Morning everyone. Welcome to Shift4's Inaugural Investor Field Day. I'm Tom McCrohan, Head of Investor Relations, and welcome on behalf of the management team at Shift4. We welcome you here. For those here in person, thanks a lot for making the trip and being here today. For those of you dialing in virtually to the live stream webcast, welcome as well. For those on the webcast, there is a presentation available on the Investor Relations website, investors.shift4.com. Just gonna read through the perfunctory safe harbor language. Before turning the presentation over to our Founder and CEO, Jared Isaacman, I'd like to remind everyone that this call will contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.
All statements made on this call that do not relate to matters of historical fact should be considered forward-looking statements, including statements regarding management's plans, strategies, goals, and objectives, the expected impact of COVID-19 on our business and industry, including with respect to economic recovery, increases of vaccination rates, the reopening of the country and any volume recovery by us, gateway penetration and spend seen by our gateway merchants, expectations regarding new customers, acquisitions and other transactions, and anticipated financial performance, including our financial outlook for the year ended December 31st, 2021, and any other comments regarding future operating performance. These statements are neither promises nor guarantees, but involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other important factors that may cause our actual results and performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results.
Performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements factors discussed in the Risk Factors section of our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31st, 2020, and as updated by our quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the nine months ended September 30th, 2021, and other filings could cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated by the forward-looking statements made today on this call. Today's formal presentation will be about an hour. We'll have about a half hour for Q&A, after which we'll break. We'll break the group up into two groups. You should see a Group A or Group B on your name badge. With that, allow me to welcome our founder and CEO, Jared Isaacman.
Test, test. How's this working? Good, good. There we go. Okay. Is there a slide clicker? All right. While that's coming up here, welcome to Allegiant Stadium, home of the Las Vegas Raiders. I know it's early, but if for whatever reason there's any news that we're sharing today that you don't enjoy, you're welcome to go to the bar right here. They accept credit cards. It's powered by Shift4, and it's Vegas, so the bar's always open. Okay.
Make sure you hit the headers and not the body buttons.
Well, this gives everybody an opportunity to read through our safe harbor statements again. Okay, we're gonna start. First of all, if anyone doesn't know me, I'm Jared Isaacman, CEO, founder of Shift4. I've asked to pretty much give the entirety of the presentation today. I've been accused of spending too much time off this planet, and I wanted to show you that we are very much involved with a lot of exciting things going on at the organization. I'm sure many of you dialed in for our Q3 update, but we're gonna start the presentation today just reviewing a couple of the points from Q3. You can skip the letter here. The third quarter was pretty good. Volume growth for the quarter was 90% year-over-year.
Revenue growth was up 86% from Q3 2020 on $400 million. You'll notice there's a little bit of noise there for the contra revenue that we had to take on the TSYS credit, but it was in fact $400 million for the quarter, and again, up 86%. Gross revenue less network fees were up nearly 70% year-over-year. Adjusted EBITDA up 94% year-over-year for the quarter at $55.8 million. As we communicated, July was hot. You know, we actually shared July's volume growth during our Q2 update. Everything was looking good. Delta variant came back and gave us a little bit of a hard time starting in August. It was very apparent in September.
As you can see from this slide, October end-to-end payment volume is up 86% year-over-year. I know we put out an update earlier in the month at 80% year-over-year. Turned out we did a little bit better than expected. As also communicated during the update earlier today, you know, we're coming off of a November, and the first October of last year was a relatively hard comp. That was a record volume for us. It was up, I think about approximately 25% year-over-year from 2019. Also November and December is when we were faced with considerable COVID-related restrictions and lockdowns last year.
If you recall, cities like New York, L.A., aside from just climate challenges of eating outdoors, or the you know impacts on travel, there were also restrictions in California and others. We expect November and December performance throughout the rest of this year to be pretty favorable, which is why we reiterated our 2021 guidance and actually lifted our gross revenue less network fee guidance for 2021. In quarter three, we signed a number of notable wins, many in our core markets. You'll see hospitality locations here, ski resorts, restaurants. You'll also see T-Mobile Arena here in Las Vegas, one of many signature stadium wins that have adopted both our software and our payments.
You know, one thing I wanted to comment here is, it should be apparent to everyone, you know, in this climate right now, businesses are generally not making horrible decisions. They're not choosing to leave one payment provider for another that is delivering an equal or worse service. If you're growing payment volume and you're picking up wins like this, it's generally because you're adding a lot more value for that customer. In the case of stadiums, via our VenueNext acquisition, we have some pretty cool fan-first technology. In fact, you'll be able to get a demo of it today later on as we break up into smaller groups.
The idea that you can order your beer and a burger in your seats, you can manage your tickets through it, you can buy merchandise, you can walk into a store and retrieve your merchandise without ever maybe going even to the checkout lane, those are what we refer to as, like, fan-first experiences. Stadiums are gravitating towards that, and in doing so, we're capturing SaaS revenue, which is one of the reasons we're gonna outperform our original guidance on SaaS 2021 gross revenue less network fees. That same story reflects across the restaurant and hospitality base that we have today.
You'll see some of these wins on this page are gateway conversions, which means we were already powering all of the hard part of the transaction experience for them, so it was simply a matter of just turning off the faucet to whichever legacy acquirer was on the other end of that pipe. But there's a lot of net new wins here too, which means those hotels and restaurants are surveying the competitive landscape and saying the solution they can get from Shift4 is better than another. Coming back to what I communicated before, despite the realities of COVID that I think virtually everyone communicated across August and September, we are reiterating our end-to-end payment volume guide for 2021 between $46 billion and $48 billion, total revenues between $1.3 billion and $1.4 billion.
Adjusted EBITDA, we are still maintaining the same guidance of between $175 million and $180 million. I do wanna point out again, if you recall, in Q1, due to the COVID effect of Q4 in 2020, we did have a single merchant failure that resulted in approximately $5 million loss. It's still management's position that was as one time and extraordinary as ever. It was the single highest loss in our 23-year history, and the last one anywhere in that vicinity was in 2003. If you take that adjustment into account, we're actually communicating that 2021 should end between $180 million and $185 million with that adjustment in mind.
Last, we are raising our gross revenue less network fee guidance for the year between $520-$525 million. Really, that is the result of the SaaS and other software-related revenue that we've generated in our new verticals that we're gonna talk about a little bit later on in this presentation. Verticals that are already yielding quite well from a revenue perspective, but we are super early days in terms of monetizing the payments opportunity. We've been spending a fair amount of time over the last six to nine months, you know, thinking about what our identity is at Shift4. What is our new vision and mission since we've gone public, since we've expanded our reach into a number of new verticals?
I would be lying if I said that my you know, nearly a year of being exposed to, again, what I think is a pretty extraordinary organization like SpaceX hasn't influenced a lot of what you're gonna see in terms of our new vision, our new mission, our values, and what we don't have in this presentation, which is the philosophies that guide us towards execution. A lot of it for sure has some SpaceX influence. Got a little bit of a video for you here if you haven't seen it yet. All right. There's a lot of gems hidden in that video. If you wanna go back and check it out, you might find some of them. You know, boldly forward, that's our identity.
We have a history of being quite bold as an organization. First, if anyone fact-checks this, we've had 22 years of consecutive year-over-year revenue growth. This isn't a new development. We're not a COVID beneficiary, when we catered primarily, at least at that time, to restaurants and hotels. We're not afraid to go in and challenge the norms and break glass in order to achieve our objectives on behalf of our employees, our merchants, our partners, and our shareholders. You wanna go all the way back to 2008, we created Harbortouch. What was Harbortouch? We pulled together multiple industries from restaurant point-of-sale software, hardware, and we bundled it together with an integrated payments solution, and then we put a SaaS bow on it and armed our distribution partners with it to go out and win.
That's still an element of our business that's growing very fast. If that sounds like a Toast or a Revel or a Clover or a Square, it is, and we were doing that in 2008, really before people were even considering those strategies. You know, in 2017, we acquired a number of software companies that had no semblance of SaaS, hadn't made that pivot yet, hadn't embraced integrated payments. We went in, we annihilated their revenue model. People talk about what's your organic revenue growth. We went in and we shut down the legacy revenue streams, converted them to SaaS with an integrated payment solution, and grew them considerably. That was before it was hot buying ISVs. I can tell you that because we bought most of them for like a 10x EBITDA multiple, and that just doesn't exist anymore.
We purchased two payment gateways, recognizing these technology platforms were the key to an integrated payment strategy. They possessed all of those vital software integrations that make commerce possible, but were up till that point merchant acquirer agnostic, outputting to all the legacy acquirers who never developed that technology themselves and doing so and providing all that value for a penny or two a transaction? I don't think so. We acquired both those several years ago, completely pivoted their revenue model. Certainly created a lot of anxiety amongst some of the legacy providers as to what this represents and now represents to us, geez, $170 billion of merchant acquiring opportunity that's living captive and easily quantifiable within our base of customers.
Created a ton of value for our shareholders along the way. That's bold. That's what we've been doing for a very long time as part of our history, and we're not gonna shy away from it. We're gonna embrace it. So boldly forward. Our North Star to power commerce and don't deny it. Then these values here will inform a lot of our decision-making and how we approach opportunities on the road ahead. Boldness, excellence, ownership, and trust. Our vision is Shift4 will illuminate the world through connected commerce. There's a couple things in there. Illuminate, that's not necessarily shining a light on something. It can also be bringing clarity to something. For those of you that aren't familiar, global commerce is anything but clear. It's very complicated.
Even some of the organizations that we all respect the most, like Adyen or Stripe and numerous financial institutions across the world, in order to bring everything together, creating a platform on top of platforms to at least have, you know, some semblance of a unified experience for their customers. Global commerce is hard. We endeavor to bring clarity to it. Obviously worldwide. In that one thing you should be taking away from today's information is we are absolutely going global, not just for some of the signature wins that we're gonna talk about later, but across the entirety of our core business, restaurants, hotels, stadiums.
