Ready to go? Great. Really excited to have Flywire here for this session. We're gonna do a fireside chat. We'll take questions from the portal and, of course, from the audience. With us from Flywire, we've got Mike Massaro, and we've put together a lot of the questions, so hopefully cover all that. Again, don't be afraid to ask. Mike, thank you for being here. Welcome.
Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.
Yeah, no.
Home turf for us, so it's nice to not travel far.
I feel like we've done this trip, and this meeting a few times, even back when you guys were private, so it's great to see how the company has evolved. I know people are still filing in and, you know, I know I've usually asked you the question around the, you know, what problem is Flywire trying to solve or the founding of the company. You know, I feel like the most common question I get, Mike, is sort of what's the moat?
Yeah.
Right? I think of Flywire doing complex payments in some important verticals, whether it be education, you know, B2B, healthcare, travel. Why those verticals and what's the moat? Why are you doing it and others can't?
Yeah. You know, if you look at payments, if you look at what's happened in certain types of payments that you interact with, whether it's e-commerce and purchasing things online, it's gotten almost too easy, right? Too easy to click and buy something and have boxes show up at your house. You're tapping and paying more places than ever before. There's been parts of the global economy that have been digitized quite well in the last two decades. Flywire kept finding industries, large parts of global GDP that were not well digitized, things like education payments, healthcare payments, certain types of travel payments, certain types of B2B payments. Our belief is that there are different types of payments. They're a bit harder to digitize. You have lots of complex enterprise software in the middle.
You have typically large transaction size, lots of cross-border, lots of bank wires have historically been there in those payments. What we built is a series of software targeted at those industries, a core set of payment functionality, and probably what's most unique is this global payment network. When you think about how we get deployed, we end up with these kind of multiple moats to our business. You deploy software first in between our customer system of record and their client, their customer. Whether that's a consumer paying a university from overseas to send their student abroad, whether it's a business paying another business in a different country, all good examples.
That software is connecting to the system of record of our client, could be a student information system, an ERP system, health system, bookings platform for a travel company, and we're delivering payment experiences straight through so their payer can pay quickly, easily, no matter where they are in the world through all different types of methods. You get the deeply embedded software, kind of first moat. Second moat you have is that we bring with us our entire payment network. Think of that as 50+ local bank accounts. Think of it as ACH equivalent local rail accounts all around the world.
Acquiring processing relationships with some of the top credit card processors in the world, third-party payment methods like China UnionPay, Alipay, WeChat, all the local methods people would want to pay around the world. We're taking those actual relationships as well from our customer and just offloading them from that burden. You know, to beat Flywire, you got to get our deeply embedded software out of this critical spot in their infrastructure. You have to develop a payment network that took us 12 years to build, and that replaces so many relationships that our clients hand over to us effectively with an agreement. We have vertical teams, and these teams are just experts. That's almost the third moat, right?
If you can get our software out, if you can replicate our network, and if you can outcompete our team of vertical experts. Think of these as individuals who have spent 10 or 20 years in education, healthcare, certain types of business payments, and they really understand these industries. We're not sending generic client service team members or salespeople into these accounts. When we say moats, we mean that, and we mean we have kind of multiple, sets of them that you have to clear to compete with us.
'Cause I get, you know, a lot of questions people ask about real-time payments and low-cost networks, intelligent networks, and, you know, there's a lot more to it than just.
For sure.
You know, just the transaction. Is the competitive advantage, Mike, if, you know, if we were to rank it, is it more the software in your mind, or is it more the network? Because we hear companies trying to, you know, build out networks.
Yeah.
You know, they're really strong on the software, but you obviously do it all, so.
Yeah. I really believe it's the combination, right? obviously, there's companies that have all started building these kinda white label networks. There's so many of them. There seems like there's a new one every day. Some are regional. Some are focused on certain types of transactions or certain types of methods. thing you often realize there is that you then have to, you know, an ISV or a software vendor tries to embed one of those networks into what they're doing, right? Usually, that software vendor is not an expert in payments. You kinda have this disconnect where you don't really penetrate the market, you don't really solve. It's kinda hit or miss success. By having that combination together, you actually understand what problems are you trying to solve within that industry.
