in those regions. These are typically high $5, low $6-figure a year ARR accounts. Again, for us to be able to do that, leverage all our existing infrastructure to process those payments, that's obviously one expansion. We've talked about some of the other segment expansion opportunities we've seen in luxury travel. Things like ocean experiences, things like golf, cycling.
These are sub-sectors within travel, but they're very specialized. A lot of the individuals who run these companies know of others running similar companies all around the world. Again, as we look at that, those are all great opportunities for us to grow the business. When you look at product expansion, we continue to do an invoicing and billing and payment solution for those luxury experiential companies. We think there's a whole series of additional software assets over time that you'd see us bring into that customer base. One actually is inside our hospitality product suite already called Sign and Pay. If you think of the Sertifi business we acquired, we had two really growth synergies underwriting that deal when we acquired Sertifi. It was to first monetize about $3 billion of payments that was not being monetized.
We're ahead of schedule on that monetization effort. With Sertifi, we've accelerated payment monetization, which was our core strategy. On the hospitality side, it's to go international. The 20,000 hotel locations we acquired with the Sertifi acquisition, they were mostly in the United States. The team hadn't had an international sales team. The product wasn't ready to go global. We spent the last year really integrating the product, integrating it with Flywire payments, and preparing for that international launch. In essence, the product allows you to sign and pay for complex workflows at hotels all around the world. We think that capability is something that frankly all our luxury and experiential customers would also want to have, right?
If you ever go on one of these trips, you're probably realizing you're signing your life away five or six times through various consents and documents. Right now that's all being handled offline. Typically, it's either in person, pen and paper. We think that's a software value add that we could easily apply to our luxury experiential business.
Yeah, that makes sense from a cross-selling or synergy standpoint. Sertifi feels like it's been a home run.
Yeah. It was our biggest deal we've ever done.
Yeah.
Obviously, timing with just the macro conditions last year wasn't great.
Yeah.
It was a great deal. It's ahead of plan. We're excited. The team's doing really well executing, and we're really excited for the global launch of our hospitality solution.
What should we expect then as you move outside the U.S. with Sertifi? What are the steps? How quickly can you do that? At what cost? What should we be asking you as we move ahead on that?
I would say for us, we've always had a great presence globally, right? We've got clients in over 50 countries across our business right now. For us, expanding our hospitality offering globally is not something that's new to us, right? We know how to hire, we know how to build sales teams, build client success teams in those regions. We're able to do it relatively light, right? Because again, you already have the payment infrastructure you're sharing. You typically have a language or a regional sales investment you're trying to make. We even have teams already in places like Southeast Asia and Europe ready to take that solution into hotels all over the world.
The other part that I think is super important is that when you look at the hospitality sector, what we loved about it was you get relationships at the brand level. Think of that as like the Hyatt and Marriott and things like that. You get relationships at the management company levels, and then you have the relationships at the individual hotel, boutique hotel levels. We have contracts at all of those various levels. If you can imagine, you're not only going into hotels in some of these international countries, you're also going to the management companies that may manage hotels in many countries.
You're even going to the brands who have yet to be able to use this product globally and saying, "Hey, we're ready to do this." We think we're going to see great acceleration when it comes to that business as we take it international. It's not a skill we haven't proven time and time again over the last 15 years of being able to take a business global.
Okay, good. No, travel feels like it's in a good place. We covered a lot there. Let's pivot to education then. I know that that business has evolved quite a bit. Catch us up on what you're seeing on the ground.
Sure.
The flows on visas, I think we now need to track that a lot closer. What's happening? Just give us an update on what you're watching.