I'm quite sure the stadiums in Europe and other parts of the world would like to benefit from the same capabilities that make Allegiant Stadium so special and all the other customers we have. Mission to power commerce through our bold, determined spirit and deliver the most trusted and comprehensive payment experience. Comprehensive in that we will absolutely deliver an experience that others would take multiple vendors in order to replicate, and in doing so, it'll add cost, it will be anything but expedient, and it will challenge the customer experience. Then the values of bold excellence, ownership, and trust to inform our process. What you don't see here is the philosophies that we embrace.
that's what's gonna enable us to execute with urgency on all the various growth vectors that we have, we're sharing with you today and the more to come. A little bit more on Shift4 for those not familiar. Obviously, with you know $200 billion in payment volume running across our rails, 200,000+ customers, 7,000 sales partners, which give us a lot of reach and operating leverage, we're not a small organization. Pretty scaled player across a number of verticals, and we serve some of the most recognizable brands, not just across you know restaurants or hospitality or specialty retail, but a number of other exciting verticals.
Many of these customers that are highly dependent on our payment technology are only using one or two components of our solution. Maybe they're just using our gateway and then we'll embrace end-to-end, or maybe they're gonna embrace our gateway, our end-to-end processing solution, and our software in the case of, like, United Center. There's a massive amount of opportunity that just exists within the commerce that we're touching today, not to mention what is a huge global addressable market that all of our software integrations connect into. You know, over the last couple weeks with various investor engagement, I truly appreciate all the feedback everyone who reached out trying to explain to us what the heck was going on over the last month. It felt like maybe people forgot that we were actually an integrated payments company.
At least, you know, as of this morning before the opening, it certainly didn't seem like we were trading that way. We power commerce by connecting our integrated payment platform into software. It's not one product. You can't have one product that can serve restaurants, hotels, golf courses, retail stores, salons, spas, mobile sports wagering, satellite internet connectivity, right? You have to connect into a lot of software. Most of our customers, being on the more complex end of the payment spectrum, require multiple different types of software to deliver a payment experience. Even here at Allegiant Stadium, you got restaurant point-of-sale software, you have retail software, you have mobile software for consumers to order from the seats. You have this in-suite software because that's a different experience altogether.
That's the type of customers we serve. Ninety-nine percent of the transactions we touch are connected to software. That's an integrated payments company. That's why we're growing very fast. We do it through three strategies. The reason we're able to do it through three strategies is because we've been doing it for a really long time. We didn't just wake up in the integrated payment space. We knew that there's gonna be opportunities within certain verticals where you should build your own product. Examples of that would be SkyTab, and now what we've built on top of 3dcart, which we refer to as Shift4Shop. Or in our past, which was the example I gave before of 2008, Harbortouch, maybe like the industry's first fully bundled hardware/software payment offering for the restaurant space.
That goes back 13 years ago. We also buy software companies. If we like a vertical a lot, and we think we're willing to pull the trigger and bet on one horse in order to have substantial share within that space and move quicker, we'll do that. A great example is VenueNext acquisition. We sized up the landscape. There's four companies that have software solutions for, you know, the bulk of the stadium market. Two of them are legacy. They're share losers. They're not winning. There's another one that was winning share. It was really grossly mismanaged. There's VenueNext that was winning like crazy, and that was out without an integrated payments-fueled value proposition. We're willing to pull the trigger on acquisitions when we can go in and dominate within a vertical.
VenueNext has performed far better than we could have expected, not just within stadiums like this, but across numerous entertainment venues like theme parks, for example, that are also our customers. Then there's partnerships. We partner with a lot of software. The same reasons I said before, we're an integrated payments company. We're not gonna be able to, as no one is, gonna build a single software application product that will work in all the verticals we wanna be in. Just doesn't work that way. There's a lot of software companies out there. Our job is to integrate with a lot of them. Now, we've been accused of integrating with a lot of old software, okay? We had 350 unique software integrations at the time of the IPO. We have 425 now.
Those 75 additional software integrations are almost all cloud-based solutions. You know why that's the case? Because the 350 software integrations we have aren't just putting up the white flag and capitulating the market, they're building new software. They're gonna build a next generation hotel software, a salon software, a golf course software. You know who they're gonna integrate it to first? They're gonna integrate it with the payments company they already have, because those are the ones that already have the existing base of customers and the distribution partners familiar with the product. So we're an integrated payments company that connects into software, and we didn't slow down in our core markets. We've only continued to add software integrations through a build, buy, and partner strategy. That's why volume's going up, 'cause we're winning share through software integrations.
We wanted to put this slide in here. The slide you see on the left is what we circulated at the testing the waters process prior to the pandemic. Very important. This was in February 2020. 25% end-to-end volume growth CAGR was forecasted, 10% net revenue CAGR, and 21% adjusted EBITDA CAGR. What did we actually do over the last 18 months in the face of a pandemic that we didn't have at the time this slide was created, that some people thought was even a little bit aggressive? 46% end-to-end payment volume CAGR, 31% gross revenue less network fee CAGR, and 41% adjusted EBITDA CAGR. Now, we're not a COVID beneficiary, guys. We don't do e-commerce in any significant numbers.
I mean, prior to the 3dcart acquisition, we had virtually no e-commerce other than our hotel room reservations. Restaurants and hotels got wiped out during the pandemic. We processed payments predominantly at that time for restaurants and hotel. We grew payment volume double digits through the pandemic. There was somehow an impression that we were actually losing share in restaurants. The way that happened is because we signed up a lot of restaurants and hotels during the pandemic, and they made that choice, not because they were trying to gravitate to a weaker technology solution. They made that choice because they were gravitating to a superior technology solution. That's how we achieve this growth performance. Now, personally, I think if the story stopped there, that would be pretty good over the last 18 months. The story doesn't stop there.
We wanted to put together a scorecard since the IPO of how we've performed. These are all direct references from the S-1 at the time. Continue to win new customers. We grew payment volume at 46%. Now, if we're losing share, that's not possible. We're winning customers, and we're winning customers not just across the core verticals at the time of the IPO, but across several new ones. Unlock substantial opportunity within the existing base. As we've said, 50% of our production in any given month comes from gateway customers moving to our end-to-end platform, and 50% comes from just net new wins in what is a really nice addressable market. That opportunity still remains. There's $170 billion gateway volume still on the platform.
I know that was $150 billion last quarter. That was before, you know, it cost $500 a night at a Motel 6. You know, the big thing there is that easily quantifiable opportunity, it's not going anywhere else. We all know where that gateway volume's connected into, right? It's Global FIS, JP Morgan, First Data. I'm very sure they are aware of our strategy because that's how we've moved a lot of end-to-end volume over to our platform right now. If you were them, and you knew that we were executing on this end-to-end conversion strategy, wouldn't you try and take that volume over the last four years and park it anywhere else but us?
I think that speaks to how valuable those 425 software integrations are and the 20 years of version history behind it. There's nowhere else for it to go. We've largely pursued that opportunity by showering those customers with incentives, lots of carrots, free handheld SkyTab devices, free online ordering, anything really to move them over, and it's working really well. I mean, end-to-end volume growth CAGR is what it is. We don't have to be in the gateway business forever. Toast isn't a gateway. Clover isn't a gateway. Square isn't a gateway. You know, at some point or another, we can sunset that strategy, or we can implement tolls or other opportunities to monetize the gateway for those that continue to wanna work the legacy acquired that's probably not adding a lot of value. Leverage domain expertise and hospitality spend adjacent verticals.
We've added seven new verticals, and we'll talk about this a little bit later on, but you have to be highly confident in your high-growth core business in order to branch out into other verticals that that business will take care of itself. That's exactly what it's been doing, which is why the responsible thing to do was to go into new verticals that we saw a lot of opportunity and bring our integrated payment expertise and start to get real results. The real results are we've generated $45 million of additional software revenue for this year in those new verticals. Now, it's still early days in monetizing the payments associated with those verticals. We've only been at it six to nine months. There is a football season that starts. Once that happens, it gets a lot harder to move stadiums over.
It gets a lot harder to move gaming customers over once football season starts. We think we're doing pretty well, and again, that expansion was largely the confidence we had in our core high-growth business, that it's gonna keep doing its thing. Continue to enhance product portfolio with differentiated solutions. We've added 75 new software integrations within our high-growth core business. Pursue strategic acquisitions. I feel like we got a little punished that we were disciplined here. We've deployed about $200 million of capital since the IPO between a split of organic and inorganic initiatives. That's what took us into gaming. That's what took us into sports and entertainment. It's what took us into e-commerce. It also included some investments and some accelerants within our core markets, which is obviously playing out well.
We have $1.3 billion in cash, and we haven't deployed that on a large scale because we're waiting for the right opportunity, and I think we've got a lot of reasons now why we should be a little bit more aggressive, and we'll talk later. We don't give ourselves a good check mark there, because we have been patient. Monetize the robust data we capture through the Shift4 model. We're still capturing all that great data that we have. You know, we're still learning, but we haven't begun to even monetize it yet. Leverage our relationships with global customers to expand internationally. You know, this one is, in our minds, there's only a couple paths to really having a global card present processing capability. It's hard.
That's why it's our vision to bring clarity and illuminate commerce on a global level. It's one of the most obvious things we can do strategically, right? Look at who our customers are, Hilton, Hyatt, Marriott. I mean, you have a lot of, you know, multinational customers already. You wanna follow them. You just wanna do it on the right terms. You know, the more synergies you can unlock from one of these deals, like bringing on a number of signature global wins, provides that much more justification to go and pull the trigger on something we've always wanted to do, we just wanna do it at the right time. I'd say we're delivering on our IPO promises based on this slide, and really, we're just getting started. We're gonna take this presentation into a couple parts.
We're gonna talk right now about Shift4, essentially at the time of the IPO and what we're calling our high-growth core. Based on some feedback from our investors, you know, we wanted to provide a lot more specifics on just how healthy and how quickly our core business is growing. Just so you know, like, most of our competitors, when they refer to their core, they're referring to something that is shrinking, their legacy business, and then pivoting over to but be excited about this shiny new object. Our core business is awesome. I mean, look at how it's performing here. This is not because, like, of any factor other than simply we're taking share in the market right now, and you can see some comparisons against Visa, Mastercard, and some other players.
I would call your attention to a couple things. Take a look at 2020's slight dip. I mean, that's what the pandemic did to us. I'd say that looks like we shrugged it off pretty well despite those circumstances affecting our customers. Restaurants are growing. Again, I can't emphasize enough, like, you've got to assume these restaurant operators are not making bad decisions, right? Like, they're actually gravitating towards a product because it's adding value. You know, well, we think you guys are probably, you know, losing share to some of the new, you know, emerging players. I don't see that in the restaurant chart right there.
