Good afternoon, everyone. I am Rayna Kumar, and I lead US Payment Processors and IT Services Equity Research at UBS. Today, I'm fortunate to be joined by the entire Shift4 Payments management team, including CEO Jared Isaacman, President and Chief Strategy Officer Taylor Lauber, and CFO Nancy Disman. Thanks for joining me.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Yeah. So, I'm gonna start with probably the most obvious question, 'cause I've been getting a lot of questions about this morning. What are your thoughts on taking the company private?
Sure. Geez, I think that, I mean, I would think the first question, had some news not broke on that, would have been about the, the supposed, cyberattacks we inflicted on MGM and Caesars yesterday. I mean, here's the answer with it, and forgive me, because that's—like, some of that trauma from yesterday is still with me a little bit. You know, since we were here a year ago, and forgive my approximations, we've grown volume over 60%. I think we grew EBITDA over 60%. I think free cash flow was 120% year-over-year. And our multiples contracted five turns. And it's not like last year things were booming from a valuation perspective. So we've been l ike, we're at, like, I think nine times on a next 12 months basis from an EBITDA perspective. So the fact that there were inquiries probably coming in throughout the year is valid. If I take into consideration the trauma of yesterday, which, you know, forgive my channeling my inner Pulp Fiction, but what happened yesterday was a travesty, and somebody's got to acknowledge it. I would say, like, the interest is so much more sincere to have one partner versus thousands, because I don't know how to describe yesterday other than, like, outright market manipulation. We spent the whole day fielding questions that we somehow were responsible for the cyberattacks on MGM and Caesars, when had absolutely nothing to do with it.
Our market cap yesterday of, like, 7.5% was greater than the combined market cap drop in absolute dollars between Caesars and MGM, and they're the actual ones that had a cyberattack, let alone the fact we had nothing to do with it whatsoever and had, like, no impact on our business. So yeah, I would say, like, there's some sincere interest in alternatives.
Understood. And so, just to be clear, no financial impact from-
Just to be on that, they're not even a customer.
We said we've only had-
Okay.
We had half the Las Vegas Strip, which was not MGM. BetMGM is a customer of ours, which, like, we get the scraps that Braintree leaves behind because they price it at zero. So, like, BetMGM is a customer of ours. That wasn't even impacted as far as we know, about whatever's happened with BetMGM. Caesars probably represents, like, 25 basis points of our EBITDA on an annual basis. My understanding is they may have had an outage for, you know, a day or two that had actually nothing to do with payments. So as far as I know, that was business as usual.
No, that's a fair point. All right, moving on from the news of yesterday and this morning. We're now halfway through September. What have you seen in terms of growth in your core business so far in the third quarter? And can you comment on progress you're making in new verticals?
Yeah, I mean, everything is going very, very well. It's like, you know, if we were to break it down by vertical, we have a ton of momentum with our SkyTab product right now, so I think you should expect a Q3 will probably give you the one-year comparison from when we came out of beta till now. I probably shouldn't be shocked, there's some good momentum around that product. Hotels continue to come on. I think we've won every new resort that's been built in this country over the last year. So that wasn't even a gateway conversion, that's net new, including the two new signature properties in Vegas, which go online in the Q4 . Stadiums have been awesome.
Probably for the past year now, every stadium we've put in the agreement that, you know, you have to give us ticketing. We just needed to get the final three integrations done or the final integration of Ticketmaster done, which was a huge one. So that's been inked, and I think that's pretty close, if not finished, with Ticketmaster, so that's awesome. Yeah, we're, like, incredibly happy. T hen obviously, Finaro, which is great because we finally will be able to sell our products in Europe soon. So yeah, I'd say we're, like, pretty, pretty happy with how things are going.
Great. You just alluded to some of the pricing pressure that we're seeing, and, you know, with the news of, you know, Adyen's growth slowing in North America, several weeks ago, what do you like, what is your pricing strategy going forward? How should we think about your spreads?
Yeah. I mean, I think this is important for people, investors to understand right now. It's like if you're growing volume, you are adding value more than approval or decline. You are contributing to some better commerce experience, and that's why people are selecting you. You know, like, again, I've used the example before, like, you know, Shopify can't come and contribute a better mobile payment experience inside, you know, the Baltimore Ravens any more than we can give, like, a seamless e-commerce experience for their customers. Like, there are some very, very clear moats, and you are getting kind of properly rewarded based on the size of the customer. That said, like, the bigger the volume customer, the pricing can come down quite a bit.
