Here we go. On behalf of Susquehanna and my group in the FinTech team here, I am delighted to, again, this year, be hosting this conversation with Shift4. It has been an exciting company to have covered since the IPO, and we have learned a lot from them and their refreshing perspective, both on this industry and industry in general, and even, like, they're just a delightful company to be covering and exciting. With us from the company, we have Jared and Taylor and Nancy and Tom, the structure of this one, guys, is gonna be that if people wanna ask questions, I'll just say this in advance, there's an app on the OpenExchange , you can ask through there, I'd be more than happy to get them in.
Your questions are the most important, so I wanna make sure we get them addressed. To start out, I'll address this to Jared. I'm just curious, what's top of mind for you these days? We're fresh off earnings. What would you describe as the priorities you think the company looks to achieve both near and longer term?
Yeah. Again, thanks for having us. I guess, the best way to answer that question, number one, it's, it's certainly expanding internationally. I, I know we've said it many times, but, you know, we've been in the payments industry for, for 24 years. We grew revenue every year, 24 consecutive years, even during the downturn. Why that matters is this is an incredibly competitive market, right? We clearly have products, services and integrations that enable us to differentiate and win in the U.S., and now we wanna bring those, those same capabilities into new markets. We're incredibly fortunate that we have, I think, hands down, the best strategic customer that you could ask for, that's guiding us into all these new markets.
We achieved a pretty significant milestone with the first market, which is Europe. Now we're ready to do the second part of that story, which is bringing all those successful products and services that have worked for us here in the U.S. into those markets. I think, like, really top of mind, of course, international expansion, too, is now bringing SkyTab, which we're having a lot of momentum with here in the U.S., into, into the European markets. I'd say those are, like, kind of top two things, and obviously there's a lot there. International expansion is a very big deal, big milestones there. Second, bringing products and services to markets like SkyTab in Europe, which we're really getting, you know, much closer to prime time for in that, in that geographic region.
Then I'd say, like, the next part of it is, is, is really just the continued implementation of the Shift4 way, which we've been talking about for a couple of years. As a reminder, these are, these are, you know, kind of philosophies that I learned during my, my time with SpaceX, you know, that I think enable an organization to execute at just a different level. We started that journey two years ago, and it involves taking out a lot of parts, which makes you more efficient and able to execute a lot faster. We're doing that, and, and, and it's reflected in our gateway sunset initiative and sunsetting legacy POS brands to consolidate around SkyTab, and the results of which are margin expansion, higher free cash flow conversion, you know, greater customer satisfaction, so it's lower attrition, signing new customers.
Those are all, like, early days and playing out really well. That's kind of our focus areas right now. You're muted. Sorry.
Oh, boy! That's embarrassing. Thank you. I was hoping you could talk about the competitive landscape across the end markets that specifically comprise your high growth core. For people who are newer, maybe explain what high growth core means to the company and then the competitive landscape. Thank you.
Sure. Yeah, we call our high growth core is basically the business we, we were at the time of our IPO, which is restaurants, hotels, and kind of complex specialty retail. Of course, we've moved into a number of new verticals since, which are all doing well. With respect to the, the core, which is kind of like, you know, you can count on this, we've been winning in these, in these verticals for a very long time and aspire to continue to do so. The competitive landscape varies based on kind of the lane you're going after. You know, with respect to restaurants, you know, which is a component of our high growth core, you know, the landscape is really, you know, it's, it's Toast and Shift4.
We both are doing a really great job winning from, you know, a lot of legacy players, older Windows-based systems, terminals, you know, non-integrated solutions. There's a lot of ground to go in that. That's not slowing down at all. You know, then there's hotels, you know, which are, you know, our prior top competitors, U.S. Bank and Elavon. You know, we probably, you know, had, I don't know, you know, sub 5%, you know, share of hotels, you know, a handful of years ago. We touched about 40%. Now, it's, it's probably our fastest growing vertical, which is, which is hospitality. It's also the one that's, like, shockingly, the most resilient of all in the current economic climate.