We've had some critiques on, you know, when our spread moves, you know, a basis point or two and a quarter, and we'll talk about that on the next slide. It's because four years ago, we had no hotels. We have a lot of hotels now. Hotels do more volume than restaurants. Average revenue per merchant's going up. Average volume per merchant is going up. Sure, you do a lot more volume, it's gonna be priced differently. Setting expectations right now, I can guarantee you Starlink is not priced at the same spread as an Irish pub on the corner. I think that would make a lot of sense if you do $100 billion a year in payment volume. The other thing I'd emphasize too here, this is all organic.
You know, we've done small acquisitions, sure, over the years. We haven't purchased a company in recent history in the last eight years that actually possess our number one KPI, which is end-to-end payment volume, which is what you're looking at here. We bought companies and transformed their revenue model, for sure. We've acquired companies and added an integrated payment solution to it. Every bit of that volume is growth from our partners, software partners going out and winning payment volume, and nothing to do with anything we acquired that already possessed it. Okay. We've had a lot of inbounds over the last month about Toast eating us alive, so I wanted to point out a couple things here.
For starters, we've been around for a long time, and I can even tell you in 2015 when we had our process to find our equity sponsor, all the questions throughout that time period was Square is gonna put you out of business. Square is a fantastic company, but I think it's very clear where their lane is right now, and they're doing great things to it. It didn't stop there. It was NCR Silver is gonna put you out of business. Revel. Remember Revel waving. They were raising $500 million valuations like six years ago before any of these like super astronomical revenue multiples were. You don't really hear about them a whole lot anymore. Upserve or TouchBistro or Toast. Look, guys, the.
It's not a winner-take-all environment. I mean, I can't emphasize that enough. You know, these are good companies. We're a good company too, and I think that's probably demonstrated by that 52% CAGR within the restaurant space. Let's talk spreads a little bit. 74 basis point blended spread. I think you can see restaurant spreads are going up. Obviously we're not under immense pressure that we gotta burn it all down and price it nothing in order to maintain relevancy in the restaurant spot. Looks like restaurants are continuing to sign up despite the fact the spreads are pretty healthy. These spreads, by the way, are healthier than the other companies been talking about in terms of what they're able to capture.
The only spread here that's actually trending down, if you'll notice, is in all other. That's the result of UPS Stores. I believe we started this year approximately 3,000 of the UPS Stores were on our end-to-end platform . We're ending this year somewhere around 4,200. It's also worth pointing out that Toast software does not power retail shipping companies. You'll see lodging at the bottom. Obviously, significant lift in lodging volume over the last couple years. Again, you're just talking a substantially higher volume per merchant. We believe they should be looking at it for sure on an average revenue per merchant, which is really what this next slide is meant to represent. Higher volume merchants, lower spread.
It's still trending up, as you saw on the previous slide, but it's obviously not the Irish pub on the corner. It's a completely different environment. This is what you wanna see, by the way. We've said of all the competitors out there, the ones that we liken ourselves most to is Adyen. You know, we're an integrated payments company just like them, and we happen to focus on the more complex end of the payment spectrum. Well, how do you know it's working on the more complex end of the payment spectrum? Average volume per merchant goes up. Average revenue per merchant goes up.
That means you're moving farther and farther away from the world that a PayPal or a Square would find success in and into the world of multiple different software applications where no one particular software product can dominate the payments conversation. You know, we talked about this during the Analyst Day at Pebble Beach, but you know, well, when questions came up about PayFacs, and it's like, well, you gotta see here, you got 15 retail stores, three golf courses using golf software, three salons and spas using salon software. You got three hotels using different software. There is no one product in here that gets to say, "I get to be different." All of this can be integrated with one common experience for security and tokenization and business intelligence and settlement. Me, I'm the golf software player.
I'm gonna do a PayFac thing and completely isolate myself from that environment. It doesn't work that way. It doesn't work that way in the more complex end of the spectrum. Obviously, the results again are speaking for itself if your average revenue per merchant, average volume per merchant, is trending upward. We talk a lot about margin. On an adjusted EBITDA margin basis, we've increased since Q3 2020, nearly 500 basis points to 38%. We're doing this while we're investing in high growth verticals. Like, this is an anomaly right now, guys. Like you there's legacy merchant acquirers who are optimizing around expense and raising rates like crazy on their existing customers because volume's going down, and that's why they're not reporting it and need to hide that fact.
That's the legacy acquirer. You have the high growth players who are saying, "We'll worry about margin later. Just value on our revenue multiple, and we're gonna grow like crazy." We're trying to do both. We're growing very quickly in our core markets where we are scaled, margin is expanding, margin will continue to expand, but we're also making investments organically into new verticals because that's the right thing to do. We're getting results and we have real results to show for it, which is the $45 million in revenue and why we're raising that component of guidance this year. We've been trying to figure out where the heck we live over the last month, so we put this slide together as much for ourselves as for you.
I don't think any of this is too shocking. Volume growth from legacy acquirers. I think for the most part, they don't report it. I think it's probably pretty clear why. You look at the revenue growth associated with it. You have the high growth disruptors. I think we size up reasonably well on the volume growth side, not as much maybe on the revenue growth side. I would point out that a lot of these players in this middle column did in fact benefit from COVID. I don't think anyone could deny that when you weren't allowed to physically go into a store, restaurant, or hotel, that meant you would have to procure things online.
If you are an Adyen or a PayPal, you're probably going to benefit in that environment, and a company like ours, where you usually do go in a restaurant or a hotel if you want to stay there, should not benefit. The volume again speaks for itself there. I don't know how anyone could think we're a COVID beneficiary, but I believe we performed reasonably well in this comparison. Now I feel like we could end the whole thing right here, and this you know would have been time well spent on further explaining the business. We are not stopping there. We actually have a lot to talk to you guys about today. High growth core, what are you doing about it? You know, we're gonna keep growing it.
How are you gonna do that? We still have $170 billion of gateway volume that remains. Again, that's really hard to do, right? That's actual commerce enabling software that's integrated into our platform. It's not easy to get software integrations. We're providing point-to-point encryption. We're providing tokenization. Everybody kinda generally understand what's going on with tokenization? Tokenization is where you're replacing, you know, what would otherwise be, you know, cardholder information of a credit card number, and you're replacing it with something that stands into that process. Now, when you tokenize, that becomes a very sticky connection back to that customer. Once you have a lot of tokenized cardholder information, you can't pick up that tokenized data out of our token vault and bring it somewhere else.
You've got $170 billion of very sticky volume using our encryption and our tokens that we are then outputting to a global Fiserv, Worldpay and every other legacy acquirer because they don't actually possess those integrations directly. To be very clear, there's no gateway connections into Adyen or Stripe. Like they. They're an integrated payments company. They have those integrations directly. This is all going to legacy acquirers that don't have integrations to our 425 software applications. We don't have to be a gateway long term. Like I said, we don't have to have a pure carrot only approach. You know, at some point we could choose to sunset those connections. They're costly for us, by the way. That's in our OpEx.
We have teams of people who have to maintain connections into all those processors. Every time there's a new EMV or security mandate, we have to invest in doing that. When we certify a new hardware device, we have to certify it on every one of those processors. That's a lot of accommodation for the competition. Doesn't need to stay that way. It is purely an eventuality. There is no size customer that lives within our gateway base that we can't do a processor change on, make their life easier having a single vendor solution, save them cost, and have a meaningful lift in our gross profit.
If you look at the gateway conversion economics, we talked about this before, we've always said every time a gateway customer moves over, they're happier, they're paying less, they got some sort of technology from us to save pain points, and it's a huge uplift in gross profit. That's based on a 50 basis point net spread. It's not how we're signing customers, so, like, don't punish us over that. We're just saying we took a very conservative assumption here saying even at 50 basis points, we should be doing this all day long, and we are. Then you have your organic wins. These are customers that require those software integrations in order to deliver a commerce experience for their patrons. They're not on our gateway, but they're still gravitating to our solution. Hakkasan, you know, TAO Group.
Like I said, these are pretty sophisticated operators. They're not moving to us for an equal or worse technology experience. They're making a good choice to come our way because they're getting a lot of value. What else are we doing in our core vertical? We do a lot of restaurants, right? We're not gonna sit on our hands in that space. There's too much opportunity there. We've known this since 2017, since we acquired three different software, restaurant software ISVs, that we were gonna deliver a next gen point-of-sale system platform. We told you about it before. We called it Project Edgewater. It has a name. It'll be fully released in the end of Q1 of 2022 to all of our distribution partners. You can have a preview of it here today. I believe it's in suite maybe 2018.
We'll give you a demo of our new prototype hardware, customer-facing display, our new tablet, and our new next gen handheld SkyTab. I imagine at some point you've seen some of our SkyTab devices in the field. You'll get to see what the new generation looks like and this pretty cool user experience that we've built out into the software. This isn't something we started working on a month or two months ago because we were in the face of, you know, this immense competition. We started building this three years ago. We have a lot of merchants using it now. What does this represent to us? There are 125,000 restaurants that already use some form of Shift4 payment technology today. 15% of which we generate SaaS revenue on. Why?
Because we moved very quickly after our acquisitions in 2017, when we acquired those software companies, to pivot their revenue model entirely towards payments. It worked really well, and we grew a ton of payment volume. We gave away things. We gave away SkyTab handhelds. We gave away free online ordering, and this still worked really well. Volume growth has been fantastic. Margins have expanded. This is a world today where if you're delivering as much value as SkyTab can, you can have those spreads on payments, and you can have SaaS revenue, and you can monetize the marketplace. I don't know if you guys know this. We've 50 integrations out there at least to your Uber Eats, DoorDash, you know, Postmates. All the players you can think of, they're in our marketplace today.
All of our merchants can connect in. A large portion of our merchants can connect into it. We don't charge any tolls on that. We don't punish the app developers 30% or 40% or anything like that. It doesn't mean we shouldn't do that going forward. Certainly with SkyTab, we will have an intention to monetize marketplace. We never pushed out a payroll or capital offering product, partially because we're moving up market and I have to assume that a Tao or Hakkasan may not wanna take high APR capital off of us or use a payroll solution. It doesn't mean we shouldn't do it, especially if we're going if we wanna take some share within the sweeter SMB part of the space. A lot of opportunity within the 125,000 customers we have.
