All right, good afternoon. My name is Tom McCrohan, Head of Investor Relations with Shift4. Thanks for joining us today. I'd also like to welcome those of you joining us virtually via the webcast. Welcome as well, and for all the shareholders that are with us today in Las Vegas, we truly appreciate you taking the time out of your very busy schedules to be with us to learn more about your company. So I'd like to point out that there's a barcode on a card in front of you for those of you here in person. If you scan the barcode, you'll get headshots and bios of all the presenters, board members, and special guests. We do have some customers here today as well, and I will quickly display. Don't think this is working.
We're having a small technical difficulty, Tom. Tom, it looks like we're good.
We're good? All right, take your time through the Safe Harbor language. Here's what we're going to be covering today. All right, great. So Jared's going to set the stage, take a look back on our performance and how the business has evolved over the past several years. Taylor will then detail a strategic review of all of our end markets, how we're differentiated, and our Right to Win. Our Head of Product, Dave Hoffman, will then provide an in-depth view of all of our products for the various verticals: restaurants, hospitality, stadiums, and unified commerce. Our Chief Human Resources Officer, Kim Rodgers, will provide an overview of how we attract and develop our talent. Josh McCall, who heads our Project Management Office, will detail how we integrate our acquisitions and some of the insights into our AI-enabled Mission Control function.
Michael Isaacman, our Chief Commercial Officer, will then detail our growth strategies, including how we add new customers through a combination of adding brand new net new customers and cross-selling payments. Our Chief Strategy Officer, Luke Thomas, will then come up and provide a double click on how we deploy capital in support of the same growth strategies that Michael Isaacman just elaborated on, and then Taylor will come back and provide an overview on the Global Blue acquisition that we just announced. Our Chief Financial Officer, Nancy Disman, will provide thoughts on our outlook, and then Jared will wrap up and we will open up to Q&A, so given that we're entertaining Q&A at the end, I just ask that everyone just kind of refrain from asking questions until the Q&A portion of the presentation.
I'd like to quickly call out the other member of the Shift4 Investor Relations team, Paloma Main, if you can raise your hand. And many of you have already met or spoken with Paloma. If you've not, please introduce yourself. And with that, I'd like to turn it over to our Founder and CEO, Jared Isaacman.
2024 was the year of Shift4. Fueled by over 25 years of unstoppable momentum, we shifted things into high gear, driving commerce forward across all industries and across the globe, powering payments and simplifying transactions for the most recognizable brands in the world. Yep, those guys too. Uh-huh. And them. Yep, them too. Okay, you get the point, but above all, this was a year of unmatched growth across the globe. We introduced more hotels, resorts, and other businesses to our five-star payment experience, signed more elite teams to our roster. We served up SkyTab for tens of thousands of restaurants around the world, and we've dramatically expanded our unified commerce capabilities. Yes, we've had an unbelievable run with unprecedented success, but now it's time to go even further. We have big plans in 2025 and beyond.
We started small, took it up a notch, and now we're shifting forward again, choosing the lanes we want to conquer and doing it all over the world. Are you ready for more? Well, strap in. Shift4 is moving boldly forward.
Good afternoon, everyone. Man, I'm excited. This is awesome. Is everyone entertained? Were you expecting this, huh? We're going to have a lot to go through today. I will say it was a little awkward sitting in here as we were listening to the audio call. I don't know if that was the-I don't know if that was the plan. We could have just done it up here on microphones. But for those of you who don't know me, I'm Jared Isaacman. I am the CEO of Shift4, at least for a couple more weeks. And I want to welcome you to our Investor Day here at the lovely Fontainebleau in Las Vegas, Shift4 customer, other than a couple of boutiques that are independently owned for those of you that flagged it.
I hope most of you had a chance, well, obviously, you just heard the earnings call, but to review our Q4 letter and listening to the earnings call, because I suspect for the next couple of hours we're going to spend very little time talking about the past and much more about the future. This is, of course, especially important for me because, as the largest shareholder that will be transitioning out of the CEO role, stepping down from the board and giving up my voting rights, I care an awful lot about the trajectory of the business. Naturally, we're all, of course, economically aligned as shareholders. As Taylor likes to say, he is getting a promotion, but he's also getting an activist shareholder. My desire to ensure that Shift4 continues to find success goes well beyond just financial motivation.
I obviously care very deeply about the Shift4 team and their families. I care about my fellow shareholders and the customers that we never want to let down. For all these reasons, I've really spent the last few months leading up to today making sure that the team and the business are as prepared as possible for the road ahead. For me, this has been a very confidence-inspiring journey the last few months, and now I hope to instill that same confidence in all of you. Okay, to start, I think this is very important. We kept our promises and we exceeded all of our expectations, really, since the IPO and especially since our 2021 Investor Day when we first established multi-year targets for volume and gross revenue less network fees.
It's also worth noting at that time, again, more than three years ago, we did not establish any targets at all for EBITDA and free cash flow, the profitable KPIs that should count for an awful lot. We actually left that to all of you and the analysts to figure out. But I think we consistently exceeded expectations, especially at the time we established this guidance. So we also stated at the time of our IPO that having gone public during a pandemic with an exceptional concentration at that time period in restaurants, that we would diversify into other very pandemic-sensitive verticals. And we've done so quite successfully. So at first glance, when you look at this slide, it may just appear we're doing a lot more volume in the categories that we already had.
When you unpack unified commerce, you can appreciate all the verticals that we now serve that we previously didn't at the time of our IPO. On that note, our new category, which we're calling unified commerce, really represents all of the new verticals we went into at the time of our last Investor Day, which was, again, about three years ago. This unified commerce platform represents the platform or product that represents the platform that we built for a very strategic customer, but now captures the entirety of our sports and entertainment verticals, ticketing, gaming, nonprofit, crypto, e-commerce, and now retail verticals. Obviously, the strength of the product is represented in the greater than nearly 100% net revenue retention rates in pretty much all of the categories. It did a pretty good job, I think, diversifying since the last time we really all got together.
And we were also able to kind of transform and improve the unit economics of the business as well. So for 20 of our 25 years, for those that aren't aware, we generally served an SMB restaurant, a small restaurant, Irish pub, for example, on the corner. Those businesses, no matter how good the product or technology is, generally have like a one-in-three failure rate within the first year. Now we have some of the largest multi-billion-a-year customers in hospitality and sports and entertainment, theme parks, and across our unified commerce platform. We moved up market, increasing the lifespan of the customer while also reducing customer acquisition costs by, well, for starters, picking verticals that we felt we could conquer with very few competitors that were able to compete.
By insourcing distribution, we did that in the summer of 2022, which was a dramatic enhancement to our unit economic model, and then deploying capital very intelligently to win faster within the verticals we were already advantaged to be in. Now we've been able to do this at scale, moving very quickly because we have the right formula for success, so we have a formula that guides us. We call it the Shift4 Way, and we really apply it to virtually everything we do, from our day-to-day responsibilities to some really big projects, as well as our acquisitions. And the formula allows us to do it really better than most, and I would say right from the start, and I talked about this in my last earnings report, not this quarter, but previous, we are not exceptional at this yet.
So I made a point last quarter when people are questioning the sustainability, things like margins, free cash flow, the growth of the business, where do you derive that confidence from? We're in early days on every one of these. So we still have software that is dated that needs to be deleted. We did a couple of those acquisitions just last year alone. We have platforms and gateways to take components out of. Our Project Phoenix and Mission Control and our AI initiatives have only just begun this year or in 2024. And our cultural transformation to live the Shift4 Way is maybe in the second inning. And we have $1.4 trillion of volume, by the way, that we are incredibly advantaged to win. So as we continue to master what you see on the screen, the performance will be even more impressive.
And I would say, despite that, the results do speak for themselves. So I'm sure many people in the room would say it's been a bumpy journey to get here. And of course, fintech was hated for about half of the last five years. But I think our results, especially relative to our peers, are reasonably good. It's interesting to think about along with all of the noise that we've encountered as a public company over the last almost five years. And there was some pretty wild stuff that was thrown at us from time- to- time. But I don't think there's a single fintech that has outperformed us since the time of our IPO. I mean, you guys can fact-check me on that one, which again, I think is especially important as we look ahead to the next chapter of the business, which you're going to hear about today.
So why will this trend continue to go forward? I'd start with history being a pretty good indicator. We're a 26-year-old company that's grown double digits in pretty much every category for 26 consecutive years without missing a beat, even in the downturn. A lot has transpired over that time period, but we've navigated through it pretty well, I would say, and we've always kind of come out on top. And that starts because we pick verticals very, very carefully where we have a real right to win and a strong product offering and generally limited competition when you really understand it. We have absolutely never gotten comfortable. We've never capitulated. There's always something coming next. And this has served us incredibly well.
It has taken us from one vertical to many verticals, from one continent to six continents and a cross-sell funnel that makes it really, really easy to predict where the next $1.4 trillion in payment volume will come from. And we've never stopped trying to be better. As investors, you generally just see our quarterly reports and the wins that we feature every quarter. But every other day, every other day at work, all we focus on is the things that we are not good at, the things we suck at. And then we work really hard to fix them, and then we move on and solve the next problem. And that's how we get better as an organization. And as a result, I do think we've become the best performing fintech stock since our IPO.
And we have done so as what I consider to be a very good company, not an exceptional one yet, but we are on a path to becoming one of the greatest. So before handing it over to Taylor and the rest of the team to go through, I want to give you a preview of what you're going to learn today. So we are doing so with the aim generally of giving the people what they want. A lot of people reached out over the last couple of quarters of, "Hey, this is what's of most interest to our investors, and that's what we want to give you." And it's also what I need to hear, for that matter, to know that Shift4 will continue to give outstanding results well into the future.
So you're going to hear about how we're going to win at restaurants all over the world. You're going to hear why our product is one of only two cloud-based solutions optimized for table service that's being actively invested in and distributed at scale. You're going to learn about our strategy, our product roadmap, our go-to-market plan, and why our approach to acquiring customers is so much more efficient and ultimately better than the competition. You're going to learn why our hospitality product is number one in the world, why it's already supported a number of signature wins like Aalterra Resort , which was a monster this quarter, why it's near impossible to replicate our library of software integrations and how we're going to take that advantage and we're going to bring it to the hospitality industry all over the world.
Similarly, you will learn a lot more about our sports and entertainment product today, why it's truly in a league of its own, why we have more features, and how we're able to serve the entirety of the venue operation as opposed to just parts of it, which is fueling continuous demand, as you can see in our earnings reports every quarter. We're going to talk a little bit about how we spent the better part of the last three years building a one platform, one integration that opens up card not present and card present transactions all over the world. We funded and built this product largely under the radar to meet the needs of one of the greatest technology companies in the world. And we've now added thousands of additional merchants to that platform, and we're now ready for many, many more.
We will explain how convincing a merchant that they should care about their commerce-enabling solution is, in fact, quite hard. They have a lot of other problems that they'd rather solve, which is why we have advantaged ourselves with what is now $1.4 trillion in cross-sell opportunity, and we are very good at cross-selling. This includes going over our recent investments as well as a deep dive into our latest acquisition because what better time to announce a multi-billion-dollar deal than when I'm pretty much out the door? But that should actually reinforce my confidence and that of our board in how good of a deal this really is and how ready the team and Shift4 is to execute upon it.
So we're going to talk a little bit more about our methodology today, our methodology to success, not just the Shift4 Way, but our people and the tools we use to deliver. You're going to hear how we applied that formula to deliver in the future alongside strong 2025 guidance and a new mid-term outlook that once again puts us above the pack in both growth and profitability targets. We are going to give you a sit-on-our-hands case, which is what is the business going to look like over the next three years if we never did anything else, including doesn't take into account Global Blue. You'll get the pro forma case to include the recently announced Global Blue transaction.
Then you're going to get what I call the likely case, which is just a continuation of what we've done over the past with the goal of exiting our next three-year outlook with one billion of run rate free cash flow. You can count on all of this. You can count on it because we kept our promise over the last three years, and we're going to do so again. At the conclusion of this presentation, I'll return for probably just a couple of brief remarks, but we'll mostly just dive right into Q&A. With that, I turn the presentation over to Taylor Lauber, your president and soon-to-be CEO of Shift4.
Thanks, Jared. I thought what would be most important for you all today is actually not to hear from Jared and myself and Nancy, who you all interact with very regularly.
So I'm going to keep my remarks brief. As Tom mentioned, I'll give some highlights of the Global Blue transaction later on in the day, but really want you to hear from the bench because I think one thing we've tried to do is kind of bear the brunt of investor and analyst interactions so that the team can execute, and they execute excellently. But given the transition from Jared to myself, we thought it important for you to meet the team. But before we do that, I'll give you an overview of the businesses that we're winning in today. I say today because I'm thinking about the Investor Day we did three years ago in Las Vegas and how there were kind of like six different avenues we knew we could go down for growth that I don't think we got much credit for at the time.
And it's time to do a victory lap because we've got really extensive capabilities in these emerging verticals for us. And what I mean by that is we invested meaningfully but frugally inside of a set of capabilities around a set of customers that now give us a right to win all over the world. And shareholders saw margin expansion during that time. They really didn't bear the cost of this in the way that I think a skeptical shareholder might think about expanding into a new vertical or new geography. Perfect. So we'll talk about the restaurant vertical, the hospitality vertical, sports and entertainment specifically, and then what does this whole unified commerce concept mean because it's blending all these elements together. What does it mean to be in restaurants?
It means we have great software informed by many brands that we've acquired over the years. The majority of that technology talent still lives inside of Shift4. So when you think about the amount of capital that we deploy in R&D, it's also fueled by dozens and dozens of technologists that have come from six different restaurant brands that can incorporate everything they've learned and what their customers have demanded over decades into a single product that we deliver in a complete vertical stack. So we own every piece of the platform that our customers are interacting with, which is really, really helpful. It's also bundled with a library of integrations that give it a unique right to win inside of verticals that many of our competitors, even our best, can't necessarily say they have access to.
So when you think about all of the restaurants in this hotel, for example, every other piece of software in the hotel is already integrated to us. This is a natural extension for us and our restaurant product. And then a distribution network that's really one of a kind. So whether it was a software brand that we acquired through an M&A transaction or the organic build of our SkyTab brand, we've got the most unique combination of in-house direct sales and sales partnerships, I think, in the industry, and we'll highlight that on a later slide. And then, obviously, just a handful of great customers below, some of which are in the room, and we really thank you guys for the commitment we've been able to make together. Hospitality, this is a payment platform that's truly unrivaled.
So we love to host events in an environment like this because take one lap around even just one floor of a casino resort, and you can imagine just how demanding our customers are and how varied the commerce experience is. And I don't think unless you're in an environment like this, you can really comprehend just how much software goes into the payment experience. Every software suite is integrated to Shift4 so that a consumer can basically take any journey through these revenue centers and get a common payment experience, and the merchant can rely on analytics and reconciliation and security that's uniform across all of those. What's incredibly interesting is that it's also a flywheel for our business.
And what I mean by that is when we integrate with a property like this or Wynn casino resorts, which is just next door, they bring us a library of integrations that they need help with too, a software suite here and there. And so every new customer kind of adds to that library, and the library becomes very self-sustaining. We do not have to call best-in-class hospitality companies and ask them to integrate their software. Our customers do it on our behalf. And when those companies want to sell their software inside of an environment like this, they know they have to call Shift4. So this is a platform that's very self-sustaining and creates tentacles into lots of different markets around the world, whether it's the retail shops, the salons, spas, the golf courses, and the parking garages. Really, really unparalleled.
It means we're generally the first, if not the only phone call for operators like you see on the wall here behind me. Sports and entertainment, I use this as an example of kind of all of the best qualities of Shift4 coming into one environment. We were able to pursue an opportunity with the Allegiant Stadium here in Las Vegas when it was being built. At the time, we didn't own any stadium software, and we had a library of integrations that I would say was kind of 50% compatible with the environment. Yet we walked through that stadium with that customer and said, "We can solve this, and we can solve it in a variety of different ways. We can buy stadium software that we think has a truly differentiated right to win.
We can combine it with our payments platform and therefore deliver you a common experience across basically every way a team is going to collect revenue." So we've got examples on this page of the Food and Beverage and the suites where we deliver the software ourselves and ticketing integrations and retail and parking. If you're seeing common threads between what we do for a hospitality operator and what we do for a Food and Beverage operator, it's not by accident. We're able to take these skill sets and apply them into entirely new markets. And this brought us further into theme parks. It also brought our number one competitor in sports and entertainment to the table to sell us that business when they knew how much we were winning and that we were going to end up winning a lot of those customers anyway.
Again, all of this delivered under a single roof. When a stadium operator like the New York Yankees calls us, that's generally the last phone call they have to make, which is something we're exceptionally proud of. Lastly, unified commerce. If it's a vague and nondescript name, that's kind of by design. It's because a single integration for these customers needs to allow them to sell everywhere in the world, physical, card present, e-commerce, etc. It's every element of the commerce experience with a single integration, and we're basically enabling these customers all over the world. We offer everything that you'd have to support in a really rigorous e-commerce environment, whether that's selling physical products all over the world, subscription billing, fraud management, security analytics, etc.
And we do it, and Dave's going to highlight this in a minute in a way that enables them to add countries very, very seamlessly. I pointed out, and I make it a point of emphasis, and it will be a point of emphasis for the day because, again, I think this is something we're not getting much credit for today because we've done it deliberately under the radar, but fueled with some of the best names in the industry when you think about the customers at the bottom of this page fueling how this product gets designed and the geographies that we go into. So it's an incredibly exciting capability, and I'd ask that you guys really pay attention when we talk through those capabilities. How do we go to market, and how has it evolved? At the time of the IPO, we were 100% third-party distribution.
This was generally partners installing restaurant technology, in some cases software partners in the hospitality space bringing us to the table to talk to a casino resort like we're in today. We've evolved that deliberately and meaningfully to give us, number one, sustained growth on higher and higher numbers and also just much better unit economics, so in restaurants, roughly a third of our distribution is direct, two-thirds partners, as we go around the world, this will continue to evolve. In hospitality, it's about half and half where we're squaring off with the operator directly versus a software operator bringing us in because they know it's an easier solution when they bring us to the table, and then sports and entertainment and unified commerce, which is 100% direct.
The punchline here, and it's what allows us to kind of invest in emerging capabilities without a lot of shareholder pain, as I say, is that the unit economics have evolved very meaningfully as we've diversified the business. So down at the bottom of the page here, you'll see our partner revenue share at the time of the IPO was about 21% of gross revenue less network fees, and today it's just shy of 12%. Meaningfully better unit economics for the shareholders, but also a much more direct relationship with the customer, and we can evolve it as we go around the world. This was the map at the time of the IPO. This is the map today, again with margin expansion the entire time. And what's most exciting is I think there's been debates about what's our potential inside the United States vis-à-vis the rest of the world.
The rest of the world is a toehold, in my opinion, in terms of what we have from a customer base. There's some really interesting stats you'll see about our early success in Europe, and I think it'll help you understand why we are so emphatic about moving across the world as quickly as possible because much of what we've been able to do in the United States has not yet been done in the rest of the world, and we can bring that expertise to these markets, so for now, we'll hang out on stage to be able to help facilitate the conversation, but I'd like to introduce you all to Dave Hoffman.
He's going to go through an overview of the product organization, both philosophically, how we think about product design, organizationally, how do we kind of get as much done as we want to, and then lastly, what do these products actually look like and do. Thanks.
All right, cool. All right, hey everyone. I'm Hoffman, Chief Product Officer. I've been with the company a little over five years. I joined just before the pandemic started, just before IPO. So if you've been following Shift4 for a while, you know it's been a really crazy ride. It's seen a lot of growth, a lot of really, really interesting things happening within this organization. Before that, I've been a product leader my entire career.
I worked across many of the same verticals and capabilities that we do with Shift4, working in hospitality, working in restaurants, venues, e-com, lots of payment experience, and some analytics. So really trying to, coming into Shift4, understanding how Shift4 operates. And I got to tell you, experience from previous organizations to previous at Shift4, very, very different. One of the things in a previous experience for me is about when you start getting to a certain level of scale, the company slows down, you start getting lethargic, you're going into a defensive mode. I promise you we don't have that problem at Shift4. The type of leadership, the leadership that we have with these two guys keeps driving, keeps pushing, keeps focusing, keeps us moving at an incredible pace, and we're reinventing the company from a product perspective almost every quarter with the amount of growth that we're seeing.
I'm super excited to give you this product review. What we're going to do is kind of walk through four modules. We've got some core value capabilities. We've got some competitive differentiation, and I'll give you some roadmap directions, strategic kind of how we're thinking about each one of these verticals, and then, as Taylor said, a little bit of insider, how we do what we do. I think it's very important to kind of get a little idea of philosophically what I call mindset. Having the right mindset is so important to making sure that we can drive in the right direction. Now, I'm really excited, as I said, to start this presentation and give it to you, and let me give you a couple of reasons why I think we are incredibly well-positioned. Some of these you've already heard.