I mean, you know, you still got, you know, great same-store sales growth within hotels, and we're taking a ton of share. Then complex retail, which is like, you know, UPS Store is a customer, you know, Fanatics is a, a customer with their retail locations. That varies, you know, you're, you're taking share from kind of, you know, I'd say equally across all of the players. You know, it's a good question because even our core, even what we do, what we've done well for, you know, decades, is more than restaurants, which I think people kind of forget at times with, with the Shift4 story.
... with regard to restaurants, how has the Focus POS acquisition been playing out? Can you remind us what the connection to SkyTab looks like for that, that, suite?
Yeah, sure. This is Taylor. I'll cover that. Focus POS was an acquisition we completed in the first quarter. The idea behind this acquisition was actually a playbook that we ran incredibly successfully about six years ago, which is a phenomenal restaurant point-of-sale software with lots of customers using it, and yet those customers are using, you know, multiple different vendors for the payment experience. While they're loyal to and interact with the Focus POS software every single day, the payments are typically an add-on from, you know, any number of third parties. Not only is it expensive, but it's also cumbersome to manage. We said, you know, we can acquire this business, we can tightly integrate the Shift4 payments experience.
Any customer using the software gets an amazing software and payments experience bundled right out of the box. They should be more successful in the market as they are. Over time, should merchants want to upgrade to SkyTab, we've got a nice base of customers to do that from. You know, in the immediate term, you've had 10,000 customers using Focus POS software and not delivering payments to Shift4. Not only is there good long-term synergy in the migration strategy over to SkyTab, but there's awesome short-term synergy in helping out those 10,000 customers that are using multiple vendors.
You know, at the time we said, you know, "It's a new acquisition, give us, you know, give us a year or two to get this one under our belt." We're very happy to say in the first quarter of owning that business, we've converted roughly 10% of that 10,000 merchants over. That's about $1.5 billion in payment volume that, not only are the customers getting a better experience, but we were able to pull forward as part of our acquisition strategy.
Yeah. Maybe just to layer on to that a little bit, I don't know how familiar everybody is kind of with our history. I mean, as Taylor mentioned, you know, this is a kind of a small acquisition that just... It just popped up. We tried to buy them 6 years ago. It's not like we went into 2023 saying, "This is a deal we need to get done," but the leadership there, and Mike Hamm is awesome, he's like a, you know, a legend and very well respected in the POS payments industry. Any opportunity to kind of bring in good talent is always great, but he reached out and said, "Look, there's an opportunity to revisit this. There's 10,000 accounts here that are not on Shift4.
You guys are pretty good at moving them over to payments." In less than a quarter, we moved 10% over already. That's, you know, pretty, pretty sizable, you know, like $15 billion payment opportunity that we've proven works very well on how we run our playbook. I also kind of want to point out, like, this is our playbook, like, we don't, we don't apologize for it. We're pretty good at it. You know, at the time that we started pursuing the restaurant ISV vertical six years ago, we were like a $50 million EBIT business. I think with updated guidance towards the end of the year, we're saying, "Hey, we're almost 10x that." We're pretty good at finding, like, these kind of underappreciated, under undervalued assets from time to time.
We have, like, a bulletproof playbook on how to move, you know, those very sticky integrated payment customers over to our rails. It's a pretty sizable lift in gross profit. I mean, you know, Taylor gave the math last quarter, but just take 10,000 customers, $1.5 billion a year times, you know, even throw out 50 basis points, which is 15 south of where our current portfolio blends at, and you can kind of get an idea of the synergy potential of it. We may not hunt these down like, like Focus POS all the time, but when they come about, it's an opportunity to kind of celebrate. Hopefully, people are starting to realize that.
We wanted to ask you more about SkyTab and the upselling strategy. For people who were able to attend the SkyTab presentation here in New York, it was in my mind, it was, it was an awesome event, in part because you got to see the intuitive features, functions that had been built into SkyTab. The ones that I remember are like the way that it fits into the waiter or waitress's apron. The way that it integrates in the back end so that the presentation layer back to the bar, for example, is done in a certain way. A lot of the... Oh, and also the way that it fits, the entire menu fits relative to, say, the competition.