You build that in the software, the software effectively controls the routing of the payment. That combination is so important. We just see it time and time again. Payments are complex. Our university clients, our hospital clients, businesses, they don't wanna understand payments. They don't do what they do to be payment experts. They don't understand interchange. They don't wanna negotiate it. They don't wanna have a primary acquirer or backup acquirer. They don't wanna deal with all the complications of global payments, that's what we can take that burden away. I really believe it's the combination of those two things together, that vertical software plus having the capability to clear the payments.
Good. I know there's a lot of questions around cyclicality and the health of the consumer and that kind of thing. Your business seems to be pretty defensive given the industries that you're in. How resilient do you think the business is? Have you seen any changes in, you know, in consumer behavior?
Yeah. I mean, we continue to be really strong. As you said, we are defensive. The industries are traditionally very defensive in nature. Sadly, with a kid going off to college, I joke I haven't seen a tuition bill ever go down.
Yeah.
Things like that continue to go up over time. When we look at the industries, our clients have often been around quite a long time. You know, seven of the eight Ivy Leagues use Flywire technology, for instance. Like, these are organizations that have been around for decades, and are quite robust in kind of going through ups and downs. Also, when you just look at education, typically, if there is a softening of the economy, typically people retool and go back and get further education. It's typically been something that has been kind of the opposite side, seeing actual growth and expansion in a recessionary environment. Again, we feel continue to be really good. B2B payments don't see it.
Even in travel, we still see a huge surge as many companies report in travel. We're focused on a particular area of travel that is a bit, we believe more defensive. It's more luxury travel experiences. Think of, you know, if you've ever gone to, you know, a big family trip in a foreign country, if you've ever gone on an African safari, family vacation to Iceland, any of those types of things, rented a vacation property for an extended period of time, those are all areas in which we actually work in travel. We're not, we're not competing with, like, general consumer low-ticket travel dollars.
We're really owning those kind of, you know, once-a-year life experience type trips, where again, the transaction size is very high and typically the consumer is able to make those purchases just based on net worth.
Good. Makes sense. How about flip it around for the client side? How big of a strategic priority is it for these education clients, travel clients, et cetera, to say, "Hey, we've got, we've got to modernize and, and think about a solution here and choose Flywire?
Yeah, I mean, you know, navigating the pandemic and kind of coming through that, you saw everybody have to do more with less, and I think that trend has continued, right? Everybody's looking at their back office. People are being careful about, you know, how they're hiring. That's what our clients are going through, right? If they can automate a process, if they can take away manual work, that was part of their day-to-day and help automate that or take work off their plate, that's where they see an opportunity for Flywire to help them. We see that consistently across industry. Remember, a lot of the payment volume that Flywire processes has been legacy bank volume.
Yeah.
Over 80% of our volume is bank volume. Again, it's not a traditional card transaction. These are typically bank wires, typically thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollar transaction sizes. Again, oftentimes historically very manual. A lot of work to reconcile, identify those payments, post them to the right system, and we can automate that.
How would you characterize pipeline, ARR, those kind of metrics in the funnel?
Yeah, I mean, we're, you know, eight quarters of being public. So far so good. you know, as we've looked at that kind of execution, we've been able to invest. Even last year, you know, we stated it was our largest investment year ever as a company by percentage of revenue, by dollars spent. Our two big areas of investment were go-to-market expansion and product and technology. being able to invest, going into more geographies, adding more sales, client service, implementation teams, we've seen growth in pipeline. We've seen record number of new client signs in a quarter.
Mm-hmm
... and growth in pipeline. Not kind of pulling in pipeline, but actually expanding total pipeline while also increasing record number of quarterly signs. We feel really good about it. It's not just more people, it's also better process. I did joke earlier, I'm no longer the Salesforce admin in my company. I love revenue operations, but we have an amazing team that's also been just helping scale how we handle these multiple verticals, multiple geographies, and it just, you know, helps us grow pipeline. Our marketing is very efficient. You know, I think there's a stat that we've shared, you know, $1 million of marketing spend resulted in over $10 million-$11 million of pipeline in Q1. Very efficient use of digital marketing targeting these industries all around the world.