Yeah. Obviously, we look at visa numbers that are coming in. Data isn't released as frequently or up to date as we would love. Again, we have taken the approach in our guide to be really prudent in how we're incorporating visa headwinds into the guide. If you look at the U.K. and Canada, for instance, we're pretty much assuming visa issuance is flat, which again, we think is a pretty prudent approach. If you look at the U.S., Cosmin's assumed the U.S. visas will drop 30%, that's already baked into our guide. We feel like we've been quite prudent in looking at it and trying to shut the noise off in relation to what headlines coming out about visas at a given moment. I think that prudence is going to allow us to watch how the visas continue to perform.
If you look at the last 12 months, which if you look at 2025, it was a lot more uncertain of a time than it was now when it came to visas. You just didn't know where the policies were going to come in. You didn't know if there was demand destruction happening. I think as we've navigated that and still proven we could gain share and grow the regions, that's pretty impressive in an uncertain time in our biggest business in multiple parts of the world. I think the reason we're still growing those regions, even though you have visa headwind, is because you have this land and expand strategy, which is deploying more software. You're getting student account software, our SFS product deployed at more places, and actually adding new clients in these regions.
To be able to outperform that headwind, and again, I think we're in a great position to execute for this year.
Yeah. I think you've talked about it, right? These bursars' offices are facing a lot of complexity. It does feel natural that, yeah, there's changes on the visa side, but just shifting more towards software and automating, getting rid of that complexity, like you said, I don't see that being a change here, right? If anything, it's more intense.
I think that's right, I think who isn't trying to do more with less, right? Our clients are the exact same. If we can offload additional workflows, if we can add new features and capabilities, if we can integrate AI into the products that we have to offload work for them, that just makes us a stickier set of software and a better partner for our clients.
Okay, good. I know you mentioned SFS, and there's a big cross-sell push. What else is on your priority list to summarize for us on the education front?
Yeah. Obviously SFS is a huge one, right? We think we can have a huge share of the global universities in their student account portal, and that's really the core use case for SFS is to get that deployed to own all the tuition dollars, whether they're coming in domestically, international, whether they're one-time payments, whether they're payment plans. That billing and payment suite really allows us to do that. We're only about 10% penetrated of our existing education customers with that product. There's a huge amount of land and expand opportunity for us. Our focus right now is on the top four geographies around the world. I'll tell you, the demand is there in countries all over the world for that type of product. You go to a lot of non-top four education markets, they don't even have a student account portal.
They don't have a secured login state. They don't have real-time payments. They're typically sending a PDF and email as an invoicing process. If you just think of the evolution of e-billing, if you just think of what is modern in the United States, all the universities around the world want the product. The question is, how do we roll it out there? How do we roll and upsell globally in those 30, 40 countries in which we operate?
All right, good. Yeah, you're controlling what you can control, and education, I think, has sort of been the lesson over the last year or so, which is comforting. I do want to get to AI and stablecoin.
Sure.
When we ask that stuff. Let's get one more out the way with healthcare. I think last year when you were here, there was a push towards getting that into a better.
Yeah.
Place. It's actually moved a lot faster than I thought. I know Cleveland Clinic and some things.
Yeah.
Happened, so there's been some good momentum there. Can you keep it up, right?
Yeah.
Can you compound this? Can you replenish this backlog? It does feel like it's in a good place, but is it repeatable?
Yeah. The team has done a great job executing on a strategy in a complex market that traditionally, typically has just lower growth in general. Big deals for us are Cleveland Clinic, Endeavor, Cook County's another one we've talked about, Jackson Health. Again, to get some of those big logo wins are really important. We're obviously finishing our implementation at Cleveland Clinic. We are seeing huge amounts of payment volume ramp, which has been one of the mix shifts in gross margin we've talked about. Again, I think it's exciting to see us have such traction in what is a really complex industry of healthcare. I think we would tell everybody, there's only so many Cleveland Clinics out there, right? We'll continue to go win big deals, and we're excited to see that growth.
At the same time, there's a finite number of hospitals, we're going to keep being persistent, get those big deals done. It's exciting to see it on a better growth trajectory than it was last year.
Okay, good. Let's get the necessary AI question.