We are already number one in sports and entertainment on a global basis. We're number one in hospitality. We're number two in restaurants, which, by the way, we're not happy about that, and we'll talk about that a little more in a few minutes, and we have this unified commerce rocket that is growing at an incredible pace, and I believe we have the smartest and best leadership on this initiative for this mission that you could possibly have, so we're super excited, super bullish, thinking about how we're going to grow this vertical and continue driving growth for overall Shift4 portfolio. Now, we have an amazing Shift4 leadership, sorry, Product Leadership team, and a couple of guys are in the room. You guys can stand. We got Frank Conway, Sports and Entertainment. We got Jay Shavitz, leading restaurants.
We got Tim Goodwin, he's Card Present in Hospitality, and Alex Wilson on Crypto. All right, these are the guys that you want to commandeer in the hallway and breaks. We're going to go to a pretty high level of detail as we go through here. We won't have time to get into a lot in 60 minutes with going through four products. As we go through, take your notes, get your questions answered, and we'll hook you up with the right guys to get anything you want to go. Do not leave this session or do not leave this day with questions on your mind. We'd love to engage. We'd love to make sure that you have a full understanding of what we're doing and how we're doing it.
And the last thing I'd say as a sort of an opening, just to kind of get your heads around this from my perspective, this team of Leadership, Exceptional Executive team, Jared, Taylor, and what I think is so amazing and what you won't see unless you work on the inside, strategic alignment across every office of the C-suite. There's no question. We're all on the same page. We're all thinking about we're using the same language. But more importantly, no ego. We simply want to win. And this team is willing to do outsized crazy things to make it happen. So for me coming into this organization, that's why I'm here. It's the best assignment by far. I'm having a time of my life. As we go through today, I get a little animated. I love this stuff. I love what we do.
And this organization just adds fuel to the fire because we're so ambitious to be able to go out and capture the amazing trajectory and mission goals that we have. All right, now, we'll get into it, but before we start, I want to briefly talk through our team alignment because in any software development shop, the people are the most important asset, and the ways of working are critical to the success. So at Shift4, we're organized by a series of groups. We've got the four groups here, three groups on top of a shared service of payments. As you know, we don't come to market with any product without integrated payment offerings. But within each group, if you were to look carefully, you're going to see a large number of small and empowered teams.
We like to have small teams because that helps us to operate very, very quickly and empowered because it drives productivity and efficiency. Now, this is also really important in how we align because as an inquisitive organization, we're highly optimized for M&A. We have small teams. They're empowered, and we can go and acquire an entity. We can bring in new talent very, very quickly. We can either create new small scrappy teams, or we can add those resources to existing teams, and we're off and running. It's an amazing flywheel in terms of productivity within a development organization as well. New talent adding to the mission almost immediately upon acquisition. Now, very recently, we've grown very, very quickly. We now have over 1,000 resorts spanning multiple continents. This structure is important for two key reasons. Number one, round-the-clock productivity.
There is literally somebody driving the mission forward every minute of every day, and second, accelerating market adoption. You're going to hear a lot about global expansion today, and when we think about going into all these exotic countries or just standard countries, having resources localized that understand how that market works, the business nuances of all the different markets, language, tax, and so forth. Think of my team across 1,000 people. Like 25 different languages are spoken. It's an amazing collection of individuals, all professionally, all motivated, and it gives us an incredible confidence as we push forward because we have these localized resources that we can attack. So we have a number of organizational philosophies. Now, I won't belabor the points here. No time to go through them all. I think I just want to boil it down to maybe two or three.
Number one, from an overall organization structure, from a product leadership perspective, we want to work with the best merchants possible. We're seeking out strategic merchants that can help us understand exactly where we need to go, the best of the best, and we want them to give us very, very complex problems, and we want to solve those complex problems. And when we do that, it's a flywheel to bring those exceedingly great capabilities to every customer in the product portfolio. Second, ownership and accountability. Everything, everything, everything boils down to ownership and accountability. We want to empower teams. We want to give them direct ownership, and we want to hold them accountable for results. And if you're setting up your initiatives with very, very clear objectives, and then you're allowing people to measure with very good KPIs, then you can let them run free. It unleashes creativity.
It unleashes a lot of professional know-how. We don't have to babysit and monitor every single small team. It's on autopilot to some degree because they are operating within a very clear objective, and the mission is stated with very clear goals. So again, M&A dropping in, it becomes almost like nothing to get additional teams running at a very, very fast pace. So these philosophies are applied across all the different groups. We'll call out a couple of examples as we go because I think it's very important, again, from a mindset perspective, not only what we're doing, how we're doing it, and why we're doing it. Now, what you see here on the screen is the order in which we're going to go through. We'll start with SkyTab, do a little bit of a deep dive here. Let's roll.
Restaurants depend on excellent service to keep customers coming back. So that's exactly what we gave them. SkyTab from Shift4 supercharges restaurants and bars with the latest point of sale, mobile, and contactless technology. SkyTab is more than just a POS system. It's an all-in-one restaurant platform that keeps things running smoothly from front of house to back of house and everything in between. With Shift4, restaurants can streamline operations and deliver a five-star experience that keeps customers coming back again and again. Some of the biggest names in Food and Beverage already trust us to get the job done. Hungry for more? Here's the taste of what our customers are saying. Without SkyTab, we wouldn't be as successful as we are. The integration operates in the same fashion every single day of the week. You have to have great partners. Otherwise, you'll be beyond the eight ball.
Them being a leader in the industry in payment and POS, those are the two key factors I look into to make my life easier and make our venues grow. We have the winning recipe of cutting-edge technology and best-in-class service that's skyrocketing our presence across the U.S. and setting us up for continued success in the U.K., Europe, and beyond. Let's face it, it's never easy running a restaurant, but with Shift4, it's pretty darn close.
So in the recent quarters, SkyTab has been winning a lot. We're regularly adding tens of thousands of merchants to the product. And we can attribute this to a number of key values. Again, we'll have time to go through, but just a couple of things to frame it. The first is an all-in-one platform. All-in-one platform, what this means is a single product delivered at incredible value.
I think a great example of this would be gift and loyalty. Gift and loyalty capabilities within the SkyTab product, if a merchant were to contract with any other provider for proportionate capabilities, it would be one of the most expensive software packages they have in their entire organization. Bringing it into SkyTab and making it available for every merchant, allowing it to be able to easily enable, easily to use, and driving key value, all within the context of an all-in-one platform, is one of the most important key values that we're driving. The second is vertically integrated. Now, let's go down to the foundation of our products. Let's think about payments. We own the payments platform, the hardware deployment. We own the terminal software. We own the encryption. All of that in our control.
So not only is it easy, essentially much easier for us to package and deploy, but we can take out parts. We can own it as we can take out the parts, and we can streamline it all the way through from beginning to end. Now, as we think about this, it's not just this area. We want to own as much of the capabilities as possible. In any case where we have the opportunity to partner with a third party or build it ourselves, we'll always build it ourselves. And we'll always build it ourselves because we want to be able to control the experience, take out the parts, and deliver simplicity. Now, the third area, the deepest experience in the industry by far, not even close. And how this happens? Over the course of the last number of years, we've been acquiring a lot of large brands.
As we bring those resources into the team, we now have a deep bench of experts, deep brand experience. So people from MICROS, from POSi, from RM, from Future, from Revel, a dedicated focus on SkyTab. Now, it's important because as they were doing what they were building their businesses prior to joining us, RM, Future, POSi , and so forth, they made mistakes. They delivered success. We take advantage of all of those capabilities, all of that thinking, all of that know-how. We won't repeat those mistakes, and anything that was a clear win, we follow that playbook. So we're leveraging experience, and it's a very clear accelerator for how we're moving forward. Latest mobile and enterprise management we'll talk about in the roadmap, very, very good examples of how this operates within our portfolio, within our product teams.
Then a long list of features that we can talk through. Number one on this view would be SkyTab being fully mobile optimized. Mobile optimized for us is about every type of transaction or every type of use case, transactions, operations, reporting. We're reaching every service point. The way that we've approached the product, it actually unlocks some really interesting use cases. Imagine a delivery driver at your front door taking a real live online payment transaction on a mobile device via 4G. We envision a completely mobilized restaurant where fixed terminals are becoming the thing of the past. We're not there yet, but if that's the way the direction of the industry were to follow, then we would be fully well-positioned to be able to take that on, especially with the investments we're making on the roadmap that we'll get to here in a moment.
The next area is merchant experience, and this in SkyTab surfaces an application we call Launch Control, and Launch Control started with a really clear understanding to press on two bookends: customer affinity and retention. Think about some of the complexities around launching a point of sale. Lots of different things. Employees want to be able to menus, all the complexities there. You have to get it all configured, and in many cases, that is a massive attrition point because it becomes so complex, so we designed Launch Control to simplify the process, allow menus to be uploaded, inserted. We're using AI to convert. Once you're in the Launch Control application, you're able to click point, takes you through the entire experience in just a couple of hours, a couple of days maximum, and gets you up and running. We call it time to value of the product. That's one.
Second, feature adoption. So ongoing, once you're launched, we are constantly bringing new features to market. If you're a merchant using SkyTab, how do you know when the next great thing is available? And from a philosophical perspective, we firmly believe that if we can continue bringing great utility, great capabilities additional to that particular merchant, they will be retained as a Shift4 merchant forever. Why wouldn't they? We're continually adding. Now, the key is make sure they understand it, see it, adopt it, and use it. So it's not just turn it on. It's identify it, turn it on, and have education around it as well. So it's a complete comprehensive approach. Proactive notifications and alerts. And this is a different way you could think about this, but let's say you get a chargeback. You want to know there's a chargeback because it's actionable.
You want to go do something, so you get the alert, you click through, you end up in another application to be able to manage that chargeback, and then Taylor and Jared have really challenged us to eliminate all support calls. Very, very ambitious goal, but how would you go about doing that, so you're going to hear today about an application or initiative called Mission Control, and we have a partnership with Product, operations, and Mission Control to collect insights on service calls and be able to identify and pinpoint the most frequent, and we are proactively attacking those, so as we go forward, we proactively attack one by one by one. We're knocking them down, and before you know it, no calls.
So, again, very, very ambitious approach, but we believe very firmly in making it stable, easy to use the platform, and we're building all of this merchant experience capabilities to make sure that we are driving on, again, affinity, retention, and removing as much friction in the process as possible. Now, right out this door, many of you have already seen there's an amazing demo room. Please go have a look. A lot of what we're talking about here, too many features on the list to kind of go through. We'll demo all of them. Anything you want to learn, we've got you covered. Now, let me come back to this competitive perspective, and I think you've heard Jared talk about it a little bit. So we believe there are two modern cloud platforms that are actively investing and deploying at scale across the world.
Toast is a significant competitor, but it's not like they've done anything that makes the restaurant food taste better. So if they are able to concentrate all of their resources into a single product for more than a decade, where in the same time frame we were building a product and also bringing on acquisitions, managing those acquisitions. Now, it was about three years ago that we consolidated our strategy, and now in that time frame, if you were to look at the SkyTab trajectory, you would see that that was the bend in the curve. So we simply just believe it's a matter of time, it's a matter of focus, and we are super excited, super ambitious on the path forward to be able to compete on a global basis. Now, a few words on the roadmap.
The point number one here, I think the localization and really just expanding into international markets. You're going to see this on every roadmap. Really important for us. We take every one of our products that we're building, we'll take it to a global stage. Now, in the area of SkyTab, this is not e-commerce. So there are certain things you have to do. There's fiscal, there's language, there's tax capabilities. Again, going back to the global disbursement of our product team, this is where that becomes a very, very clear advantage. Second, enterprise management. So we are actively building, and we will launch soon a new enterprise management capability into SkyTab that's informed by the absolute best brands.
Look at the product portfolio that we currently have being informed by things like Bloomin' Brands, Cheesecake Factory, bringing all those capabilities to SkyTab, but also utilizing the talent that built them in the first place. They know where the bodies are buried. They know where the things worked, what didn't work. We are not trying to blaze new trails. We are simply following the playbook, matching feature functionality that's known is proven in the market, and putting it in the product as fast as we possibly can. The next area is mobile. We are currently working on our third-generation mobile platform. In fact, this evening, if you come to the dinner, you can have a firsthand look at this. It's a unified client across all of our different service points.
So if it's a fixed terminal, a mobile terminal, or whatever terminal, it's all running the same standard code base. And that's important from an efficiency perspective. You build one feature, you deploy it everywhere. Best-in-class capabilities, and it has multiple different configurations. So what you'll see tonight is what's called table side, taking orders at the guest table. There's other ones that we call Solo. Think a food truck. More simplified, easy operations as a complete point of sale in your hand, running everything, very economical, amazing value proposition to put that into a small, simple business. And then even like payment optimization. If you go to Europe, you never give anybody your credit card. The payment terminal comes and is presented to you. That's a certain configuration within the platform as well.
One application unified across all the different service points and then turning into various form factors depending on the business cases for deployment, optimization, and simplification. We have just a whole bunch of merchant-focused platform expansions. This is one of our key ways of working within the product group, partnering up with very good merchants, finding out what's missing in their business, finding out what their pain points are, and bringing new safe capabilities to the market, starting with those, but then the advantages to every single merchant in the portfolio. Things like invoicing, things like tip distributions. These aren't things that we think are most important. These things are validated by strategic merchants that we are working with. A lot of reasons why we feel very strong about SkyTab.
Thinking about the international expansions, taking these capabilities, expanding them, it is very, very important that we stay focused, but the path set forward is incredibly well-defined. Jared mentioned in his remarks bringing crypto to market. So our crypto journey started three years ago with a strategic merchant. They were expanding in the areas where Visa and Mastercard weren't the primary payment methods. But now we're bringing them into the mainstream products, starting with SkyTab. We're seeing international demand already. And in the U.S., it's beginning to show as well. In Vegas is an interesting use case. You go to one of the fancy nightclubs, and maybe you've got a group of friends that have some bottle service. End of the night, the bill is $5,000, probably very common in the Vegas market. That transaction can happen.
You have a mobile device presented to that particular client, and they're able to transact on crypto. And the most important thing about that transaction is the merchant doesn't have to touch crypto at all. It can go from a crypto transaction on a mobile device all the way through settlement of U.S. dollars, and everything flows straight through. Now, if the merchant doesn't want to do that and they actually want to settle in crypto or settle in stablecoin, those will be options available as well. And then the last area just to mention, the pace of technology innovation is not slowing down. And we've got a lot of individuals focusing on strategic initiatives like enterprise, strategic initiatives like our mobile devices. We have a number of resources that really are focused on engaging with merchants, understanding pain points, trying to find very difficult problems to solve.
And then we have a very small set, not very small, but a small investment off to the side that's all about innovation, creativity, experimenting, new ideas. And it's really important because it becomes a think tank, and what we discover in this small group can inform what we do across the board. A couple of examples of just some things that we're working on at the moment could become products, may not. Virtual reality kiosk. Imagine a kiosk that talks to you, interacts with you, can answer your questions. You ask for recommendations, it gives you recommendations. We have a prototype of this available. We actually have it here. We can give you a demo. Another one would be AI health metrics.
Imagine wearables like Whoop do a really good job of being able to say, "Today you were seven." And if you do these three things tomorrow, you'll go to an eight. Apply that same thinking, the same mindset to hospitality, especially to SMBs, small business owners that need all the help they can get. They are operating with single-digit profit margins. The rate of going out of business is incredibly high in that market. What if you could give them a health metric, and that health metric tells them every single day where they're tracking and then gives them three things to do? And if they follow the script, they continue to get better, smarter, more profitable. These are the types of technologies that we want to be able to invest in. They make an amazing difference in the success of our individual small merchants, and then we're mutually aligned.
We want to retain them. We want to help them grow. We're mutually motivated to do that. These are the types of technologies and approaches that will get us there. As I said, lots of demo capabilities across the way. Jay Chavez is here, head of SkyTab. Please engage. Let's have some discussions. We're happy to show you anything. Again, we love this stuff, and we'd like to give you as much knowledge as you want to take.
When it comes to complex payments environments, Shift4 handles them with ease. Whether it's a mega resort, a sprawling golf course, or a world-class casino, we deliver a flawless commerce experience both for the guest and the business.
With over 500 software integrations, we can connect every touchpoint across the property, from booking online and checking in to playing 18 holes in the morning, enjoying a post-round massage at the spa at a night out with friends. Shift4's all-in-one payment solution makes it all seamless. And now we're bringing these capabilities across the globe, gathering insights to empower businesses with centralized business intelligence and delivering solutions that make payments simpler and stress-free. But don't take my word for it.
We've got about 7,000 full-time year-round employees. And then at peak season, we quadruple in size. We go from about 7,000 to 28,000 people on an annualized basis across 19 properties, across hospitality, Food and Beverage, lodging, lift operations, and a whole bunch of other businesses that we have.
There's no doubt that the willingness of the team at Shift4 to really understand our unique needs was certainly a core decision-making factor as we looked at who we were going to kind of go all in with across our portfolio. We're number one because we give hotels and resorts the same VIP treatment they give to their guests. Yes, Shift4 is the leading payment platform for thousands of hotel and resort properties around the world. But you won't find us lounging by the pool or relaxing at the spa. We're hard at work continuing to shift forward to deliver a five-star commerce experience.
Let me summarize the hospitality vertical simply as I can. Embracing complexity, removing operational friction. That's what we do. So let's think about the Fontainebleau, this casino where we're sitting, a typical experience about how somebody would engage, a guest would engage with this property.
Probably starts with an online reservation, go on some website, make a booking, maybe put some credit card information in there. You come in, you go to the hotel front desk, there's a property management system there. They're taking a credit card, we'll file, they're putting a deposit. Then throughout here is your stay. You're going to the restaurants, you're going to the spa, you're going to the retail, maybe you have the opportunity to go sit at the poolside. Every one of those we call points of interaction are fully integrated to the Shift4 rails, deeply integrated across every transaction, whether it's in person or online.
Now, if we go just south here to Wynn Casino and just look at just the payment stack alone, forget about all the other different service points where Wynn was relying on a number of different providers, FreedomPay, Elavon, Stripe, Chase to facilitate what we do in an online transaction environment or, sorry, a casino environment. Moving from all of those providers to Shift4, they land at Shift4. It's an amazing value proposition. The complexity aspect of it is what we absorb. And again, I mentioned earlier, we love complexity. We like to work with the most difficult, challenging merchants on the planet. We embrace complexity. We look after all of the different challenges. We bring those capabilities into a portfolio, and then we allow any merchant that wants to utilize those identical capabilities to grow with us. It's a very, very powerful flywheel.
550 integrations available today, but every time we engage, we get better, we get more. And that could be an expansion of an existing integration, or it could be a completely new integration. So we move from 550 plus, new capabilities because one partner had us doing some new things, or we end up with 560. And again, every merchant, going forward, is going to take advantage of all those capabilities. But it doesn't stop just there. So if you think about value-added services, when you apply loyalty gift cards into a hotel hospitality environment, exceeding value. And we talked about that as a specific example of how fully integrated value-added capabilities, unifying the guest experience and being able to offer that at every point of interaction across the entire estate.
Then where the value really comes through, where the complexity of the simplicity value really comes through is when you look at the consolidated activity and operational and financial portal. It's a product we call LBM, Comprehensive Business Management, Lighthouse Business Manager. Consolidated transactions, settlement, reporting, insights, and CRM. Bringing it all together, when you place this application with all the different integrations into a hotel, a casino, a large venue, it immediately becomes the center of all their activities. It's utilized by all different service points in this hotel, night audit, finance, accounting, Food and Beverage operations, poolside operations, retail operations. They're all in the portal. And every single thing that's happening is coming into the portal to allow them full access, whether it's issuing a refund, looking at transactions, understanding insights, seeing where sales are increasing, where sales are decreasing, completely at their disposal.
Now, this is really important. So we prepared a little demo. I was going to give you a live demo. I want to make sure that we don't have any technical challenges. So we just did a little bit of a canned demo. Take you through it. Maybe I'll try to annotate it a little bit as we go. So available on any device. We're going to take a first look at sales, look at transactions. We're looking at all kinds of different search criteria. Every transaction comes into a single portal, different transaction type. Now we'll dive into an individual transaction. Not just a transaction, but all related transactions for that particular guest. Doing a refund, adjustment within the portal. Chargeback, get an alert, jump in, do a chargeback.