Great word of mouth as well that just drives low LTV to CAC. Really great business, when it comes to adding more pipeline and signing clients.
Before we get into the verticals, like maybe... I like to look at NRR and, you know...
My favorites.
... it's been... I think you trained us to look at it. I think there's been a lot of... We've sort of moved away from it at the same time, if you like, sometimes.
Yeah, a little bit. Sometimes.
You know, we've seen it sort of peak out, I think, at a pretty high level, 107%, and something of its own, and it sort of drifted a little bit down, but still very, very strong. Can you build up for us the NRR?
Yeah.
I get questions around, you know, same-store growth and upsell, cross-sell.
Yeah
churn, that kind of thing. How do you build it up?
Yeah. Net revenue retention is a number we report, quite a bit, have since the IPO. You know, three-year average, kind of in that mid-120s%. It's the cornerstone of our growth algorithm. Since IPO, even on the last earnings call, we continue to tell people think of us as a 30%+ organic grower. On top of that, inorganic moves can even bring that number up higher over time, right? The cornerstone of that growth algorithm for people to get comfortable is that NRR. That is, think of it as almost like a same-store sales number.
When you start with something in the kind of mid, and three-year average is in that mid-120%s range. You're already in that kind of proven ability time and time again to grow revenue at existing accounts. You're adding on top of that full-year effect of clients signed in the prior year. You're adding on top of that new clients signed in a given year, and the revenue associated to those clients, right. You can, you can kind of very easily map how you can get to that kind of 30%+ organic growth. You also have all these great drivers of NRR. A lot of companies just have a price lever they can use to push it. Maybe it's another product capability some companies have.
We actually have like five or six different things that are driving NRR, right? You got macro conditions, right? I mentioned, you know, tuition bills go up, right? That does help. You've got geographic expansion. You could have signed a client in. A good example is Hilton for us in our travel business. We signed Hilton doing their European and U.K. properties for their vacations club business and then expanded to rest of world properties. Same product deployed in multiple geographies, so the same client grows NRR. You can layer in a new product, right? You could do the cross-border tuition product, like we did at Stanford, and then add in the domestic payment processing for Stanford, again, driving more NRR. Sometimes you'll get a hospital where you're deployed in all their.
You know, Flywire's deployed in four of the top 10 U.S. hospital systems. Sometimes you'll get one state or one EHR system like in Epic, but you don't have the Cerner deployment for that same hospital. You'll get a different state or region of the country that you can expand to. Sometimes it could be a geographic, sometimes it could be a functional. All these different levers, even our payment network drives NRR. If you think of our ability to process payments for all over the world, if we get a new node in that payment network, if we're monetizing a new country like Vietnam or Nepal, all of a sudden that's volume that was already going through Flywire, but it wasn't being monetized.
If we can turn on a new node that, you know, new bank account, a new payment partner in a given geography, that can create NRR across our entire customer base, 'cause now we're monetizing payment volume that we weren't monetizing before. All of those are kind of feeders into that NRR number. It's what gives us such confidence in it. Again, that three-year average is, you know, we've proven it twice as a public company to be able to maintain it, which we think is pretty impressive.
Good. Let's talk about education.
Yeah.
Start with that. You know, that's how I got to know the company with, you know, with the cross-border piece servicing, you know, international students. You just mentioned, right, the Ivy League side, you guys have quite a bit of penetration there. How much more room is there to go?
Yep
... with the, with the cross-border piece? I always like to ask you the question, Mike, right? It feels like you're just beginning to transition and start to do domestic payments.
Yeah
as well-
For sure.
... amongst your existing accounts and doing payment plans and designing that, and I'm sure there's a lot of pain at the, you know, at the AR side. Talk us through both those things, if that's okay.