These are all very intuitive things that even someone like me could relate to, so I appreciated that demo. We want to get your perspective in upselling. What's the value proposition if you had to name a couple of SkyTab versus some of your competitors?
Yeah, well, I mean, look, I think if the fact that you were there and got to see SkyTab in action should just kind of, I don't know, dispel some of the mystique around restaurant point-of-sale payments, that there's nothing cosmic about ringing up a cheeseburger. I mean, I. We've been saying it for a couple of years now. We've put it in our earnings reports. It's like we're very good at restaurants. We've literally been growing high double digits in the restaurant vertical for, like, 20 years. We've always run into, you know, the next player who's gonna winner take all, right? I mean, at one point, it was Square, then it was Revel, it was NCR Silver, TouchBistro. It's like, the end of the day, right? You're, you're ringing up a cheeseburger.
You wanna, you know, add onions, drop tomatoes, like, we love being in the restaurant vertical, but we also like being in six or seven other verticals that are growing really quickly at it, too. Anyway, with respect to, like, competitive advantages, I think, you know, both us and Toast are advantaged in that we have a, a fully cloud-based solution. Why, why is that important and not just, you know, like, buzzwords? In today's world, you know, restaurants are relying on lots of different software to grow their business. You know, they have integrations, they require integrations into Uber Eats, DoorDash, you know, Grubhub, you know, payroll, loyalty, gift.
They wanna be able to run their business from their cell phone and, like, see real-time stats on what's working and what's not, and have great, you know, insights into, you know, labor management, such as, like, they can keep their expenses and revenue in track. Cloud solutions do this really well. On-premise solutions do not. If you can deliver that cloud-based solution that rings up a cheeseburger well and provides all those good business intelligence insights, you know, and it costs a lot less. I mean, I think we tried to illustrate in our earnings report that our solution is probably like, you know, 1/3 - 1/6 the cost of our competitor over a multi-year period of time, you're gonna win, and they're gonna win, too.
That's fine because it's a really big market, and I think both organizations have our sights set on the globe. There's plenty of business to, to chase down. I think that's pretty much it. You know, a lot of expertise over decades of being in the vertical, cloud-based solution that runs on Android, sexy handheld devices, you know, and an attractive price point. That's how you win.
Then sticking with the restaurant theme and zooming out a bit, could you talk about Four's strategy when it comes to marketing and winning more merchants and distributing more terminals in the restaurant vertical more broadly?
Well, I mean, I, I, I can answer it for restaurants, but it's really a factor of, of the entire business, which is, we do everything we can to get a foot in the door with a customer and then grow wallet share over time. You know, good examples of that would be, you know, over our, you know, history, we've bought two gateways that got us, you know, over, you know, $200 billion in payment volume, where over time, we can move them to our M10 platform and get a 3x-5x lift in gross profit, and, and provide them an overall lower cost of service.
We also have acquired ISVs like Focus POS and others, where you have just the software relationship, and then you can leverage that to get payments as well and deliver them a lower cost of ownership. What I would say is that kind of wallet share growth strategy in the business is like half of our production, and that has worked very well for a long time and will continue to work well for like, a, you know, a decade into the future. Then we also build really good products that allow us to go out and just win new restaurants and new hotels. You know, that's the other 50% of our business. When you see, like, Virgin Hotels being announced, you know, this quarter, it was never a gateway customer. It was never a software customer.
You know, that's an example of just winning a net new customer. If you take Clyde's Group, for example, which we talked about this quarter, which is Old Ebbitt Grill, the historic restaurant in Washington, D.C., that was the software-only customer that moved over to end-to-end, and now they're paying less. From our perspective, it was like a, you know, probably a 5x uplift in gross profit. This is kind of our strategy. You know, in terms of marketing and getting the word out there, we're, we're very good at creating noise and making the phone ring. You know, generally, we let the products, you know, drive the demand, and we let customer referrals do a, a good part of it.
You know, honestly, this past quarter, an opportunity was presented to us where maybe some trust was shaken with one of our competitors and we decided to, you know, use a little bit of our growing free cash flow to put some marketing out there and some incentives in order to stimulate growth further. It's working. It's creating a ton of demand.