And not only the chargeback, but be able to respond with all the different details that are necessary to appropriately run a chargeback. Full selection of reports, report subscriptions, individuals that just want to have them received in their email box, and the full section of capabilities on a schedule and a distribution type. It's available by individual property, revenue centers, full consolidated view. And what's not shown here is from a user perspective, being able to assign users to, "I'm a Food and Beverage worker in one particular revenue center. I am night audit across the entire property or multiple properties." So all of that feature functionality is built in. Shift4 for many years has been the gold standard for this type of application.
This is our third-generation business management portal, and it addresses, as I said, every use case that is necessary and becomes an indispensable tool as it's placed in an operation. So it brings all the value that we bring, the 550 integrations, all the extra value-added services you can drop in, and then wrapped up in this consolidated portal, it's a value proposition like none else. The reason why we say we're number one in the world in hospitality. Now, we'll look just briefly at some roadmap. Accelerated global expansion. Again, no surprise there. What we're doing now, we are seeing some kind of unique things here. Buy Now, Pay Later. They've been very popular in the retail space. It's now becoming more and more popular within hospitality. We'll be bringing that to market.
Pay by link, making it simple, easy to get a payment link to a guest to be able to click through, pay without any friction. And again, as these capabilities are added, we're able to deploy them one time, use them everywhere. Dynamic Currency Conversion, ability to pay in your home currency. Currently working on this. It'll be launched in Europe, U.S., and Canada very shortly. And then we've got some really interesting stuff that we're working on, hospitality, loyalty, and insights. Loyalty, gift card coming as a pair, but being able to bring all the think about all the data that we talked about. If you were to overlay loyalty into all the different service points around a casino, what you could actually capture, it becomes a definitive source of transactional data identified to a single user.
With that, if you were able to apply some AI capabilities to be able to provide certain insights, what are the types of loyalty programs that actually move the needle? What are the ones that are a waste of time? Being able to not have somebody just go into a dashboard and understand this, tell them, make it super easy. Say, "We see this is happening. Stop doing it." If they follow the script, you would expect them to be better, faster, more knowledgeable operators. And then the last area is device management. Sounds very boring, but it's actually really interesting as you kind of follow the story. Device management, if you are putting all kinds of different devices, payment devices in the market, device management for us, terminal management system, will be able to manage all the different vendors all into a single platform.
So here, a single console managing every device terminal in the entire estate. The roadmap aspect is to be able to allow third-party vendors to also go into a marketplace. Simply as we do the 550 integration, it becomes a new type of integration into a marketplace that allows those vendors to deploy to our terminals, and we facilitate it. So again, it's just another aspect of the flywheel. As you get these valuable partnerships and you get more and more terminal software, the terminal becomes a strategic lens into every consumer. What can we sell? What can we upsell? What can we cross-sell? How do you leverage this as a strategic component? This will give you the technologies and unleash that innovation. We're very excited about this, and we think that there's an amazing road ahead of capabilities in the marketplace for merchants or customers like Fontainebleau Casino.
In sports, it's a race against the clock to win the game. The same is true for the in-stadium payments experience on game day. That's where Shift4 is unbeatable. Shift4 has revolutionized payment processing in the world of sports and entertainment, scoring big with SkyTab Venue, our seamless commerce solution that covers the entire venue, including next-gen POS, mobile ordering, and loyalty. As the leader in venue commerce, we deliver a comprehensive end-to-end solution that connects all revenue streams: concessions, suites, ticketing, retail, parking, and more. Shift4 is already a crowd favorite in stadiums and arenas around the world, spanning every major sports league, and with every new win, our popularity grows from stadiums and arenas to theme parks, zoos, and other entertainment venues, and expanding to additional revenue centers within our existing venues. Fans love us because we get them back to the action quicker.
Our customers love us because, well, we'll let them tell you why. We've embraced Shift4 across the whole business. So we have it in our bars. We have it in our kiosks around the stadiums. We can also get the data to understand customers' behavior and therefore improve the service in the future. We were looking for a partner in the payment process field that would help us not only create a first-class venue, but also take us into the future. Since the opening, we've had over 4.2 million transactions that have taken place at the stadium. We were voted by the NFL Fans survey the number one stadium in the world. Shift4 is the reigning MVP for complex payment solutions in sports and entertainment. But we're not stopping there.
We continue to push ourselves to be better, faster, and smarter than our competition, working as one team with one shared goal: to deliver the best commerce experience on Earth. Now, that's something to cheer about.
This is an amazing story. If you have a favorite club, football team, baseball team, whatever, spend any time in the venue, being able to consider all the different possibilities and options that SkyTab Venue and by the way, as we go through, the product was VenueNext. We recently rebranded as SkyTab Venue. I'm an idiot. You can't keep them straight. So if I say one, they mean the same, just so we don't get confused. SkyTab Venue, incredible capabilities. What it unleashes at a stadium, which is looking at an average stadium, the size and scope of a pro venue is just mind-boggling.
How much capabilities are now the different service types? You can certainly go stand in line for an overpriced bad hot dog, but you can also make a reservation and go to have a full-service meal in one of the most amazing restaurants that you've ever visited, and everything in between, and every venue is unique. Every operator is thinking about all the different things they could be doing to enhance the fan experience, and we're right there alongside them, trying to keep pace and continuing to press the envelope to deliver every piece of feature functionality they want to deliver their vision. Now, SkyTab Venue is the only integrated solution available with capabilities covering the entire fan experience, and I want to go through it because this is really important. There's a lot of nuances in the fan experience, so let me show you why.
We're going to start by looking at two different venues, both with equally complex and identical requirements. We're going to start with this one, little gloomy, sad venue that hasn't yet made the switch over to SkyTab Venue. If you were to go in and view all the things they're utilizing: MICROS, FreedomPay, Tapin2 mobile, Spoonfed, Fortress loyalty, and likely Chase for ticketing. All those different technologies that are necessary to do the fan experience and comparative to any other venue. Now, think about that. Separate relationships, individual costs and licenses. You got integration headaches, no centralized management consoles. Every system is using its own console. Scattered data and reporting. You got so many throws to choke. When something goes wrong, who are you going to call?
Security and compliance, nightmare. That changes over and over again every season. Let's compare this and contrast this to, again, identical capabilities, identical requirements. We move to the SkyTab Venue. SkyTab Venue runs SkyTab Venue. It's amazing how much parts are taken out in the approach that we've been able to build. Streamline operations, streamline relationships and most importantly, as you look at, it's not just the streamline taking out the parts. Go through the experience, and it's a fully unified fan experience. No watered-down capabilities. It's best-in-class capabilities across every service point. Let me walk you through them to show, first off, let's take a look at point of sale. Typical point of sale, you're going to have quick-serve concessions. You're going to have self-service kiosks, full-service clubs, full-service restaurants, in-seat hawking, catered suites.
Each one of these is a different form factor or a different menu or different screen flow, all of them through a unified client capable within the platform solution, and all transactions across all these different service styles are being rolled into an actionable real-time BI portal. I'll move to our mobile solutions. If we are looking at the overall mobile, you're going to have order ahead and pickup. You're going to have Scan and Go. You're going to have in-seat delivery. VenueNext, the product that was acquired, was started by the 49ers, and this capability, how we think about mobile, was the fulfillment of the 49ers building the platform from the beginning, their Bay Area vision. The best technologists in the world envisioning the best fan experience possible were envisioning this. It's now available through SkyTab Venue to any stadium that wants to engage.
When you think about the way that mobile is deployed, empowering fans to control their own experience. So again, I go back. If you have a favorite club, if you're going to the game on Sunday, imagine you being able to drive anything you want. You can go stand in line if you like, but you can also order on your phone and have somebody bring it to you. You can go Scan and Go and expedite the service types. All of that available to you on your phone in a SkyTab Venue. And then from an operator perspective, think about the hardware and labor savings. You can eliminate so many parts from their side as well simply because we're relying on technology that's already in your pocket to drive the experience. Retail, we partner with some of the best retail partnerships in the industry.
This includes traditional point of sale retail. And in fact, we are the exclusive payments provider for Fanatics Team Store. But then also emergence of autonomous, just walk out. I'm sure you've seen this at airports. You're seeing it in stadiums where you tap, you come into the retail location, whatever you want in your hand, you walk out, magic happens. We partnered with Amazon Just Walk Out. And in fact, we're the only mobile wallet that's integrated with that solution platform. So it's the same flywheel within this vertical that we've talked about in the other verticals. All the capabilities that we've done here, everything that we've done from a retail perspective, all the integrations, everything that we build for one stadium is available to all stadiums. We just keep getting better every single shot on goal.
This is the reason why we seek out the most challenging merchants and the most challenging business cases to solve for because every time we solve them, everybody gets to take advantage of them, and it creates that much more of a moat in the competitive landscape. And then loyalty, this is the linchpin. This is really what brings it all together. So, so critically important to us. It's the wrapper around the entire fan experience, and I'll tell you why. Teams rely on their ticketing platform. They're selling season tickets. They're selling single game tickets. They're relying on their ticketing platform as their CRM. We're sitting over here interacting with them, and they want to be able to drive value in packaging. So a season ticket holder will get some package A or discounts or whatever types of incentives they want to package through.
Maybe a multi-game or a VIP gets an entirely different set of packages, different benefits. All the reward levels that we have in the platform, whether it's virtuals, currency, discounts, cashback awards, all gets assigned to different levels. Then the fans come in, mobile device, they're utilizing just what they would usually do. They're buying retail. They're buying hot dogs. They're doing in-seat delivering. And all that's coming to life. Cashback's happening. Points are being rewarded. It's so cool. Now, I want to make sure that this comes very light and clear. So we have a little video that we want to show you for a little demo. See the annotations coming through. Magic money, virtual currency, push notifications. This is the fan mobile device. Everything driven from this. This is an example where it goes outside the stadium into an entertainment district.
Not just what we're doing within the four walls of the stadium, but in an entertainment district, what can we do for push notifications, partners, and rewards and loyalty to the entire area where stadiums are located. Incredibly powerful. And again, the linchpin that brings all the different capabilities together. It's what unlocks the ticketing relationships that we have, and it makes the fan experience so much more valuable because it all flows straight through, beginning at the ticketing CRM. All right, roadmap here. Again, top item is a top item. We are expanding focus within SkyTab Venue, Canada, and Europe. And really just leveraging the same rails and same capabilities. SkyTab is a little ahead. SkyTab point of sale is a little ahead of SkyTab Venue from an international perspective.
So what we've already learned, what we've already been doing, all the capabilities that SkyTab has fully translates to SkyTab Venue to, again, shortcut how we go from start to finish, and we eliminate the problems and the potholes along the way. Fan insights. So this is really interesting because just from what we described, SkyTab Venue is the definitive source of sports entertainment data. The largest distribution, number one in the world. Think about the data that comes through. Now, if you think also about the individual operators and how they're leveraging ticketing and setting up all these different rewards and packages and cash offers, what if you could pull it all together and make prescriptive insights of what works and maybe what doesn't work?
This is the power of unified data, being able to apply it with a lot of AI on top of it to provide prescriptive direction for, we recommend you make this season ticket offer, this multi-game offer, this bundled offer. And we know this because across the network or within an individual venue, we're seeing what's working, what's not working, and how to optimize. We're mutually aligned here. We want to make sure that however they're positioning is enhancing their fan experience because it makes our application that much more valuable. And then the entertainment district insights. If you take it outside the stadium, we just saw with the Chick-fil-A example, you move it from just the four walls into an entertainment district, it becomes that much more valuable. And then finally, wallet. And again, wallet from the demo, it's the center of the fan experience.
Making sure that we're continually investing. This is not a one-time investment. This is a forever investment. Right now, in the current quarter or two ahead, we're really focusing on segmentation, push marketing. We got targeted offers, behavior rewards. And I think where it all comes together is geofence type offers. Not only are you able to push to a specific device or a specific user, when a specific user comes into a geofence, things fire. That drives an enormous amount of flexibility, an enormous amount of efficiency, and it's the next generation of SkyTab Venue.
Shift4 has collaborated with some of the most technologically advanced companies to design the ultimate unified commerce payment platform. We started with one of the most demanding businesses in the world or above it. And now we're expanding to support some of the biggest names in online payments.
This business has truly unique e-commerce challenge. We run the gamut from really high demand on sale for things like Ikon Pass, really slow, complex, hard-building e-commerce of the most sophisticated vacations that you could book. Multiple people, multiple sizes across multiple days and activities and categories. We're a passenger airline. We serve just about 550 nonstop routes, primarily routes that aren't served by other carriers. They've taken a lot of time to really get to know our business, how it operates, how our website operates, what is the behavior of our customers. And they've kind of taken all of that into consideration as they've structured their product. So Shift4 has been a partner that we can rely on just in their ability to adapt and be flexible to meet our needs. But we're not just online.
With decades of experience powering enterprise card present businesses, we're uniquely positioned to deliver a truly unified commerce solution connecting the physical and digital worlds. With a single integration and simple implementation, we enable e-commerce and omnichannel businesses to unlock customers across the globe. From our merchant of record solution and cross-border capabilities to seamless pay-ins and payouts, businesses can easily accept over 100 payment methods and 160 different currencies. We guard every transaction with the latest security tech, tokenization, and cutting-edge fraud protection tools powered by AI and machine learning, serving mature markets as well as unique geographies around the world. Here's where we are, and here's where we're going. That's right. There's a new player on the global stage, and we're shaking up the entire unified commerce landscape. One platform, one integration, one global solution. That's how you shift forward. Let me tell you about our rocket.
This is really a couple of core philosophies coming together to get us to where we are today. Philosophy one was customer-focused development, and philosophy two, working with a very challenging merchant to get us to the next level of feature functionality and way of thinking about a product or even an industry. That's what's happened here. We've partnered with a very technologically advanced strategic customer and followed them all over the world. They were working with companies like Adyen and dLocal, so from a feature functionality perspective, they already had best-in-class designs. They already had an understanding about how everything had to work, and we had to match that, but then we also had to show value, so we can't just go also-ran. If we're going to be best in class, we've got to be best in class.
So we understand those particular competitors, what they do well, what they don't do so well. Matching that's one thing. But then engaging with the business and saying, well, what are the really challenging problems that you're unable to solve? Certainly not Adyen and dLocal are solving every single thing. And we found that one of the most challenging things they had are going into what I call exotic areas, exotic regions, countries that in some cases I would challenge you to find these on a map. So we said, that's an interesting challenge. We love interesting challenges. Let's go. And that's kind of how we got here today. We've engaged. We've built a product platform. The product platform is everything that you need to run the business as evidenced by this particular relationship.
Pay-in, payout, local to local, cross-border, PayFac, merchant of record, intelligent reporting, fraud tools, everything within a single product that you need to run a global scale business. We've built that. We've delivered that. And then being able to go from where we are today to where our strategic merchant means that we're launching a new country, brand new countries almost weekly. So the effort, the mindset, the focus to be able to do this has been unmatched. What you see here is really important from the overall value proposition and how we would talk about this to any new merchant that we want to bring onto the platform across the top. One platform, one integration, global reach. Now we think about the feature functionality, what sets us apart. Again, we'll talk a little bit more here in a second about unique geographic coverage and fast expansion.
That's today's stakes for us at this point. We know how to do that. It's incredibly challenging. It keeps us moving every single day. But again, we have this team in place. The smartest and the best technologists and business leaders, product leaders, in my opinion, on the planet are working on this mission. Developer-first toolkit. So the platform was built from the ground up with developers in mind. And it's really important because if you take a look at some competitive opportunities, to be able to go from hello to fully boarded and transacting is an incredible journey. You've got to talk to all these different people. You've got to maybe hire consultants. We want to take one piece of code, drop it into a website, enable commerce, and go. And we deliver that. Best-in-class capabilities.
Again, from a, we're mutually aligned because the faster we can get you to transact, the better off we are. So we want to make sure we take every piece of friction, take away the parts. Unified dashboard. So like our other verticals, where does the power come from? It comes from, let's say, I don't know, let's make something up. 25 different countries, 25 different currencies, local payment methods, one dashboard bringing it all together. What were my sales yesterday? Well, sales were $1 million. What does that mean? Click into it and you find out. The lens of the business coming through a single consolidated portal, incredibly valuable. That's just top-line sales. Now let's drive into chargebacks. Let's go into fraud management. All the best-in-class capabilities that you need. And then bring to the next level where you've got paid in, paid out.
And then things like subscriptions, recurring plans, payment plans, local to local, cross-border. All these different nuances, capabilities are in the platform today and are being expanded around the globe at an exponential rate. This is where we are now. Bottom line is where we're going. I saw this just as we started the presentation. I think we made a mistake. Again, we are doing a country a week. The backlog's far too small. But it's an incredible pace. And we continue to press and press to saturate the globe. And the flywheel effect, any place where these countries are launching, any other like merchant can follow. But it's not just countries. In order to transact in a country, you also need whatever payment methods are local. Our brand proposition is whatever we need in a particular country or geography, we're going to enable that.
We want to make that easy for our merchant and our merchant's customer to transact the way they want to. And then our consolidated business portal. Already mentioned this, but a comprehensive view. Accounts across regions, transactions, individual customers. If you are a customer and you're buying a certain product, you're in that particular CRM database. We can click in. We can look at every transaction. If you want a recurring payment plan, all that's available. If one transaction fails, alert, understand, dive in, and figure out how to fix that particular problem. Operational controls. There's a financial aspect. There's an operational aspect of e-commerce. Card fingerprints, blacklist, fraud rules, events and login. Making sure that we're understanding exactly how we're tracking the fraud. If you worked in e-commerce space, it's no joke. You've got to keep your eye on it every single day.
It can get out of control before you know it. We have to provide the tools, functionality, and capabilities to. We have to manage it. And also our merchant has to be able to proactively be notified if they think a problem's going on and then to proactively correct it through different rules or rely on an AI engine to correct it automatically in the background. And then from a business functionality, flexibility perspective, payouts, payment plans, all of this all in a single platform available today. Now, there's something I want to show you here around a merchant experience. And the use case is I have a business transacting with Shift4 Unified Commerce, and I'm currently doing business in the U.S. I'm here. Maybe I'm in Las Vegas. I come into the portal and I have a vision maybe I want to expand to, let's say, Brazil.
How hard would that be for an average merchant to go from, "Oh, look, this is cool. Let's be in Brazil," to transact in Brazil? Let's have a look. One merchant account. This is the U.S. You see on the account name, you click. There's our map. Green's where we are. Blue's where we can go. Let's click on Brazil. Look, the different currency types, payment methods, card support. We'll go ahead and enable it. Account details, currency conversions, different configurations of how you might want to handle local, or cross-border. All the different account details. Live. Everything around account provisioning, underwriting, all happening in the background. We already know this merchant. We're able to underwrite and move it forward very quickly. Transacting from their website. We're looking at a currency in Brazil called Pix. Super easy to engage with a Pix transaction out of the box.
And then flow straight through to your dashboard, your overall volume, paid-ins, paid-outs. This is the pace of the business. This is what really matters to be able to track sales, understand what's happening, individual transactions, and then roll it up to the overall balances and a payout. It really is that easy. We designed it from the ground up. We talked about merchant experience. I gave you some examples with Launch Control. The same principles that we use at Launch Control with affinity, retention, frictionless, taking out parts are applied here. Totally different domain, but the mindset, the thinking, and making it as easy as possible to expand and transact, all in the same philosophy and fully offered through the product platform itself. You don't have to call sales. You don't have to go online and do some stuff. Go into the product, discover, click, and enable.
All right. And then just a couple of words about where we're tracking. So as I already mentioned, more countries, local payment methods. Crypto acceptance is also coming to unified commerce. And then along with acceptance, we'll have crypto settlement and stablecoin settlement. Platform optimizations. This is some really interesting sort of low-level details, but really, really important. Something called AI auth rate optimization. If you're seeing trends towards declines or downgrades, let the AI engines fix them for you. Be proactive. We shouldn't see end of the month or even end of the day that we have to go and analyze a bunch of transactions that weren't in process as we expected. Let a robot, let an engine do that for you. We're building that into the framework of the platform now.
And then, along with that, from a reporting perspective, we think that we have report builders and we have lots of available reports, but an AI report builder is really important to us. Let's build reports through just simple common language. You understand you want net sales for Brazil on a particular date, week, or month. Just type it in, hit go, and then AI takes that language and translates it into the actual code that creates that report, and within seconds, that code is available for you. You can run it one time. You can put it on a subscription. Again, removing friction, making it super easy to run your business, manage. An incredible amount of process progress has been made on this platform in a very, very little time. As I said, it's a rocket. We're super bullish. We love this space.