Sure. Flywire started probably first six, seven years were only with one product in one geography, so in one vertical, and that was cross-border education. It's where we started. We saw the use case of universities struggling with the ability to get paid from all over the world. Their students and families were having to do very manual processes, high-cost payments, and we looked and said, "Geez, if we can solve that, we can be the pay button for the international student and parent, and then streamline the back-end operations, you know, that seems like it would be a good business." Took us time to actually then realize we needed the payment network to monetize that. You couldn't borrow someone else's network to do this accounts receivable transaction in many, many places around the world.
The beauty of that model, it's a B2B2P, B to B to payer, right? We're getting the university to make us the bill and/or the pay button, and we're getting put in front of the parents and the student for that transaction. Great, great way of growing the business. Then our clients effectively kept saying... We kept looking for another product. I remember my head of sales, Sharon, telling me, you know, "I need another product to sell, right?" I have all these amazing clients, they love our first product. They're like, "I can upsell them with something. What are we gonna kinda build out?" We thought of all these different ideas, other things we could do, and our clients just kept saying, "Just domestic payments.
Why don't you just do all my payments?
Mm-hmm.
Right? It was something that we had thought was already solved and almost a commodity. The reality was a lot of the legacy vendors in that space had relatively dated technology. People looked at us as being a modern vendor of software, someone that could deploy all the payment methods and just standardize across cross-border and domestic payments. We started to add that as an offering. We also went global, so we took the education business outside the United States and had this question of, could we get universities around the world using this product? You know, is it hard to get a Canadian university or a U.K. or a Spanish university or one in Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, using the same product? We started seeing success globally and doing both domestic and cross-border.
That's been a huge growth lever for us. If you fast-forward today, you're, you know, sitting with, across our industries, 3,500 clients, over 30, I think it's 35 countries now. It's a significant global footprint and client base. Now we're actually moving all the tuition dollars for huge U.S. universities like Texas A&M, Stanford, UVA, where my son's going next year.
Go U-
I know. You're an alum actually. It's a really great growth strategy for us to be able to deliver software that doesn't just monetize the domestic payments but also the cross-border side. When you think of the penetration level...
Yeah
... to finish the, your question, we're still single-digit penetrated within our total addressable market for education, and the number of clients that have taken, our, all our capabilities is still single-digit percentages inside education. We actually shared a stat that without signing another customer, we could 3-5x revenue in the company, never signing another customer, just by getting all our existing clients to use all our capabilities, which is a pretty powerful stat.
Yeah. You gave that metric around a million translating to $11 million in pipeline, right, Mike, so ? The temptation, I'm sure, to spend more, right.
Yeah
to drive growth has got to be there.
Yep.
I think you've also talked about the partner model and the potential to get more through partners. Where are you in that.
Yeah. We have bucked, you know, we have bucked the trend. I mean, we continue to have really great growth numbers, and as I said, last year was a record investment year. Even as you saw companies starting to pull back, we continued to talk to the market about why we wanted to keep investing around go-to-market and product, 'cause we just saw so much opportunity continuing to penetrate the, the total addressable market we had. We're seeing some of those continued benefits this year, we're even though our spend, our hiring spend, for instance, is down 60% or so from last year, we're still hiring, right? We see that opportunity to invest for the future. These aren't investments we're making for 2023 or even early 2024.
These are investments we're making for multiple years out. The beauty of those investments are they aren't massive dollars, right? You could actually expand geographically in a country with a handful of new hires, and you could turn that into a market that's not just initially generating six figures of revenue, but seven, eight figures of revenue with just a handful of clients and salespeople. Those kind of investments we wanna continue to do. We see the opportunity, and we've proven to be able to do it in over 30+ countries across multiple industries. Those are the types of investments we're making. But it's not just people, it's also process.
You know, being smart about our tooling, I think every company is looking at, you know, SaaS-based tooling and what is critical software you're using in the company, and how are you negotiating those agreements and being efficient. You know, we're looking at all areas of spend to just really, you know, be great stewards of capital, which we have been historically as a private company. You know, we continue to show not only great growth numbers, I think it was 57% constant currency growth.
Mm-hmm.
Also EBITDA margin expansion. We've committed to 300-600 basis point EBITDA margin expansion. We're able to show these growth numbers with positive EBITDA and EBITDA margin expansion, which we think is pretty unique.