Anytime we talk about whether it's a gateway conversion or a cross-sell, that's always about 50% of production. There's still a very large addressable market that 7,000 of our partners are waiting, you know, for a product that they can go out and make some noise with. That's where you'll find SkyTab POS. Immense opportunity within our existing base. Huge cross-sell opportunity out there. New revenue opportunities from payroll capital, marketplace. There's also. It's gonna unlock a ton of efficiencies inside the organization. We, you know, we have 1,700 or so employees right now. It takes a lot of people to upkeep, you know, Windows-based point-of-sale systems, especially when you connect into an awful lot of them out there.
You gain so much as you consolidate customers around a single product type. Android-based systems are less maintenance intense. There's no question about it. We'll gain a number of internal benefits alone with just the SkyTab POS program. Some of the capabilities, and we'll give you a demo in the back, so I don't need to read through all this. There are a couple, you know, big sizzle ones. How do you get here so quickly? Because we've built a lot of these components in essentially modules. The same type of SkyTab pay-at-table, order-at-table application that connects to numerous software integrations we already have, that's easy to bolt right into SkyTab POS. Our QR code payment and QR-based ordering capability, you already built it out. It works.
You just integrate that module into it. There are other examples, like our free online ordering platform. Same thing, you integrate into it. Really, we just had to prioritize this new user experience, take some of the fan-first capabilities that we've learned from our friends at VenueNext, and also build in some other sizzle things that we like it has free loyalty modules right now that we think is pretty differentiated. You might have seen a couple, you know, pure loyalty-based companies trade this past year at some pretty extraordinary revenue multiples. Loyalty's easy. I mean, think about it. For the longest time, it was just a punch thing on a card. You went to the barber 10 times, you get a free haircut.
You can either make it, like, frequency-based or you can make it dollar spend-based. It's easy to do. You don't have to charge for it. It's embedded in SkyTab POS. It'll be one of the differentiators when our partners go to market, is free loyalty-based solutions. We built our own kitchen video display system. I know Square is very proud of theirs. We're very proud of ours as well. A new handheld manager app we call InCharge. New business intelligence platform. But again, we'll give you a demo on it. Last, this isn't PowerPoint. We're not telling you about something we want you to get excited about a couple years in the future. There's 2,000 merchants using SkyTab POS.
We've already brought in a lot of our sophisticated distribution partners for this beta, really for over a year now. You can see an idea of the number of customer growth over the last year. We have some pretty notable customers already using it. Church's Chicken, United Center. United Center is about as end-to-end as it gets in our world. It's our restaurant point-of-sale software, it's our mobile software with VenueNext, and it's our end-to-end processing. Expecting the end of Q1 2020, we'll unleash this to our partners. What have we done since the IPO? We've moved into three exciting verticals through organic and inorganic means. Sports and entertainment, we've been announcing wins in stadiums and theme parks. I would say pretty consistently since the acquisition, which was only about, you know, six to nine months ago.
Gaming, this is entirely organic. We had to build out all the integrations to software platforms like Everi and, NRT, PXP, alternative payment methods. You know, in the mobile gaming world, people have a variety of solutions. Sightline would be another great example of that. And then e-commerce through 3dcart and our Shift4Shop acquisition. What we did is recognize at the time of the IPO, we were very fortunate to launch a successful IPO during a pandemic. We knew great confidence in our core markets and our unique software integrations that you can't replicate that. The responsible thing to do is take this newfound position and enter into new high-growth verticals and do it, and do it quickly. We did do that.
In doing so, we've expanded our TAM by about $630 billion just between these three verticals alone. To give you a little bit of a sense of the timeline here, you can see Shift4 IPO. We acquired MICROS Retail Systems. That was an accelerant within our core markets. We acquired 3dcart, renamed it Shift4Shop. I talked earlier on our earnings call about some of the things we're doing in Shift4Shop right now, which is great. Acquired VenueNext. We launched Shift4 Ventures. We made two investments in early this year. One of them is Sightline, and the other was SpaceX. They've both since done subsequent transactions and have appreciated considerably. We began processing payment volume in our first stadium. We had our first notable gaming win, which was BetMGM. We've since followed that up.
Recently this past quarter, in a very small transaction, we acquired PosTech, which is another accelerant within our core markets. Again, deploying about $200 million, so not a lot relative to the amount of firepower we have available to us, not a lot relative to many of our peers who were on a shopping spree over the last year. It was both organic and inorganic strategies to be in these three new verticals. We've got $45 million of software-based revenue to show for it. We've added $630 billion of TAM.
Living within these verticals today, just the software integrations we're talking about, VenueNext, you know, Shift4Shop, we have a $6 billion cross-sell opportunity of customers already using our software and that we're in the process of moving over to monetize payments on. I say all this because this is also a drag on margin expansion, and I know I mentioned it before. We could have not done this. Maybe we wouldn't be at 38% margin, maybe be at 40%, and then we'd be just talking about a restaurant hotel specialty retail story. Instead, we're able to talk about all of this while still expanding margins and deploying capital wisely. A couple specific updates within these three new verticals. Gaming, we have eight gaming licenses now. I think we got another eight or so.
Well, however many states want to do gaming, you can expect we have an application in on. 20 integrations with top gaming providers, and alternative payment methods. Deep partnerships with Sightline and Everi. You can see other ones on this page, like NRT, are also very relevant players in the space. E-commerce. I think we said earlier, we're at about 70,000 sites that are on the Shift4Shop platform. There were approximately 15,000 at the time of the acquisition, which is a year ago. This is not a huge needle mover at all for us from a volume or revenue perspective, but it's a presence in web store e-commerce. Restaurants have web stores. You know, bed and breakfasts have web stores.
You know, a lot of businesses like having that capability, and it is a way for us to differentiate along the way. We have integrated with Facebook ads, and we also are announcing or we'll announce shortly donations at checkout with a pretty notable nonprofit. You can probably guess who. Then we have enabled crypto acceptance through BitPay on that platform. That's good exposure because one of the big customers we announced today certainly has an affinity for crypto, and if they tell us they want us to bring that into other verticals, at least we kind of have some sense of what we're doing in it now. Then sports and entertainment, tons of wins that are going on there, as well as theme parks.
Look, there's real SaaS revenue in there from the most well-known theme park in the world, and that's growing. That's a revenue stream right now that would, like, almost weigh against us, that we'd be penalized on, that you'd almost wanna be. You'd think would be rewarded. In any case, it's still very early days on payment monetization across these three verticals. These are all efforts in the last six or nine months, but there's real results to show from it. Okay. Shift4 for tomorrow, our new expansion, really the transformation. I love this slide. To the moon. Okay. Big thing here is we're going global. Every one of these customers has a need outside the United States.
We'll talk a little bit more on that right now over the next couple slides. I think the big takeaway here is, if we're going to invest the energy to meet the demand and the energy and resources to meet the demand of these three signature wins and to capture additional share within their verticals, we are not doing it just to the limitation of those verticals, right? If you're building out this capability, you're going to build it out across the platform so that our stadium business can go international, our gaming business can go international, our e-commerce business can go international.
You know, if you added 55,000 or so, 60,000 sites on Shift4Shop in the last year in an entirely domestic strategy of no hosting fees, we purely monetize via payments, what does that do when you make it available to most of the world? I would think it goes up. You can do the same with your restaurants, your hotel business, your specialty retail business. When we're going global to meet the needs of these awesome customers and the industries they represent, that global TAM expansion applies to all of our integrations, core, the three new verticals and the four that these three signature wins represent. St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. I mentioned it earlier on the call right now. I think one of.
One of the analysts had a good question, was like, "Why is your platform that does restaurants and hotels, why does that add any value to nonprofits or airlines?" It's like our platform is an integrated payments platform. We connect into software. We happen to have a lot of software in restaurants, hotels and specialty retail. But really, what makes our platform special and why there's so few like it is because we cater to the complex end of commerce. Not just one piece of software. Multiple pieces of software need to exist in order to deliver a commerce experience for that particular customer. I can tell you, nonprofits haven't been really exposed to this for the last really year. They have so much software there. It's incredible.
I mean, there's like 10 different roll-up strategies going on right now just for nonprofits, and they all have a collection of like 50 software in them, and they're all even more fragmented than that. You know, you wanna take donations during a live stream of a video game. There's software for that. It's not the same software that's doing, you know, the in-venue or in-person galas and donation events. It's not the same software that's on their website and such. It's incredibly logical that we would go in the space. What's like a more signature win to usher us into nonprofits and healthcare than St. Jude Children's Research Hospital? You're talking about over $2 billion in annual payment donations. We're the preferred partner there. You know, I think that we.
The commitment, by the way, is that volume will begin in January. As soon as we get through the busy season, you can expect those integrations come in. Keep in mind again, when they're integrating all these different software applications into our platform, those same software integrations take us into who knows how many other nonprofits and healthcare verticals. Pretty substantial win in its own right. Obviously a huge TAM expansion when you think about a land and expand across the vertical. Allegiant Air. We're in Allegiant Stadium, that's cool. This is really an extension within travel and leisure. I can tell you one of the ways we were able to differentiate and win here is Allegiant does own some hotels.
I think they're expanding into additional ones. They do own some restaurants. They're trying to have more of a, I think, an end-to-end solution there. The fact that we would be able to integrate into all their existing hotel and restaurant point-of-sale systems as well as integrate into the travel side of the business allows them to know their customer better and follow them through tokens, which drive usually the business intelligence solutions they're using. Allegiant's a public company. You can see what their revenue is. It's pretty much all credit cards. I don't think you can buy an airline ticket in cash. You should expect that to migrate over to Shift4. I think that's, you know.
I think maybe, like, I would accept that would be like a second quarter thing, but I'm certainly hopeful that we can expedite some of the integrations. It's their travel management system that's new integration for us obviously, but opens up opportunities into additional airlines, which is a pretty substantial TAM in its own right. I don't know if you know this, most of the airline volume lives on one acquirer right now. That's the same acquirer that we've been just beating up like crazy in the hotel space, for the last couple of years, as demonstrated by the hotel volume growth CAGR. They pretty much all came from one player. That's Allegiant.