There's just an amazing amount of new capabilities and opportunities for us over the horizon, and we're super excited to see where we're going to be in a very short period of time following this roadmap and direction. All right. Let me end where I started. It's a great time to be a product leader at Shift4. These guys, Jared, Taylor, have us positioned so well. We've got amazing talent. We're working with some of the best merchants on the planet to keep us on our toes. We're building capabilities that are available for every merchant, creating a dynamic flywheel across every vertical that we serve. I believe there is no limit to what we can achieve, and actually, I'll say this not from Shift4, but for myself. If we fail, it's our own fault. There's nothing standing in our way. There's nothing obstructing us.
Nothing can happen to us. We just need to execute. Put autonomy, put accountability in place, follow the script, and we're going to have amazing results in a very short period of time. We're going to go on a 15-minute break. I think we have some refreshments. Again, out that door, straight across the hall, SkyTab demo room. If you haven't been there, please go have a look.
You're getting a sense for not just the breadth of products and the verticals that you've grown to know us in and love us in, but also a lot of where our energy is spent behind the scenes. I think, you know, that Brazilian enablement and Pix transaction that Dave walked you all through hopefully was a little bit of an eye-opener, because we don't talk about that very much.
Hopefully the country list was a little bit of an eye-opener as well. We're always doing a ton behind the scenes. Every little inch we advance the product gives us much more confidence to go serve more and more merchants. So if you're scratching your head about why we're so excited to have a foot in the door at tens of thousands of the largest retailers in the world, which is the Global Blue transaction I'm going to be talking about in a little bit, hopefully that product's capability matrix that we just walked you through gives you a sense as to why we're so excited about kind of embarking in these new geographies with these new capabilities, with these new merchants and new verticals.
But I think most important is for you all to understand how we get this done, both from a talent perspective and an organizational perspective. I think one thing we get fairly criticized for is how much we're trying to accomplish at the same time. And so you're going to hear from Kim Rodgers, who's our Chief Human Resources Officer, and Josh McCall, who's our Chief Business Operations Officer, about how we get all this done. Thanks.
Hey, everyone. As Taylor said, my name is Kim Rodgers. I'm the Chief Human Resources Officer here at Shift4. I've been with the company for about six months now, and it's been an incredible journey so far. And I hope you can also see the incredible journey that we're on, right? We've got talented and passionate leaders, really incredible product set, growing globally, and tons of opportunities for development and growth.
I'm excited today to kick us off and talk a little bit about what that looks like. So just one slide here to kind of cover it all. So I want to walk us through how do we get people in the door at Shift4? How do we approach development and growth once people are in the door? And then what does it mean to kind of stay with Shift4 and grow from there? And how does that all connect to how we deliver results ultimately for the organization? But the one thing I want to call out to start is, at its core, our talent strategy is highly connected to our acquisition strategy.
So Luke Thomas, who you'll hear from a little bit later in the team, bring in companies who are kind of naturally aligned to the work that we do, understand our industry, understand our products. And that makes it a lot easier. When folks come in the door, we don't have to spend so much time educating about our industry. We don't have to spend as much time externally recruiting to bring talent in, because we naturally have this opportunity to bring great people in right away. And in fact, greater than half of our workforce, so a majority of our workforce right now, came in through an acquisition at one point or another in Shift4's history. So we are highly supported by our talent that came in through our acquisitions.
The other part I want to say on that, it's not to say we do not kind of supplement bringing in great talent to fill gaps externally, but it absolutely is a core part of our talent strategy to bring in folks through acquisition, and what that means is, instead of spending all of that time externally from a recruiting perspective, we instead can spend much more time onboarding and getting all of these companies who are coming from different cultures and different mindsets into our Shift4 way, and so you heard kind of all of our leaders so far talk about how important that Shift4 way is for how we work as an organization.
And so it is extremely critical to us that as part of our integration efforts, when we're bringing people in the door, we focus so much on that so that we can hit the ground running very, very quickly to ultimately meet our deal objectives, which is really important to us. And then once folks get in the door, there are naturally a lot of opportunities for development. So you heard a lot about our growth story. And I think about it in this way, right? There is absolutely stretch opportunities just by doing your job, right? No matter what, right? We are growing every single day. And so our talent is naturally stretching and growing as a part of that. But in addition, we put people into roles. We promote from within. And in fact, fill a vast majority of our positions through internal talent.
That is a big part of our growth story. Bringing folks along the journey is extremely important to how we operate. We also have a ton of opportunities for global growth, of course. In 2023, about 18% of our employees were located outside the U.S. Just at the end of the year in 2024, that number is 45% outside the U.S. That also naturally brings a lot of development opportunities for our teammates. The other thing we focus on here is we have a high performance management culture. We are in the process of putting productivity measurements in place for all of our roles across our organization. Our people know where they stand and how they're producing for the company.
We have tailored success measurements for our positions so that when we go through our performance cycles, people know where they stand at any given time, and we also know that as part of our growth strategy from a people perspective, we have to be really thoughtful about how we review our organization on a regular basis to make sure that we have the right resources in the right roles kind of all the time, and it is part of doing business for us, and it's really important to maintaining that high performance differentiated culture, and I think as a result, people like to be here, right? We have low turnover, really high engagement scores, and essentially, people are able to grow and develop, I think, highly at Shift4, and hopefully you get the chance to talk to some of our colleagues tonight.
But I think also another reason why people tend to stay with us is we really mean it when we talk about a pay for performance culture. We reward outperformance, right? We put really stretched goals in front of people. We talked a little bit about that scrappy team kind of mindset. But we put people against really kind of seemingly impossible things. And when they outperform those, and you've seen that we've been able to do that, we reward them for it. And we're not afraid of that. We're excited to do it. And I think folks understand that if they work hard and kind of drive the business forward, we will absolutely incentivize against that. And it's kind of a core part of our retention strategy. And then finally, this piece about extreme ownership and accountability, I think, is really exciting. So we set a goal for ourselves.
I'll just give one example. We set a goal for ourselves at the end of 2024. We said, gosh, we should be able to use our employees for our installations, and we specifically said for SkyTab Venue. And we said, wouldn't it be great if we could have 100% of our new SkyTab Venue installs to be completed by our internal employees? Obviously, reducing some costs there, but also aligning our teammates to our merchants, getting folks more aligned, and having more pride behind our mission and the work that we do, and we met that goal in January. So now 100% of our new SkyTab Venue installs are being handled by and being installed by our in-house employees, which is really cool, right? We've been able to reduce some costs and again, align our teammates against our mission and drive that forward, and so all of these things, right?
Bringing in talent from acquisitions, developing, and really taking that targeted approach towards that, making sure that we have a performance management culture that really drives that, rewarding exceptional performance when people are outperforming, and making sure we drive that extreme ownership, I think really is part of the breakdown of the formula behind the Shift4 way that drives us forward as an organization. And you can see as a result, we've really shown that we are a highly productive workforce, right? Despite having grown our headcount, we try to stay mostly flat, excluding acquisitions, and have been able to show that productivity gains since 2018. But also we're projecting that that will continue on that path in 2025 and beyond.
I think a lot of opportunities here at Shift4, and excited to pass it over to my colleague, Josh McCall, who will kind of take it a click deeper and take you into some actual work that we do here.
Just before you get started, I want to kind of emphasize how we think about productivity across the organization. This chart down at the bottom is literally just how we know that we're headed in the right direction on the compass, right? M&A has been an amazing way for us to grow our capability set, grow our access to customers, et cetera. But if you're not doing it well, you are adding employees faster than you're adding productivity, and your revenue generation and your profitability per employee drops.
The singular focus for us in making sure we're on the right course is literally this chart down below. It's one thing to say you've grown an organization because you've grown employees three, four, five X over the course of a really short period of time. But if productivity per employee is not growing, you're going in the completely wrong direction. So you'll see this as we think about human capital management, this is the starting point. Where do we think productivity per employee is going to go? And how do we make sure it's trending in a positive direction regardless of how fast our headcount is growing? And our headcount is growing extremely fast. So we're happy to report we think it's going to continue to grow meaningfully, 20%-40% per employee over the course of the next year.
And Nancy can double click a little bit on some of the things that Kim mentioned with regard to just how our expense base and our headcount grows without M&A, because it really doesn't grow very much despite all the capabilities we've been adding. And Josh and his team are a core part of kind of making sure we're constantly pointed in the right direction. Thanks.
Hi, guys. How you doing? Josh McCall. I'm the Chief Business Operations Officer here at Shift4. As Taylor mentioned, we have the program management team that sits underneath this organization. We're all about getting things done on time. So I couldn't help but notice we were like 20 minutes ahead of schedule. So I'm going to turn my five minute time slot into like 25 minutes, I think, just to slow us down and get us done on time.
That's why I wax poetic about program management. But just a quick intro and a bit about my background. So I joined the Shift4 team in 2021. Spent the first 13 years of my career at Lockheed Martin. Had the pleasure of working with a bunch of our allies in the U.K. and Australia to build out flight training programs across the world with Lockheed. Worked on a bunch of cool technologies and products there. Worked on radar systems, weapon systems, programs for the U.S. Army and Navy. Had a ton of fun, but ultimately wanted to make a change. Came to Shift4 and found an awesome change back in 2021. So as you guys have heard, you may be wondering how this organization juggles all the priorities we have going on. You've heard about a ton of the product priorities, a ton of the M&A priorities.
To maintain focus, execute with urgency on this stuff, it doesn't happen on its own. So this program management team that's highlighted on the slide behind us, we've worked really hard over the past four years to build that out, turn it into a highly functioning team from the ground up, establish process procedures that we could follow and deploy across the entire organization, not just within this team. Helps us bring order to the chaos, ultimately. That's the challenge we live every day and really standardize the way we execute our most important initiatives across the business.
We've got this team of 12 that are constantly working to manage the priorities, helping teams optimize how they're working, make them more efficient, facilitate challenging decision making that we have to do on a daily basis throughout the organization, and ultimately lead us to better and more efficient outcomes as a company. All in line with what you've heard multiple times now when we talk about the Shift4 way, and I'll talk about that a little bit more in a bit here, and just in case it's on your mind, this isn't an administrative program management function like you might find in other organizations like I've seen in the past, and many of you may have experienced with other organizations.
We're super focused on being value added members of the teams we support, helping them in the trenches to solve challenging problems, rolling up our sleeves and helping to solve real problems with them, not just be an administrative arm and an annoyance or a reporting function within the organization. So that's very important. We try to embrace that in everything we do across the business. Also in line with the Shift4 way, we don't always get it right. So you'll see the continuous improvement highlighted on this, whether it's internally within the PMO or across the team, regardless of where it sits in the organization. We're always trying to drive a debriefing lessons learned process back into the business.
We want to run into a problem and come out the other side of it with better processes and a better team in place than we were when we hit that problem in the first place. This team's critically focused on that. Obviously, Shift4 has been extremely acquisitive over the years here. And that's going to obviously continue to be part of our DNA moving forward. This PMO team has managed more than a dozen M&A integration programs over the last four years and will continue to do so. To be successful with this much M&A, we need to execute aggressive integration plans. Again, our core values of delete the parts and execute with urgency are always front and center in this process. You won't find a dozen company websites with powered by Shift4 or a Shift4 company underneath of it.
You won't find organizations within our org structure that look like companies within the companies. We break down the silos, we integrate the teams, and we execute efficiently on our integration strategies. My group also partners really closely with strategy to start that process from the get-go. So we're riding shotgun through the due diligence process, building detailed integration plans along the way, and ultimately executing them with conviction when we get to a close date. It's critical to how we win. I'm going to turn this over to Anthony Perez. He's going to talk you through a perfect example of this process in action when we acquired the Appetize business back in October of 2023.
Thanks, Josh. Anthony Perez, Global Head of Unified Commerce on the commercial team here at Shift4. I joined Shift4 four years ago, actually by way of acquisition.
I've had that unique perspective of coming in through an acquisition and then also subsequently being part of us ushering others in through acquisition as well. I was the CEO of VenueNext, which Shift4 acquired in early 2021. Before that, I was the Chief Marketing Officer of the Orlando Magic. Some quick background here. We obviously were super familiar with Appetize. We were our primary competitor for many years. And in fact, if you go back to 2019, when VenueNext, prior to Shift4, chose to really pivot all the way into the point of sale space and compete directly with Appetize, there were a lot of folks that were questioning if that was a good idea. It was largely because Appetize had a huge lead at that point. They'd raised a ton of money, and they had captured a significant portion of the market.
But we really felt confident that we had a differentiated value proposition that was going to resonate. So we forged ahead. You fast forward to early 2021, Shift4 acquires us. That value proposition further differentiated, really enhanced. But even then, we were still very much the challenger, and Appetize was the 800-pound gorilla. And I remember vividly when we had our VenueNext all hands announcing the acquisition to everyone. Jared joined that, and he said, "We are going to kick Appetize's ass." And there was a lot of nervous laughter because even then, as I said, we were the challenger. And so there was a lot of ground to cover. It was a steep hill to climb. And so it sort of made everybody uncomfortable, such a bold statement. But the two and a half years from there, that's exactly what we did.
A business, Appetize, that SpotOn paid more than $400 million for two years prior. They sold to us for $100 million. Now, I think stopping right there, most companies would be happy just given the scale of the customer base that Appetize had. I think most companies would be happy to stop there, put a sticker on the hardware with the company logo and sort of move on. Certainly the easiest thing to do in some respects, but not Shift4. For us, this deal only made sense if we were able to realize the synergies of deleting the parts. That was a primary goal for us, to take that customer base off of the Appetize software and convert it to VenueNext, what's now SkyTab Venue with Shift4 for payments.
And not to do it over five years, but to do it as quickly as we possibly could, to sprint at it starting on day one. That drove every decision that we made, that drove every action that we took. And so how did we do that? Number one, we cherry picked the best employees that we thought could contribute the most to the go forward business, not the business that we bought, but the business that we were going to maintain and grow going forward. We onboarded them quickly and ramped them up immediately on SkyTab Venue, on the Shift4 business, the value prop, and how to think about converting that customer base. We went out to all the Appetize customers and operating partners and said, "We are not going to invest in two software platforms going forward. We're going to invest in SkyTab Venue.
And the best thing you can do is convert to that software as soon as possible. We'll make it as easy as we can." And that was certainly part of our consideration as well, just sort of foreseeing the objections that we might encounter, making sure that we had a clear, clear commitment to that conversion, not letting ourselves sort of fall into the traps of, "Well, let's let this customer stay for a while because they've got this one little custom feature that we really need to deliver on before they're willing to convert." Not letting that stuff get in the way, these marginal things. And then also just sort of foreseeing that some of these customers are going to see transitioning to another software platform as a challenge. It's going to take up time from them. I don't know when I'll get around to it.
We made sure to build the tools on our side to make data migration, menu transitions, all of those things as seamless as we possibly could. So again, just preparing ourselves to overcome those objections in advance and being ready to go. The results, I think, are pretty compelling. They speak for themselves. That acquisition happened 15 months ago. We've already converted over 70% of the Appetize customer base across the major and minor league sports venues. As Dave mentioned before, we offer a lot more than just F and B point of sale. We can power a much broader ecosystem for these teams. That's certainly been a focus for us as well, growing those relationships, expanding those relationships even further. To that end, we've already successfully upsold more than 25% of the professional sports customers that Appetize had at the time that we bought them.
We've cross-sold on ticketing, which is a huge opportunity for us with a lot more room to go where we feel really confident. So we've done all that over that 15-month period. And I think this acquisition is just a great example where our sort of guiding principles have been the Shift4 way, deleting a part and having conviction around that and executing with urgency. That's certainly been a driver for us. I will be at the dinner later for anybody who wants to talk about this further, if there's interest. And in the meantime, I'll kick it back to Josh. Thank you. Thanks, Anthony. Okay, so wanted to highlight a couple of things here on Mission Control briefly. Addison, if you give a wave. Our technical lead, Addison, is here tonight, today, and he'll be at the dinner later. So I'll give you kind of the overview here.
We've got a quick video on Mission Control. And if you have any detailed questions, definitely seek out Addison because this is some really cool tech that we're putting in place within the organization. So it's also an organic internal initiative, right? So we've got a lot of M&A going on, as we've been talking about. This one's completely organic, and it's really built with a focus on keeping the company organized across a lot of different elements of the business. So we've kind of taken a play out of the space industry's playbook here of building out a Mission Control concept that monitors our most critical no-fail platforms and business processes. And really, the business process is where the magic is in a lot of this. So just highlight a few of them here that you could see on the screen. Time to revenue.
This team is monitoring how quickly we can get a customer going from signature to a go-live. Mission Control helps monitor both SMB and enterprise customer base and their onboarding metrics. We look at time to onboard, time to install, time to go live, all at the mindset of finding deficiencies, finding bottlenecks, and driving positive action back into the process to eliminate those bottlenecks, ultimately accelerate the end-to-end process for our merchants. We believe that the faster and easier this process is for us internally, the better experience we can create for our customers externally. Super important insights that this team is gathering on a day-to-day basis. Then to highlight customer satisfaction and merchant attrition, since they kind of go together.
This team is a back office team monitoring all the ticket trends overall across the business, but also at a merchant-by-merchant level to identify risks within the business or just general trends that need to be fed back to maybe product or operations or the commercial team to fix these things for our customers, so they're constantly looking at survey results, transaction volumes, and customer transaction behavior, batching behavior, unsettled transactions that might be sitting with a customer longer than typical, and again, driving positive action back into the business to rectify anything they find. This team's constantly hunting for every piece of data they can to better understand our customers' pain points and partner with the right internal teams to work these problems to resolution. We've got a quick video to highlight this capability. I mentioned Addison. He's here, so definitely, if you've got more questions, seek him out.
And then I'm going to turn it over to Michael here to tackle growth strategy.
What happens when you take the no-fail mindset and process from the space industry and apply it to payments? You get Shift4's new Mission Control platform. Mission Control is a centralized hub where merchant payment data is aggregated, analyzed, and actioned on. It's a game changer. As the new nerve center for Shift4's global operations, Mission Control brings together different data streams in one unified system. The mission is simple: streamline onboarding for faster go-lives all over the world and faster time to revenue. Improve customer satisfaction and reduce attrition by finding and solving problems before they happen. Monitor connectivity to the entire payments ecosystem to improve platform reliability, stability, and uptime. And leverage AI and machine learning to detect fraud more effectively, recovering sales, and reducing attrition across the board.
That's just the beginning. As more issues are corrected, actions will become automated, improving customer satisfaction and boosting our bottom line. Businesses are always looking for a competitive advantage. We're delivering that edge for our customers while keeping Shift4 ahead of the curve. Mission accomplished.
Really cool. Thanks, Josh. Hello, everyone. My name is Michael Isaacman. I'm the Chief Commercial Officer for Shift4. I want to recognize a few people from the commercial organization that are here today: Suzanne Davis, who runs hotels and restaurants for us globally, Anthony Perez, who you just got to know. He runs all the other verticals globally for us, unified commerce. Dustin Alpert is back there also. He runs our sports and entertainment division. So if you want tickets to a game, like he's your guy, he can definitely hook you up.
Nate Hirschberg from marketing is here with the entire marketing team. And I also just want to take a moment to thank Tom and Paloma and the marketing team for making this day happen because this was no easy task. So thank you. Thank you for making us look good. And the immersive graphics are really cool. So I'm going to talk about our growth strategy and how we win. I'm going to start with a question. So how do we compel a restaurant or a hotel or sports team to move to Shift4? So let me start with a conversation that I had two weeks ago with a prospective customer of ours. So this is a CFO of a multinational restaurant group with over 100 locations in North America, in the U.S. and Canada, Sarah Grover. Hi, Sarah.
She, on our board, she actually made the introduction to this prospective company. And we were in discussions about consolidating multiple point of sale solutions into one, removing support and gateway fees and device fees. And they saw the value, but they wanted to hold off because they had a pretty big early termination fee. Two weeks ago, their gateway provider, not Shift4, informed them that all their PIN pads were reaching end of life. So they're facing an urgent and costly refresh. And they made the decision to begin the migration to move over to Shift4 starting next month, saving them hundreds of thousands of dollars and reducing five vendors down to one. For restaurants operating on razor-thin margins, these cost savings are game-changing. And this is what we do.
Whether it's a small bakery in Sussex, England, or a complex resort like Fontainebleau, Shift4 tackles complex challenges and lowers the total cost of ownership for our customers. We've spent 20 years in the integrated payment space, and we've intentionally chosen verticals with weak competition where we could become the market leaders. And I think we've done a pretty good job. I think you've seen some of this already. I know Taylor's addressed it. Dave Hoffman's addressed it. We're number one in sports and entertainment. If a venue chooses an alternative to Shift4, they're stitching together at least 6-10 different vendors across multiple platforms to try and solve the problem. A hotel that works with us, we're the only ones that have a solution that solves for every integration on-site, online booking, loyalty.