Before we leave education, anything else to call out that I didn't cover? I know you get questions on China.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, we've had, you know, as you came through the pandemic, you saw different quarters and different outward student trends. You know, India became the number one dominant market for international students in the world.
Mm-hmm.
You know, you saw lower visa numbers at one point with students coming out of China. Those trends have started to change, and we also remind people that we're not fully penetrated. Even a decrease or a flattening of certain geographic number of students from a certain region, oftentimes it's picked up by other regions or geographies. Flywire still has the ability to grow, right? If we sign up a new school or university, you're gonna automatically grow the number of Chinese students 'cause there's a population there, or Indian students or Korean students. There's still a lot of room to grow, even if that international student number takes time to recover from that pre-pandemic level.
If you look over the last 20 years, international students have grown in the low mid-single digits over the last two decades, if you exclude the pandemic. We think it's bound to return to that growth trajectory. You're probably gonna see that at some point in 2023 or 2024.
Okay. Okay. Let me do healthcare, and then I promise we'll open it up.
Sure.
With healthcare, same thing, I get a lot of questions, right? That market is so complex. You got EHR players, you got a lot of software players-
Yeah.
They're doing payment facilitation. JPMorgan Chase bought InstaMed, right, to do healthcare payments. What's your sweet spot? Like.
Yep.
What is Flywire really focusing on, and what's the edge?
Yeah. Again, remember, we have this kinda platform of payment capability. Things like a payment plan concept, which exists inside education, that same component is configured differently for healthcare deployments, right? Where we are in healthcare is we're post-insurance, so we're not involved in the insurance and the claims processing. We're post-insurance being applied out-of-pocket spend of the patient. What's happened in U.S. healthcare over the last, probably four or five years, has been what used to be 5% of revenue or less for these hospital systems has become 20% or 25% of revenue, which is the out-of-pocket spend component that we all pay when you go have a medical procedure or go for a doctor visit. Believe it or not, they didn't have a great way to connect with you as a patient.
If you ever had kids, I have four of them, you get inundated with, paper bills. They'll look like bills. They have amount dues on them, but they say, "This is not a bill. Don't pay this." Right? It's a massively confusing process. If you have multiple, trips happening, you're not sure if this bill has included the last bill or the last event. There's a consolidation problem. If you're going to different types of doctors, even in the same umbrella of hospital system, you may get billed from different entities. That's the problem they've all been dealing with. What's happened is, those hospital systems have said, "We gotta be better at this.
What used to be something we could write off is now something that's critical for us operating a sustainable health system." That became a cornerstone of kinda back office. Not only now are these hospitals looking at their EHR systems, the Epics, the MEDITECHs, the Cerners that deal with all the patient data, but they're looking for patient engagement software as well. Software that delivers a good payment experience, provides flexible ways to pay. Not everyone who, you know, has an emergency doctor visit that may result in a $2,000 unexpected expense can pay that all in a lump sum. How do you provide ways in which a hospital can get paid in more flexible ways? What our software does is understands what's the patient side of it after insurance being applied.
We have all the communication abilities, text, email, portal access to display that balance owed by that patient. We actually look up a history of payment at that hospital, through our system integration, so we know how you've paid historically that hospital. We also can look up credit. We're not looking up credit to extend credit. We're looking up credit to say, "Does this person need help paying this unexpected medical expense?" Someone that has paid their bills in full for the last 10 times is probably gonna be asked to pay that bill in full again. If someone hasn't, putting a $2,000 balance in front of them isn't gonna get you any money, right? How do you, as a hospital system, extend maybe 10 installments of $200, right?
It's non-Flywire balance sheet-Hospitals effectively just extending different payment terms through our software to their payers. It helps them start getting payments back in. We're connected in case other procedures happen. You can update those payment plans. The user can opt into different changes to those payment plans. That's how the software works, really helping just digitize, shut down paper, consolidate, you know, billing, patient billing inside hospital systems.
To clarify, the average ticket on this is high, just like in education. The monetization.