It's just like, it is as Taylor-- It's like some laws of physics there. Like, you know, if you sell a 1% interest in the Baltimore Ravens, it costs an awful lot. They're not giving them 50 basis points, you know, very easily, but what they do care about is making it an awesome experience for their fans to be able to order a beer and a burger in their seat. So, you know, we're a 24-year-old company, 17+ of those years, you know, focusing on the restaurant on Main Street. That's like an 80-90 basis customer, those take rates have been unchanged throughout, like, my, all of my, you know, memory over the last more than a decade, even as you add more value, such like software and such.
But, you know, a customer like potentially the Dallas Cowboys, they're going to come in at a meaningfully lower take rate than that. Now, what happened with Adyen, like, you have to-- I think there's some very unique circumstances there. Adyen is hands down the best global e-commerce payments company in the world. They value in Europe and emerging markets like nobody else does. They are the button for every awesome customer, like an Amazon, Facebook or whatnot in the world. But the U.S. is going to be the lowest take rates for sure. And when those merchants woke up earlier this year, you know, and started doing layoffs, and people cared about more than just the top line, it made sense that they went back and revisited the easy button in the US market, where there's no FX, no fraud screen, no 3D Secure.
It's like this is an end market that can be priced really low, that, that happened. But that doesn't change the rest of the world. And frankly, you know, if people were paying attention, we said this in Q3 last year when we surprised people with a lot of volume and said, "We match Adyen rates for this one customer." And you know, that's like, you know, kind of take rates, but it's better everywhere else in the world. That's why we're following that customer into new markets, and when we get there, we're not trying to do it to win the next Uber. We're just going to sign up a lot of restaurants and hotels when we get there.
Yeah. I think it's safe to say that you are frustrated with how investors are viewing-
I'm trying to-
Your business and your stock right now. What do you think investors are missing about your story? And I'd also love to hear from Taylor since she's been with you for a long time.
Wonderful.
I think there's a handful of pieces. We are a complex business because we serve a lot of verticals, and the idea that each vertical has its own different dynamics that help us win can sometimes be consolidated down to a simplistic story. You know, we've had, you know, exponential volume growth because we keep adding bigger and bigger customers in bigger and bigger verticals, you know. 17 years of our history, we boarded, you know, the bar and grill on the corner, and suddenly we're boarding, as Jared mentioned, you know, the Baltimore Ravens, the Washington Commanders. These customers are fundamentally different. The reasons we're winning them are fundamentally different.
I think that can get lost and kind of commingled into a story that, you know, it's growth at all, which has been, you know, to investors' credit, has been a dangerous story in the fintech landscape. I think where we get sort of a little bit frustrated is, I think we've delivered kind of best-in-class growth, but also an incredibly disciplined profit machine and free cash flow generation, expansion, et cetera. And, you know, in the investment community, there's not always a perfect home for both high growth and cash flow generation. People seem to want one or the other, and oddly, delivering both, which is something that is just intuitive to us as a founder-led business, sometimes takes a little bit of time to find a home for.
Yeah. Look, I mean, if I'm like, chill out, just zoom out, which I try and do and have like an objective view, I think that for the last, like, three years has been an incredibly turbulent time to be a fintech investor. From a period of, like, can do no wrong, like, throw the dart at the board, and I'm sure it's a great company, to, like, now, where it's super hard to figure it out, right? I think people woke up a lot of days and found out that, you know, some of the investments, like, behind it, like, these companies were ludicrous and, like, completely mismanaged investor capital and on how they did it. So I understand some degree of skepticism as you go through it.
I'd like to think we actually have delivered really well and tried to point out along the way, like, when things came up, like, you know, great payments companies don't do M&A. Like, okay, there's only one scale payments company that's never done M&A, and they just lost 60% of their value in a matter of a week. It's like, actually, there's a convergence between software and payments going on all over the world. There's exciting opportunities to be a good capital allocator and unlock value in it, right? Or it's like, Oh, well, you have, you know, your tech is old. It's like, well, the sexy tech company just had a 24-hour outage, so I don't know if that's necessarily, like, the right way to be evaluating, like, the good and bad.