We eliminate support, gateway, and device fees, which is why resorts like Fontainebleau, Pebble Beach, the Halekulani, and Wynn choose Shift4. We're close in restaurants, probably number two, adding tens of thousands of restaurants a year in the U.S., Canada, U.K., and Europe. Industry leaders like Tao, Cordish, Balthazar, Shoney's are all choosing SkyTab. And I want to thank Sturge for making his way from Tao. He's here today. I know it's nerve-wracking to record a video, and you looked really good up on the big screen. While I'm thanking customers, I also want to thank Andy, who's here from Aalterra, representing unified commerce and resorts and F&B. There's a lot to do at Aalterra. And then we have a great partner from St. Jude, ALSAC. We got Rick and Kira from St. Jude, they're right up front. And then BJ, Robert Neill from Allegiant Air.
Thank you for coming in. Another customer that stopped up and recorded a video for us. And you look like a rock star. You're a movie star now. So thank you. So I go back. In the unified payment space, we have the card present expertise that the e-commerce leaders, excuse me, our competition does not right now. And this is why we can announce wins like Aalterra, supporting our Mountain Resorts at over 17 U.S. and Canadian ski resorts and online payments for the Ikon Pass, providing access to over 50 ski destinations across the globe. And when we engaged with Aalterra, the value prop, we started with one resort where we're already supporting them. And then the discussion expanded to being able to support them in U.S. and Canada, and then being able to support the e-commerce work that they're doing with Ikon Pass.
It just turned out that they were already in discussions with Givex. The roadmap's going to take a little bit. Over the next 18 months, you're going to see one of the best technology showcases around. Thank you, Andy. Returning to my original question, what drives customers to choose Shift4? As you've heard before, we solve complex challenges and reduce costs for our customers. Whether it's a high-end restaurant like Komodo, where we're going to eat tonight, or a transit system in Portugal, that's what Shift4 does. Our early investments in products like SkyTab POS and SkyTab Venue have secured our leadership in key U.S. verticals, which we're now expanding globally. Our own products and the 550-plus software integrations empower customers to operate frictionlessly across the world.
And then these new integrations that typically come when we're installing at places like Fontainebleau unlock new verticals for us. Think about an EV charging station that a resort needs to stand up or golf management software. Those unlock new opportunities for us, and they expand Shift4's TAM. Our end-to-end solution saves money for businesses of all sizes, eliminating multiple vendors, extra device fees, gateway fees, and operational inefficiencies. Let's spend a little time on cross-sell. I think we do a pretty good job at cross-selling. At a high level, we trade legacy dollars for SaaS and payment revenue. The process begins with strategic acquisitions, whether it's a gateway or a point of sale system or loyalty or a gift card solution. That's our foot in the door.
Once we're in, we present our value proposition, again, eliminating gateway fees, providing free devices, reducing complexity, and lowering total cost of ownership. Sales is hard. Merchants are running their businesses. They don't want to think about or talk about payments, so they're probably never going to respond to a cold call. Having an existing relationship with sticky software that Shift4 owns makes it so much easier, and it gives us so many different levers to pull. This is a huge advantage that we have over the competition. If you look at the top chart, you can see our addressable pipeline has grown almost fivefold since our IPO. If you believe that we're great at cross-selling and you liked our cross-sell pipeline at IPO, you should love us now, and we're successfully exporting this playbook globally, partnering with major brands like Best Western, Walmart, Nobu, Vail, Aalterra.
What started as a single country relationship has evolved into a multi-market partnership. And that's why these clients are choosing Shift4 to power their global expansion. We're seeing similar success with our partners. For instance, we just launched our first hotel in the U.K. on Visual Matrix, which is one of our property management system ISVs, one of our partners. They've already committed to rolling out SkyTab in all the hotel properties that have an F&B revenue center. Our international card present expansion is taking off, as you can see in the bottom chart. Six months ago, non-U.S. card present production was a rounding error. Last month, a third of our applications were from Canada, Europe, and the U.K. A third.
Just like our journey in the U.S., where we went from zero market share to dominating the sports and entertainment vertical, we're now repeating that process with new verticals and new geographies. Anthony did a pretty good job talking about the Appetize cross-sell. Let me give you a quick refresher just on how we entered the sports space. We planted our flag in sports with the Raiders at Allegiant Stadium right here in Las Vegas before they even opened their doors. One of the strategic technology partners in the venue was VenueNext. We went to market with them as a partner. In 2021, we acquired the business and quickly began dominating the S&E vertical. Our goal was to support every revenue center associated with the venue. It's the same playbook we use when we're going into a resort. We want everything that's in here.
Fortunately, there's a couple of boutiques that are independent. You heard the story. In 2021, we struck a deal early with SeatGeek and Paciolan . So the most coveted revenue center in sports and entertainment is ticketing. It's the highest volume contributor. In 2023, we signed an agreement and began the integration work to unlock Ticketmaster, which is the whale in the ticketing space. This significantly expanded our TAM, and we continued to expand and cross-sell in the U.S. while we unlocked new geographies and posted signature wins like FC Barcelona and Exeter. And there's several more to follow. This playbook is working in Europe, where we're rapidly expanding in transportation and EV charging, two massive high-growth verticals that match our strengths in the card present payment space. Shift4 was an early mover in the EV charging space.
We obtained EVC-ready device certifications ahead of our competitors, and we formed partnerships with software and hardware vendors. We started in Italy, and now we're live in 10 countries across Europe. In parallel, we began solving complex problems for European bus and transit systems. The legacy closed-loop metro card-like system was great for daily commuters, but it wasn't good for anybody else that was going to use the subway system or the tube system. We worked on building out our own open-loop solution that provides a seamless experience, supporting tap when you enter the station, tap when you leave the station. Our first one was in Portugal, and now we're operating in Romania, Italy, Germany, and Greece is about to go live.
We literally just executed an agreement today with Curb in the U.K. to support their iconic black cabs across London, supporting both their card present and card not present needs. We're now operating in the rental car space, where we have our first handful of sites up and running in the U.S., and they're supporting both online payments and a pay-on-the-lot solution, very similar to our pay-at-the-table solution that we're using in restaurants right now. We're going to follow TSD globally to support rental cars across the world. We start small, we expand quickly, and we take market share. We discussed how we win business. I wanted to give you a quick overview on the process behind the scenes. Our customer acquisition, onboarding, and go-live process is a proven, repeatable system, enabling rapid global expansion.
In the U.S., the majority of our SMB business is driven by our own Skyforce direct organization. This team was primarily built by insourcing our distribution partners and organically recruiting bartenders, servers, and restaurant managers with a passion for the industry that we retrain on the Shift4 way. They use our technology platform to plan their day, meet with prospects, and rapidly onboard new merchants, which then creates a digital assembly line to process the order, build the software, and program the menu. Our launch team then assists the restaurants to ensure a successful go-live. The process is very similar for SMB hotels and retail locations. Our enterprise directors use the same technology stack to assist our most complex prospects. They leverage SkyTab POS, SkyTab Venue, and our 550-plus integrations to win new business.
Once sold, they hand off to an enterprise account manager to work through checklists within our digital platform and ensure a successful go-live. The enterprise account managers continue to manage and grow these enterprise relationships for the remainder of the customer's lifecycle. We're constantly refining the process and adapting to new regions as we enter new locations across the globe. In summary, our value proposition resonates across many verticals. We have built an unmatched customer acquisition engine, and we're scaling it globally with precision. We continue growing market share with our own products and strategic integrations. Complex customers drive new integrations, fueling land and expand opportunities for us. Our $1.4 trillion cross-sell pipeline is overflowing, creating massive market advantage for us. And just as our cross-sell funnel has expanded, we've also scaled our TAM.
The best part is every new market we've entered is growing faster than our traditional markets. We'll continue to deploy capital strategically, expanding our reach, cross-selling our solutions, and winning in every vertical we enter. Thank you for your time. Over to you, Luke.
Thank you, Michael. Hi, everyone. I'm Luke Thomas, Chief Strategy Officer here at Shift4. One sec. So I wanted to start just by hitting on the strategy group's ultimate objective, which is really maximizing the long-term growth of the company in a capital-efficient manner. So our job is to ensure that every dollar that we invest back into the company has an above-market return associated with it. Basically, how do we get the most long-term benefit from the least amount of capital invested? And I think where we're different than most of our competitors is that this capital efficiency ethos has been seared into the company DNA by Jared. So it's not just the strategy group that has capital efficiency top of mind, but every division across the entire company is acutely aware of the value of every dollar they spend.
And this really comes from the company's unique history. Shift4 didn't raise outside capital for our first 16 years in business, which meant that every dollar spent had to be earned. And this is a legacy that'll stay with us for many years to come. So we know that capital efficiency is important, but how do we think about how much capital we actually have available to invest? And it's basically that cash flow for investing section of our cash flow statement, which we think about in these three buckets of customer acquisition, product investment, and M&A. This is really the excess capital that we have available to us to invest back in the business.
Stepping through each and looking at customer acquisition first, which we really think about the upfront hardware that we give away to a merchant when they switch to Shift4, or the bonuses we pay out to salespeople or distribution partners. Basically, everything we have to give away upfront to win a net new merchant. We will always allocate capital here first because of how phenomenal the returns are. This capital has a sub-12-month payback period and an almost double-digit LTV to CAC, meaning that every single dollar deployed here has an incredible return, and we will always prioritize it. Next, looking at product investment, which we really define as our capitalized R&D line. This one is incredibly important for building a long-term sustainable advantage by having the best product in the market.
The better your product is, the more merchants want to switch to Shift4, the more customer acquisition dollars we're able to deploy. This is why we've increased investment here so much recently, having 6x'd our capitalized R&D over the last four years. Finally, we have M&A and shareholder investments like stock buybacks. We'll get into more detail on our acquisition strategy on the next slide, but I think the important piece to highlight is that a primary rationale for doing acquisitions is to still feed that first bucket of customer acquisition. So it's really the latter two ones of product investment and M&A that are primarily geared toward being able to deploy more customer acquisition dollars. This takes us into our acquisition strategy and why we have an M&A-led growth model.
I think it's important to highlight upfront that we don't do acquisitions because it's easier or because we have to. It's actually a much higher execution bar from a skill set and company culture perspective, but the results are so superior that it's worth it. This page lays out the primary advantages our acquisition-led strategy affords us, and I wanted to hit on each of them through the lens of a recent acquisition to help bring them to life. We'll use Givex to step through the details. Starting with the advantage customer acquisition cost model, and this is one of the most important parts of our acquisition strategy that I think we can do a better job communicating. Using Givex, we paid right around $130 million in enterprise value for 130,000 merchant locations, so $1,000 per location upfront.
Taking a reasonable assumption for free hardware and sales incentives on top of that, you're looking at $2,000-$3,000 all-in for customer acquisition, including the price of the company. For context, Toast spends right around $17,000 per location in sales and marketing alone, meaning that our acquisition-led growth strategy is over 5x more efficient than almost all of our SaaS and payment competitors that use PPC and traditional advertising channels instead of buying a sticky base of merchants using an ancillary product that you can cross-sell software and payments into. Moving on to enhanced platform and capabilities.
And I think this is one that's often overlooked because while it's true that the primary rationale for buying Givex was to cross-sell payments into their merchant base, we also picked up a best-in-class gift and loyalty platform that we can integrate into our overall platform to offer to all of our merchants, enhancing stickiness and monetization. This is a huge advantage of buying these payment-adjacent point solutions that really should be features as a part of a broader platform instead of standalone companies. You get to upgrade your service offerings in all of these areas to the market leader without actually ascribing much deal value. Next, we delete the parts in all of our acquisitions, which results in operational efficiencies and cost savings.
And in a lot of acquisitions, this means deleting the part on the acquired company side, whether that be a legacy technology or an internal system, but sometimes it means deleting the part on the Shift4 side, as was the case here. We had an older homegrown gift card system that paled in comparison to Givex's, and so we made theirs our default go-forward offering, enabling us to delete the part on the Shift4 side and unlock cost savings. And finally, on accelerated time to market, we were already organically expanding to Canada, where we have gateway-only merchants and existing U.S. merchants that have Canadian locations and wanted us to expand there.
But this massively accelerated our pace, giving us a huge base of merchants that are now more interested in our more complete offering, a bunch of valuable sales talent with relationships and the local product expertise needed to understand what you need to win in each individual province. And just to call it out, we have all of these advantages in addition to the fact that we got a profitable growing company, which is the only reason that almost every other company does acquisitions. But we underwrite our deals on the back of these primarily four advantages, and the fact that we also get a profitable growing company is just a cherry on top versus the core reason that others do deals.
Given this unique acquisition strategy where our acquisition fills up our cross-sell funnel, allowing us to deploy our next customer acquisition dollar, how do we accurately measure return on capital? Because you can't just look at M&A or product investment or R&D. You really have to look at the total capital deployed across all three buckets over a long enough time horizon and say how much incremental EBITDA and free cash flow did that capital generate. This gives a simple ROI view of how much profit we generated per dollar invested back into the company. The nice thing here is that it's a totally transparent measuring stick that anyone can look up and use it to compare us to competitors or internal return benchmarks. How have we performed?
If you look back at the last five years since we've had public filings, we've invested right around $2.7 billion across those three buckets, and that $2.7 billion in capital has generated an incremental annual EBITDA of $590 million and free cash flow of $424 million, meaning that every dollar that we invested back into the business was at a sub-5x EBITDA multiple and a 6.5x free cash flow multiple, or a 16% free cash flow yield, which is quite attractive considering the majority of our competitors and us trade in the 4%-8% free cash flow yield range. Said another way, we are paying way less per dollar of free cash flow than you can get anywhere else, which is what gives us confidence that we'll be able to generate well above market returns on the capital that we deploy.
So to recap, we don't have an acquisition-led growth strategy because we have to, but because it creates sustainable above-market results if you're able to execute it well. It's why we've been able to deploy a lot of capital over the last five years at excellent rates of return and why we have customer acquisition cost multiples lower than our competitors that use traditional models. But why are we successful at it? What makes us special? To start, we saw the opportunity in the convergence of software and payments before it was even called integrated payments and established unique rights to win in verticals that would benefit. Now, the integrated payment journey is pretty well understood in the U.S. today, but there are still hundreds of companies that are payment-adjacent point solutions that should be features as a part of a broader platform instead of standalone companies.
And even more excitingly, the integrated payment journey is very much in its early days abroad, which is why you've seen us move quickly into the international market. And as Taylor will talk about shortly, we'll continue to make bold moves to further our track record of picking our spots early and establishing dominant positions in corners of the market where value will accrue. Another really important piece is that there's no mystery internally as to what our acquisition strategy is or how we achieve the synergies that we underwrite on each deal. We'll go into more detail in a sec, but we have three acquisition themes that are clearly defined and well understood across the entire company. Each one has its own specific synergy realization playbook that Josh and the strategy team and PMO work to implement together.
And then every single deal that we do, we learn from that deal, we iterate the playbook, and we make it better for the next one. And next is our ability to source and execute, partially driven by our reputation in the market as an extremely efficient buyer and partially driven by the incredibly talented team that we've assembled. So to give a sense, we evaluated over 300 deals in 2024, the vast majority of which were outside of banker-led sales processes. We ended up performing concentrated diligence on about 50 of those. We issued IOIs for a little over 15 and actually executed on five of them. And I did want to call out the strategy group back there. If y'all can raise your hands, I would encourage you to find them later. We have Kevin, Sushmi, David, and Neelesh.
They are all acutely aware of the quantity of deals that we looked at last year. And it's really these features that enable us to unlock that kind of long-term sustainable above-market results that we talked about on the last page. So I wanted to walk through those three acquisition themes, and I'm going to use a recent example to highlight our synergy realization playbook in each of them. So the first one we call top of the funnel and delete the parts. This is really what I think of as the core Shift4 playbook. You're buying a sticky base of merchants using an ancillary product that you can cross-sell payments into and then delete that part. A good recent example here is Eigen, a $30 billion card present gateway in Canada and the U.S. that we closed on in November.
So the most obvious synergy clearly is cross-selling payments into that $30 billion gateway-only merchant base, which is a strategy that we know how to execute extremely well. But you also get cost savings from deleting the part. In this case, the Eigen gateway, given that we have the perfect replacement product in the Shift4 gateway, so we can execute our gateway sunset strategy by increasing pricing on those merchants on the legacy product, incentivizing them to move to our end-to-end platform and deleting the part. And a third, and I think often overlooked advantage here is that we picked up a ton of valuable talent. So whether that be scarce payments engineering talent that we can reallocate to the Shift4 gateway to accelerate pace there, or valuable sales talent with great relationships.
Next is international expansion, where we expand our distribution or payment rails into new geographies so that we can recreate that same Shift4 playbook in new markets, and a good recent one here is Vectron, a German restaurant point of sale company with 65,000 merchants and a dealer network of over 300 dealers. The most obvious synergy, again, is cross-selling payments into that 65,000 merchant base, which, by the way, was almost entirely unmonetized whenever we bought it, and while it took longer than we'd have liked, we launched our payments-led value proposition into that dealer network at the very end of last year, and I'm excited to say that we've already signed up hundreds of merchants, and the pace is rapidly accelerating.
Despite the value in all of that payment volume from the embedded merchants, it's actually that 300 dealer network that's the most valuable asset here, as evidenced by the fact that it took Vectron over 30 years to assemble this network of highly specialized POS resellers. They're already thrilled to be selling our new payments-led value prop. They're going to be even more excited whenever they can sell a cutting-edge cloud product like SkyTab POS. Finally, we picked up a ton of valuable local talent, not only in Germany but across Europe, that understands the product requirements for each individual market and will ensure that SkyTab is ready to dominate. Then lastly, we have capability enhancement, where we're expanding our capability set in order to establish the Shift4 playbook in a new vertical or product line.
While we don't do many pure play product acquisitions, I think the VenueNext one is a good example, which we've already heard a bit about, but because it opened up an entirely new vertical to us, that was ripe for disruption from that integrated software and payments playbook, so in general, we look for verticals where there isn't a lot of competition, and sports and entertainment was a great example of that with no clear market leader, and most importantly, we had the demonstrated evidence that our value prop could work in the market because we had already partnered with the VenueNext team prior to the acquisition and won several large stadiums. We saw how much more value we could provide to those teams by bundling the software and payments and still had a good margin on just the payments as Shift4 standalone.
We knew that bringing them completely together could help us dominate the market. And the only thing I wanted to hit on here, really, is that all of our previous acquisitions fit neatly into one or multiple of those three buckets I just walked through. And in each one, we relentlessly executed on our synergy realization playbook and then fine-tuned it based on everything we learned for the next one. And this is the flywheel that gives us confidence we'll continue being able to deploy capital at excellent rates of return. And I do know it's a bit intimidating to see all the logos on that last page because it's a lot of parts, which is why we are maniacally focused on deleting the parts. And so I did want to show here just kind of the surviving standalone pieces. So this is the actual go-forward profile of Shift4.
As you can see, it's almost entirely SkyTab, Shift4, and very recent acquisitions. I wanted to end with a quick case study that we haven't shared before and take a deeper look at Finaro. I think very important to recognize here that this was a pure capability expansion play for us. We needed the payment infrastructure in Europe, and they had best-in-class payment rails. This deal was really all about giving us the payments plumbing that we needed to take what made us special in the U.S. over to Europe. Despite that, it's actually performed quite well financially also. We basically doubled the company in the three years since we signed the deal, having increased volume and net revenue by 2x and Adjusted EBITDA by 2.5x.
Importantly, we've done this while meaningfully diversifying the business, taking it from 3% Card Present at the time that we signed it to 30% Card Present as of December. And I think this is pretty representative of Shift4 as a whole. We've grown the business really nicely while meaningfully diversifying it and increasing the durability of the business by leveraging our unique strengths, in this case, Card Present expertise. And with that, I think we have a very short break, and then Taylor will talk us through the next giant funnel that we're going to leverage this European payment infrastructure for. Thank you.
All right. Last stretch. Really appreciate everyone for maintaining the focus. I think this is the right framing. Why do the largest M&A transaction in the company's history, with a 26-year brilliant and inspiring founder on his way out the door onto a new mission?
And in fairness, that was, I think, a question a lot of our board members had. So if you're wondering those same things, you've got a great audience of governance challenging us on these bold moves. So worth talking to them because I think as we kind of matured the process, discussed them through the transaction, it became obvious to all of us that this is an imperative. It's not something that we would like to do. It's something that, at this moment in our time, with our capability set and with, quite frankly, the transaction being something that was available to us, we had to execute again. So I spent a little bit of time on the rationale, a lot of time on the business.