Yeah, a combination of software and transactional. It's a great point. Flywire's revenue stream in general, think of it as 20%-25% software platform usage like fee, 75% roughly transactional in nature. Healthcare has more of that platform, software-based component, high software like gross margin business, with a little bit of transactional in there.
Great. Questions from the audience. Happy to take some here. Yeah, there is a mic. We have one up front as well up here.
Thank you. Thanks for the time today. I'm interested on the payment plans, if you could give a sense of what portion of the payments you're handling come through payment plans and who deals with the customer service cost side of that. Obviously on there can be renegotiation, there can be follow-up, there can be all kinds of-
Yep
... costs you might incur. Do you cover that or would that university or healthcare provider?
Yeah. You know, part of, I think having a modern platform to do this is to build it in a way that doesn't lead to a lot of questions. We've seen this both in education and in healthcare. Frankly, great story in education. One of our clients deployed our version of a payment plan product. They staffed up with temps as they historically have done for the last decade in their finance department, the phone calls didn't come, right? Again, if you're using modern technology that lets someone configure a payment plan, maybe change their installment, delay a payment by a month, simple things like that can really reduce the amount of inbound questions.
Flywire does staff kind of a white glove, you know, customer service team that will deal with payer interactions. Traditionally, we get more of the cross-border calls, you know, someone from maybe China or Korea calling to have a question about their payment to Harvard or to, you know, MIT or something. You're unlikely to be able to get to the finance department of that university, and they're very unlikely to be speaking Mandarin or Korean when you call them, right? Based on time zone and based on obviously language skill, and we can augment that, right? That's a huge skill set, a huge value add that our clients see. We don't charge for it. It's kind of part of our total offering.
Our job over time is to become more efficient and obviously, digitize more of that response as much as possible.
I was just gonna ask on the transaction revenue stream, what are the take rates and how do we know that doesn't get pressured over time?
Great question. We've had a whole bunch of disclosures in the supplement material as well as our investor day material, showing consistent pricing. Again, we're not dealing with typically price sensitive payers, right? We're dealing with a high-stress, critical payment. They wanna pay the right way. They want a fair and reasonable price for that transaction. Typically, we're able to beat their former retail bank rate they would've gotten in a wire anyway, right? You're leaving payment method choice up to the payer, currency choice. They don't even have to convert currency with us on a cross-border payment. We really leave all of that out there.
It blends, you can do the math, but it blends to that 1.5% just based on taking the reported volume and the revenue based on those two buckets I've mentioned. People can look at that, but we always encourage people to remember you've got mix happening in there by payment method. You have some payments like bank payments, which are really high- margin payments-
Mm-hmm
... almost like software margins. You have credit cards, and the mix of that's decided by the consumer, not Flywire. That blends to what we believe are really healthy margins, as you can see in our public numbers, kind of in that 65%+ range. Again, it's not something we control. If you see, we've also been talking a lot about the growth we're seeing in travel. Travel, more people use cards. It's just inherent in the consumer behavior. Still great gross profit, straight, still great take rates compared to a traditional model, acquire model, because that's the software driving value. It's not pricing, it's not pricing sensitivity, it's not pricing pressure, and we've been pretty good in the disclosure showing that in our supplements.
Great. Any other questions? You talked about gross margin. I know payment type does matter. Some of that is outside of your control. You've laid out a plan to get to 25% EBITDA margin.
Yeah.
I ask you about go-to-market. There's a lot of product I know that you've been talking about as well, but just sort of the visibility, the pathway to that 25%, the incremental margins are very high.
Yeah.
We know that. How are you balancing the margin versus growth?