So generally speaking, I think, like, we've tried to deliver really well over time. Like, we have a playbook that's worked for a very long time. We recognize the convergence that's happening with integrated payments and where there's awesome opportunities for the continued convergence of software and payments all over the world. You're just trying to do it without having your entire day ruined over things that have nothing, nothing to do with us.
Got it. Okay, that's really helpful. And just to bring Nancy into the conversation, one thing I hear about Shift4 is investors want more transparency in the financial accounting. Some people question customer acquisition costs and advertisement. Maybe if you can just, like, help clear that up, because I get the question a lot on your accounting, and you're obviously fairly new, and you've signed off on those accounting practices. So could you just explain why Shift4 does some of those that are different from your competitors and any transparency you can add in?
For sure.
Yeah.
So first I'd say I'm new to Shift4 as CFO. You know, I think probably many people know I was the audit committee chair before joining the company, so not new to the accounting practices, not new to kind of the, the company story. And I would argue that we are incredibly, I don't know if you guys can hear me. I would definitely argue that we are incredibly transparent. I actually think some of the criticism that we get is unfairly because we overcommunicate.
I think whether that's in our 10-Q or in our footnotes, or in these types of settings. I step back from it and say, where we spend our money, whether it's CAC or equipment, the way we handle free equipment and our strategies there, are very strategic. And it is very important, I think, for investors to pull out and compare those investments, and the idea that every single one of them is tied to a dollar spent for a customer we already have won, versus, let's say, our competitors that are spending multi-millions of dollars on digital advertising and hoping they will come. So the idea of taking the cost and counting them over the life of, you know, the relationships that we have found.
Frankly, I feel very comfortable. I certainly wouldn't have taken this job coming off the board if I wasn't incredibly, you know, confident in the company's accounting practices and with a stellar team or, you know, obviously take this incredibly seriously. And I think the scrutiny is just part of maybe this story that's just out there. You know, I think kind of it—I would almost put it in the same pile of stuff that Jared kind of went on about. Like, I just think it's unfair criticism at this point to a company that I think it's pretty, pretty buttoned up and pretty transparent.
Yeah, that it's almost like there's, like, a more honorable way to win a customer. I mean, look, I think everybody knows if you ever tried to, you know, like, start a business, it's really hard to win new business, right? Like, people—yet generally speaking, merchants have, like, anything they'd rather to do than have, like, payments-related conversations. They want to bring more people in the front door and sell burgers and beers and all that kind of stuff. Like, there isn't, like, a more honorable way to have, like, customer acquisition costs. Like, oh, I'd rather you just spend $100 million a year for AdWords and bring people into the door that way. That keeps so much better than, like, buying an old POS company that has 10,000 highly sticky customers and migrate over to your platform that way.
Like, that's just called, like, having good unit economics, like, being very good capital allocators, recognizing the lifespan of the customer and how to deploy capital for the greatest return possible. So, like, giving away free hardware, and charging a little software to get 20 basis points more take rate on customers that can grow in an inflationary climate, is just being intelligent.
Yeah, I'll pile on because this is something we're clearly really passionate about. I think it's ironic because we get more criticism on the quality of our free cash flow than our competitors that have none, which is where you see a sense for the frustration. And our, you know, the entirety of what Shift4 thinks about is our unit economic model, what it costs to acquire a customer, and we are incredibly strategic and also pragmatic about our desire to acquire customers at the most attractive rate possible. Jared gave the example of doing it through M&A, buying a captive base of customers who've been sending payment volume all over the place and delivering them a better bundled solution, or going out and winning in the market.
Our gateway conversion strategy, another great example of being highly disciplined in it. The fact that we think and know that bundling the hardware, providing a sales bonus to the partner who gets the installation done in a complex environment, is a great way to get the customer over the goal line is, I think, you know, just one of the ways that we're very different from competitors who don't have these models, don't have the right incentives, and quite frankly, don't have the free cash flow, despite charging for a lot of these services.
Understood. Just staying on the competitive landscape for a little bit. Toast recently announced Toast for hotel restaurants, so they've maybe entered some of your space. Any thoughts on if you're seeing them more as you compete for hotels?