My personal favorite, I don't like to say that this is opening us up to, you know, the new vertical of, space-based, broadband technology. This is sexy tech. Like, this is a $100 billion company. If anyone didn't know, that's what they raised their last round at. I think there was a Morgan Stanley analyst that predicted their revenue opportunity is gonna be over a $100 billion a year. That's also gonna be credit card and crypto-based. I mean, this relationship alone, which is a five-year strategic partnership with a commitment to move all the domestic payment volume within 120 days of when the contract was signed. We're well on our way in that integration path. This one relationship could more than double the size of the company.
Not to mention, it's a stamp and a validation from probably our, you know, generation's greatest entrepreneur that we can do sexy tech. I wouldn't expect it to be the last. I don't know if anyone like, again, that $100 billion round was raised on very little disclosures out there based on the belief that, you know, the world is gonna wanna be connected through access to information. It's a lot harder to run cable lines and DSL lines into the desert. This is a whole new world of cord cutting that's gonna go on with Starlink satellite connections. They have 1,740 up right now. They consider that their beta.
They'll have 30,000 up, and they're a vertically integrated provider, and then they can put their own satellites up. I don't know if you saw there's a lot of other satellite companies applying for permits. They haven't built anything yet pursuing the same landscape. They're gonna probably have to pay SpaceX to put their satellites on orbit, and you can imagine what those costs will be if to the competition. Also worth pointing out, they have a restaurant in Starbase, Texas. I don't know if you've ever been there, it's like a religious experience. It's amazing. This is like the gateway to Mars and beyond. It's pretty cool. Very Manhattan Project-like vibes of building a city in the, you know, in a pretty scarcely populated area. They have a great restaurant there now.
They're adding a couple bars on top of these big high bays where they're building 100 of these cool Starship spacecraft. It's also part of the agreement that those will wind up using SkyTab POS. In fact, I think we have a demo coming up this week. A lot of extraordinary opportunity there too. This is for sure the signature win that is gonna take us all across the world for the benefit of all of our other software integrations. Yeah. These pretty much are the three wins we just talked about.
I can tell you that in terms of who we displaced in it, 'cause it's usually one of the questions that come up. Adyen and Stripe both lost at least two of the names that we just talked about here. I think those are amazing organizations, by the way. I totally respect it. Wrapping up here, and apologies if I'm running a little long. We wanted to set some expectations. I think that we've personally I think we were really bad about this in the past. We'd do acquisitions like VenueNext or 3dcart, and we'd get excited about it internally. I don't think we gave our investors a lot of reasons to be excited all the time. I think we have to set some expectations here.
We anticipate by the end of 2024, that year we'll have $160 billion end-to-end volume, $3.5 billion gross revenue, $1.15 billion gross revenue less network fees, which represents at least 50% end-to-end volume growth CAGR over that time period of 30% gross revenue less network fee CAGR. Let me also get out in front of too just a question on, well, what does this mean for margin? First of all three of those wins I just announced have margin in it. Those were not throwaway deals from a pricing perspective at all. I think the idea is our core business that we talked about, our high growth core, is gonna continue to expand with margin.
We will continue to balance investments organically and inorganically to support our three new verticals from this past year, the four new verticals that we're announcing today as we go global, while also letting our core business expand. Of course, long term, we expect, you know, as you're talking, you know, 160 billion end-to-end volume, you get to like a quarter of a trillion volume, the long-term margins are gonna be the same. I mean, we consider ourselves very Adyen-like in that, you know, at some point in time, you, these transaction volumes are, they're all incremental and fall to the bottom line.
At least, you know, for the next couple of years in these new verticals, we are gonna have to make investments if we're gonna go global. We have a ton of demand, and we're gonna deploy capital, of course, to support it. Again, can't emphasize enough, core markets are gonna continue to do their thing in terms of margin expansion while we balance our investments that we think are necessary. Another thing I'd say here too is just what is the whole, what do you have to believe on this whole thing? If you look at just the CAGR on our core business, that's not very far off from that 50% end-to-end volume growth number. We've been doing that for four years.
Even if you were to discount off of its current number, you're just saying that of the three new verticals that we entered six to nine months ago in gaming, e-commerce, and sports and entertainment, you know, sports and entertainment venues, plus these four new verticals that we now have an immense right to winning, which is nonprofits, healthcare, travel and leisure, as well as, sexy tech. That just needs to contribute 15% or so of incremental intent volume growth, and you start blowing through these numbers. I don't think it's a tough ask on what you need to believe. That brings me back to this slide, of which, I think we continue to size up very well. Again, I think if there was an organization I liken us most to here, it's really Adyen.
Adyen is a very impressive global commerce player that integrates software across all verticals. This is not like, are you a jack of all trades, master of none? You know, why don't you just get really good at restaurants or, and why are you doing also hotels? Now you're doing satellite global. You know, satellite broadband communication payments. We integrate to software. A lot of the software is made by great companies. I've no doubt the software that powers Allegiant Air is awesome. I'm sure. I definitely know for sure the software that's driving the commerce experience for Starlink is pretty incredible. We wanna connect into it. Just like Adyen, we wanna differentiate and win those software integrations and go out and conquer across a number of verticals, which is why this is exactly what our strategy's been.
It's why we've increased our TAM so significantly. I feel very compelled to talk through this over the last month. Look, I mean, I think in terms of SkyTab POS and Toast, there's a lot of similarities there. We're not a stranger to restaurant point-of-sale technology. We've been doing it for a really long time. We've been growing restaurant payment volume even in the face of these death star competitors for a long time right now. We have our new platform. We have very sophisticated distribution that provide local sales, service, and support, which we think is important as you wanna move up market. We have some advantages. We have an in-house payment platform, and we do have local distribution and support, and we think that matters quite a bit.
Unlike Toast, we haven't pulled all the levers yet. You know, Toast very smart from the beginning. I mean, integrated payment strategy, SaaS, monetize the marketplace, capital, payroll offerings. I mean, those are all great levers that they've already implemented. We have not monetized SaaS anywhere close to the level. It was not even a requirement for our solution. I mean, again, only 15% of our restaurant customers are paying it. We've never put out a payroll solution. We haven't put out a capital offering. We haven't monetized our marketplace, but we're going to. That seems some upside for this product. It's also worth noting, and we pointed this out before, you know, Toast doesn't power UPS stores. Toast doesn't power hotels. They don't power golf courses.
They don't power salons and spas. They don't have a gaming application. They don't have an e-commerce web store builder. They don't do stadiums. They don't do theme parks. They don't do hospitals. They don't do nonprofits. They don't do airlines, and they don't do Starlink. And even the restaurants that are part of SpaceX, they don't do those either. So wrapping up here, and then we can go to questions. Pretty deliberate in how we told the story today. We thought it was very appropriate, because we hadn't done an investor day for a while, and the last month was, you know, it was pretty chaotic out there, so we felt like we owed you this deep dive here. We broke it up deliberately into three parts, Shift4 at the time of the IPO.
The core markets are doing fine, and they're gonna continue to do fine because it's so hard to replicate those integrations. We're not just relying on the integrations we had, we're expanding on them. We have 425 of them right now. Margins are good. Spreads are fine. Margins are expanding. Spreads are fine. You can see it right there across the restaurant track. The only category that trended down is retail. We had a monster of a customer in UPS stores that boarded over to our platform, which is great. It's very hard to win volume right now. It's why some people don't even report on it. Those margins will, those spreads will expand over time, just like you're seeing with lodging, as we continue to add more value for those customers.
We felt really good that our core business is gonna do fine for a long time, which again emboldened us to go out and take advantage of this great opportunity at the time of the IPO to invest in new markets, in gaming, in sports and entertainment, and e-commerce, which are all early days, but we've got something to show for that $200 million. We've got good revenue there, and we have a real right to win in those verticals. We expanded TAM considerably, and then we had some monster wins. That tees us up for tomorrow as we go boldly forward after healthcare, nonprofits, travel and leisure, and sexy tech. What this has done is create enormous demand. If we could process payments in South America tomorrow, we would have volume waiting for us there.
In Europe, the same. Recognizing this enormous TAM and this immense amount of demand that's already from our committed customers, we've positioned us well, thanks to you and a lot of our investors who entrusted us with a lot of cash, that we are now more motivated and have more rationale to deploy than ever to accelerate our growth in these verticals and fortify the ones we're already in today. With that, we'll take questions.
Hey, Jared, it's James Faucette from Morgan Stanley. Appreciate you taking time today, and just so you know, I didn't come up with that $100 billion revenue number for Starlink. That's another Morgan Stanley analyst. Anyway, I wanna ask a couple of things. First question is tied to your medium-term outlook. Just clarifying, are you looking at that, particularly the revenue growth as organic versus inorganic? And I guess I would tie that back to one of the things on your scorecard about acquisitions and doing strategic acquisitions. Like, how do we tie those things together? You know, it is hard to do deals out there, at least at valuations that people find attractive. How are you approaching that?
Good question. And by the way, whoever it was, the Morgan Stanley analyst on it, the assumption was, $29 a month subscription fee for broadband. They charge $100 a month right now, so could actually be 3x that $100 billion number.
Yeah.
People seem to like to pay a premium for Elon's products. Look, the way we look at it right now is we just have an awful lot of demand right now, and we have to meet it. That will unquestionably include deploying capital organically towards some of these initiatives like we're doing in gaming, and for sure inorganic, as well. Now the result of organic could be that we considerably exceed. Let me clarify considerably. I don't want to get too like it could exceed a lot of what we communicated already. To your point on valuations being challenging, for sure. That's a large part of the reason why we haven't pulled the trigger before. Things have changed. We have more rationale than ever right now.
You know, there could be hypothetically an international opportunity that we looked at and said, "You know, we can't, you know, maybe justify this price because they're in verticals that aren't like, you know, very compatible with what we try and do." Today you can say, "Well, wait a second. You can just supplement that with the instantaneous demand that, you know, Starlink would have in that region, which could help rationalize that transaction even at that multiple." These three really important wins, St. Jude for nonprofits and healthcare, Starlink for sexy tech and really global demand associated with it, and Allegiant definitely changed the game a little bit for us in terms of, you know, our willingness to maybe pay up for some of these opportunities that we think we can immediately benefit from.