Sure.
Out the way, just to ask it. We've been asking all the companies, Mike, as you can imagine, tech conference and everything else. The first one is the obvious one. Is AI a threat from Could it lower the barriers to entry for other players to do what you're doing? Could it automate some of the work that you're doing, which impacts the value of goods or services that you provide? Or could it replace some of the things that Flywire does? How do you respond to that in general?
Yeah. I'd start by saying any company that doesn't innovate with an amazing technology and the changes in AI that we're seeing today should be worried, right? Priority one for us is to continue to innovate and to be on the forefront of it. For us, that's kind of how we look at it. If we were just a software player, I think you'd have more concern, right? We have regulated infrastructure all over the world. We move money. I think when you look at the problems that AI is solving, I don't think it's going to kind of speed into letting AI move your money around the world for you, right? Or dealing with complex global regulation.
Again, I think that's a pretty hard and protective moat around the business, is you kind of have this regulated payments infrastructure, the movement of money. People want kind of a trusted, regulated, proven vendor to deal with that for them. You have software that is industry specific, that's deeply embedded. Typically, we have three or five year agreements with our clients on that software. You have a team, which is kind of a group of people that are really subject matter experts at Flywire, who have really close relationships with our customers. You kind of put those together, and to me, that's like a series of moats that makes disruption very difficult. You can see that in our very low churn numbers.
You can see that as we're continuing to hit kind of record average new deal sign, average transaction value for our new signed deals. You're also signing 200 clients a quarter in the last quarter. Again, for us, we see it as an opportunity. We have to innovate. I think it allows us to do more with less in every company to become more efficient. It allows us to enhance the value we're giving to our customer by automating more of their workflows in the back office using AI. I think there's a whole bunch of just operational improvements we can do as a company. Again, for us, I think it's way more of an advantage than it is a threat. I think the major part of that reason is because just the regulated payment infrastructure, that's really hard to replicate.
Yeah, no, that's the complexity. That is the moat, like you said, and how integrated you are between the software, the payment, the network, and of course, the compliance around all that.
Yeah.
That can't be wrong in this rate.
Yeah.
No errors.
I'll tell you internally, I think the other part of the question was how are we using it or what opportunities do we see? Of course, we're seeing major progress in development. Just faster iteration between product engineering. You're seeing things like identification of a tech support ticket come in, triaged through AI, solution proposed through AI, reviewed by an engineer, pushed to production, right? Those are pretty cool advancements that you're seeing kind of happen for the first time. You're seeing a 40%, we've talked about a 40% reduction in payer support tickets. That's a pretty significant reduction driven out of a manual queue into kind of an automated agentic kind of queue. Even internally, we're probably driving our organization crazy, Cosmin and I are probably in the top 10 of our internal users when it comes to AI token and usage.
Part of that is about just driving up information to make decisions quicker, better, faster in the organization. I think when you have a company that has a data mindset and is eager to become more efficient, there's probably no company that shouldn't be, pick your number 15%, 20%, 25% more efficient in the next two or three years. The question is the speed and the timing of that, and maybe how inefficient you were at the start of all of this, right? If you look at just becoming more efficient as a company, this is the perfect opportunity to do it. I feel like I'm in my early 20s at the emergence of the internet again. It's that cool of a time where things are changing so fast.
You can actually build things, funnel up data into your organization quicker, move the business faster, and I think that's how we're using it. A couple things that I've personally built have probably saved me 150 hours a year of my own time. Things that I would've manually had to do, reviews I would be doing, data I'd be digging into. Like I said, driving our teams crazy, but these are things that have become part of our day-to-day workflows at the company. I think we're pushing that from the top parts of the organization, which is the right way to do it.
I'll have to ask you guys about the token consumption race between the two of you. Who wins that one? Okay, good. No, like I said, I think you addressed most of it. We've been asking everyone across marketing or go-to-market operations, you hit upon it all. It does seem like the energy on the Flywire side is pretty pervasive culturally in terms of the embrace of these tools.