Well, they don't do hotel payments, so they don't have. They're not even. They don't even have a payments platform to integrate into. They do a merchant of record model and use other people's infrastructure. So, like, they can't actually even do hotel payments because they don't have any hotel property management system integrations. We have 550 of them. So, to be very clear, they don't compete with us for hotels, nor have they said they did. What they did is they cut a deal with Marriott for some subset of their properties to be able to sell their software and hardware into those locations and not even get payments revenue at all.
It's actually like what they've illustrated is exactly our value prop and why we win so much within the hotel vertical. They said that we get to sell our software and hardware into hotels. We have to integrate into FreedomPay, the gateway, to use JP Morgan to actually power the payments of that restaurant in that hotel. It's like super misleading, considering what portion of their revenue actually comes from payments. It would be like us putting out press releases of some of our software-only customers, of which we have many, and they're really awesome names, but we don't have any payments revenue. We don't actually disclose them as like a win until we get our number one KPI associated with it.
So, like, in the end of the time, like, to me, to look at, like, a lot of restaurants inside of hotels have old stuff. I mean, you're talking a lot of Micros and Agilysys-type software in there that is on-prem, and it is inevitable that they are gonna want to move to a more modern solution. I have no doubt, like, Toast will sell some of them, and maybe even in some of those cases, they'll actually get payments. It certainly won't be the Marriott example, that's why they had to clarify that release. From our perspective, we will win a very large share of the restaurants that are in hotels, just as we've done for X number of years. We'll also win the hotel itself, and the salon and spa, and the golf course.
So, like, I guess saying it differently, like, when both Toast and Shift4, I expect next year will be a big year for both of us in Europe, they will sign up a lot of European restaurants. We'll sign up a lot of European restaurants. We'll also sign up a lot of hotels, they won't.
Do you see any impact from their $0.99 consumer-facing fee, which they, they withdrew several weeks, several days later?
Yeah, I mean, big help. I mean, that was just like, that was a tactical mistake, right? I mean, because in the end, the actual dollars and cents of it was not that big of a deal. They just should have charged the merchant it and given them the option for the merchant to put some sort of a surcharge on the consumer rather than them go direct to the consumer. And I think that was a, you know, that was like a Silicon Valley misstep of like, I can be like an Uber here when you can't. Like, your customer is the restaurant. They will bounce back from it. They actually put in the letter, which I think is helping the sales force of Shift4 and a lot of others.
Like, we got you guys, we got the $00 .99, but we'll be back with, like, a terminator when we're done. So, like, we'll get a different rating from somewhere. And the answer, like, it made a lot of headlines. It's not going to change anything in the fact that, like, they're going to sign up a lot of restaurants. What I'd say is, like, I interpreted the last quarter or so as, like, we challenge you to put up location count growth. So I'm sure you've seen we put some fair amount of, like, we've used some of that free cash flow no one gives us credit for anyway to actually market a little bit more and put some greater referral fees in. I would expect that we'll give you an update on location count growth, positively received.
Perfect. The gateway conversion remains one of your drivers of end-to-end growth. Can you talk a little bit about how that's progressed and what your expectations are over the next year?
Yeah, there's still about $150 billion, so the payment conversions has not slowed. It's been about, it's, it's remained consistent. What I think is cool is you get, like, pockets of enterprise customers, you know, several hundred location ones that just, you know, they kind of come alive at different points in time. There were a lot of reasons over the last couple of years, whether It all comes down to, like, what's my bigger priority or problems to solve, and they had labor issues or other things that made this less of a conversation. Those come up from time to time, which is nice because that's like, those are big lifts when you move a, you know, like a multi-group location type operator. So we have a couple of those that come online in Q4, which we're, we're kind of pumped about.
But I think, like, we took a position with you guys, you know, starting a year ago, basically like, hey, we have to take our philosophies to execute or take out the parts, get rid of the old in the future. We have to get rid of some of these gateway connections, and the way we're going to do it is they're going to move over to end-to-end, or they're going to at least, if you're on a handful of connections, pay us an equivalency. I'd say we had a very soft touch the first two years on that. I think next year, a little bit more, you know, to kind of keep that migration ongoing. So I expect next year we'll, we would have even better results than this year, but it's still going really awesome.
I know this year you decided to implement basis point fees based on volume tiers, and that's different from your fixed monthly fee. Are you starting to see any reaction from merchants to that?