I get really excited when we announce a transaction and 90% of the room doesn't know what the business does, and yet they're embedded in tens of thousands of the largest retailers in the world. That means we're doing something right. I can point to, I guess, I don't know, at least half the room gives us M&A ideas constantly. This is not one that anyone presented to us, which is really cool. It speaks to the talent and sourcing of the strategy team. So little highlights on the transaction itself. We signed a definitive agreement this past weekend to acquire Global Blue for $2.5 billion. It works out to $7.50 a share. It'll be an all-cash transaction that we expect to close in the second half of 2025. There's a regulatory review period, but I do not want to scare anyone who's been with us for a handful of years.
This is not an 18- or 20-month regulatory review period. These are a handful of licenses and countries that we've already begun the process on, and we expect to be concluded within about six months or so. So what does Global Blue do? They are the number one provider of VAT tax refund services across an incredible base of merchants that I'll talk about in just a second. When I say number one, it's like 80% market share, and then number two has 20% and is losing. That's a really exciting standalone business for us. They enable the best merchants in the world to deliver an incredible commerce experience for international travelers that are shopping abroad and get a discount. They don't have to pay the VAT as long as they prove that they're leaving the country. This is a technology solution that enables all of that.
If that sounds complicated to you all, it should. That's what excites us about it. This means you're plugged into in-store transactions. You're talking to tons of different data systems. You're maintaining things like passport information so you know what the shopper's doing and where they're going and that they're actually eligible for the refund. The refund can come in numerous forms. It can come in cash. It can come in local currency. It can come in the currency of the cardholder themselves. They enable this across 50-plus countries around the world. Incredible.
They do it at both the country level, where they manage a VAT refund process for all of the merchants in a particular country, and then they do it down at the merchant level in other geographies where it's up to the merchant to create a great experience between them and the consumer and, quite frankly, the customs agents that have to make sure all this works. They have about $30 billion of what they would call sales in store. These are the transactions that they're actually enabling these functions on. You can think about it as our own payment volume. This is the payment volume or the transactions that they are in the mix on. And yet, despite that, these businesses are selling lots of goods to all sorts of consumers who aren't going through this refund process. It's a local purchaser.
So there's a huge payment pie available to us, and we've got an incredible foot in the door with a mission-critical vendor that already owns 80% of the market share that these stores can't live without. Obviously, selling to international shoppers is a critical component to how a lot of these businesses operate. We estimate that payment volume at about $500 billion plus. I think sometimes there's eye rolls or yawns when we talk about the payment opportunity inside of an acquisition. When you start to see some of the names on the page, you'll get a sense for that being a pretty conservative figure, and again, phenomenal standalone business that's been growing nicely in their own market and winning share. They have about €486 million of revenue in the calendar year 2024 and $188 million of Adjusted EBITDA. This is a great business.
This is a business that's got good margins, that's growing fast, that's digitizing inside of their customer base. They're making refunds easier and easier to access, which we found incredibly compelling. What I think the market didn't necessarily appreciate was, number one, it was 90% owned by private equity sponsors and a really significant overhang that made liquidity a challenge and actually getting into the equity a challenge, and their market share inside of their core product offering was so high, it was kind of hard to envision where they go from there. Lastly, I'll point out, and actually, I'll skip to the next slide. This is the punchline, right? These are now merchants we are a critical vendor for when we close on this transaction. It's not just a merchant solution. Providing an incredible consumer experience is core to making this all work.
The business does not earn revenue unless an international shopper goes into a store, buys a good, and leaves the country and gets the refund, and actually goes through the steps required to get the refund. This is why forward-thinking digitization in a world where travel was coming back incredibly rapidly was really, really important to maintaining and growing the share that they had inside the market. So what do we get as a result of this two-sided network? We get about 15 million shoppers that are traveling around the world buying luxury goods. This is a group of shoppers that I think any great business would love insights to. Live inside of the Global Blue mobile application contains all of their data to fulfill the refund experience. And you can present these shoppers with really interesting ideas as they travel around the world.
Clearly interesting corollaries with the hotel business that we have inside the United States and is growing in the rest of the world. I talked a little bit about the tax-free shopping side of the business. Any of you that know our M&A philosophy, there's never one thesis. There's never two theses. There's usually like three or four that help us build conviction around something like this. They also have a payments business that does Dynamic Currency Conversion and FX exchange solutions for a wide swath of the international merchant market. Dynamic Currency Conversion, for those of you that aren't familiar, is the ability to pick the currency within which you're paying with at the point of sale.
It's really important if you're a foreign traveler and you want to know exactly in your home currency the charge that's going to show up on your card as opposed to the currency in the country that you're in and who knows what that's going to look like on your bill. We have never offered this to any of our hotels or any of our merchants inside the United States. So we've kind of alluded to this idea that we've got this cross-sell into this phenomenal new set of merchants through the tax-free business that Global Blue offers. We also have a Dynamic Currency Conversion cross-sell into our base of customers. Multiple ways to win, especially in a large transaction that's already a great underlying business at a pretty decent entry price, is kind of the hallmark of how we think about underwriting a transaction like this. How does it work?
I gave an example here. This is a great takeaway for the slides that you're all going to see on our website later. But essentially, a shopper goes into the store and buys a product and is entitled to a refund of the VAT tax that they paid on that product. Their data is collected either through the mobile application or, quite frankly, right in the store. I was in Paris last week. Great due diligence when you get to buy your wife an expensive handbag and call it a business trip. Card taken in the store, scan my passport. By the time I was home, there was a refund on my card. And a meaningful refund, right? It was about 10% of the purchase price, so it really compels users to want to do this.
This is an incredibly compelling process for international travelers around the world, whether that's Asian travelers going to Europe, U.S. travelers going to Europe or the Middle East or Asia. These are really, really interesting kind of travel-leading incentives that countries are putting in place to compel people to want to travel there. It's very meaningful if you've got this VAT infrastructure to say, "Hey, if you come over and spend your money here, you get it back." And the easier that process can be, the more compelling that is to both the country and the merchants inside that country. And they make the process really, really damn easy. So I talked about kind of why we like the business on a standalone basis. Tax-free shopping is growing all over the world.
It is just an increased trend that if you're applying a VAT tax inside of your country, waiving that for shoppers that are going to be incremental inside your country is just good common sense. Here are a list of just a handful of geographies that have continued to make this easier over the years, so there's a macro trend that supports the underlying business. They already own 80% share, but the TAM is growing as countries adopt this. Further penetration into these markets through making the process easier, more digital, is really, really interesting. They're winning merchants every single day. By taking merchants who have traditionally used a really cumbersome paper process, I've actually got to submit a form, mail a form to get my refund, and I don't even remember when I bought it.
By the time the refund may show up into an incredibly digital experience like I just had last week, it's growing the number of VAT refunds that actually occur inside of their existing merchant base. So you're not just talking about luxury retail growth. You're talking about digitization being a growth lever on top of that and geography expansion being a growth lever on top of that. Really, really compelling business. Separately, all these value-added solutions that I talked about that we get to do inside of their merchant base and inside of our merchant base. Hopefully, this is checking a lot of boxes for those of you that know our M&A strategy. And then this concept of a two-sided network, a really awesome toehold into consumers, is something we've really only seen in nascent stages through our stadium business that Anthony talked about.
15 million consumers that we've got incredible insights into and can action around is going to be really, really impactful for our entire collective merchant base. I would also say it gives us a really nice toehold around the world. So this is not a transaction we could have embarked on if we didn't have meaningful payment capabilities in a lot of the countries that we just talked about. This is something that we've looked at for over half a decade and, quite frankly, couldn't get conviction in without having those capabilities that we can actually deliver these merchants a heck of a lot more in their home country than just what Global Blue is doing for them today. So it fulfills that really, really nicely. This is an awesome takeaway. It really illustrates the idea that it's a meaningful component to enhancing our unified commerce platform.
This is not a nice-to-have across the merchant base that they serve. It's a must-have, and there's one competitor that's not doing great these days. So the idea that you're taking a must-have component and embedding it into a solution is really impactful. I illustrate that example of a merchant that could hypothetically be using the Global Blue product suddenly can enable e-commerce sales really, really quickly in a foreign geography through our platform. And hopefully, you get the sense as to why this is so compelling. Meaningful revenue synergies. So we'll talk about that in a second, just what we think they can be. But there's a lot of them in just the concept of multiple cross-sells, natural geographic expansion for us. A strategic partnership with Ant International and Tencent.
These are two of the best e-commerce companies in the world that recognized the criticality of this product for their consumer base. Their predominantly Asian travelers traveling all over the world using their wallets to pay wanted a seamless VAT refund experience. They were shareholders of this business before us, and they've agreed to retain a stake in Shift4, which we're really excited about, and continue collaboration. We've had lots of dialogue already about how we enable the predominance of mobile wallets in Asia across our existing customer base in the United States. Stadiums, hotels, restaurants, etc. A very disciplined transaction.
Despite the incredible opportunity, despite the finite timeline we found ourselves on, we weren't going to compromise on what we thought was what we had to do to make the transaction work if we got every single one of those theses wrong. The stylistic difference between, I think, Jared and myself and something we've been talking a lot about is I think about the world in terms of if everything you think you can do goes sideways, are you still happy with where you are? In this case, the transaction is a resounding yes. And then he says, "If you screw up that badly, you're not going to be at the helm too much longer," which is a nice motivator. Quick snapshot of the combined business. Again, leading platforms in highly adjacent verticals: hospitality, luxury, retail, and travel.
We do not have critical components to the value chain that they offer. And likewise, so we do not offer Dynamic Currency Conversion. It's been on our product pipeline for much longer than it should have. This is an instant synergy in that regard. It allows us to eliminate multiple vendors that we might have been considering working with. And then separately, they do not have any of the payment stack but are deeply embedded inside of it. What I mean by that is when you pay, there is data going to Global Blue. When you get a refund, they need to go back into that transaction and make sure that refund works. So we can now offer them the rest of the stack for their merchant base and vice versa. And then scaled presence in a lot of countries.
So we showed you a lot of countries on a map where we've got emerging capabilities. They have scaled presence. They have physical employees. They have booths in airports. All of these things give us further rationale to expand into countries, give us more confidence in our journey around the world. So whereas a month ago, we might have been looking at a new e-commerce country as, "Can we go sell restaurants? Can we go sell hotels? Can we go sell stadiums?" We now have the ability to ask ourselves, if we're in that country, "Can we go sell e-commerce and physical payments to the best retailers in the world who happen to be operating in those countries?" The map gives you a sense of where we are today as a result of this signing. Again, embedded payment capabilities. I think Dave had Australia on his must-do list.
They already have payments infrastructure in Australia and a great Dynamic Currency Conversion business there. So that'll check a box for the product team, which is really exciting as well, and then lastly, synergies. This is really just a basic underwriting of, "Let's assume we can cross-sell in a very modest way into their base. Will that mitigate any risk we have around growth?" Yes. "Can we cross-sell Dynamic Currency Conversion? Do we know the percentage of our spend across our merchant base that's foreign cards?" Yes. We think in a very reasonable scenario, this adds $80 million of synergies on top of the business itself. That's really attractive, and $70 million of kind of flow through down to Utah, and I hit this partnership. I don't want to understate the value of it, though. These are incredibly impactful companies that have been driving e-commerce innovation around the world.
I would say the fact that we could mutually come to an understanding of kind of our vision for commerce around the world and their vision for commerce around the world and both be excited to partner with each other is really, really, really exciting. Kind of helps underwrite or put a good housekeeping seal of approval on the path we're on from the standpoint of two of the best e-commerce companies in the world. We hit this early on, and it was referenced on the call, but give you just another double-click down into how this transaction we anticipate the closing to work. So it's a 100% cash transaction today. There's a committed bridge financing by our advisory and banking partners. We intend to replace that with longer-term financing over the course of the next few months.
The exact mix remains to be determined, but that's actually a really good thing. We've seen kind of every option of financing available to us on the transaction. So we're going to be coming to the market with more permanent financing around the transaction in the next month or two. That's it. I'll hand it over to Nancy for the financial outlook and then Q&A.
All right. Nice to see you all. I feel compelled because all of my colleagues kind of gave some shout-outs, and three of my awesome teammates are here. I dare say you could also speak to them at dinner. But in the room up here in the front is our Chief Accounting Officer, Jay Whelan. And in the back of the room, although I can't see, is our Global Head of Tax, Dylan O'Hare back there.
And definitely one of my secret weapons, the head of our strategic finance organization, is Cory Farley. So Cory, we were going to hide you in a closet, but you could still come to dinner. Okay. So as we go forward here, I know we've covered Q4 a bit. Jared's had a lot to say. And for sure, a picture is worth a thousand words. And I would say if you're kind of historically just going up and to the right, it's a pretty good picture. And so kind of speaks for itself. A few things I want to point out. Organic revenue growth for full year 2024 was north of 25% as promised, 26% to be exact. And really pleased with the momentum of organic growth. Positive operating leverage with Adjusted EBITDA growth exceeding revenue growth and continue to expand free cash flow conversion.
Excluding the drag of M&A, a couple of things I want to point out. EBITDA margins expanded over 400 points this year. SG&A on a full year basis without acquisitions, which obviously get consolidated, [showed] low single-digit growth, and without one-time expenses, we were flat year over year. I bring that up because I know Taylor pointed that out when Kim was out here. We have tons of focus on that discipline that we have around expense takeout and taking out the parts. We've talked about that quarter to quarter and things like Mission Control, Project Phoenix. All of these are margin expansion opportunities that are still ahead of us. Okay.
Let me keep going here just to keep us on time because I think Luke did a great job of going through kind of capital allocation, which I won't spend any time on that, but re-presenting first 2025 guidance. We're going into 2025 very confident. $200 billion-$220 billion volume growth, which is 21%-33% growth. Gross revenue less network fees between $1.65 billion and $1.72 billion, 22%-27% growth. Adjusted EBITDA between $830 million and $855 million, 23%-26% growth, and Adjusted Free Cash Flow conversion, which we'll talk about in a minute, greater than 50%. So I'm going to deeper dive into this, touching on a few things. First, we'll start with the volume bridge. Very similar to, I think the last time we presented this bridge was for 2024, kind of at the end of 2023.
But as you know, we have great line of sight into the coming year because a majority, a very material amount of what we're going to see in 2025 is from the business that we already signed and installed in 2024. When you look at the rest of the bridge, this is our typical Shift4 land and expand. You've heard it a few times over and over, but I will therefore repeat it again. That is going to come from two places. One is an ample backlog. Probably didn't spend as much time on it today, but we have a significant backlog of merchants that we have signed, but they have not yet installed. So again, lots of insight to that. And second is the funnel, right? The embedded volume, cross-sell, and upsell opportunity is overflowing to go after the volume that you see here.
From a spread perspective, I know we've talked a lot about kind of our spread stabilizing. We expect about 60 basis points of spread going into 2025. Organic growth probably should have started there. Expect it to continue on a great trajectory and north of 20% as we look to 2025. I want to spend a minute on the Adjusted Free Cash Flow conversion because I know that we'll get some questions. Ahead of, I think we kind of talked about this last quarter, without the change of cash taxes and interest expense with our recent financing, our free cash flow conversion would be in excess of 60%. And when you think about the components of really just where is that cash flow expanding, it comes again from that discipline around expense management and just better unit economics and flow through from gross profit.
When you think about CapEx for Shift4, just remember that almost all of our CapEx, I think Luke did a great job outlining this, is tied to our growth. We do not deploy capital until we have acquired a customer. So the bulk of that CapEx is going to customers that we've already acquired. Okay. Keep it moving here. Proven track record of deleveraging. I love this slide. I think, again, another one that kind of a picture speaks for itself. We feel incredibly proud and very focused because this is what cash flow generation allows for, right? Exiting the year at 2.5 x obviously sharing that we expect to be at the end of the year, even post-Global Blue and the financing that we expect to do at 3.3x net leverage. So you can count on this.
Again, high confidence in terms of our vantage point at this point, looking at that ahead. Okay. So now to roll out our midterm guidance. And the sitting on our hands case is kind of if we do nothing else. Excuse me. Sit on our hands case, which will never be the case because that would mean that we don't deploy another dollar of our free cash flow. But it really reflects the trajectory of our existing business ahead of Global Blue. So gross revenue less network fees, three-year CAGR of high teens, and Adjusted EBITDA margin, high teens plus. I just want to make sure. Yeah. When you look at this margin expansion that we're expecting of the base business, it completely correlates to the synergies that we know are left to synergize over the next 12- 18 months.
So again, base business, sit on our hands, don't deploy additional capital. This would be our midterm guidance. Now layer in the impacts of Global Blue. Gross revenue less network fees and EBITDA both growing three-year CAGR 25%+ . So Taylor just presented those numbers. Layer those in, sit on our hands, plus Global Blue. And then finally, the most likely case, which is we will continue the Shift4 playbook, utilizing the free cash flow that we generate to do M&A consistent with our playbook. And that three-year CAGR 30%+ and Adjusted EBITDA three-year CAGR 30%+ . So again, high confidence going into this midterm guide and kind of excited that I was the one that got to present it. But now kind of this is literally the money slide. Aspirational, but completely achievable, or I would not be presenting it today.
This really is our understanding of where the synergies are across the business, the automation, the AI, all of the ways that we know that we have room to continue to expand margins on top of synergizing the recent M&A that we've done. Really that puts us right on track exiting 2027 to generate $1 billion of free cash flow. Okay. I know it was short and sweet. I know it could be, oh, you know what? I just realized, I think I did touch on it. Okay. We'll leave it for Q&A if there is any. With that, I'm going to turn that back to Jared. Thank you.
All right. We're almost through the day. Hopefully, we've made this as interesting as a fintech analyst day can be. Okay. Before kind of closing remarks, we do have one more thing. We'd like to announce a new board member. So Seth Dallaire right here is joining the Shift4 board. He is the current Chief Growth Officer at Walmart. So welcome to the team. Thank you. Okay. So just to close this out here, my goal for the day was, as I started, to instill the same confidence I have in the ongoing trajectory of the business to all of you. So hopefully, we were successful at that. But just to hammer home a couple points. Let's start with 2024. We didn't spend an awful lot of time on that during the Investor Day itself, but we did during the earnings call. 2024, what did we do?
We expanded all over the world really fast. By the way, that's really hard to do, and we did it. We added numerous countries and some really challenging markets. So basically, from the time of our Investor Day three and a half years ago in 2021, where we said, "Hey, we're entirely in the United States, but watch what we're capable of following a few signature merchants," we did it. We're in six continents right now. We won pretty much all the major ski resorts. We're thankful for Aalterra to join to be one of our featured hospitality wins this quarter. But if you recall from previous ones, it was KSL, Vail Resorts. We're doing really great on there. We signed Ikon Pass to our unified commerce platform as a billion-dollar e-commerce customer. We're very proud of.
We proved that SkyTab can hang with the best restaurants like Cipriani, which we announced this quarter, and Balthazar. And we ended the year with 26% organic revenue growth. Our backlog grew once again. We exceeded our midterm outlook with what I believe to be a quarter to spare. And we set the table really in all respects for the year ahead. So bringing us to the year ahead, 2025, here's what I hope you learned about the journey ahead. So you should have gained confidence in all our products and their ability to just win in their own right. So number one in hospitality, super deep moat with all of these software integrations. You really need them all to deliver the kind of experience that, well, complex hospitality merchants require.
Now we're taking it all over the world, of which we've already got really strong results between Canada and Europe. You should have walked away knowing that we're number one in sports entertainment. We have lots to share there. Really awesome story that Anthony Perez told. Got me charged up going from one to virtually a large portion of the industry in a very short period of time and conquering the 800-pound gorilla. You should understand why we do it, by the way. There was a lot of great product slides of how we own the entire venue environment, not just pieces of it. That's key when you understand why we win. It's not just the concessions or the mobile application or the suites. It's the cashless checkout. Those type of cool experiences matter in a venue environment. You have ticketing, you have parking.
You can understand why we win there, and now we're doing that all over the world. We've acknowledged, "Hey, we're number two in restaurants." We didn't get the benefit of concentrating on a single product for the last 15 years like others have, but we're doing great at it. We surpassed our 30,000-plus systems installation goal for 2024. We've proved that we can use SkyTab in everything from the Irish pub to merchants that have hundreds of locations out there, and it's doing really well, including some of the most up-market restaurants out there, and now we're doing that in multiple countries, Ireland, the U.K., and soon it'll be in Australia and New Zealand. We introduced you to the unified commerce platform, so this is our one platform, one integration, serving card-present, card-not-present merchants really all over the world, and we did it quietly.
It's not like we're announcing we're going to go begin to do this and just bear with us while we spend tens of millions of dollars. We did it already. And we got some really awesome merchants that are using it. So I hope you were actually paying attention to that demo because that was really the new information, right? I mean, you saw the restaurant, hotel, and stadium demos, but you probably generally like, we know they're either number one or number two in that space. But unified commerce was new. There was new information there. And that demo, I thought, was pretty wild, right?