Yeah, I think so, and we were talking earlier, we get kids that are getting up there in age, and you're starting to think about kids potentially in their careers, and you start to wonder, what does it impact for the future of employment? Again, even what the shift I've seen in, I would say three, six months, has been wild. Where initially everybody was saying, "Hey, anybody coming out of school, good luck finding a job." You're finding AI native people. These are people who grew up in the age of AI. It's like people want those folks at their company. You kind of have this combination of how are you going to retrain, how are you going to enable people to understand these tools in your organization? Stopping the spigot of hiring AI native people is a bad strategy for companies.
You want to hire great kind of AI forward, AI native people. You want to uptrain your existing teams. I think that's the combination where you can't be binary in either one of those, because I think that combination's going to be really, really important. For us culturally, we've always had innovation and change, has always been a constant, right? Our company, even just in the last five years, going public, it has grown significantly in size and profitability. It's gotten more diversified, and I think our team knows that level of change that we've seen in the last four or five years. We're very clear, we expect innovation to be a cornerstone of our culture as it always has been.
All right. Good. Let's do this similar question on stable coins.
Sure.
Mike, just same thing, right? Threat, opportunity. Just get the threat one out the way. The worry that it, same thing, lowers the barriers to entry. It's going to pressure the economics on B2B payments. We've heard from some of your peers about this. I think you have talked about it, as well. Any new thoughts on the threat side of the equation from stablecoins to Flywire?
Yeah, again, we look at every method, right? Our job is to accept whatever methods our clients want to accept and whatever methods a payer wants to pay in. Flywire never forces anyone to pay in a given method or a given currency. We announced a stablecoin pilot a couple of quarters ago that's active and live across over 1,000 clients. Again, we're obviously watching and monitoring it. There's really three areas when you think of stablecoin for any, I think, payment-related company. You have acceptance, you have internal money movement, and then you have payout or settlement. I think we look at it in those three ways, right? Take them one by one. If you look at acceptance first, again, there are certain markets around the world that I think you're going to see people hold stablecoin, right?
If you're in Nigeria and your choice is holding Naira, which could fluctuate heavily and is difficult to move around outside the country, and you could hold a USDC stablecoin, that makes a lot of sense. I think there's countries where you've got volatility in currency or you have certain types of difficulties moving money in and out of the country, where you're going to see a stablecoin emerge. Whether that emerges as a Visa-oriented card product, whether that emerges as a stored value wallet, I think there's all types of things. We want to accept those methods. Even in the pilot that we've done, again, it's very small amount of total payment volume compared to all of Flywire, but you're seeing economics that are on par with bank transfer for us, right?
Remember, we control the payment methods, we control the economics, and we want to accept all the ways to pay and let the payer choose. Again, very encouraging to see stable, good bank transfer-like economics for us to see it live and see people using it to pay. We're not seeing that kind of rocket ship growth yet, right?
Yeah.
We heard similar things around crypto as a payment method in 2015, 2016. We were there evaluating the technology. We'll watch stablecoin in the same way around acceptance. If you go into the second set, I think any company that isn't using it for internal money movement or to operate in a 24/7 way when certain currency markets don't have liquidity, certain currency markets are closed, stablecoin provides a huge opportunity to become more efficient seven days a week as money's crossing borders in your kind of treasury and operations. You can expect us to be investing in that and to gain some efficiencies there. The third area is around settlement. Don't have huge demand, right? Most of our clients are in pretty major countries and markets. We haven't seen a shift for our clients.
A lot of our clients are enterprise, 100K-plus ARR clients for us a year. The demand for them to settle in stablecoin isn't huge yet. It's another thing we're monitoring, right? I think you'll see that a lot in small businesses, especially small businesses operating around the world. You'll see that differently in companies that service that sector, where if you're in a country like Pakistan or India or somewhere, you may want to get settled in stablecoin. It's not something our clients, major universities, large businesses have really asked us for yet.