I just wanna mention again, there's a tab in the top right corner, a tab that people could drop down if you wanna ask questions, or you could just hit me on the Bloomberg, and I'll ask them for you, or you can send me an email. I wanted to pivot over to hotels for a second. Within hotels, how does Four approach that market differently versus, say, restaurants? Contractually, what might be some key differences, especially if the hotel has a franchise model?
Yeah. I think the key to winning hotels is, you need 550-plus software integrations that like, basically sell every possible combination of software required in a hotel or resort. If you're even short one integration, you're, you're out of the mix, right? You know, you take some of our customers that we, you know, whether it's Virgin Hotels or Pebble Beach, for example, you're not gonna be able to win that relationship, if you, if you don't have a key integration. You know, Pebble Beach is not gonna switch and say: Okay, you can do everything for me but our golf courses. That's not gonna work. All the software has to be able to talk to each other, you know, work over common tokenization, encryption, business intelligence, and settlement for the entire resort environment in all of the revenue centers.
The point is, you need 550-plus software integrations across a lot of years of merchant history to even have a seat at the table. There's three companies in North America that can do that. There's Shift4, there's one that I mentioned before that lives inside U.S. Bank, and then there's a third, which just does gateway services. Only owns kind of one piece of the value chain. As a result, all those software companies I mentioned before, that all have huge teams of salesforce out in the market trying to win hotels, will steer those customers to Shift4, because they know the overall cost of ownership for payments will be less, 'cause they're simply just, you know, less hands in, in the pie.
We're able to provide a lot more value to the resident, like free devices. We basically own the experience end-to-end. The merchant gets a lower cost of ownership, the software companies have less, less pain and friction in the, in the sales process.
... and it, and it probably also comes down to a much narrower competitive landscape. We have, again, only, you know, only other two competitors that are capable of addressing vertical, and we just have more links in that, in that value chain. It's just kind of that one throat to choke, one hand to shape type environment. I don't know if anything you want to add, Taylor?
No, I think you covered it well.
About that, what are some of the metrics you track when thinking about customer stickiness across the high-growth core more generally? I mean, you're saying that there's a ton of software on the back end, say, for hotels. I would assume that that would imply that it is really, you know, durable and sticky in that respect. Yeah, how, how, how is the churn in there?
Yeah, the churn is incredibly low. I mean, what you find basically with any merchant that's using software that's tightly integrated through a payment experience, is the churn is, you know, substantially lower than a merchant who's using a non-integrated or standalone payment experience for the obvious reasons. As the merchant uses more and more software, the stickiness grows in conjunction with that. These are, you know, for better or worse, these are mature markets. You don't typically have a lot of, you know, new businesses popping up and/or failing, inside of these verticals. If you can imagine a merchant that's relying on, you know, 20 or 30 or 70 different pieces of software to power their estate, and every one of those needs to work flawlessly with the payment experience, they are very hesitant to switch that out.
As Jared mentioned, the competitors that can serve them are so few and far between, that it really doesn't behoove them to do so. What they're asking for is an experience that works reliably, 100% of the time, no matter what, and also, an enhanced view of their customer. They want to be able to follow their customer throughout this web of revenue centers in a reliable way. If Shift4 can provide all that, plus make things easier, like their device management, like, you know, calling 1 vendor for 5 or 6 things that might have been separate phone calls before, you know, the customer's highly likely to stay.
Okay. wanted to shift over to consumer spending trends. What's your view on how consumer spend feels these days? Are there any pockets of weakness that have appeared, or is it, you know, generally running at or better than expected?
Well, I'll, I'll start, and then if Nancy wants to layer in. I, I would say we've been, we've been pessimists for a long time on this topic, and we're ha- happy to be proven wrong. Consumer spending has been quite resilient. It does feel like the economy is firing on slightly different cylinders, though. For example, you had really strong, you know, restaurant trends in 2021 as a result of the pandemic, but you hadn't yet had hotel travel pick up. While we've seen restaurants moderate, you're not seeing spending decrease, but you're also not seeing it grow substantially. Hotels, on the other hand, are going really well, as is sports and entertainment. It really looks like the consumer to us is eager to spend.