There were only probably two companies that would have ever shown you something like that before where a merchant logs into their portal, sees this really interesting geographic map, and says, "I want to start taking payments here now," and then activates it, runs a transaction, sees it shows up in the summary reporting. You're talking two companies, maybe now three with us in the world that are capable of doing that. And I thought that was pretty interesting. And now, four hours or so later, I've certainly gotten feedback from some folks and people like, "You really want to take on Adyen out there?" I'd say, "Look, we're already doing okay. We have a lot of incredible merchants on that platform. Some we can't talk about anymore, but some are here. Aalterra, St. Jude is a great example. Rick Shadyac's here, CEO of St. Jude.
Great to see you, sir." There's billions in volume already flowing through that platform right now. And if we keep winning in that platform, it's an incremental to the story you were already underwriting, right? And I think a lot of our investors and analysts were happy covering Shift4 knowing that we're going to do well with restaurants, hotels, and stadiums all over the world. So if we do well here with this, it should be a lot of, and we find success in our unified commerce platform, and we certainly have a lot of shots on goal with it now with a lot of fantastic luxury customers, then perhaps it's just further upside to what was already a really awesome story. But even not. We now have so much more air cover in all these various geographies, which is what Taylor was talking about.
Look at the physical presence we have with personnel now in all these interesting countries around the world that just makes it that much easier to go in and start selling restaurants, hotels, and stadiums like we were planning to do anyway. I'd probably reinforce on Unified Commerce. It's already working. If you remember very early on to some of the first few slides that I presented, you saw that volume diversification slide. Look at how big Unified Commerce has grown. That's not all just sports and entertainment. That's all the new verticals we went into since our Analyst Day in 2021 where we were at more or less zero. Look at what it's become right now. That brings us to. You learned a little bit about our capital allocation strategy.
You already knew a fair amount about it previously, but you got to hear from Luke go into some more specifics, some more proof points. I'd probably go back to one of the highlights was actually Anthony Perez, CEO of VenueNext, acquired by Shift4 four years ago, chooses to stick around. He obviously runs our unified commerce platform now, which is our new platform that we're going after luxury retail all over the world. But he told you how we had one stadium at the time of that transaction that we partnered with, how we had a town hall with their 12 or so employees at the time saying, "We're going to go after the $400 million VC-funded, totally reckless organization out there, the 800-pound gorilla, and we're going to beat him." And we did. We had tons of success and ultimately a really cool capitulation transaction.
I ask you to keep that in mind when you have questions about how much success we will or won't have pursuing this Global Blue opportunity. There is no one in this room like three years ago when we just said the Raiders Stadium would have believed that we would have virtually the entire market three years later. I wouldn't discount the possibility of what we'll do in that transaction. Then Taylor talked about Global Blue, which again, we think is an awesome company that we got a really great deal on. It was a really overlooked business, the larger of essentially two platforms. As Taylor said, one of them is doing really well, the other not so much. It is a two-sided network. They are serving 400,000 locations of luxury merchants, but they're also serving millions of consumers around the world.
That's increasingly becoming a more digitized experience, which I personally think there's going to be some interesting opportunities to monetize that in the future. It gives us the air cover to move into more countries to sell what we're really good at, restaurants, hotels, and stadiums. But it also gives us important capabilities like Dynamic Currency Conversion, which we needed to serve hotels in general as we expand across the world. And it also comes with a cross-sell opportunity that now brings us up to about $1.4 trillion, which I guarantee you we will have some success with. You can definitely underwrite something more than zero. We're pretty good at this. If you give us 15% credit against that population without signing any net new customers, we doubled the volume of the business. That makes me feel pretty good when I'm moving on.
And the reality is, if you look at any of the past transactions where you had to underwrite some sort of a cross-sell for success, our batting average is way better than 15%, which then you heard a little bit about how we work. So we have very mature processes at PMO. In our PMO operation, you got to hear from Josh talk about all the exciting stuff he did managing projects at Lockheed Martin and weapons and really cool programs. And he said he was really excited for change coming into payments. And him and his team have been doing an outstanding job. You heard from Kim in HR.
You heard about our mission control program, our internal systems refresh with AI to basically improve the efficiency and quality of our service, basically taking some of the no-fail operations you see in the space industry and bringing into fintech, which is especially important. You think about how all these payment rails that power payments all over the world and all the APMs. It's a lot of cobbled together spaghetti, and you want to centralize that in a no-fail environment. I think we're really on the right path to it. What does this really all translate into?
2025 guidance that sets us up well for a really nice cadence, which even though I heard some people like, "Oh, it was a little lighter than expected," I literally got feedback emails from every one of you guys saying, "Dial it back." So we tried to give the people what they want right up until they don't like it anymore. Alongside products that are either number one or number two in their various categories. We have an overflowing cross-sell funnel of $1.4 trillion, which we talked about, and I guarantee you'll have some success in it. We now have beachhead in numerous countries and continents to sell the products and services that we've always been really good at.
We gave you a sit on our hands case, three-year growth case that is really better than, I think, everybody else more or less in fintech, but it's already obsolete because the pro forma case, which is sit on our hands plus Global Blue, is a 25% CAGR across gross revenue less network fees and EBITDA, and then what you have, what I consider the more realistic cases, we're just going to keep doing what we're doing, which is a continuation of 30%+ gross revenue less network fee and EBITDA growth, and when we're done with it and we're exiting the end of this three-year outlook and Taylor and the team have you guys all back here or some other cool location customer of ours, we should be declaring our $1 billion of free cash flow exiting this new outlook, so that's the recap.
I wouldn't bet against this Shift4 team. I'm very confident. I hope you are as well. And with that, we will turn to Q&A.
Just administratively, we've got Paloma and Tom with microphones. If you have a question, which I think we're right on time for, feel free to raise your hand. Looks like there's a few up here.
Great. Hi, Tim Chayoda at UBS. I wanted to see if we could go back a little bit to the volume bridge for 2025. I just think that'll be a big focus. So when we look at some of the categories there, if you could just dig into what are some of the assumptions you thought about for the Revel cross-sell opportunity or the 300 dealers that you have now with Vectron. And then I believe the backlog, most of that's hitting unified commerce with the ticketing. And then the last point on that is when we look at it, you had the annualized $20 billion extra. I think the other way that investors are looking at it is starting with the Q4 number of roughly $48 billion.
And given there's a little bit less seasonality now, taking that and multiplying by four, that gets you pretty close to the low end, which seems pretty conservative. So maybe you could just expand upon that a little bit.
Yeah, you want me to go first? Is it fine?
Yeah, you're good.
Okay, great. Well, I think you kind of just summarized it well. So I think you kind of got it. I mean, I think the low end of the guide does mathematically work out to what you just said. I think the premise there, without getting into each bucket by vertical, is just to remember that with the backlog, it really is that's business that's already implementing, right? So that really is just a multiply by four, taking into account some seasonality. Then we have our backlog. Again, just to reiterate so everyone's super clear, that's merchants we've already signed. So we are just either implementing, waiting for them to allow for that implementation. But we have a lot of focus on improving implementation timelines on our side. So that's going to happen. That's kind of in the bag, kind of guaranteed.
And then you have the kind of cross-sell upsell opportunity. Revel is certainly a great example, just like Appetize was. Vectron, obviously getting those dealers lit up. I know Jared probably has those stats that he could throw in really quick. But just the funnel topper is so big. GB now on top of that to go after that 25 number gives us high confidence. I mean, I really look at the whole guide. I probably avoided saying the words that Jared then went up and said, but we're definitely going into the guide with high confidence. I think understanding how we do that bridge should give you confidence as well because it's really very similar to what we did when we kind of showed you that bridge 2023 going into 2024.
Yeah, and maybe just to layer onto that, right? When you think about the international opportunity, we were pretty self-critical in our last earnings call about it not being at the pace we'd like it to be. But having all the foundation in place, I will draw your attention back, and all these materials will be posted very shortly to Michael's slide, which talked about international deal volume being about 7% of the total. And now it's 32% of the total just like two and a half months later. So we think we're hitting the right stride there. And that's, by the way, not because the U.S. has slowed down at all. So we're growing confidence in that number as well.
Clark Jeffries with Piper Sandler. Reflecting on that TAM slide, I think what jumps out is just the size of the retail TAM, both in the U.S. and Europe, and given Global Blue, I just wanted to ask a few questions there. When we think about that high teens and then the 25%, those two cases, how much of that is specifically an e-commerce benefit within those retailers, or is it also card present, maybe kind of understanding the breakout between those two, and then do you think that there will be a forking at some point where we'll see a retail-specific product within point of sale, something that won't be SkyTab that'll be really addressing those pain points in retail specifically?
Yeah, it's a great question. And it's one, the retail sector has not been lost on us. We are in tons and tons of retail outlets via our payment platform every single day. What was lost on us is a point of difference that we think was meaningful enough to drive really significant conversations inside of merchant bases. So if you look across the retail point of sale environment, you'll find dozens of different platforms that get even more convoluted in different countries. We've looked at all of them, and we didn't find a singular point of difference in regards to a payment conversation by owning one, just by way of example. Global Blue is a meaningful point of difference, and it's a conversation that all of these retailers are talking about with Global Blue every single day.
So I don't want to say that we would ever stop with one capability. This one just differentiated itself in our eyes as incredibly meaningful. In terms of how we underwrote the synergies inside of the transaction, it's actually just really fundamental. It's just a modest cross-sell of payments across their merchant base, less in the large enterprise because they're big and they're slow and they take time to make decisions, and a little bit higher in kind of the long tail of small and mid-market retailers throughout the world that can benefit much more from a consolidated payment solution and can make decisions quickly. That can come in multiple flavors.
That can come in them just giving us e-commerce business in any one of the dozens of countries we just showed you, or it can be physical in-store payments in a country we're already fulfilling the tax-free portion of the payment solution. So we actually don't look at it through this lens of we have to go get e-commerce or we have to go get in-store or we have to get these countries. We just know that all of those are available as door openers.
What I think three years from now you're going to find is that every one of them was utilized at different points in time as a meaningful value driver, whether that's helping an awesome retailer expand into a new geography for the purpose of e-commerce because they want to try it out, or it's enabling their physical stores in that geography, or it's quite frankly enabling an entire country with a VAT tax refund process that they want to implement and make incredibly seamless, which Global Blue already does today at the countrywide level. So again, multiple ways to win, and we don't necessarily have to pick e-commerce versus card present, nor do we think that's actually the right way to kind of have a conversation with the merchant.
I will jump on a little bit on this one too, because it does beg the question. There are others, not many, but there are like two other payment players with kind of a one integration, one platform worldwide payment capabilities. How do you intend to differentiate? Well, first, it's like, how are you going to have the conversation? You're going to have the conversation because 80% of them use and are very dependent on a platform like Global Blue, which is part of our whole M&A strategy of getting shots on goal, which, as Michael pointed out before, sales is really hard if you don't have a foot in the door. So we have a foot in the door. And then how do you differentiate from the other two? What's the start? One is card present. So you asked the question, and Taylor's right.
Maybe it goes either way, but I'll tell you what differentiates us even in today's environment, pre-Global Blue over anyone else, is we can do complex card present better than anyone else. And it's way harder than card not present. I mean, card not present, not taking anything away from Adyen and Stripe or the others, but it's a lot easier when you don't have physical devices, encryption, and PCI certification standards, which vary based on region and debit networks. It's really hard. And we're very good at this, and you can already see the proof point of it in Europe. I think Michael went up there and showed a slide, plus it was also in Luke's as well. A business that we acquired that was 3% card not present is now like a third card present.
That whole example of going into public transportation, taxis, car rental, that's all leveraging our card present capabilities. So I believe that gives us, that is, a conversation that we'll be able to have because, again, we'll have lots of shots on goal. And then two is the unique geographic coverage. We're in this really interesting sweet spot, right? There's a really well-known company that covers enterprise, global e-commerce, and mature markets. And there's another one that's known for covering them in emerging markets. And we have this interesting mix of both.
I think what's going to happen with a lot of those customers that we're now able to talk to as a result of Global Blue. We'll be able to talk to them about our card present capabilities, but we'll talk to them about geographies that they may be interested in and were previously not able to get into or not with a partner that they necessarily trusted. That's where I think it'll start, and then it'll expand from there. So hopefully that addressed your question as it can be card present, card not present. I think it's going to be a mix of both, but it also should explain a little bit more of our rationale and why we think we'll be successful with GB.
Okay. Hi, Andrew Schmidt from Citi. Thanks so much for the details and the presentations today. Maybe just ask on Global Blue two questions. First of all, obviously, you know he's called out the biggest acquisition in Shift4's history. Maybe talk a little bit about the sort of execution hurdle. Is it higher than acquisitions you've done in the past? Maybe comment on that. And then when we think about the synergies, just the $80 million in Rev synergies, talked a little bit about this already, but how does that break down across sort of selling DCC into sort of the existing Shift4 base? There's obviously a lot of opportunity to sell that into hospitality clients versus the cross-sell of Shift4 into the Global Blue base. And maybe just any comments on just the assumptions you're making just holistically on the synergy number. Thanks so much.
Yeah, sure. So I think Jared alluded to this, but in either case, meaning whether it's taking their DCC product to our merchants around the world or taking our payments product to their merchants around the world, we've underwritten below average success rates. And I don't want to say that's because we think this will be below average. We just think prudence is appropriate in a transaction like this. And quite frankly, below average execution would still yield an excellent result on behalf of our shareholders. So philosophically, that's kind of the approach that we took. We do have a moderately higher degree of success penciled in in the DCC. And then within the VAT tax business, we have a higher degree of success penciled in against single location decision makers than we do against large enterprise chains.
I don't think any of these are meaningfully different in terms of execution from one another. These are just prudent lessons learned. Again, from an underwriting perspective, we're not trying to get you all to dream the dream. We're simply saying these synergies are highly executable. And quite frankly, the growth of the business in its own right was pretty nice to begin with and isn't even baked into those synergies. So it feels like a very achievable number. It's beneath our historic conversion ratios. And by the way, we've got a lot more products we can sell them now. It's not just in-store payments. We can do e-commerce and all these other things. It doesn't underwrite any concept of getting e-commerce volume that's not flowing through a store. And yet clearly you can tell that's going to be a high priority for us.
So hopefully that gives you a sense for kind of the conservatism we brought to underwriting a transaction like this. And quite frankly, why we were all able to get so comfortable. Again, sort of stylistically, really poor execution or minimal execution against an already great business at a great financial entry point is good. I think Jared's going to demand more out of us than that. So hopefully we exceed expectations.
Yeah, I think two other things to comment on what you said. We always model a base case, right? So there's always a mid case and then call it a Jared or now a Taylor case that we go after. But when we financially model, we're going off that base case. And I think to answer the other part of your question, since Josh isn't up here, while this is bigger, while this deal is substantially bigger, it's also a much more mature organization. I was joking with someone at the break that from most of the deals we've done, I haven't gotten one single finance or accounting person in the transaction. And now we've got a very strong team of colleagues that are going to be joining us that we're looking forward to leveraging and working with.
You have to balance that with kind of a lot of these other deals. We had to lean in a lot more.
Yeah. I mean, just to layer onto that too, I mean, that was one of the first things. Well, I mean, we knew this business for several years, but when we were able to just go down even a layer deep in diligence, realize this is a great business. This isn't a broken business. That's very different than how we've approached almost all the other acquisitions that we've done. I mean, you take Revel. The business existed for like 15 years, always burning cash, flat to losing customers. Appetize business really knew how to hemorrhage cash. These were ones like you had to parachute your team in day one, burn the ships. We're done with this product. We're moving everyone over. Basically, the whole example that Luke and Anthony gave earlier, you spend five minutes looking at the service. You're like, wow, this is a great business.
Two platforms, one of which is shrinking, the other one's growing, very quick to digitization, has all the best luxury retail brands. It gives us a totally different kind of softer approach on it than we normally would. So I think the question on, even though it's our largest acquisition ever, is this coming with substantially more execution risk or something? It's a great business. If we do nothing, it's an awesome business. It was just overlooked and undervalued. But the reality is it's coming with a great cross-sell. The product integration for things like DCC is what they normally do with payments companies. The VAT integration is what they normally do with payment companies. So very low execution risk, very high potential when you think about the cross-sell.
Hey, guys. It's Darren Peller from Wolfe. Thanks. And congrats on the deal announcement and all the great success. When we think about the globalization efforts you guys have, I mean, I'm just looking back and you have Finaro, Revel, Vectron, Givex, Eigen, now Global Blue. And I guess it would be helpful for us to take a step back and first revisit what inning we're in in some of these opportunities because it feels like there's a lot at once going on here for us to keep track of. And so maybe just help us get a sense of where we are in the opportunity cycle and the execution risk of any of them left, if any. And then I just have one quick follow-up for you.
Yeah, sure. I'll start with focusing mainly on Europe. So if you recall, we set a pretty ambitious international expansion objective at our Investor Day here in Vegas three years ago, and we're forthright about the idea that we didn't have any local payments capabilities in Europe at the time. Finaro fulfilled that for us by giving us kind of local acceptance, local settlement, some cross-border capabilities, some FX, but serving a merchant base that was not what Shift4 endeavored to go pursue, which was restaurants, hotels, stadiums, all the things that have made us successful in the United States. The management of the Finaro platform has been phenomenal. I think Luke alluded to those results, so as a standalone business, we would have been very happy with those results.
But if you're trying to get a sense for the inning we're in in terms of actually executing against our European thesis, I think it's best illustrated by that stat that Michael gave you, which is that 7% of our deal flow or new merchant flow, if you will, in November was from international. And it's like 32% two months later when we can kind of get the kinks out. Now, why is that the case? It's because of things like Vectron and what they enable us to do, 300 dealers, an incredibly large base of customers right in our core verticals. So we feel really good about that. We don't think the capabilities need to be meaningfully augmented to support merchants like what Global Blue supports today.
So we feel highly confident that any sales momentum we can get either from their existing customer base or simply having a new conversation with a new customer is going to go really well. Canada, a little bit of a different flavor, which is that we built out our Canadian capabilities organically, being able to serve customers, and then fortuitously had two really, really easy to underwrite transactions present themselves to us. Eigen was a hospitality gateway that Luke had been pestering every six months for four years, saying, "Hey, we see a lot of interesting things we could do together." They ignored it up until the founder elected to sell the business. We had to execute on that really, really quickly. And it was fortuitous because we only recently developed these organic payment acceptance capabilities in Canada. And I think Givex was a flavor of that as well.
So maybe just to summarize it, we've got really lofty international ambitions. We now have capabilities, both that we've built out organically and some that we've acquired. And yet the sales engines have not even close to the amount of fuel they should for the market opportunity that's presented. I mean, Vectron's like 300 dealers. That should look like thousands if you want to replicate the kind of success that we had in the United States.
Yeah. I mean, just to jump on it too, because I think this is pretty important in understanding a little bit of our history, right? It certainly was busy in 2024, and we ended the year strong, and we're certainly kicking it off strong as well. But if you kind of go back in time a little bit, I mean, first, didn't do an acquisition our first 15 years in business, did one, didn't do another until 2017, did five, didn't do anything until 2019, did a single deal there. 2020, 2021, world's crazy with valuations. What do we do? Raise a whole bunch of cheap capital. And we did one or two deals in 2021, one of which was VenueNext, incredible deal, probably the only time we ever did a revenue multiple in our lives. And then in 2022, what's the best use of our capital?
Why not insource distribution, completely transform our unit economic model because we couldn't find a better use of the capital out there. That was an incredible. I mean, it was. It was a very transformative deal. And then what we were doing was waiting people out until there was kind of valuation capitulation a little bit. And we saw that come in the end of 2023 when we jumped on Appetize. And then 2024, we hammered it. We didn't overpay for a single deal. I think Eigen was like 10 x EBITDA at the end of the year. And we'll probably synergize that thing down to like three times by the end of this year. I can't wait, by the way, for the next one of these two years from now to do the case studies on all the 2024 M&A because every one of them was home runs.
It's not just getting good financial transactions. Go back to Josh's presentation on them. How do you know that you're really good at this? Generally speaking, margin expansion is a good one. If you're saddling yourself up with a lot of baggage, you're going to have really big drags. But you won't find websites that say, "Eigen powered by Shift4." Those are all signs of acquisitive companies that don't know how to integrate. You go in, you delete it all. The fact that we're able to keep up with that shows the capacity of the machine. I also generally think we are heading into another potentially '21 type time period. I think this is going to be. We're going to see a lot more dealmaking again. That's the time when we pull back and we let our cash pile up.
And maybe the best use of it is buying back stock or whatnot. But that was part of the reason I pushed to for Global Blue is this is a company that's probably going to be worth twice as much in two years. Right now, we're going to be kicking ourselves for not doing it. So we strike while the iron's hot, which I think 2024 really was, and then kicking off this year. But we may very well just sit on our hands in some cases and play out the recent transactions if valuations get super frothy again.