Got it. Demand's not there. Economics have been good so far from what you've seen.
Yeah.
I think that's been the lesson, right? Right, Mike? Money movement is not the value.
Yeah.
In what you do. It's all the complexity around what you do.
For sure.
Around transactions.
I think anytime you see a new method, again, we've seen this, you saw it from some of the remittance players the last 15 years, the cost of money movement goes to zero. We've talked about our stable spreads for over eight years with public disclosures. If you look at what the cost is in complexity in global payments, it's actually more in identity and risk in operations than it actually is in the conversion of currency. Once you get to a certain scale, you're converting currency even through the traditional banks system at a couple of basis points. It becomes the value equation of what are you providing to either the consumer or the business that you're serving, and what's the risk and operational demands to run a good, compliant, safe business? There's a cost to that.
Until, whether it's crypto, whether it's stablecoin, or whether it's something new, solves identity and money movement and risk, and oh yeah, by the way, it has to also solve global government regulation, right? It has to magically allow the governments in China and India and South Korea and Argentina to magically let money leave their country without any regulatory checks on that, right? You're not going to remove all the cost, because it's in operations, it's in compliance, it's in risk. It isn't actually just the conversion economics that are costly. They're actually not that costly through traditional bank rails.
Well said. Just to wrap that up then, you did mention it in your second point, just around efficiency, around settlement, and the whole treasury services function and whatnot. Do you see it potentially having some structural benefit to margins at some point for Flywire?
I think for us, movement, being able to move money after a market's closed on a Friday and have it sit in a Flywire account for two or three days before payout. I think those types of things increasing money that's coming through our system and putting more inside Flywire's network, I think it has real potential to do that or improve economics. Because again, some of these markets, once those markets close, you can trade the currencies. You're just paying a higher rate.
Sure.
In trying to get that money there on a Friday or a Saturday versus get there on Monday. If stablecoins provide. We've built a payment platform that's already done this across banks, meaning we source different FX rates by bank. We'll actually engage and trade that currency via different bank connections based upon speed, based upon economics. You can imagine we're adding stablecoin rail to do that same thing. If we get a better price, if we get a better speed, imagine our platform executing that just seamlessly.
Yeah. No, and hearing you describe it that way, it makes sense, right? Why you're pushing into B2B, and that's your right to win on that category. Just wrapping it all together. Pretty much out of time. Just trying to think of just a way to close it out, Mike. I know you're working on a lot of different things.
Sure.
We talked about the strategic review and the four main lines of business. What are you excited about?
Yeah. Sure.
Maybe that's the way to talk about. What are one or two things you're most excited about? What do you think we'll be talking about? Hopefully, we'll have you back here next year.
Yeah, hopefully.
To highlight or to lead the discussion up front, what would you call out for the audience here?
I think for us, we've started really strong for the year. I think as I mentioned before, we've navigated lots of uncertainty in our largest market. We've continued to gain share. We continue to become more efficient. It was 300 basis points EBITDA margin expansion last year. We've guided 275 this year. We're showing we can become more efficient of a business. Oh yeah, by the way, we're still transforming the organization. Underlying systems data, AI, all making us set up for more scale and more growth. To have a company that's doing as well financially as we're doing, that's culturally a great place to also be, and yet you're gaining share, your customers like you're becoming financially more efficient and more profitable, and you get the opportunity to invest in the business and transform and set yourself up for future growth, it's pretty cool.
It's pretty cool to be able to do all those things, especially in an uncertain time.
Yeah. No, it's been fun to cover it and follow it and see it evolve and, like you said, mature since the IPO. Appreciate the update, Mike. It's a pleasure.
Yeah. Thanks for having me.
Thank you, sir.
Appreciate it.
Yep. Thanks.