However, the categories they're spending on are, are, are slightly evolving. As you know, the world has reopened, and they get to engage in more experiences, they're seeking that out. Restaurant spending, which has been strong for 2021 and 2022, is, is, is holding more than we would've expected, quite frankly.
Yeah, I think Taylor covered it. I mean, we remain cautiously optimistic, you know, that consumer spending will continue to be resi- resilient, but certainly a little bit more cautious on spending at restaurants moderating.
Okay. Thank you both. Wanted to pivot over to sports and entertainment. How is the market here different from or similar to the high-growth core? In your answer, if you could talk a little bit about the importance of ticketing, I think that would be instructive.
Yeah, well, I, I would say it's incredibly similar to many other merchants in our high-growth core, which is, walking through a stadium is not incredibly dissimilar from walking through a big resort. When you think about the number of revenue centers that you engage with, what the operator of that stadium is trying to do with their fans, they're trying to push mobile engagement, they're trying to, you know, predict what you want. They're trying to bring you a beer and a hot dog in your seat if that makes your experience better. The ability to stitch all these revenue centers together and provide a common, both commerce experience and payment experience for the merchant, and fan is incredibly valuable.
You know, our success in stadiums, having had none at the time of our IPO, well over 100 now, really being a category leader for us, is not at all surprising because we identified stadiums as a, as a vertical that could use a solution like Shift4 had pioneered in so many hotels. What has been a surprise to us is that traditionally, ticket spending has been in a totally separate ecosystem from the stadium itself.
Yet, as we start to engage with our teams and engage with our venues, they said, "This is a major revenue center for me that I need to be able to see alongside of everything else, and can you help with that?" Obviously, eager to participate in solving that problem for the merchant, we engaged in software integrations with all the largest ticketing platforms and are happy to report today, basically, the three major ticketing platforms in the United States are integrated to Shift4, and therefore any customer using them can use Shift4 for payments. How does that work mechanically? A team says, "I am using SeatGeek," or, "I am using Ticketmaster, and you are powering the concessions and the retail and the parking at my stadium.
I want to see all the payments through a single settlement engine, through a single set of reports and analytics." Shift4 can do that simply by working with the ticketing provider to say, "Send us the payments when the consumer engages with, you know, buying a ticket for that event.
Thank you. No, that makes a lot of sense, that sequence. Hopefully, you can also make-- help make my teams any better. I wanted to pivot over to nonprofits. From the recent earnings call, it sounds like Shift4 has made some significant progress in the not-for-profit front. Can you talk about what you're doing there to win, and what do take rates and profitability typically look like versus, say, the more traditional parts of your business?
Yeah, I'm, I'm happy to jump on that. This was the most material update on the nonprofit verticals in almost two years since we announced, you know, signing St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, which was a, you know, a heck of a anchor, you know, relationship for entering into a new vertical. What you're seeing with nonprofits is very similar to the ticketing story, where you get a good land and expand in a complex payment environment that requires lots of different software to deliver a commerce experience. Like, that's, that's what Shift4 does well. We had one signature customer, taught us an awful lot. We then reinforced it through the acquisition of The Giving Block, which is the largest nonprofit crypto donation platform.
That story is much more about access to 2,200 of the world's greatest nonprofit brands, and a ticket to pursuing a $450 billion payments addressable market within the nonprofit space, than it is anything to do with crypto. We basically spent, you know, again, almost the last 2 years building out integrations and rails for traditional payment donation volume, and then cross-selling all of those existing, The Giving Block customers. It was, it was slow. I mean, it, it, it takes a long time to get all of the integrations that, that are needed because these nonprofits use a lot. I mean, that's why, that's why we're attracted to it. It's not like just a Square app going to, like, a charitable dinner.
I mean, they take donations across, you know, that are initiated through their CRM system, through their website, through a hosted payment page. You know, influencers are, are attracting donations through YouTube and Fortnite. I mean, it's complicated, right? Almost two years later, you've got a nice breakthrough. You know, those reference logos, you know, like, American Cancer Society, that we put in, you know, Give Lively, that we put into our earnings deck, those are traditional payment wins. Yeah, it's, it's been hard to enter a new vertical like that, but now we're getting some real momentum behind it, which I guess that is very much like the Shift4 story. Yeah, it's the same thing Taylor talked about.
You know, no stadiums, really two years ago, now the category leader in the space, and not just stopping with, like, in-seat ordering and concessions, but going for ticketing where, you know, you get 5x the volume and 3x the spreads. You know, it's pretty, pretty, you know, pretty nice, like, expansion, you know, land and expand playing out. That's what you're seeing across E-commerce and gaming, our other verticals that we've entered into since the IPO as well.
Thank you for that, Jared. I wanted to ask you about the gateway conversion discussion, which is one that's really attracted a lot of investors. Our view on it is that, to some degree, Four can make your own weather through this initiative. A couple of questions here. The first one is: we're just interested, what does the conversation look like on the back end when you go into the merchant to discuss this topic? What kind of conversion penetration do you think is realistic?
Yeah. So, I mean, this began at a, you know, called five, six years ago, as a $200 billion payment opportunity in cross-sell. Last update we gave, which was just a quarter ago, was there's about $150 billion of it left. What is addressable? All of it. We're doing it all. I mean, that, that's all volume that's going across our rails. We're just, we're just getting paid very poorly for it. It's, it's not like you have to, you know, like, bolster up the organization to handle, you know, another $150 billion volume. We're doing it already, we're just getting paid a couple cents a transaction for it. You know, the idea that, you know, like, merchants really want to stay with, you know, GPN, Fiserv, Worldpay, no.
I mean, nobody wants to have, like, 5 or 6 people on a conference call pointing fingers at each other when something goes wrong. Like, you can have a single integrated solution that costs less, you know, and solves for real pain points in a business, well, that's obviously that's what you choose. For the last, you know, five, six years, that conversion process has been working incredibly well. Really, it, it's all just timing, right? You know, at the end of the day, we're talking about anywhere from what, you know, well, let's just call it round numbers, 50 basis points, you know, that a, that a merchant pays, you know, for, for payments, right? Think about everything else that's going on in their world that has more of an impact than 50 basis points.
You know, if you're hypothetically the Four Seasons Hotels, and you've doubled your room rate over the last couple of years, like, 50 basis points is probably not, like, top of your priority list. It's our job to solve pain points for them, whether that's, you know, mobile payments, QR payments, you know, the next database update for their property management system. You know, new EMV devices because of some, like, PCI compliance update. You know, you know, giving them SkyTab POS systems for their lobby bar or restaurant at a good rate. Like, we have to think constantly about how to approach that population of gateway customers and solve a problem for them that's more important than 50 basis points, hypothetically, and that's how they move over. It happens every month.
It's about 50% of our production, and the rest is just like a gift that'll, you know, keep on giving for years into the future.
Okay. When you use the word production there, Jared, what, what does that mean? You mean like volume?
Yeah, no, meaning like number of MIDS. Like, we look at MIDS as, you know, one of our KPIs, which is just net new customers, kind of, or new customers joining the platform, right? You know, for at least the last half decade, half of our production comes from just pure net new in a very large addressable market. That's restaurants, hotels, stadiums, E-commerce, airlines, right? Then the other half is kind of your wallet share gain. That's a software customer using end-to-end or a gateway customer moving to end-to-end. I guess, so what I'm saying is every month, in terms of just production of new customers, half are, are wallet share gains, gateway or software customers using more and more of our services, and half comes from just winning a pure new customer, like Virgin Hotels, for example.
About new customer wins. In the past year or so, it feels like Shift4 has won a series of kind of landmark enterprise-level wins across various verticals. How's the company thinking about this part of the business the same or different versus your historical wins? Financially, how would these deals impact your KPIs?
It's, it's only getting better. I mean, you know, you look at every earnings report, I, I get this is a, you know, it's like a chaotic time in the market where, like, everybody just burns the first 4 pages of the earnings release and just flips right to the guidance. Like, you look at it's, it's, it's like, actually those logos that are in every earnings report that's delivering the results of the quarter that people don't, don't seem to care as much about, which informs guidance, right? It's like, it's like if you look at the logos in, I mean, every quarter since a public company, it's, it's only getting better. I mean, you know, this past quarter, you know, we had the, the happiest place on earth or the most magical place, whatever you want to call it.
I mean, pretty much every quarter, you're just dropping in, you know, 12 of the best live sports stadiums, you know, in the country, the best new hotels that are being built and all the existing ones, whether it's in Vegas or other attractive markets. You know, we are continuously moving upmarket into the most desirable places where people want to spend time. It's, it's working, right? I mean, look, we, you know, as Taylor mentioned, we are playing a, a close eye to, you know, consumer sentiment and economic conditions in the market. We have to, given our verticals. When you grow payment volume 60% year-over-year, are you that sensitive if, you know, same store sales decline 1%? You know, it's clearly a factor of winning share and gaining more, more wallet of your existing customers.
It, and it's working really well. In fact, like, it's actually what's contributing to the expanding margins and free cash flow of the business, because at the time of the IPO, when we were, we were almost all restaurants, that is, like, the most labor-intensive customer, and it's the highest customer acquisition cost. I mean, it's lots and lots of hardware and restaurants call us for everything, like, changing menu prices, you know, counties have different taxes, manager quit and needs to be retrained. It's very labor intense. When you're moving into enterprise customers, like airlines and gaming, you know, huge resorts and, you know, stadiums and ticketing, like you, you have almost no hardware deployed, so your customer acquisition cost is down, and the amount of overhead that's required to support those customers and all their incremental volume is so minimal.
Like, we're thrilled about the average customer size going up as much as it has and as many new enterprise, enterprise customers as we've been winning.
Okay, you alluded to this in the prior answer, but in terms of wallet share, you talked more on the quarterly call on growing share of wallet, and we were hoping you could double click on that.
Yeah, I think it's just a, it's, it's a. What's lost in our story is just, you know, the gateway conversion and all of our software customers that are just inevitably moving over to our end-to-end solution, and in doing so, they're saving a lot of money and solving a lot of pain points, and it's, it's a huge gross profit lift for us. You know, maybe, you know, the way we've been describing how gateway conversions work or, you know, how software-only customers move over and take on SaaS like was, was too complicated before or underappreciated, which is why we're just saying: Look, it's all just a wallet share gain.
If you have a gateway customer, or in our case, you know, tens of thousands of them doing $150 billion a year in volume, they decide to move over to end-to-end, we're throwing a switch. In terms of like a wallet share gain, we're taking a ton of revenue away from, you know, legacy acquirers that we were outputting the volume to. Like we said, it's about a 4x-5x uplift in gross profit for us, the customer is paying less. The same applies, you know, to customers that were just using our software and paying 3 or 4 different vendors, whether it was a different gateway, a different merchant acquirer, or buying devices somewhere else. When they switch to end-to-end, all those problems go away and they're paying less. It's a big wallet share gain for us.
That's half the story, as I mentioned before, in terms of our new production.
Okay, we're starting to get some questions from the audience. This one's about how much can you lean into the Toast trust issue? If so, could it be an opportunity, you know, throughout this year and potentially even to next year?
I, I think, like, history is a really good indication of, of future performance, and we have been winning and growing volume high double digits in restaurants for, like, 20 years. So we don't need a marketing campaign or a misstep by a competitor to ensure continued success. I just think that for a while, people drank the wrong Kool-Aid and thought there was some sort of, like AI, you know, you know, craziness magic or something going on with ringing up a cheeseburger and maybe now, like, you know, regrounding with, there's two great companies that have the capabilities to go out and, and, and win the restaurant vertical, and will both continue to do so in the U.S. and in international markets.
The really only other difference is, we happen to be really awesome at stadiums, retailing, commerce, airlines, hotels, and a lot of other verticals who are maybe a little more diversified. You know, does this trust campaign, you know, help us? Sure. Were we gonna do fine without it? Absolutely.