And like I said, the cadence remains consistent, and it really is like, it was a handful. So, like, if you see the EVOlution of a gateway customer, that was always just crazy because it was the technology that actually enabled the integrated PINs transaction. Like, they were paying, like, $0.03. So, like, our repricing EVOlution, if you will, to get more in line with, you know, the majority of the payment economics, which we think we're entitled to for the service we're providing, it was, like, $0.03, then, like, $0.03+ like, $30 a month, which would have been like, call it last year's kind of story, to like, you know, $0.03, $30 a month and, like, three or four basis points type thing, depending on the size of the customer, right?
The answer is, like, we doubled your room rate, you know, from $400- $1,200 a night. That didn't make the phone ring very much. So, you know, it's good. It has like, you know, I'd say, like, it certainly didn't have the effect that, you know, maybe like, as we're trying to march on a journey to, you know, 40-50 basis points would have, like, when you think about the year ahead.
Lodging has been one of your fastest growing verticals, and I'm always amazed to hear about how many wins you announce each quarter. In the near term, do you expect the lodging to become a bigger vertical than restaurants?
Yes, I would think we are on a pretty good pace to do that. It certainly, as a subset of our core, lodging is the fastest growing lane for us.
Yeah, it doesn't take many hotels to eclipse a restaurant. And, you know, our hotels range in volume, you know, a Best Western in middle America doing $1 million in volume to, at the highest end, you know, a large resort doing $200 million in volume. So, from a volume perspective, it will absolutely be our largest vertical in the short term. Keep in mind, 40% of the hotels in the country use us as a gateway, and a small fraction of that are currently end-to-end customers. I think we want, you know, most of the hotels in Nantucket just, you know, last month as a result of our gateway conversion strategy. They've been on the gateway for a while, as just one example.
So, the spreads come in modestly lower, which you'd expect given the multitude of volume. So I don't want to comment too explicitly on the revenue contribution, but, you know, in terms of volume contribution, hotels will be, you know, really significant. They continue to grow. I mean, what it used to be kind of the majority of our business, 80%+ being coming from restaurants. Now it is much closer to an equivalency in hotels and restaurants today.
I always get tons of questions on stadiums, and obviously, that's another very strong area of focus for. What do you think is driving those wins? And maybe just talk about the competitive environment. I know Global competes in the stadium market. Who else is there, and what do you think you do better than these players?
Okay. I mean, I feel like-
Take it.
I feel like I'm on the bad guy trap, so just keep going. Look, if you, if you, if you have a stadium in your hometown and you're - you want to put up your, like, you can write a big enough sponsorship check where they'll forgo a lot... where is the easy one to, you know, concede? It's like the concession stands. It's - there's only, like, five or so different, like, menu choices, pretzel, hot dog, beer. So like, you know, you can put in 500 Clovers. I mean, like, not like - it's not like they needed 400, but they went for 500 anyway. Like, it's probably however many concession stands they had in the joint.
What I would say is that actually driving the decision-making of stadiums, if you think about the mentality of these team owners and what they care about with their fan base, it's like a cool experience. So every stadium we have won since our first, which was Raiders Stadium, so that's kind of a separate story of how we got into that one, it's entirely driven off mobile. So patrons want to order a burger and a beer in their seats. That's what starts the conversation, and you leverage that to get the concession stands, the suites, the retail merchandise store, the parking, and then, like, you know, the best-case scenario out of that is ticketing, which for the last year is, like, we've embedded in our agreement, it's like, you'll just do it.
So, so like that, that has, like, a whole pipeline in itself of as contracts fall off, we'll just turn on ticketing, which is huge because it's like 3x-5x the volume, and probably 3x the take rates. All right, maybe that's a little much, but it's a, it's a, it's definitely a healthy step up versus concession stands. So like, to be clear, like, that's what's driving, you know, the, the stadiums to move very quickly to Shift4, and we have a total, like, demand problem there. Like, that is, how many installs can you get done before the season starts? That's not an issue, because we are the only one that under one roof has the payment platform, the suites, the restaurant, the mobile ordering, the concessions, and the retail and parking integration.
So I don't think that'll slow down, but if you write a big enough check every now and then, you know, one or two will maybe make a bad choice for some period of time.