Yeah, in terms of getting the specifics of how much is baked within that, I think that we're never, you know, 100% counting on, well, this acquisition is needed in order to achieve this right now. I think we looked at it as we're very comfortable with the demand that we have, that we can quantify from our gateway opportunity, the integrations represented in these signature multi-year strategic partnerships to have confidence that we're gonna get there or even surpass it and use the resources available that we have available to do it.
Then one question that we get a lot from investors that are especially kind of kicking the tires and then due diligence on Shift4 about is, while you show very good margins on the P&L, the cash conversion or cash flow relative to others isn't as good. I think the assumption is that ties a lot to that you are doing your own hardware. In a lot of cases, you are building that into the pricing. How should we think about that evolving or is that, you know, are you always gonna be kind of a lower cash conversion? It seems like some of the path to improvement there would be extending the life of terminals or doing some other things. Can you just talk through how we should think about the evolution of cash conversion?
Yeah. No, I got that feedback from someone. I was like, "Wow, it's like the clock rewound six years that we're talking about a valuation on free cash flow basis." You know, there's really horrible businesses that we can't even buy, and they're on a revenue multiple basis. Look, I think a lot of it does drop to the bottom line, but we're intelligently reinvesting, you know, in the business to continue to win share. I mean, you look at what that volume growth looked like. We put that slide in there for a reason. It's telling you that we're not losing customers, we're gaining customers. I mean, you know, we haven't refreshed this in some time.
The average customer lifetime on our gateway platforms at the time of the acquisitions was close to 13 years. That doesn't go down when you move them to our end-to-end platform. You're now actually, you know, de-risking the relationship with the customer and adding more value. You know, last time we really, you know, picked apart our unit economic model, we were sub-12-month payback periods. I mean, frankly, giving a $110. I mean, like, these devices over here, your Shift4 device over here, they're like $125, and every one of these came with a, you know, probably a $10 device management fee or something.
I think, you know, people would be getting too wound up on that right now if they're not seeing that you're getting growth, you're getting real EBITDA, you've got real free cash flow in the business. This is only gonna improve. To your point on, like, when you start moving to a more Android-based systems, that's not Windows-based. You got solid-state hard drives there. It's less bloated. They don't fail as much. The replacement cost on some of these devices is considerably less. As you move more upmarket, you're gaining IT resources. They generally have their own hardware and infrastructure. A lot of times your acquisition costs even less as you move upmarket and have a higher revenue per merchant.
I would love to ask that same question to some of our other competitors that, you know, just have pure negative cash flow. Fair though.
Hey, Jared. Chris Donat with Piper Sandler. In terms of your 50% growth rate for end-to-end volume through 2024, how should we think about the big swing factors for that? Is it organic growth? Is it these three new relationships really delivering or is that what's gonna make the difference or just what should we worry about? If we worry about something, what should we worry about?
Well, I mean, I certainly like some real lumpiness in there could absolutely come from those wins and when they come on board. I mean, geez, Starlink is monster, right? I mean, you know, if they're doing what I think they're gonna do, because those assumptions on $100 billion a year were, I mean, they were pretty conservative. They were $29 a month subscription plans. It's $100 a month now. There's a $400 device kit cost. You know, so like Starlink doesn't have to come on at full throttle, and you're still gonna start throwing off like substantial volume contributions just from that relationship alone. I mean, right now, you know, you just look at what our core business' CAGR has been at, and you're not that far from that 50%.
If everything else that we've talked about in these new verticals even ramps up at an anemic pace, to me, it would seem like we're comfortably past it. Yeah, for sure. Those three signature wins alone just on their current volume rate would be like a 12%-14% lift in our exit volume of 2021. Those three accounts aren't insignificant in terms of immediately boosting us on there. The core business is still growing very fast and the markets that they open up are pretty enormous and we're obviously signaling that we're willing to be very bold and aggressive to go out and capture that demand.
Okay. Just one follow-up, separate topic, but as you talk about going global, and we think about being in a stadium environment here, do you have a different set of competitors internationally? Like you mentioned Europe as stadiums there. Is like Adyen already in stadiums in Europe, or do you have other competitors who are there? Or is it a greenfield opportunity?
I mean, Adyen and Stripe are awesome, and they're all over the place right now. I mean, they integrate into someone else's software. We felt comfortable buying software that we think is gonna be a winner in stadiums in the case of VenueNext. The idea that we could come into those markets and say, which by the way, there's already demand for it now, to be able to come in and say, "Look, we'll replace all the software you have with our VenueNext solution, and we'll do the payments. If you really want this software, you kinda have to give us the payments, which is part of the deal," we think we'll find a lot of success in it.
We are advantaged in some cases when you do own the product and the payment rails in order to displace a competitor. There's a lot. I mean, the idea of mobile ordering and, you know, kinda, you know, checkout free shopping and retail, those trends aren't gonna go away. There's gonna continue to be demand for it, which they're still ramping really.
We got a couple questions, Jared, from the webcast.
Yep.
They pretty much all focused around international and margins.
Yeah.
On the international side, people are wondering, can you go international without an acquisition? Are there any certain international markets that are priority? The margins, just questions about what the margins trends are.
Good questions. It's interesting. I don't know how familiar everybody is. We've obviously done a lot of work in the international markets over the last year. We've more than kicked the tires on a handful of opportunities. You know, it's not totally like for like on how we do things here or at least how Shift4 does things, which is predominantly spread-based. You know, a lot of the players we admire over there, they have a portion of the. You can see in all these charts over there. They get a portion of kind of acquiring end-to-end volume. They charge separately for gateway. They charge separately typically for risk-based services.
Usually a very healthy portion of it comes from a currency conversion, like a shockingly healthy. What I'd say is perhaps, you know, the actual acquiring portion. First, everything should be again, relative to the size of the customer, right? Like, you know, but just as we've seen the difference between hotels and restaurants. You know, the acquiring portion might be hypothetically 20 basis points, but when you average in, you know, gateway, fraud services and DCC, you start to get to places that look very similar. In terms of, you know, where I'd say there's urgency, you know, the core business would say, getting to Europe would be maybe the bigger priority.
I think when you look at where Starlink's trajectory likely is, you know, you'd actually probably even sway more towards, you know, South America, Latin American area, Africa and other places because they are prioritizing parts of the world that having broadband connectivity has been a lot harder to reach. Can we do it organically versus inorganically? We're certainly gonna do both. But I'd say there is more urgency now just based on if you have a lot of demand, and you gotta go buy a factory in another country in order to satisfy that demand, that makes a lot of sense to do that. I think, you know, we would have a lot more rationale to do an acquisition than we did previously.
We've already have gateway transactions across the Caribbean. We have gateway transactions in Canada. It's not like we're at a starting place from zero if we do wanna continue to build out and invest on organic level.
Hey, thank you, Jared. Cole Hyland here from Credit Suisse, here for Tim Chiodo. Just doing some quick back of the envelope math here. The medium-term guide seems to imply about a 220 basis point take rate on the gross revenue. On the gross revenue less network fees, it's about 72 basis points. Down from where it is today, which makes sense given the move upmarket. That very healthy take rate on the gross basis or gross revenue less network fees seems to imply some material contribution from something like software revenue coming more into the mix, or are there other factors that are helping to support that net take rate, I guess we would call it?
Yeah. I think, you know, probably Brad should weigh in on it. What I'd first say is like when we built this midterm outlook, a lot of it was based on the idea that our core business, you know, can get you there. You know, you can see a lot of similarities already like that in our core business in terms of volume growth and what the spread contribution is from that. The idea that you should gain even greater comfort based on all these new verticals, of course, I think some of those will come in in a lower spread. I think some of them will have a much higher SaaS contribution to it as well. Brad, if you wanna.
That's the piece I was gonna add on. If you think about, you know, go back into the history of primarily monetizing through spreads, we've done that historically through the hotels and restaurants. Now as we move into these other verticals, you are gonna see a mix. To the point Jared just made, you may see a stadium come on, you know, at certainly lower spreads than a restaurant or hotel, but that SaaS component is gonna prop up the total revenue stream. And I think that's one of the shifts we wanna make sure people leave this room is understanding that we've talked historically, even going back to the IPO of taking SaaS revenue streams and almost completely blowing them up and converting it completely into payment space.
Well, what we found is there are certain verticals where we actually do have a really good opportunity to capture that SaaS revenue in addition to the spreads. E-com and VenueNext have really taught us that. When you look at those net spreads, they still look healthy, but it's componentized a little differently than necessarily pure being on the payment side. Now we're actually gonna keep those, some of that SaaS revenue with it as well.
Another question from the webcast, Jared. People are asking about next generation PayFacs and how Shift4 is positioned to win against next generation PayFacs.
Yeah. I mean, PayFacs is essentially where the software company itself becomes a payments company, monetized through payments. We know how to do that. There are portions of our business today that are where we have customers that are essentially PayFacs. Generally, as an overarching statement, right? We wanna be very far from the simplistic end of the payment spectrum. We don't wanna compete with Square, we don't wanna compete with PayPal, we don't like anything where one application that you can download on an iPad, which is where a lot of those PayFacs live, can run the entire business. That's an environment even legacy acquirers can compete in. It
All it is is opening essentially one merchant account at really, really low pricing, and then pushing all the obligations of managing the sub-merchants onto that customer. It's generally not where we wanna be. I don't wanna fight with like FIS for a penny a transaction on, you know, the next great PayFacs or something that's out there. We wanna focus on the complex end of this commerce spectrum. We want customers that need lots of different types of software in order to deliver a commerce experience for their customer, and ideally across a lot of different geographies. And that's how you're gonna be able to protect spread. That's how you're gonna be able to command the SaaS revenue. That's how you're gonna be able to differentiate from those that are having a harder time differentiating.
I don't know, there's too many examples of it, but yeah, generally that's probably not where you wanna be, if you're looking to, you know, move the bottom line.
You've talked a lot about restaurants and adding restaurants. I'm wondering if you look at, you know, over the last six months or 12 months, whatever timeframe is appropriate for you, what are the types of new restaurants or customers you've gained? Existing restaurants that you've taken away from people or brand new locations that have opened up?