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you're seeing, I mean, as we've said, 30%+ organic growth, also 300- 600 basis points EBITDA margin expansion. We've already moved that up after Q1 for this year, our target. Coming off what was a record investment year last year, you can imagine once we overcome mostly that hiring surge, you end up with a lot more leverage in the business, right? Where we're already showing scale in the numbers we reported in Q1, as you overcome that kind of year-on-year effect of that hiring last year, we end up in Q3 and Q4 with lots of optionality as to how to invest in 2024. We feel really good about that. People shouldn't expect us to, you know, shut the investment-
Mm.
you know, faucet off. We think we continue to show how we can build pipeline, how we can grow and invest in the business, but we're, again, gonna do it the way we always have in a very smart way based on ROI. So, you know, have more opportunity to drive that EBITDA margin expansion, but at the same time, you know, we told people expect that range on a yearly basis. If you march out the next three or four years, you'll see us get to that 25%+ range that we've talked about in our Investor Day.
Is there freedom for you to do acquisitions and to get to that? I ask because you've been mostly doing product at M&A. I'm curious if you'd be interested in doing scale M&A, 'cause we've seen Western Union get rid of their business.
Yep.
I know that's in the hands of other sponsors now.
Yep.
on the education side, but I'm sure it's on your mind, so curious what you're thinking.
You know, on the inorganic stuff, you know, we've done two deals as a public company, one prior to the IPO as well. I'd say those were in the kind of, you know, $40 million-$150 million range. I'd say they've been on the smaller side. Obviously, the next size is kind of that up to $500 million-$600 million range in the medium, and then above that. What I would say is, we're looking for great deals in all of those categories. A great deal for us means one that fits one of our strategic pillars, helps us in an industry or vertical we're in or geography, gives us something we can upsell to our existing client base, or something that potentially brings us to a new industry or new geography.
If it fits one of those three pillars, it kind of then goes to the next level, which is it a tech disaster, or is it something that we can feel like we can consume and standardize the tech behind it, right? 'Cause we're not gonna sacrifice our technology and our platform. It lets us move very quickly. We're not just gonna kind of grab old, outdated tech that we don't feel we can migrate easily for customers. It has to be a culture fit. We've had an over 95% retention of clients and of people in acquisitions we've done, right? That's a cornerstone of kind of deals we look for. You get into the financial metrics, right? The growth metric, and if you look at 57% constant currency growth, there's many assets we could acquire.
One larger that would be similar size that would cut our growth rate in half or more, right? That's a huge consideration to take into when you do a big deal. Even if you end up with more EBITDA, you know, taking down that growth rate I don't think is a one-to-one trade-off. You have that dynamic that you have to take into account. You have to find something that is either growing at a rate in which you think is healthy enough to not negatively impact our growth rate, or we can accelerate through synergies and bring that growth rate up. You know, you still have a lot of private companies that, even though there's cost-cutting and right-sizing of business models, there's still a lot of companies that are losing money.
When you get to the EBITDA margin expansion that we've kind of set to the Street, you know, we don't wanna see something that massively changes that trajectory either. That's a lot of... I say, yeah, we'll just snap our fingers and go find a bunch of those targets.
Mm-hmm.
Whole team working hard to go do that, but those are the factors we're taking into account. Looking for great deals that hit the strategic pillars, that don't take us off our financial goals and metrics, and that we think tech and people would be a good fit.
Okay.
We think there are those deals out there. We just, we're patient. We don't, we don't feel like we need one. We get great organic growth and we'll be ready when the right deal comes along.
Good. No, I trust that's the case. I know we only have a minute left or so, Mike, so we've talked about a lot. With you as CEO here, to close out the rest of the calendar year, what's top of mind for you from a, from a priority standpoint?
Yeah. I mean, it's been a, it's been a blast, you know, growing the company, transitioning the last eight quarters to public. You know, I think we've, you know, been well-received from the investors. At the same time, we're still trying to tell our story, right? Get out there in front of more people, share our story, share the fact that we've proven the ability to go after the global total addressable market within our industries. You get the strong, predictable growth levers that we think we can maintain and an ability to grow and grow profitably. You know, that's what we're, you know, focused on doing, keeping proving that every single quarter, and executing. You know, it's a lot of fun.
I spend a lot of time thinking about how to organize the company, how to scale, how to retain what I think is one of the best teams, that we've built here at Flywire. That's what we're up to.
Yeah.
We're gonna keep doing that, working hard to execute.
No, it's absolutely working, so happy for the success and it's fun to track it. Thank you for the time.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks.