Day two of the Wolfe Research FinTech Forum. We're obviously thrilled to have the team from Shift4 here with us. This is a team that, you know, we did the IPO for. It's been a little while now. Wow. I can't. I think it's been 20, early 2020.
Yep.
Can't believe it's been that long at this point. Regardless, it's one of the names that I know we spend more of our time on than most of the names we cover because there's so many exciting things happening across the business. It's a lot of fun to do research on it. You know, we're really happy to have you guys here with us. It's a name we've been recommending pretty much throughout our coverage of the story, given we still think Shift4 is one of these names that folks don't appreciate in some ways how it operates and how it executes on very complex verticals better than anyone else we've seen. We're thrilled to have the entire team here. We have Jared, the CEO and Founder, one of the founders of the company.
We have Taylor, who's the President and Head Chief Strategy Officer, and Nancy, who's the CFO. Maybe just start off with a quick, you know, backdrop, Jared, on the business, if you don't mind, for anyone maybe a little less familiar with Shift4, what the differentiation is of the business, and we'll go from there.
Yeah. I think, I think right from the start, you know, Shift4 is an integrated payments company before anyone knew what to call an integrated payments company. We've been around, this is our 24th year in business. For the first couple of years, we were very much just general practitioners of payments. I mean, that was like the acceptance phase of, you know, the golden age, just enabling businesses to accept credit cards. We were very quick to see that, you know, that's not gonna end well because at some point you're only gonna be able to differentiate on price. Early 2000s, we started to build our own software, our own hardware, bundle it together with SaaS and payments.
Tried to take multiple parallel industries and smash them together to help our distribution partners differentiate to win really premium customers and then retain them an awful lot longer. You roll that forward to today, like 99.9% of our transactions are integrated. That's unheard of. That means, you know, our payment platform directly connecting into commerce-enabling software. You know, we began our journey in integrated payments predominantly focusing on restaurants, kind of moving from the Irish pub on the corner to now, I mean, you know, Irish pub on the corner all the way up to The Cheesecake Factory. We actually tend to skew much more in the more complex end of the restaurant vertical. Customers like Tao, Hakkasan would be examples of our customers. Then, we moved into hospitality.
I guess throughout our journey in integrated payments, getting into it very early on, recognizing the importance of it, we've been able to balance by vertical kind of this build by and or or partner strategy. In some verticals like hospitality, where we have like, you know, close to 40% share using our, our payment rails, you have to integrate into hundreds of different software applications. There is no, you know, dominant hotel property management system. There's no like Toast thing going on there where customers are switching out property management system software. Those are like elevators inside hotels. They never kind of change. You have to play nice there. Within the restaurant vertical, we've had a lot of success. We said this is a vertical that we're gonna bet on.
We'll have our own products within. We went into the, you know, just referencing the IPO, we went into June 2020, the heart of the pandemic with a big concentration on restaurants and hotels. We actually grew our end-to-end volume, our number one KPI, double digits on that, grew revenue double digits, and it was predominantly from just taking share. We came out of the IPO saying that we would, we'd wanna be a bigger, healthier, stronger company. You know, we diversified into, you know, less pandemic susceptible industries like stadiums, travel, leisure, nonprofit gaming.
What you'll find across all the verticals we're in within the integrated payments universe is, they're all complicated, that you cannot download a software application on an iPhone or an iPad and power a ski resort, you know, or a major restaurant like Tao or, you know, retail store like UPS Stores or certainly like a major airline and such. We tend to be on the most complex demanding end of the commerce spectrum. Now we've embarked on a really awesome journey after 24 years of deriving almost all of our revenue and volume here in the U.S. on a global expansion initiative. We are following a very signature customer who is already operating all over the world, and we're quickly trying to catch up, which is nice. We're bringing all of the kind of product services and integrations that made us successful here in the U.S. into those markets.
I mean, to be clear, you guys were always known for, just for everyone in the audience, you were always known for, you know, restaurants and hotels. That was probably what you were most well known for for a long time. But in the few years since you've been public, we are now stadiums, we're now in charity, we're now. I mean, there's so many more verticals that have been expanded upon beyond the two original core. It's really a very different company than it was three years ago, right? I think that's very easy to say. Now, as you, as you mentioned, we're going, you know, internationally. A lot has changed. Before we go further, I just wanna get this one out of the way. SVB, lot of noise in the market with banks obviously.
I think you guys said it was very... What was it? $45,000 in deposits or something immaterial effectively or-
Yeah.
Just to be clear.
Effectively nothing. you know, one small account related to an acquisition that, you know.
Yeah. This has zero impact on your business?
Yeah. Interestingly, you know, the analysis we do in circumstances like that is we actually go look at our merchant base and say-
Right.
Are merchants impacted by this?
Yep.
Even there, you know, there was no exposure whatsoever. I think it's probably a little bit to do with the fact that we've never been a Silicon Valley darling. You know, even our merchants don't bank there. No.
Right. Okay.
Yeah, I mean, really shocked when we ran the report on Friday evening against all the ABA numbers that we settle funds into, and we would touch a lot of commerce. We didn't have a single customer in the bank that asked for me.
Oh, wow. All right.
Which was really surprising.
Good. Okay. Going back to the business. Before we go to recent trends, Jared, what are the top priorities for this year for you guys? I mean, there's again, a lot of moving parts, but maybe just give us a sense of where you're spending most of your time.
Yeah. We love the verticals we're in right now. The idea is, number one, again, follow our signature customer that's literally all over the world right now. That's a real special relationship where they are helping us evolve a product that we have that was up until, you know, last year or so, we were almost like a 100% card-present transaction processing. Evolving that product to meet the needs of a, you know, multi-billion dollar multinational, you know, e-commerce customer. Helping us evolve our product, catch up to them in all the markets they're in, bring the products and services we have into those markets. There's a lot that goes into that, right?
I mean, if you think about a restaurant product that's very, very successful in the U.S., you have to localize it in the various markets you're going into. There's fiscal compliance in that. Number one priority is exactly what I said, follow the signature customer all over the world. A lot goes into that. Bring our other products and services. Then number two is what accelerants do we have within the verticals, that we already have some unique right to win in? I think those kind of may be familiar with the story. There's a little bit of unique elements, Shift4. We have a, you know, a gateway platform with about $150 billion or so gateway volume.
Yep.
Basically we are driving the commerce experience for these customers. It's our platform that's talking to their software solution. It's our tokenization, our encryption, oftentimes our devices. We make very little when they're a gateway customer. We put a lot of various incentives out there, a combination of, you know, sticks and carrots to migrate customers to what we refer to as our end-to-end solution. You eliminate about four or five different parties that are involved, ultimately deliver a lower cost of service for the customer, but it has a very material uplift in gross profit contribution for us, and that's like literally flipping a switch. That's about 50% of our customer adds in any given year.
In terms of priorities, capital allocation, like that's the lowest hanging fruit you can get in this industry where you can literally grow substantially without winning a new customer. That's like. That would be the second most important priority for us, is continuing our various gateway sunset programs to pull forward that gateway volume to our end-to-end solution. That's about it. Like, we like our verticals we're in right now. There's a lot to conquer in this kind of integrated payments 3.0 evolution, which is connecting into commerce-enabling software, but now doing it all over the world. That's a universe right now limited to kind of your Stripe and Adyen. It's really important from our perspective to kinda quickly get to that stage.
When you think about just taking it a step back to the recent trends, you obviously had very strong results that came out last quarter not too long ago, a couple weeks ago. Maybe you could just take a step back and remind the audience some of the recent trends and really what flowed through into this year that informed your outlook for 2023 as well.
Yeah, I could definitely start. You know, I think some of the things Jared mentioned, right? You think about each of those priorities, we had a nice margin uplift 2022 over 2021.
Sure.
You know, I think just first half of the year before we got to kind of some of the strategy plays that really played out the back half of the year, we were up about 400 basis points first half of 2022 to 2021. I think heading into the back half of the year, we really laid the groundwork for each of these initiatives, right? The gateway sunset, it has incredible flow through from a margin perspective, with both the carrots, the sticks, and the conversions.
Yep.
Right? With most of the growth coming from high-growth core. You think about kind of this launch of SkyTab, right?
Mm-hmm.
Our single brand into the market, cloud-based, gave us the opportunity to really look at that in-source distribution for the first time. With that, you know, it really combined now better unit economics, you know, just better flow through of operating leverage. Most of the new verticals that we're talking about are coming through in a direct model. I don't think people realize that our partner model was really more of where kind of IPO timing our high-growth core, but all these new verticals were going direct.
Right.
unit economics improved, you know, eliminating that partner share, you know, flow through for the rest of the year. Ce rtainly informed, you know, the guide as we look for greater margin expansion, greater free cash flow conversion. I think, every one of the kind of levers that we're playing with right now just has better flow through on a margin and a free cash flow basis.
If you could just remind us again on the guide, the data points for top line, for volume growth, I mean, I think it's underappreciated still by some in the magnitude, and then profitability.
Yeah, sure. You know, we contemplated a number of scenarios as I think is prudent, as we were constructing the guide. We really, you know, at the low end, came through scenarios of about 40% volume growth, and at the high end above 50%. What informs that is, like, one of the, one of the nice benefits to our business model is that the annualization of the customers who joined you the prior year delivers you the majority of your growth in any, in any given year. If you think about the year we had in 2022, you know, you mentioned all the new verticals. Not a single one of them contributed in substance until the back half and sometimes even the fourth quarter of 2022. You know, we mentioned, you know, one of our largest merchants went live in November.
The annualization of that really drives a healthy portion of that volume growth over the course of the year. We do expect to continue to add merchants at the clip we have, which is really nice. The traction in these new verticals tends to be a flywheel, so we expect to gain more on that front. The one area where we're just a little bit, I would say trepidatious is in 2022, we anticipated some recovery in travel that we'd benefit from, and I think we just wanted a little bit of prudence around this, the current climate, the merchant base. It's nice to be able to put forth a guide like that that doesn't include a robust same-store recovery.
We think it's prudent to kind of think that that might not be the case this coming summer. If it is, that's great. Yeah. I mean, our the guide that we assembled really, I mean, if you're looking at it somewhere on the conservative scale relative to 2022 where we, you know, we beat and raised most of the year, this is pretty hyper-conservative. I mean, you look at a Q4 annualized, like the exit rate from Q4 and annualize it, and you've got pretty line of sight to our bottom end of the guide, which is the, you know, the mild recession case.
Right.
We went into 2022 where we had commitments from major customers in nonprofits in the form of St. Jude, a major travel and leisure airline, an e-commerce customer that required international capabilities. We knew we were gonna go after ticketing in our sports and entertainment vertical, but in all these cases, we didn't have a single software integration. Getting integrated payments is really hard 'cause you have to convince a software customer or a merchant to do something they don't wanna do, which is integrate with another payments company. They'd rather do anything else. Going into 2022, we had a plug in our, in our bridge of, like, $3 billion contribution from new verticals, major customers.
First two quarters a year, we were way behind schedule on that. We wound up getting them done in the third and fourth quarter, which is why there was such a significant contribution then. Like, you went into that guide knowing you had to get things done. That was very hard. We go into this year with all of those integrations complete. Now.
Yeah.
A lot of stuff just layers on very easily. Like, ticketing, once you have that SeatGeek integration done, then it's just a matter of each sports team deciding that they're ready to throw the switch. We actually had a record weekend with our with our VenueNext sports and entertainment product. It shouldn't be that way right now, and we actually had to look into it why because football season should be the strongest.
Yeah.
It was advanced ticket sales that started rolling in, and that was the first time we've seen that.
That's great.
We do think we set up this year pretty well in light of what, you know, what could be.
It sounds like trends to date are definitely giving you conviction around, you know, the guide at least.
For sure.
Which is what we obviously wanna see. You know, when we think about the other part of that, which, Nancy, you touched on, was the profitability side. I mean, again, I think a lot of folks were kinda confused at first when you bought in the residuals and you shifted to more direct, which you were talking about in terms of sales. But it obviously had a very big impact on your margins and profitability. Thinking about that now, I mean, it seems like it was the right choice, obviously. But are we done with that, or is there more to go on changing the sales strategy?
You know, I think we laid this out at our investor day, right? That it was a very strategic insourcing, right? We went for our best partners that were probably about 50% of the partners. They were doing about 80% of the production. I think what was a little bit lost in the story there is we actually insourced, but we bought the whole company in many cases of our best partners, right? That means we took on their sales offices. You know, there's a little bit of an exchange there for kind of, you know, gross margin, but we took on SG&A, right? I think that's a little bit lost in terms of the strategy, but it gave us the opportunity to kind of have in-field servicing, right? Now our partners can service locally.
We took on over 350 people with that insource. It was really a model change, but it was the right thing to do now that we were kind of uniting under a single brand. I think when you think of, again, the margin profile, it's certainly one element, right, that gives us now that better unit economics going forward. I think you have to layer on kind of every one of these kind of initiatives that we're doing, right? Every one of them is kind of improving unit economics for us. I think the other half of that from a margin perspective, so just to reiterate, I think, 'cause Jared just touched on ticketing as a great example.
When we bolt on ticketing, you know, to our stadium customers, there's no incremental expense to do that, right? No incremental infrastructure for us. There's a lot of direct flow-through from these new initiatives-
Yeah.
These kind of cross-sell opportunities. I think another point to make is, like, as we move upmarket, you know, we are getting scale that we've never had before. Like, right, what it takes us to service kind of these upsized and kind of marquee enterprise clients is just not the same of what it takes us to deploy-
The incremental margins are high.
100%. I think the piece that we haven't touched on is obviously then on top of that, we layer in just great cost management, right?
Yeah.
I think we're kind of laser-focused in places that we haven't been before.
If you back out the residual benefit, I think you're only guiding for about 100 basis points of margin expansion. Wouldn't there be more than that given the operating leverage of the business?
You know, I would say it's... I know I think I gave you that math at one point on the fly. You know, I would say it's a little bit more balanced than that. I would say the unit economic improvement, I would probably equate to about 50%-odd of kind of the flow-through and kind of all these other initiatives. Remember, Gateway, you go in with a carrot or a stick, that flows right through. You know, if you look at every single one of our growth levers, they are all kind of contributing to the margin. Yeah, look, you know, it's a beat and raise mentality, and you know, we feel very good about the margin guide that we put out.
It wasn't just the magnitude of the margin wasn't just the residual side, it was a little bit more spread out.
It's really.
Regardless, it sounds like there's conservatism in the margin as well from the way you operate.
For sure. I mean, Jared likes to say that I hedge him a little bit.
If you believe what we're saying in calls, we've 2,300 employees, and we're gonna maintain flat headcount, upgrade talent.
Right.
You look at the margin coming off of Q4, which is not seasonally one of our strongest quarters, you're 47%.
Right.
Um.
Right. There's definitely some room. When we think about guidance, one last point on this is that this did not incorporate, I guess, Finaro either, right? The closing of that deal, which just a quick word on it, I mean, it's still scheduled for sometime in the next couple of months, I think in the middle of the year, by the middle of the year.
Yeah. Scheduled is an odd term because we're basically waiting for approval, from the regulators, and that's always got some ambiguity to it. We expect it to close, you know, within the next, I don't know, you know, 90 days feels reasonably comfortable. It is uncertain because we wait for the regulators to tell us that our application's submitted.
Yeah.
It's being worked on. I think regardless, because we've all had these partner models of integrating to each other, we've been able to get a lot of technical work done, which has been immensely helpful. Like, their team understands sort of our go-to-market, our product priorities, et cetera. We've shared customers, meaning that we've got a customer in the U.S. that's processing locally on their rails with a single integration to us and vice versa. That's really powerful. We've activated restaurants on SkyTab in Europe. We've activated venues on VenueNext as well. Technically, it's largely mission accomplished, but we have to wait for the regulatory approval to formally close.
Okay. even beyond the inorganic element of bringing on the Finaro revenues itself, I think more importantly, this bringing you internationally, including that signature customer that is notable in size, and I believe it could be billions of dollars of volume, right?
Oh, yeah.
That could be pretty quick once you close.
Oh, yeah. Yeah, the plumbing's already there. We've been running, you know, transactions across the pond between Finaro and Shift4 for six months or so, at least now. We're able to, during this, you know, staggered period between signing and closing, operate under various commercial agreements. To Taylor's point, you can hit the ground running, as soon as you close. There should be a lot more synergies now, especially with other work we've done, basically over the last year period of time than we had at the time we announced the deal. I think what's really important is, like, we're we put out a guide that basically is telling you, like, we can surpass our second year of our midterm outlook without international capabilities.
That was certainly at the time that we established a midterm outlook of 50% volume growth, 30% net revenue growth.
[crosstalk] Which there was skepticism on at the time.
[crosstalk] International was part of the story. We're saying we're gonna get through the first two years of it, you know, reasonably comfortably without that authorization and settlement capability in Europe.
When we think about the international opportunity, taking it a step further, this big signature is one, but you have customers that are obviously global customers.
Absolutely.
You haven't done much with them outside the U.S. What kind of opportunity is that, and how fast can you move that?
I mean, you know, what I put in our prepared remarks for the earnings is, look, we will have restaurants, hotels, stadiums, and our e-commerce customers processing across North America and Europe, in 2023, no doubt. Yes, you have a very big customer that we can follow all over the world, and it's a great kind of validation of the service. It sends a message to the rest of that kind of sexy tech world that there's more than two choices to consider, which is pretty important. We're getting RFPs now that we never would have seen before from some of those, you know, awesome logos that people would be familiar with. We don't need to win those, you know, as an extension of this strategy.
We touch, you know, again, 40% of the hotels in this country. The decision makers for those properties in Europe are based in the US. You know, you give somebody a single portal, c ommon tokens across all their platform, great, you know, business intelligence and insights into their customers, makes people's lives easier. They already made their choice of us in the, in the U.S. We can make it a lot easier for them in some other international markets too.
The plumbing's done in terms of, you know, Europe, Eastern Europe as well, other markets?
That's another nice thing is I mean, it's our international expansion is not all inorganic. Organically expanding Canada, Caribbean, here in the U.S., through our partnership with Finaro prior to closing, they've expanded into a number of Eastern European countries already, specifically to meet the need of our one big customer, which is great. We're, we're obviously looking at other continents as well, which is, which is very important. I mean, that's kind of the exciting thing is, like, they're already there. They're already in almost every market in the world, like, except like North Korea and China, and Iran.
Yeah.
I mean, so, like, to us, it's just a matter of catching up, and we get a lot of good insights on how much volume is already there, what product feature, you know, modifications we need to make. When whatever we need to do to enter that market has happened, the faucet gets turned off and volume flows out.
To be clear, it's obviously great for a customer to have one integration with one -partner, one vendor. At the end of the day, there's something else that's going on. I mean, Shift4 has obviously won a lot of business in the U.S. with hotels and restaurants.
Mm-hmm.
Just taking a step back, Jared, explain the integrations you have with the, all the ISVs that are necessary to execute, why it's really only a few companies in the world that can do that.
I mean, you know, as I said before, where you won't find Shift4 is where you can download an application on an iPhone or an iPad and run a business. You look at, like, the bookends of the commerce spectrum, and you have, like, every know Square, super simple. It's designed to be that way. It's very visible when you go to a coffee shop.
Yep.
you know, bakery or something. You have, you know, the complete opposite end of the spectrum, where you have a, you know, resort like Caesars that uses 40 different pieces of software, probably made from 12 or so different software companies, on, like, 20 years of version history, and it all has to talk to each other. You know, you go to a retail shop and, you know, in The Forum Shops, and you wanna charge back to your room. You know, it's all common encryption, tokenization, business intelligence. You, you have to accumulate a lot of integrations in order to be able to respond to an RFP like that. You know, as you probably recall, our analyst day, before the pandemic in Pebble Beach.
Yeah.
We gave you guys the treasure map. Go look at you know, 12 different restaurants, 10 different retail stores, three different hotels, three different golf courses, three different salon and spas. It's all different software. It all talks to each other. there's only, you know, a handful of gateways in, you know, in the world that have, you know, in our case, over 500 different software integrations across, again, like 20-plus years of version history that allow you to respond to those customers. That's what gives us a strong right to win within our, what we call our high-growth core. It's the confidence there to be able to continue delivering growth. I mean, the 40%- 50%, you know, year-over-year volume growth was happening, you know, well prior to the pandemic.
When you normalize for the year-over-year growth during the pandemic, you're right there, and we've continued to do it now emerging from it.
Right.
That's confidence from high-growth core. It's what allows you to be able to invest in the new verticals that are now obviously yielding quite well.
Right. That could, you could take that internationally as well.
Oh, yeah.
SkyTab is another area that I think we're excited about for this year. You guys did a great demonstration of that, I think about three, four months ago in New York that we were at. When we think about what that is, I mean, it looks a lot like other big, like Toast, obviously, right? It looks a lot like other, you know, great restaurant software, payback type models. You know, talk about it a little bit. You had 10,000 locations, if I remember correctly, last quarter already in a very short amount of time.
Yeah. I mean, keep in mind also, like we do touch about a third of the restaurants in this country right now. That, you know, that 10,000 number is not actually from upgrading existing ones. It's really just in a very short period of time, you know, net new demand out there. It's like, obviously we have a lot of expertise in restaurants. We've been growing in this space since 2005. That was our first entry into integrated payments. Like reality right now is there's two really great companies that are gonna win continue to win a lot of share in restaurants. I think people underappreciate, you know, how many merchants are using, you know, legacy solutions, older Windows-based systems, you know, that are very costly.
They don't talk to Grubhub or Uber Eats or DoorDash very well or drive loyalty and such. Right now, if you have a good product, as Toast and Shift4 has, and you have good distribution coverage, it's just a matter of time before you're walking into a restaurant who's pissed off in the moment, which is very easy to do because the previous generation of payments companies that had a lot of share of restaurants, you know, have been like abusing the hell out of them from a fee growth perspective. Reality is like a lot of merchants are migrating to a more cloud-based solution. The truth of it all is when they do migrate, like all generally does the same thing.
There isn't anything earth-shattering happening with how you ring up a cheeseburger. They all generally do the same thing in that regard. It's kinda how you choose to differentiate with your sizzle features. You know, capital offerings, payroll, kind of appeal to new, generally new merchants. You know, we try and Our software, for example, SkyTab, is not module-based. Like you get free online ordering, free marketplace, free loyalty, and we try and target a little bit more upmarket. You know, in general, I think between us and Toast, like the end of the year, we're both gonna continue to add a lot of customers.
I think where we try and have a little bit of an advantage is a little bit of a much lower customer acquisition cost 'cause we can leverage a huge network of existing customers to create referrals, versus like just a lot of digital marketing and such.
There's so much to talk about and not enough time, I'll start to move a little more quickly now. The gateway conversion, I think you still have $150 billion plus of volume that you're not really full stack on. You have a captive audience here from the, you know, back from the acquisition you made a few years ago, right? Thinking about that volume conversion, there's been pricing strategies around it now. You've always talked about converting, I think, around, we always thought around 5%-7% a year. You know, talk about that. Talk about the conversion versus the pricing strategy now and what you anticipate for the year ahead of us.
Yeah, sure. The objective is really compelling the conversation. As much as we'd love to say that this is the first priority of every hotelier and restaurateur waking up every morning, their payments company isn't necessarily especially if it's working well. You know, we had a tough time during the pandemic. I think that's lost on a lot of investors. We grew payment volume really nicely in hotels and in restaurants during the pandemic, but it was not easy to compel people to have these types of conversations.
Yeah.
As we kinda exited the pandemic, we said we were gonna prioritize a bunch of ways to, as Jared likes to say, make the phone ring. We were gonna implement pricing strategy. We were gonna look at connections that were noneconomic and say, you know, "We're just shutting this off. This doesn't make good sense." It's perpetuated a wave of customers that pick up the phone and wanna have that conversation. I'd say it's increasingly effective as well with the enterprises that now truly understand our priorities. There's no ambiguity about the fact that we don't wanna be a gateway on these economic terms for these customers, and that our end-to-end solution is a much better option.
It compels kind of a really steady number of customers to reach out to us, and to accept our call in any given month or quarter. That sustains growth. It tops off the funnel, as Jared likes to say. You do get a little bit of lumpiness as these enterprises start to engage in the dialogue, but that's a good thing.
In terms of timing on that, I mean, we used to think, again, about 5%, 6% of the gateway conversion per year. Should we think about that differently now given the approach?
I wouldn't say that we target a percentage like that. We target, you know, a portion of the customers that we wanna interact with at any given time. One thing that we've been more adamant about and to contrast it to the IPO, I think is a good way to do it. We're simply saying the economics are gonna be fair for the services we're providing, and we're gonna implement that in reasonable increments over the next several years. It should compel the conversation more quickly. It should accelerate end-to-end conversions, which is all great. But we're content with a customer that says, "I'm willing to pay you more for the service in the short term.
Speaking of gateway, I mean, you talked about a big hospitality win that you had that could add billions of dollars. I don't know if that was a gateway customer or not already. Either way, I mean, maybe you could touch on why you won that and what the opportunity there is.
It's usually, I mean, Our offering is actually quite standard. You know, we try and keep things simple and take the parts out. We provide free devices for hotels. We provide, like, lifetime swaps and replacements. If the PCI Council were to determine that this version of Ingenico device is no longer compatible, we'll swap them all out. We eliminate our gateway fees because now we're monetizing entirely through spread on processing services. We'll cut good deals, like with our restaurant products. Most hotels have, you know, some restaurant or lobby bar in it.
It's generally a very, you know, standard offering, the idea being prior to us acquiring these gateways, which was actually, you know, more than five years now, it'll almost be six years since we bought Shift4. The hotel industry just worked with five vendors, you know. This is my gateway provider, this is my processor, this is the acquirer. I'm buying devices here, and this is the company that's gonna do the encryption and installation. It's just a lot of hands in pies.
Yeah.
A lot of finger pointing. You don't have that one throat to choke, and it costs more. This customer is just a matter of getting around to it. As Taylor mentioned, you know, hotels went from having, like, the worst years, like in modern history to some of the best years. You know, your payments provider who maybe can help improve things like on the order of like, I don't know, 30, 40 basis points isn't the highest priority when you're getting, like, these astronomical room rates. People always ask, you know, "Well, you started with $200 billion in gateway volume. Like, why isn't it all there?" It's like, well, first of all, it's a lot of commerce, and they have a lot of things to do other than talk to a payments company.
The fact that about 50% of our production, you know, over the last five years has come from gateway customers migrating over to steady pace has always been just good and fine. Sometimes, you know, with the larger hospitality operators especially, either their staff was furloughed in 2020, you know, in 2021 or in 2022, they were busy as hell. Actually a lot of the bigger enterprise customers are literally just getting around to having those conversations that you've been trying to have for years.
Got it.
You know, you're booking a lot of nice wins from it.
Look, we don't have that much more time. I'll try to put it all. If we could just do a quick overview of the other verticals you're excited about, maybe the priorities and what you see having the most success. Whether it's stadiums, you know, gaming, nonprofit, sexy tech, there's a lot that you guys are doing. A quick roundup.
The thing I'd say is like the investments into new verticals began in 2021. That was all part of, okay, we're public now. We got to do more than restaurants and hotels. We did a lot of it organically, the results really started to show in the second half of 2022. I guess the message is the table is really nicely set now. As Nancy pointed out, you know, when BetMGM adds four more states because now they've got regulatory approval, they don't have to hire more people to support those states for BetMGM. We just throw the switch. We're certainly the category leader in sports entertainment. A lot of the, you know, all the best NFL teams are on Shift4.
When they decide to add ticketing, you don't have to go do an install at the stadium. You don't need to hire more people in overhead. Now you just get, you know, potentially double the volume from that same customer. They're all starting to scale really nicely. E-commerce, great example. Big customer decides to go into some new states, or they just recently raised the cost of satellite subscription service by 20%. Get a lot of nice benefits from that, if you're processing those payments. I think like sports entertainment will still be, you know, in terms of really awesome logos in our earnings stack and be very visible if you go to stadiums. It's probably gonna have the most momentum, I think, going this year. Still international expansion to support our e-commerce customers, pretty high priority for us.
Great. Well, we're almost out of time. Guys, any other questions you wanna ask?
With SkyTab, when we think about the go-to-market strategy, can you share with us how, you know, you guys are prioritizing net new merchants as versus cross-selling to existing merchants?
Yeah. Repeat the question real quick.
The question was, you know, how are we prioritizing upgrading kind of our legacy restaurant customers versus net new wins with SkyTab? The answer is it's been almost all net new wins. Recognizing the climate we're in, a lot of rightful attention towards margin, free cash flow. If we're upgrading existing customers, you're gonna know it because CapEx can go up 'cause you're deploying a lot of hardware, and you're not getting any associated revenue lift 'cause you already had the payments. When we take 10,000, oh man, it's almost all net new customers. We will for retention purposes, for sure. If somebody's on an older Windows-based POS system and they're thinking about leaving, like we'll put them at the top of the list for SkyTab.
Our goal, because it does unlock a lot of efficiencies. We have 2,300 employees. A lot of them are most labor intense customer is a small restaurant who calls in for a lot of things. It is in our interest over a multi-year period of time to consolidate our restaurant customer base on SkyTab. It has to be done in an orderly way. We gotta budget it out because, you know, it's not as easy to, like, immediately quantify the cost, the cost savings from doing it. For now, almost everything is just net new customers.
Any other questions? Let me just quickly wrap up with one last one on M&A. I mean, you obviously have done a handful of really good deals. What's on the horizon?
Jared emphasized this, but the number one priority is international expansion. That's where we're spending the bulk of our time. We do keep a team dedicated to looking at M&A. You know, at any given time, regardless of the cycle, we've got kinda 70 odd things that we think are potentially interesting.
Yeah.
I'd say the climate looks really good right now. Like the number of parties willing to have a good conversation are as high as they've ever been. It's always hard to handicap getting something done, especially in volatile climates like this. I'd say, it's an incredibly constructive environment for M&A.
Excellent. Guys, thank you very much. It's great to have you with us.