That's a pretty good question. I'd like to think that most are already established restaurants because that would support the idea that your average volume per merchant and average revenue per merchant are going up. Generally, new restaurants have a one, they have a very high failure rate. Usually, last I checked was about one in three, and also it takes them a long time to ramp and build the following. I guess just looking at our average volume per merchant going up, it leads me to believe that they're usually pretty established ones that require multiple different types of software in order to win.
Are there any couple providers that you're winning from, or is it?
Yeah. You know, again, I you know, last couple weeks, and clearly I probably put a little bit too much Toast in the presentation, but man, we were fielding so many damn questions about it, you'd think all we did was restaurants. I think people lose track of it. There are winners out there, but it's really more who the losers in the whole thing. You know, Heartland probably had the most restaurant payment volume in the country five or six years ago. They were all essentially non-integrated terminals. They bought a couple ISVs, they shut a couple ISVs down, they bought another ISV. Like, they're donating share. Heartland's part of Global. You know, FIS had a lot of restaurants as part of Mercury, which became part of Vantiv.
The bottom line is like the legacy merchant acquirers are enormous and have a lot of restaurants using cash registers and non-integrated terminals. That's why they're shrinking. They don't all just follow the yellow brick road to Toast. Like, you know, they go to a Revel, they go to an Upserve, you know, they go to. Maybe some go to Clover, some go to Square on the small end of the market. A lot of them go to Toast. A lot of them go to Shift4 too. But yeah, it's not a winner-take-all environment in restaurants. It's probably a little bit more of a winner-take-all in lodging, I'd say of late. But you know, it's. We're certainly on the end of the spectrum where we're able to differentiate add value through technology and grow volume.
Can you give us an update on Shift4Shop? I think that's one of the most interesting things you've launched recently, and I know you've mentioned some merchant count, but maybe some more color on how it's being received in the marketplace and how you stack up against Shopify?
Yeah. It's definitely like kind of our R&D shop for us. I think one of our investors really said it well. It's like a self-funding R&D shop for us. That's a pretty fair way to say it, right? For at least its purposes right now. I mean, it's hard, right? I mean, even you know, you take a giant like Shopify and you know, huge customer acquisition costs for a long time, lost a lot of, I mean, invested a lot of capital to get their positioning, and ultimately you're not winning Amazons all the time. You're winning a lot of you know, new entrepreneurs that have an idea with an immensely high failure rate. I mean, it takes a long time to get payment volume from it.
You know, we bought that business in September of 2020-ish, October 2020. I mean, it was during a pandemic, felt like the right thing to do if you could buy an e-commerce platform at a 14x EBITDA multiple. And we've been growing site count like crazy. And if I look at the volume, end-to-end volume growth from platform, it's doing a hockey stick. It's just relative to the rest of the business. You know, it's just it needs to keep doing this for a really long time to start moving the needle. But what it is allowing us to do is be that self-funding vehicle. We have had BitPay integrated into Shift4Shop for, I don't know, I think at least four months or so. That's giving us some crypto payment exposure.
I think that might matter with Starlink at some point in time. It's. What was the other big initiative we did there? Well, anyway, there's a lot of interesting things that we're experimenting with there that we'll be able to carry over to the rest of the business for sure. Capital offering is gonna start there. Man, there's something else that's eluding me that.
Just as an aside, just talk about crypto payments. I just don't understand why most people would wanna use crypto for payments because it requires tax information, and it's much easier to use your PayPal or your credit card. What's the opportunity in crypto payments?
Oh, yeah. I mean.
At least in the U.S.
Yeah. I mean, I kinda don't wanna say anything that's like offend any customers. I'm not like a huge crypto bull, right? Like in this at all. I just. We're a payments company, and we're going to provide connectivity to meet the demands of our customers who are responding to the demands of their consumers. If there was ever an environment to experiment with it in, it was Shift4Shop. Because it's card not present, it's kind of easy to do that. Man, I don't know why it's eluding me right now, but we had another recent, you know, experiment. Oh, sorry. The donation widgets that we're gonna do for St. Jude, we incorporated into Shift4Shop.
It was a business that gives us exposure to card not present as a payments company that focused almost entirely on card present volume for forever. And it, you know, it is profitable, and it does allow us again to experiment in some of these new things that I am very confident will be applicable across the business. I guarantee you, long before we do like the, you know, SkyTab POS facing capital offering, we're gonna have it out and test it in Shift4Shop first. It's a good platform for us at all. It's gonna keep going up in the right. The model makes sense.
If the platform capabilities meet your needs as an e-commerce entrepreneur, why wouldn't you take the no subscription fee model with all the capabilities? You don't have to unlock any modules, and you just have to pay payments or go somewhere else, pay all the hosting fees, pay for all the modules, and pay the same cost for payments. Like, we're materially lower cost for the entrepreneur to build their e-commerce business. It's just we're big business in a lot of the other things we do too, and it's gonna take a while for that to, you know, make an impact on, you know, given just the size of the company right now.
Hi there. This is Collin McBirney from Topline Capital.
Mm-hmm.
Can you talk about like the new customers that you win, kinda how much of those are direct versus come through the partner channels when you talk about the 7,000 partners, and then maybe within the partners, could you talk about like who those partners are and then like are they selling other solutions or are they just selling Shift4, and then kinda how you get the attention of them versus, you know, them selling someone else's solution?
Yeah. All of our new verticals, so the three that we've really invested in this year, which would be gaming, e-commerce and sports and entertainment venues, largely direct strategy. Gaming, there's a lot of partnerships involved, but largely direct. The four new verticals we've entered into are all direct relationships. That said, you know, it might make sense as we continue to pursue things like healthcare, nonprofits, to leverage our distribution network to go out because there's a lot of them and they're very attuned to integrated payments. Basically, it's the core markets that are mostly supported by our 7,000 distribution partners. Yeah, they're largely, you know, going to market with our integrations.
I mean, some might, you know, do restaurants and say grocery stores, in which case, you know, we've one grocery, you know, relationship and we're looking to expand upon that. That might be with somebody else. Most of them are with us. I mean, look, if you're going after restaurants and talk about that vertical directly, you know, it's either really Toast, which is pure direct or you're with us. It's not like we're competing for a lot of their time. They like to win. They like to survive. You need to put products in front of them that allow them to really differentiate, sizzle and win payments volume. We've been doing that for a long time, and SkyTab POS will be very helpful for the years ahead.
Another webcast question, Jared, on bank joint ventures. As you think about growing internationally, how you think about bank JVs, given a lot of markets like Europe are very bank JV heavy.
Yeah. Yeah, I don't know about that, right? I mean, you know, I mean, a lot of the. At least a lot of the bank opportunities that we've seen in Europe of late are more, you know, kinda call it EVO appropriate, where you're buying the existing book of business that they have there and then a referral relationship going forward, and it's kind of all constrained. Like, the whole beginning and end of it is constrained within what that document is. I don't know if that's necessarily the right way to go to market for really tech-heavy enabled solutions. What I will say for sure is there's no question we're gonna have bank relationships across the world. You're gonna have to have anything close to like a unified commerce experience globally.
It's not all done with a U.S. bank sponsor. Adyen doesn't do it that way. Stripe doesn't do it. You need BIN relationships and PSP relationships pretty much everywhere in order to do that. I would say like we're not gonna intend to go to market through banks. At least that doesn't seem like you know immediately obvious to us you know with our integrations in other markets right now. Yes, sir.
Hey, Jared. Thanks for taking the time. Just curious how much you guys spend on R&D now, and if you could compare that versus what Toast spends on R&D. I'm not saying it's all good spend, but just a sense of who your chief product officer is, chief technology officer is, and the idea of doing a few small experiments.
That are, you know, $1 million-$5 million in cost, let's say, versus, you know, a Super Bowl campaign or something like that, and just, you know, M&A, like, just trading off those different capital allocation activities.
Yeah. So, you know, I'll defer to Brad to give you the exact dollar amounts. We're certainly not spending at Toast levels at all. We'd be punished for doing so. It's like immensely, right? Like we just had a question on free cash flow conversion. We're in this weird spot, which is why we spend as much time as we did on this investor presentation. We're growing really fast. There's a lot of attributes to the business that are expected to grow really fast, but also want margin expansion. Like, we don't get the luxury of just hiring and firing, like, 2,000, you know, developers at one time.
The idea is we have a lot of expertise within the domains that we're in today, and we can build good products, you know, kind of responsibly and win. It's not, these aren't hypotheticals, right? It's why we also put the volume and spread data up. We are winning in restaurants. We have been winning in restaurants. We're gonna maintain our spreads in that. We're also developing in e-commerce. We've added a number of people to Shift4Shop. I mean, you know, we've added a lot of talent over last year. We said we were gonna do that. That's how you build out, you know, an organic initiative like gaming. We just know that we're looked at differently than everybody else, and we've got to kind of balance it all.
I think in terms of capital allocation, you know, like the Super Bowl ad, we just bought 3dcart, which was... You know, we renamed Shift4Shop. We got a heck of a price on it. I think it was a 14x EBITDA multiple. If we paid 16x, nobody would have faulted us for it. So the idea was, hey, this is an opportunity to shine a light on Shift, on Shift4 because a lot of people aren't familiar with us. More specifically, shine a light on the Shift4Shop platform. Let it know as, hey, it's an alternative out there. If we whittle away like, you know, 200 basis points from Shopify, it was money well spent, and that was effectively what the cost was for, you know, a Super Bowl ad.
The result is 70,000 sites on it versus 15,000 sites on it now. You know, that was probably the boldest, you know, trigger we ever pulled, I think relative to a marketing campaign. You know, wouldn't rule it out as we start seeing some momentum on SkyTab POS to get the word out a little bit more that we do restaurants even better than anyone else and create some sizzle. But yeah, I think we're, for the most part, from a capital allocation perspective, we're super disciplined. We have a great track record on that. I mean, again, you try and unscramble the egg from any of our acquisitions, like they all, you know, average down in effective multiple probably to, like, 2x or 3 x right now.
Just a quick follow-up there, specifically as it relates to Toast, would your all-in pricing on a software plus spread relative to TPV be higher because you have an indirect partner that's taking, you know, some amount of fat? Are they basically adding some fat to the pricing relative to Toast because they're going direct?