Hi, this is Rayna Kumar from Oppenheimer. Can you talk a little bit about why a retailer would choose Global Blue versus a sole competitor, Planet? And where are there opportunities to gain market share from Planet? And then I just had a quick question for Nancy, more of a modeling question. Is there anything unusual in the first quarter EBITDA margin since your guide implies it'll be down 120 basis points?
Yeah. You want me to go first?
Yeah, you go first.
Yeah. I think if you look historically at our Q1 step down over the last two years, that's why we put out the guide to 45%. It's really right in line, and we've got some drag out of the 2024 acquisitions that we just did that won't be fully synergized, so really, the 45% is kind of putting it back to where I think it should have been just based on the seasonal low for restaurants and hospitality.
Then in terms of what's really differentiated the business, I'll start with the basics, which is that the operating team is excellent. And they've been focused on a mission through a really significant amount of turmoil for their end markets, right? If you think about what the pandemic did to restaurants and hotels, it's nothing like what it did for luxury shopping and traveling abroad. They spent that entire time digitizing the experience. So those of you who don't shop as frequently abroad or maybe did it once might recall or maybe happen to pick a Planet location might recall is like a cumbersome set of forms that you had to fill out by yourself, that you had to negotiate with a booth at the airport, and then you might get a check in the mail a few months after that. That was the typical VAT refund experience.
Emerging economies have said that's not going to be good enough to attract travelers. So these are places like the Middle East that have said, "If we're going to implement this mechanism, we're going to do it right, and we're going to standardize and digitize the process across the entire country." And they've increasingly picked Global Blue to lead that journey for them. And then separately, they thoughtfully used a ton of this downtime to say, "If there's not commerce going on, how can we make the experience better when it comes back to life?" And so today, they've got really, really meaningful growth both within their existing merchants because the refund process is simply easier. So lots more people are doing it. And then they're winning share from the merchants that they service. I'm sorry, from the merchants that are kind of demanding this new digitization experience from them.
So if any of you have done it or have not done it, I would encourage you to download the app. You'll see how easy it is when you're going to a particular geography to learn which merchants it's available with. It's a lot of great ones, and it's soon to be a lot more. So that's just one piece. But I think it is really an organizational philosophy to make the friction as low as possible in a really complex environment. That's kind of two of the things that we could get really comfortable with the thesis on. They solve really tough problems, and they solve them all over the world versus one competitor. And that's our bread and butter kind of way of going to work, if you couldn't tell from the presentations today.
Yeah. Hey, Rayna, I think you know the space pretty well. So this is more for everyone's sake. But I think it's really important to kind of understand the basics here on this one and how it works. So you're going to Europe. You're buying a $10,000 bag. That's what we're talking about with these type of luxury retailers and shoppers, right? You're getting $1,000 back doing the tax refund. So it's real dollars now. So now here's your two choices. One could be like a near-automated process where it's credited back in an app. And the other is you're waiting on a really long line at what feels like a customs booth for a stamp. And that's going to annoy you, right? And $1,000 matters. So you don't want to be annoyed because you're a high-end shopper.
And then you express that to the retailer or like, "This sucks," right? And they hear that enough times. And they're saying, "I'm not risking these super high-end luxury shoppers anymore to a lousy process. I'm going to go to the other company that makes it very, very easy, that digitized experience." And what happens there is in a world with largely two platforms, it goes like this. And one company's got like 80% or high 70% share, and the other has like 20%. And that's why it's such an incredible business in its own right. Where do we get at it with adding the end-to-end offering?
Hey, this is James Faucette, Morgan Stanley. Had two questions, one backward-looking and one very forward-looking. Quickly on the backward-looking, really helpful to see kind of the breakdown in NRR by end market that was given during the presentation. Can you just give us a little context about how that has been evolving and what you feel like the drivers have been for those markets? And then second, really forward-looking, and this is kind of a governance question, but eventually, Jared, when your public service period is done, and we know you've changed your share classification or voting rights, but is there a way for you to get your voting rights back, or is there a process for that? Just wondering about that. Thanks.
You want to start with the NRR?
Yeah, sure. No, you hit it.
Yeah. I think generally, when you see the NRR, and Taylor could comment on vertical specific, it's really two things, right? Our ability to upsell, cross-sell. I think the S&E example is always the easiest, but it'll certainly be true with Global Blue is just all the add-ons, right? You think about if we had F&B in a stadium, and now we have the parking, and we have ticketing and all these add-ons for the same customer. So certainly, NRR obviously going up that way. Always pricing power when you sit in a position like we do. Obviously, that's certainly not been a lever that we've pulled except when we've excessively been looking at carrot and stick type discussions with our gateway-only and our software customers. But that's really the mix there.
We're really in a sweet spot across all of the verticals with both that combination of being able to upsell and cross-sell our existing base of merchants.
I'll say just one more thing to add to it. Restaurants is a really hard business to be a service provider in. And one of the ways we kind of fight that trend is to focus increasingly up-market on the quality of businesses that we serve, whether that's larger restaurants or, quite frankly, the smallest hotel is bigger than most of the restaurants that we serve, and then the smallest stadium is bigger than a lot of the hotels that we serve. So quality of customer actually helps ensure that they're going to stick around for you, which isn't always the case if you're serving 100% SMB restaurants.
On the governance question, I've honestly never given any thought to that at all. It is interesting. It's not directly your question, but oftentimes when you're meeting with some of our larger investors, they actually ask about the governance issues associated with SuperVotes. And I tell them all the time that it wasn't my idea. It was his idea. He's sitting in, he's one of our board members right there. I never was actually on board with it. And I don't think anything would have changed in any of our decision-making over the years as a public company, whether we had the SuperVotes or not. We generally all agree on the direction we're going in, or we just simply don't do it.
So whatever happens at the end of if the Senate chooses to confirm me the job, I'm going to be just an awesome cheerleader on the sidelines in the extent it's permissible. I'm always here for my thoughts and advice.
If it helps, he's going to yell louder than the votes that he gets, so.
Andrew Bauch from Wells Fargo. Just wanted to touch on the strategic relationship that you're close with with Ant and Tencent. Can you help us just, without getting ahead of ourselves, help us understand the potential opportunities to work together? And B, is any of that and those opportunities contemplated in either of the GB cases that we saw today? And then one other kind of follow-up modeling question. You gave us the free cash flow conversion 50% in 2025. When the deal closes, do we see any pressure on that free cash flow conversion that we ultimately kind of grow out of throughout the following years?
Yeah. I mean, I think when you think about the 50%, that is definitely still compressed for all the existing deals that we've done. And that was why we wanted to show you putting GB aside or any other future M&A. We think we will have, over that three-year period, at least that 300 basis points of expansion just because we do have a line of sight to the synergies and the automation and the AI. And just we know what the takeout is to delete the parts that will get us that first 300 basis points. But certainly, look, GB is not a deal we're counting on expense synergies from, right? So that business on its own, it will always afford us opportunities because I think the unit economics and the upsell, all of that's going to end up flowing right through because there isn't an add-in on expense.
So I don't know if that's fully answering your question, but I don't anticipate an incremental drag from trying to synergize GB. The M&A that's to come after that, depending on what it is, there always could be some. But we track this really closely. And so our confidence in actually getting that first 300 basis points is super high because we know exactly where it's going to come from.
Yeah. I'll just layer on the free cash flow generation at their standalone business is great. So that's one of the things that we liked about it. Separately, no kind of revenue synergies associated with a strategic partnership are embedded in this. What I think it's important to understand is whether it's Ant or Tencent, these represent the majority of wallets used by the majority of Asia and the shopping opportunity behind that. So we view them as a critical partner in this ecosystem. We want the experience inside of their app to be as seamless as using the Global Blue application in and of itself. This is work that's, by the way, already been done. They were existing shareholders of it, and I think they saw some benefit in that being translated into all of the great in-person venues we have across the United States.
We're really excited to learn and partner with them and enable them in e-commerce in a bunch of the countries around the world, and then maybe one thing that might not be intuitive in what we've already said about the transaction, but is really, really interesting, is that a predominant growth driver and consumer base for Global Blue's product offering has been Chinese travelers traveling to Europe, for example, Russian travelers. Russia has entirely been sidelined from this. There is no revenue contribution from that whatsoever. It's interesting to think about a more peaceful world where those travelers get to go around and shop for luxury goods again, and the Chinese consumer has been pretty hampered over the past few years, and so their punching power inside of the business is actually pretty depressed, and yet we're really optimistic will grow over time.
Again, confidence you can get inside the existing business. China is nowhere near its historic contribution to the business. Russia is nonexistent. And those are just two consumer bases before you've even talked about all of the new countries that have kind of adopted this over the years.
Hi, this is Ken Suchoski from Autonomous Research. Thanks for all the materials here. I have a couple of questions. I guess first, maybe just on the customer acquisition strategy. You talked about the M&A-focused customer acquisition approach. And I think in that one example, you guys got the cost down to $2,000-$3,000 per merchant. Can you just talk about how sustainable that go-to-market approach is? Because Shift4 scales, especially after the Global Blue acquisition. Don't you have to acquire larger businesses to get the same level of customer growth? So I'm just wondering if you think it makes sense to pivot more to a more traditional customer acquisition strategy over time, or maybe the cross-sell opportunity of the $1.4 trillion is so big that you don't need to make that pivot right now.
And then I guess secondly, I think I heard the expectations for organic growth north of 20% in 2025. You mentioned 26% organic growth in 2024. So can you just talk about the drivers around the change in organic growth between this year and last year just because we're getting a few questions on it? Thank you.
Yeah, I'll hit the customer acquisition cost first. I would say we've generally lived within $3,000-$5,000 to acquire a customer across all our verticals in any form of strategy, whether that's winning new customers off the street or not. We have not found a need to stretch that spend to go after the largest customers in the world. And I think recent M&A transactions are just one example of that. Hell, the VenueNext transaction is a great example of getting access to incredible customers through technology that doesn't require spending a ton of money. So we haven't really felt the need to challenge that model. The idea of should you be spending more on pure net customer acquisition than $3,000-$5,000, it's never made sense to us.
I'll pick on the restaurant vertical where we've got a great competitor that spends like 5x what we do to acquire a customer. That's really tough for us to stomach knowing the longevity of a lot of the customers inside that vertical. I would argue with the idea that it's a preference. We're actually pretty agnostic to how we win customers as long as they fit within that financial framework. A few areas where we've been more disciplined than $3,000-$5,000 have been in Europe specifically where the restaurant we might win might be smaller than the average restaurant in the United States. So I think that prudence is required. But that, again, if it fits within the math, we are going to build, or we're going to buy, or we're going to partner to create a sales engine that fills that funnel.
I'd be really nervous about competitors that have to spend 5x what we do to acquire a customer in a market where the customers might not generate the same store volume.
Yeah. I mean, I've certainly a lot to layer onto this. I mean, right from the get-go, I mean, every one of our products wins net new customers independent of our M&A-fueled funnel topping strategy. This property we're in right now was just a pure net new win. It was not associated with any acquisition. Wynn Resorts, which was last quarter net new win without it. Aalterra was a net new win. A lot of the restaurant customers you have just feet on the street that are knocking on doors doing it without being supported by super expensive pay-per-click type advertising.
I would be incredibly disappointed to find out a couple of years from now that we somehow, despite now having rationale to do M&A transactions literally all over the world, whereas versus a couple of years ago it was just entirely domestic, that we had to resort to just hiring thousands of people and doing exceptional amounts of Google AdWords or something. I'd say that's virtually impossible. And look, the proof point is in the history too, right? I mean, we were being asked this question a year ago, and then two years ago it was like, how many more acquisitions are you going to pull out of a hat? And Revel comes three months later. Then Vectron comes three months later. It's like, we are pretty good at this, and we're doing it without the support of bankers.
I mean, there isn't a deal that we've announced that you knew was being shopped out there by anyone. So I'd say the proprietary pipeline is pretty awesome. We now have the whole world to seek out these type of potential transactions. We don't have to because we got a $1.4 trillion cross-sell, and all of our products can win in their own right standalone without resorting to super expensive advertising methods.
Yeah. And on the organic, I think north of 20% is a really solid high confidence guide. Certainly, the company is getting bigger, so the base is getting bigger. The mix of the business is changing. And so I think comparing it to the 26% versus now, obviously, larger base to grow off of, north of 20% felt like the right guidance point at this time.
Sorry. There we go. Andrew Jeffrey with William Blair. A couple of questions. One, I'd like to ask about SkyTab. Do you have any goals for installs in 2025 as it compares to the 2024 number where you outperformed? Because that'd be the first question, what the implications are for margin specifically as SkyTab revenue or SaaS revenue increases as a percent of the total. And then specifically with regard to Global Blue, is there any channel conflict given the company's relationship with other acquirers in its business? Is that something you thought about?
Yeah, I'll hit the Global Blue one. We don't see conflict. We see in all of our expansion efforts around the world a really interesting mix of service providers that enable these solutions. I think merchants are going to benefit intensely from what we can offer under a single roof. But I also know that there are going to be merchants that choose to work with multiple service providers. When you're an enterprise-grade merchant, you will chop things up if you think it'll get you incremental sales in a particular geography or things like that. Partnerships have been a way that they've enabled their product. I don't necessarily think they're critical. I mean, they own 80% market share, so I don't know how much more partnerships will get them. And I also know that merchants benefit from some level of consolidation.
But despite our ambition, we're not everywhere in the world yet. So there will be areas where we think it benefits us to actually partner with some of their existing payment providers and unlock geographies, et cetera. So actually, I think it's a more interesting conversation that we could have with some of the best payment companies in the world over the next few years than we could have today.
Yeah. I mean, I go back to some history here. I don't see a channel conflict. Channel conflict to me is when you're partnered with a great hotel property management system player who brings you into all these hotels that also has their own restaurant product, and you're like, how do you play that with SkyTab? And it's like, well, we navigate those waters incredibly well all the time and have been for years. To me, this is just opportunity. We're not friends with the other guy. And I think our batting average on going after that volume, again, is going to be more than zero. And maybe it's in markets they're not in. Like I said, they're in typically mature markets. We have this unique balance of mature and emerging markets. But look, if I rewind the clock to 2017, we did four or five acquisitions that year.
They were generally all restaurant ISVs. Almost every one of them was partnered with Mercury Payment Systems, which was part of Worldpay. And you know how that story went. So I like how we're set up with Global Blue.
And then in terms of just SkyTab progress, we mathematically have to add meaningfully more sites than we added the previous year. I think the international proof point is just one example of high confidence in our ability to do that. It remains an incredible funnel for us. We feel no rush with SkyTab specifically in places like Germany where we've got an embedded product and can follow through with SkyTab later. So there's a lot of ways to add lots of restaurants without just being SkyTab. But yeah, we've got to add a heck of a lot more. If you can step into my shoes for a second, if he's got to take us to Mars, adding tens of thousands of restaurants around the world doesn't sound too daunting from his perspective.
Hi, Andrew Harte from BTIG. Part of the roadmap in all the verticals, a big part of it was going globally. I guess to dig in on two of them. First was SkyTab. Can you talk about a bit how your international footprint today gives you an advantage over some of your competitors here in the U.S. that are also trying to go there? You talked about a couple of things like the fiscal compliance, tax, language, et cetera, just anything there. And then in the hotel vertical, I'm curious, can you kind of break out in the U.S., you're clearly a share taker, how you view the U.S. hotel market now? And when you're thinking about the hotel growth going forward, how much of it is globally outside U.S. versus domestic? Thank you.
Yeah, sure. On hotels, we've got just tons more to do in the United States and an emerging footprint in the rest of the world. So I think the United States, at least in the short term, is going to continue to drive a lot of the hotel-specific volume and revenue growth. And yet internationally, we're adding really at a really nice clip. It's just that the U.S. is still a market where there's tons of room to go from our standpoint. And then in terms of how SkyTab development is informed by our presence around the world, this is where an acquisition strategy helps you a ton. Vectron, there are no mysteries as to what needs to exist inside of a product, whether that's fiscally, whether that's language-wise, whether that's culturally, to win inside of that environment.
And they're informing the development of SkyTab so that when we choose to pivot, there are lots of embedded features that look incredibly native to a user inside of that geography. You don't get that by deciding you want to go into a new country and needing to figure things out. You also don't necessarily get it from hiring people in a local geography who are sometimes incented to simply tell you what you want to hear. So this idea of having a proven kind of merchant base on the ground and boots on the ground that have been there before is, we wouldn't necessarily be leaning as hard into international expansion if there were mysteries as to what we needed to do. But I would emphasize there's many layers of it. It's not just the fiscal and the language. There are cultural things as well.
There are local integrations to things like food service delivery providers that are critical in one country, but we've never heard of in the United States. So there's a lot of work to be done, but an incredibly well-informed pipeline, whether that's by our local people on the ground or strategy saying, hey, size-wise and capabilities-wise, here are the markets we want you to focus on first.
I'd layer on too. I think personally it is going to be we are definitely advantaged with our approach going into international markets. I definitely think you'll see us go way faster with SkyTab moving into lots of different regions very quickly. So I think that will actually grow really fast. And we already are seeing some proof points again going November to January. A third, more or less, of our production now is actually coming from international locations. And to Taylor's point, the domestic didn't slow down. So I feel really good on that. On hospitality, I'd actually point you back to Luke's section, our Chief Strategy Officer during his presentation. He said, look, generally speaking, we size up a transaction. Number one is going to be the cross-sell. That is our MO. That's what we're really good at.
But he said somewhere like around number two or number three, there is usually some extra capabilities that we're getting as a freebie along the way. Global Blue is one of the largest Dynamic Currency Conversion players in the world, which is, it's becoming an emerging requirement in the U.S. It's a firm requirement in all these other international markets as well. So when you say like, hey, you seem to be a decent share taker in the U.S. when it comes to the hospitality market, what's your plan to go from whatever, 40% share to 80% share? We could bundle DCC into our offering here in the U.S. and literally give it away for free.
And it would be a huge differentiator because you already know our only other real competitor in hospitality is doing a great job because they are the other alternative to Shift4's bundled offering is just a gateway. So they have to bring in multiple players to do it. You bring in gateway, acquirer plus DCC player, a lot of mouths to feed in that one. So just gives you an example. It wouldn't even make the list. The top percentage of our deal rationale for Global Blue is that you can literally bundle a capability that's more or less becoming a requirement in hospitality to further differentiate.
I think the webcast is going to cut off right around six. So Jason, probably time for one more.
I'll be quick. Jason Kupferberg from Bank of America. Two follow-ups on Global Blue. First, I think it's going to be adding about 50% to your total headcount, if I'm not mistaken, if I have those numbers right. So just curious how you're approaching the integration versus prior deals, probably pretty much in all non-U.S. workforce. And then just the 15 million consumers on that side of their network, what percent of those are from China?
Yeah. So don't have the answer on the latter question. We can get that as a follow-up. But on the former, we spent a lot of time on this. We actually really appreciate the local presence that Global Blue gives us. It gives us scaled presence in a bunch of these geographies. It's not a nascent sales team that we've been building out organically in the U.K., for example. So we really like the regional infrastructure we get from a company of this size. They kind of force us into that. I will say they've been incredibly financially disciplined. They had to be. COVID made it a necessity to make sure they've had the right level of employees for the service provided.
Obviously, the digitization that we just talked about has been a huge driver for minimizing the headcount they need for expansion, which is more and more of their transactions are handled digitally without a person involved, which is really, really nice. We are excited to get these scaled footprints. It's going to give us, the strategy team, a heck of a lot of reasons to look at a lot of countries and say, hey, we need SkyTab immediately in this country. We've got no excuses because you've got a meaningful infrastructure there. I will say it will be a little bit atypical from our playbook because you're not going to mess with that infrastructure very quickly. You're going to see how you can supplement it with the resources you have today as opposed to the standard smash sales into sales because that's easier from an org chart perspective.
And with that, I think we've got an awesome dinner ahead. And almost everyone's sticking around. So I think the Q&A will probably continue. And encourage you to get to know not just the people who are on the stage, but we made a deliberate emphasis to have one and two levels deeper inside the organization. So ask away.
Yeah. Hey, I just wanted to close out too with a thank you for all of you. I know there was probably a lot more questions. You are going to have an opportunity. The whole leadership team's here, our board's here. I want to especially express my appreciation. We have some great customers that have taken time out of their busy days to be here and support us on all of this. I will actually be flying right out, so I won't be able to necessarily join you for all that. But have a great time tonight. You're going to see SkyTab Air in action at dinner. So that's the new hardware we just unveiled. It's actually new software too. And really appreciate everything, guys. Thank you.