Wanted to ask you about the margins of the business. It's something that you have really delivered on since the IPO. How should investors think about the operating efficiencies of the company going forward?
Yeah, I'll take it. I think Jared kind of mentioned it just now in, in, in some of his conversation, but there's so many components. Pretty much I'd start with everything we're doing right now is margin accretive, and free cash flow accretive. It starts with just the overall scalability of the business by maintaining, whether it's flat headcount or taking out the cards. We're really streamlining all of operations. I know we kind of teased out a little bit about AI and some of the other investments we're making, really to, I would say, upgrade our internal systems across the board. Pretty much every kind of strategic initiative aimed at expense that we have going on right now is going to improve productivity. I think the other piece of that, you know, that focuses on expense, but it's really about moving upmarket, right?
What it takes to service our, our enterprise clients, we are just not adding anything to the SG&A of the business. While that, while that revenue might come at a lower blended spread, it's, it's completely accretive, from a drop-through, really straight through to EBITDA and free cash flow. You know, again, I think the investments are being made, but they're all driving that incremental, margin generation that you saw us put into the guide.
Nancy, can you remind us what you had said about free cash flow conversion targets and what some of the inputs might be?
Yeah, for sure. You know, we really didn't put out a target. I mean, I think you could see first half of the year really overperforming our guide. We've steadily kind of continued to increase the guide. I, I would note, I know you just asked about kind of our competitive campaign, whether it's against Toast or just going out in the restaurant space. All of the, you know, kind of investment to do so is included in that new guide that we put out. It really comes down to the efficiency, right? There's investments within that.
While we're not targeting, I would say it's probably the guide point that I would say I feel most bullish about, when you think about the, the, the new increased guide that we just put out.
Since we're talking about the guidance, can you revisit what the guidance message was and specifically the contribution from Finaro, how it's baked into the 23 guide?
Yeah. Taylor, do you want to take the Finaro piece first?
Yeah, sure. We had included the Finaro transaction in the back half, or a portion of it in our guide, simply because we've got really good line of sight on that closing imminently. Had we not included Finaro, we would have increased both the gross revenue, less network fees and the EBITDA by $10 million. That can give you a sense for two things. Number one, the organic growth inside the business, and also, as Nancy mentioned, the margin expansion. I think it's worth noting that, you know, we do expect Finaro to close, so that's incremental to that. We're not exactly sure when in the quarter it will close, we gave ourselves some wiggle room inside of the guide framework.
Again, it would have increased by $10 million on both gross revenue, less network fees and EBITDA.
Yeah. I, and I think, you know, when you think about why is that flowing through at 100%, that really speaks to all of kind of the initiatives that we have going on the expense side of the business.
Thank you. That, that was a great, incremental insight. I was just curious, Taylor, what is it that accelerated your view about the potential close on Finaro? Was it a regulatory thing, or why did that move up?
I'm just curious, your choice of word accelerated, because we signed and announced the deal in March, March 1st of 2022. There is no one on, on this side of the table that I think anything was asked about this.
You're right. That's not-- That I didn't phrase that right. Now that I remember that. Still, something happened that made you say you could close it now. That's what I was getting at.
Yeah, it's, it's actually a variety of things. For those not as close to the story, Finaro operates as a European bank, fully chartered, with a, with a UK branch as well. The approval that we've been waiting on, which is the last of a series of different approvals, is the transfer of ownership in a European bank. We've had some really strong developments on that process, as well as just a handful of other solutions from our advisors that have pulled the timeline in from something that was kind of nebulous and hard to predict into something that's much more predictable.
Got it. Okay, that makes sense now. Okay. Wow, that was a lot! We started out talking about what was top of mind for Jared, growing the high growth core Focus POS was a great discussion. We talked about restaurants, hotels, customer stickiness, consumer spend, sports and entertainment, nonprofits, gateway conversion, enterprise, and then we hit on some of the financials, and we did get more detail on the Finaro impact. Jared, Nancy, Taylor, Tom, thank you all for joining us today. I know you got additional meetings coming up, so we're really grateful.
Thank you.
Thanks very much.
See you again.