Yeah, I just want to maybe address it in a slightly more technical way. From a competitive landscape standpoint, in terms of who can provide a similar experience to our sports and entertainment customers, there is nobody, period, full stop. What Jared mentioned, whether it's mobile ordering, concessions, you know, sit-down restaurants, integrations to anything else they might want in their environment. In Las Vegas, they have nightclubs, part of the stadium. It's just one bespoke example of a process we can serve for them, a nd adding on ticketing differentiates us even that much further.
So while, you know, it's fair to argue that you can get a little bit confused looking at one provider of one service inside of a stadium like this, there is nobody that can do the breadth of services, which I think is why you're seeing the win rates that you are. We're kind of taking what we've done in hotels, which is really pioneer a much more sophisticated and bundled go-to-market for these big, complex customers in a way that no one else can.
Do you still expect to narrow the close of one in the third quarter?
Yeah, I think that we've been on the to be like, look , you know, to be fair, take responsibility for where it's applicable. We weren't super clear in Q2 earnings as to, like, what the exact timing contribution was for Finaro. We tried to give ourselves some wiggle room, and I don't think we helped ourselves too much on that. So, like, let me be very specific for, like, the sake of clearing on, you know, non-public information. We have been on the shot clock, so the way the regulatory process works there is they spend 18 months to get the application complete, which is like the background checks and financials on every board member and executive in the company.
Then they declare an application complete, they have to decision it within 60 days. So we have been existing in that environment, which gives us very high confidence as to, you know, the timeline to close. I think October first would be a nice date for, especially for the sake of Nancy and her team's finance and accounting department. If you're going to own a bank, might be a good idea to start it on the first day in the first quarter of the first quarter. Finaro is. And again, to take, like, let's clear up too, Finaro is a much better business today than we bought it. And I've said that before, but let me give you some specificity around it. We announced the deal, like, 18 months ago.
We said, like, "We think this is a $30 million EBITDA business," but keep in mind, you know, they've been historically taking some customers that we don't want, and we have 18 months of oversight in this business. We have ushered a lot of those out, and now what you have, like, when this closes, you're talking before any kind of cost synergies and other optimization we do, it's a $45 million run rate EBITDA business, and a third of which represents customers that were, that were already Shift4's, that we've been kind of working with them on over this prolonged regulatory process to get them going in Europe and receiving no financial benefit from.
Now, you, if we'd known it was an 18-month process, maybe we would have worked out rep shares or something so that you could have seen some of this performance flowing through. But look, this is a business now that's ready to do lots of, is doing lots of card-present transactions, and we're ready to start lighting up a lot of hotel and restaurants in Europe, which is why we did the deal. But more importantly than that, like, some big customers we already have, have been live in that environment and successful for a pretty, pretty prolonged period of time right now.
Got it. I have two questions for Nancy, and then I want to open up the floor for any questions. We will have a mic going around, so feel free to raise your hand if you have anything. So, Nancy, how should we think about the margin profile of Shift4 after 2023?
Well, obviously, our plan will certainly be to give a lot more priority when we report ER and results on kind of confirming the mid-term that we put out that we feel great about, and we know we owe you some bridges there. But I think there is room for margin expansion beyond obviously this most recent raise and kind of where we're going to exit this year. And it really comes from our function as, you know, what I look at as incredibly positive differ which I know with a lower blended spread, people initially say, like, that feels negative until you understand that it's right. And we change the profile, and as we move it, we will see that those customers is going to require more than an end-to-end, greater customer conversion. And so that isn't going to change.
The mix of the business is going to continue to move upmarket. The second piece of that is we, it kind of goes back to what Jared said. The opposite, we kind of have the opposite of that effect, where we're in the U.S., right? So all of the kind of upsized blended spreads and the greater margin opportunities are really what we know across well and built internationally. And so being that we're going to do that, it will help us where the rich spreads are, what you're going to get as an international kind of element with APM. You know, we expect to see similar margin expectations.
You've been in the seat for several months as CFO. Any changes to your capital allocation prior?
I think we've been incredibly clear and to the, you know, international is our one priority. I just want to reiterate that we think we're really great capital allocators. You know, this idea of finding captive volume, you know, that we can convert to end-to-end, that's going to continue to be the company's, you know, priority going forward.
Got it. Okay. We can open up the floor now for questions. If anyone has anything, please raise your hand.
It's been in a year.
Sorry, a year, yeah.