Well, first of all, I think our spreads are. I mean, I've looked at their materials. Our spreads are certainly higher. You know, I'd like to think that's, you know, because we're adding a lot of value to that customer. You know, we don't charge for a lot of other things that they're monetizing separately. But what I would say is whatever expense that we have by working with third-party distribution pays for itself several times over. I mean, look, we don't need anywhere near as many. Look at how many different verticals we're growing in right now, and we have less employees than Toast.
We don't just do restaurants because we have thousands of partners out there that when a printer breaks at a Hakkasan or a Tao, like, we have somebody who's economically aligned to get out there and go fix the printer because it costs them just as much as it costs us, right? That's worth it. I mean, there's tons of operating leverage that come with it. We introduce a new product. We enter the, hypothetically, the healthcare vertical tomorrow with some, I don't know, really interesting integration. We can do a healthcare 1-on-1 to 7,000 partners, let them go after that market, take share really, really quickly. Whatever expense the, you know, from a rev share component is well worth it because it's resources we didn't have to burden our OpEx with.
I think having, like, third-party distribution is really worth it. I don't think it comes at the expense of the customer at all. I think we're delivering a lot of value. We just might be bucketing that revenue in different places.
Also just to add on to that, think about when we do share with our partners, we're sharing that on the payments piece. We're not sharing that SaaS components with our partners. That's just another element to think through as you model these kinds of revenue streams out, you will see share to the partners go for those indirect components where we are actually going to market through partners, but only on the payments piece, not on the SaaS piece. We'll keep all that. Just to come back to your question on R&D, just wanted to get ahead of that. We spend right now about $10 million-$12 million a year on R&D. Historically, it's been kind of, you know, piecemealed on a lot of, you know, smaller different projects.
What we have seen happen in the last, call it, 24 months is that Shift4 has made more towards kind of transformative projects, right? You think about Edgewater that we just went through today and how SkyTab POS is gonna be deployed. That's a byproduct of a lot of R&D over the last 24 months. The other one is the Everest platform, where we're building internal capabilities. What we're seeing is, as opposed to R&D being deployed to necessarily maintain some of the other software packages we use, which we have several in the market right now, it's concentrating much more heavily into more, you know, call it more transformative type initiatives. That's what we could see going forward.
Hey, Jared. Great presentation. Quick question on the gaming business and vertical. Can you talk a bit about what you guys are offering versus what Sightline is offering differently? B, can you also talk about where your, you know, nascent offering is going up head-to-head with some of the competitors? Because there's companies out there that have been talking about doing iGaming and whatever, and they haven't disclosed a company like BetMGM. Why did you guys win that versus, you know, a competitor in a bake-off? Where does Sightline play into all of this?
Yeah, really good questions. So first, I've often thought of, like, you know, Sightline is kind of like, you know, what an early day PayPal was, but just for the gaming industry, it's a good intermediary wallet. You know, it's. Look, for right now, like, a lot of the credit card issuers do not want direct gaming transactions. They block it. I mean, if any of you ever FanDuel-ed or DraftKings or something, you just try and do, like, your normal Capital One card. It's probably gonna get declined. That's, like, kinda how industry early days in e-com looked at buying things on, essentially like eBay and get, you know, brought through a PayPal wallet as a better way to manage that experience.
I like to think that's what Sightline's doing right now. The idea is that when those transactions flow through Sightline, somebody has to process them. That's what our preferred relationship with them is all about. Obviously they have a ton of traction. I mean, they're not just, you know, like that intermediary wallet, if you will, for mobile wagering. I mean, the whole cashless concept that will inevitably come to the Strip. I mean, the same way we kinda woke up one day and all the quarters were gone from the slot machines and tickets started coming out.
That's gonna happen across all of table gaming, and you can pretty much count on it, I think, and that probably is why Sightline's valuation went where it did, that Sightline will be at a front row seat for all of that. Now, in terms of the market, right? Nobody was considerably advantaged of the three. We're talking about, you know, essentially Nuvei, Paysafe, and Shift4. All three of us, you know, had good arguments of why we should win some of the gaming business. Nobody was, like, crushing it in the U.S. already because it was illegal up until recently. I mean, you know, you talk about remember the poker days where, like, you woke up one day of online poker, and there's just FBI logos on all the websites.
This was an industry that got super punished in the U.S. market, right? Really it's you have three players that want a piece of this market, and we all have a story to tell. You know, Nuvei would say, "We own SafeCharge, and SafeCharge has a lot of relationships in Europe, and therefore those relationships will our experience and expertise over in Europe is why we're gonna be one of the players that'll do well in the U.S. market." Then you have Paysafe. They have, like, virtually no domestic payment capabilities at all. They bought iPayment and Merchants' Choice Card Services , so those are like legacy ISO acquirers. If you remember who iPayment and Merchants' Choice was.
What they do have is a ton of alternative payment methods in Europe, like Skrill and PaysafeCard, right? So they would say, "Well, we're relevant because, you know, those APMs are gonna matter here in the U.S. market." Maybe they will. The U.S. has not been a very hot APM market, by the way. Like, as close as you can get to a hot APM in the U.S. market is PayPal. Those are usually connected to normal credit cards or ACH. Then what would Shift4 say? Shift4 would say, "Well, half of the Las Vegas Strip, for actual in-venue payments is connected into our payment platform." That's a fact. We tokenize all those transactions, and those tokenized transactions can feed into business intelligence systems.
You may wanna know, you know, how your players are doing in venue and in a mobile environment. You may want somebody to be able to, like, win a bunch of money in their mobile app and then come into a store and buy, like, a watch with it or go to the nightclub or restaurant. We think that matters. The other thing I'd say is, like, don't overlook the stadium side of it with VenueNext.
I can say that I truly believe the largest reason why we won BetMGM had more to do with stadiums than our presence on the Strip, because people are gonna wanna go to a stadium, bet on the, bet on a game, bet on the first half, make a real-time prop bet or something, win, and then use that money to buy a burger and a beer, all within the same app. That, I think, is ultimately why we won BetMGM there. You know, I will say in the end, like, back to the theme of there isn't winner take all. It's super rare. Same in restaurants, right? Like, Toast isn't gonna be endgame everybody in the restaurant space.
We're not gonna own all of mobile wagering and this whole digital conversion to, you know, gaming in-venue either. Like, this industry's been so traumatized, they're gonna put pipes into us and Nuvei and Paysafe, and we're probably all gonna benefit pretty substantially from that. Maybe if one adds more value than the other, they'll get a preferred status. I think we had preferred with BetMGM.
Hey, Jared. I was looking at slide 25, and the $1.9 billion of addressable revenue here on the SaaS, you know, revenue potential for restaurants. If I divide that by the IBISWorld sort of, you know, estimate of 860,000 restaurants, it implies like, I don't know, $2,200 per restaurant or something like that, give or take. When I look at what Toast is making, they're making, like, $4,400, and the bulls think that's gonna go to, like, $9,000.
Hmm.
My question is, you know, maybe the Toast you know estimates are just too aggressive. My question is, it doesn't seem like your feature set is any, you know, less or, you know, you're not offering a, you know, potentially a worse solution. Trying to understand, like, why is the assumption, the two sets of assumptions so different? Thanks.
I mean, off the top of my head, there's two answers. One of it is we could just be taking the same conservative view that we have at the 50 basis points on the gateway conversions. The other is I thought we actually just robbed that right from a Toast deck or something. I mean, I think the idea is that you are gonna monetize that relationship with the customer through a number of areas, and you can make trades, and maybe SaaS is a little less, and it's more on the payment spread. That's pretty much what we've been doing for the last four years. We're saying it doesn't have to be that way. Maybe they expect to take more in on capital or payroll offerings or push payments than they do on the SaaS side.
Maybe they're not discounting any of those, and they're just gonna get full freight on every one of those buckets, and maybe that's what's in the Toast assumptions.
Every dollar that you gain here would be at a SaaS gross margin, is that right? Like something 70%-80%. Pretty high, right?
I would think.
I have another question. On the 2024 guidance, are you using the same philosophy of, you know, relative conservatism, I guess, that you gave during your pre-IPO deck? Or you know, for example, like Starlink. That seems like a tremendous opportunity, but it's unclear if, you know, if you're assuming a gazillion dollars of Starlink in that or not. Any color you can share.
Yeah, no, we're not assuming that, you know, Starlink's just gonna save the day and that's everything. I think actually the story we wanted to tell today was core business is doing fine. Core business has been growing at nearly 50% end-to-end volume for four years. Spreads are stable. Expect us to continue to do well there, win new integrations, take new products to market, like SkyTab POS, and then you don't have to believe a whole lot is gonna come from the other seven verticals and we'll get there. That said, the choppiness disclaimer is, like, you know, some of these organizations work on a timeline that we've, you know, never seen before. For all I know, you know, you could have 25 billion of volume dropped on you know, 2023 or something. It's unthinkable, right?
You know, how many people love their Comcast internet? Probably not a lot. Things can happen very quickly in that, but that's not baked in, like, that there's some massive shift in a short period of time, that's coming from it. That would be like a nice surprise, and we would tell you the story as it's happening. I think that, by the way, that's another kind of just general commitment. I think, as I said before, we were rather quiet over the last, you know, five months or so. I mean, people should be interested in what we're doing across the world and what we're doing with Starlink or Allegiant, others and nonprofits.
We're gonna try and provide healthier updates, so you know if, you know, if we've entered, like, a bunch of new countries, you can take you know, probably make some assumptions that probably has an impact, but that's probably driven by Starlink volume.
Thank you.
Okay, that concludes the Q&A. We'll have Jared give some concluding remarks, and we'll finish up.
Yeah. Really, I don't know if anything's further to be said other than I appreciate you taking the time to travel out here and spend the morning with us. I think we still have some agenda items today you're welcome to participate in, including, you know, a nice tour of the facilities, some demos of hardware. We're happy to do some smaller, you know, small group or one-on-one discussions if you like. I believe at Bellagio tonight, this evening, we're gonna have, you know, dinner, drinks, cocktails for anyone who wants to stay. That was somewhat dependent on share price reaction. Up, down. If it's up, we're happy to have dinner and drinks and cocktails with you guys. If not, you can find me in the Bellagio pool.
With that, again, thank you guys very much for your time, and turn it back over to Tom for the next phases of our agenda.
Thank you.