A year this March.
What a year it's been. It feels like.
Well, I'm surprised no questions after that. Okay, well, I guess we'll have more. Would love to hear just what you're most excited about, Jared, in the coming months, and, you know, what keeps you up at night?
What am I excited about? That's good. All right, we're like back, you know, kinda back to the business. Closing Finaro will be great. It was an 18-month journey in getting restaurants and hotels going in Europe. So the more time we've spent in Europe over the last, you know, I, I, the, the last year and change, like, it is amazing that it looks just like the payments landscape here in the U.S. in, like, 2014. Like, it is right at the Mercury Payment, like, Square early days, which is awesome, because, like, we literally watched that unfold and, you know, during that time, we had to kind of like sequence our strategy out to, you know, to really lean into the integrated payments time.
Like, you know, we had a PE sponsor, we had a lot of leverage, so we had to pick and choose our battles. Now, we can look at the European landscape and be like, "Well, we know exactly what this looks like when you have hardware, software, and payments on different sides of the street, all walking into, like, the restaurant and hotel separately." It is largely a non-integrated environment. So even when you're in Europe and you go to a restaurant, and they bring the mobile device over to the table, that's nothing like what Toast and Shift4 have in the U.S. That's not order, table, or pay table. It's truly like a bank terminal, like an EVO terminal, not talking to the POS. And the same goes applicable inside the hotels when you check in.
Like, they are pulling up your reservation in the computer for sure, and then they're punching in the number into, like, a largely non-integrated terminal. So you're talking about, like, an environment that's super ripe, and now we'll have a European platform ready to go with our existing integration in the U.S., which is like Opera, Agilysys, all our hotel systems, like the power of the hotel, not Toast, is actually ready to be turned on in Europe. And like, SkyTab is ready to go into Europe. So those are all, like, pretty cool because we thought about, you know, what it'd be like to be a global player for, you know, more than a decade, and now we're really at the cusp of it.
So I think, I think it's hard not to say that, like, Finaro closing and being able to begin that next leg of the journey isn't, you know, in Europe, isn't, you know, pretty, pretty exciting. So... And we also have another, like, really awesome customer that I remind myself of time. Like, they themselves could be like a $10 billion a year customer at some point. So like that, I find, like, you know, pretty good satisfaction following them, too, around the world.
What worries you the most?
What worries us the most right now? Whatever the next rumor is that gets floated crushes productivity. I don't know.
For much of your time running Shift4, you've actually ran it as a private company. So hypothetically, if you were to go private again, what would potentially change in Shift4's strategy versus being a public company?
Everything would be better. I mean, look, when we, especially when we talked about for the last year, our capital allocation priority is, is largely internationally focused, and that is following a customer we, we don't deserve to have, but we do, and it's going to take us through these markets profitably so we can do all the other stuff in those, in those regions. Like, you do look towards M&A as a means to accelerate your entry into certain markets or accelerate your growth in particular verticals. And, and like, it's pretty smart to use, like, to have, like, equity alignment with those type of, you know, targets because they're on the other side of the ocean. You want them thinking the same way you think about it.
As a private company right now, you look at our cap guys and takers, would anyone really, like, argue to say that we would be equity in this idea at, like, a valuation double where we're at today? And would they be pushing back? Probably not. So like, that's an incredibly costly aspect of, I think, being a public business right now. But like, we are like, I mean, I would say, like, we are very well equipped to operate, I think, in either environment. We like our strategy, so I guess we'll just leave it at that.
Yeah, so just to highlight, in the first 15 years of the company's history, there was no outside capital. Again, I think the Fintech label comes with a lot of connotations, like series A, B's never happened inside the company. So, the idea that you need to, you know, self-fund your something we've always lived by. The Capital Markets, you know, have been with us from time to time. They're very painful today. They're certainly not needed to execute against our strategy. And, you know, it's just a constant balance of whether it's too much of a distraction and cost versus the opportunity it presents. And I think you're hearing Jared's sentiment on where that scale exists today. But from a strategy standpoint, you know, and I think, you know, we've mentioned this for over a year now, the distraction factor is becoming an increasingly heavy element on that end of the scale.
Understood. Okay, well, we'll end it here since we're out of time. Thank you, Jared, Taylor, and Nancy. Very insightful and interesting meeting.
Thank you.