About over the long run. We don't expect a significant impact in 2019, but our new business in Africa and planned second quarter launch in Canada are exciting given the size and potential of these markets. Similarly, we're excited about the early-stage launching of our general purpose reloadable card, which adds value and utility to our customers. Lastly, we are clearly a growth company, but we do not expect material marginal leverage in the near term. We are forward-thinking and are excited about developing a number of initiatives that will lay the foundation for sustained revenue and income growth over time. With that, let me go ahead and turn the call over to Tony to review our financial results in greater detail. Tony?
Thanks, Bob. Let's turn to slides eight and nine and review our fourth quarter metrics. As Bob noted, we had another strong quarter. The number of transactions grew 26% for the quarter. Recall from our previous commentary that May was our first month with more than 2 million transactions. With our continued growth and strong performance, we completed the year with over 24 million transactions, averaging just over 2 million per month for the full year 2018. Volume growth for the quarter of 29% outpaced transaction growth as average send amounts increased over the prior year. Revenue growth of 27% for the quarter was driven by the combination of transaction growth and volume growth. Fourth quarter adjusted EBITDA grew approximately 35% over last year and 41% over the full year, outpacing revenue growth as we realized operating leverage through scale benefits and savings from our efficiency initiatives.
Lastly, we'd note that there are reconciliations from GAAP net loss to adjusted EBITDA at the end of this presentation for your reference. Turning to guidance on the next slide. Let's review first 2018. We delivered $47.1 million of adjusted EBITDA, which was right in line with our last estimate of $46.5 million-$48 million and well ahead of our initial guidance of $40.1 million. We truly out-delivered against our expectations from the beginning of the year, thanks to strong execution and some market tailwinds. Lastly, on slide 11, I'd like to close the prepared remarks with the introduction of our 2019 financial guidance. Our view for full year 2019 revenue is a range of $320 million-$330 million, and adjusted EBITDA of $54 million-$58 million, which implies respective growth of 18% and 19% over the full year 2018.
As I've said previously, we expect margins to be relatively flat year-over-year as we continue to focus on the growth opportunities we see. I'd like to note here that due to the front-loading of some marketing and technology investments, EBITDA growth is expected to be lower in the beginning of the year and accelerate in subsequent quarters. Additionally, we do not currently expect much impact in 2019 from our incremental growth initiatives in new markets like Africa or Canada or our new product features like the GPR card. We will, of course, update you as we achieve more critical mass there. With that, I'll end by saying that we're excited to have had another great quarter and year and even more excited about our prospects for continued growth in 2019. With that, let me turn it back over to the operator to open your line for your questions.
Great. Thank you. At this time, we will be conducting a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two if you'd like to move your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment please while we poll for questions. Our first question is from Jason Deleeuw from Piper Jaffray. Please go ahead.
Hi, guys, thanks for taking the question, and congratulations on a strong 2018 and start as a public company. The first question is just on thinking about the revenue growth for 2019 and just some of the key drivers and how you're thinking about that versus the past year, and then also just the view on the growth you're expecting from the stronghold states versus the growth markets.
Okay. Well, we expect continued growth in the stronghold states. By the way, this is Bob Lisy. In 2018, we continued to expand our market share in the stronghold states and grew faster in those states than the market did overall. Probably about twice the rate of the market. Mexico, as you know, grew about 10%. Although we believe we grew right about 36% or 3.5x the market rate in the growth states. We think more of the same. There's still tremendous untapped opportunity for us west of the Mississippi, but also in areas like Illinois and New York and the Northeast. States that were later states for us to enter as Intermex expanded, and as a result, the level of market penetration and thus market share is lower in those states.
They continue to be some of our fastest growers with a huge amount of greenfield. We look at our business a lot based on how many vacant zip codes are there that we're either underperforming down to the market share of the zip code or those where we're not present at all. The abundance of those opportunities for us in places in the West, like California, Texas, or even in states like Illinois, are still tremendous. We think that we have many years of growth ahead of us in those areas and opportunities to, in some cases, in some of those states, quite large states, to be able to double and triple our current volume, which have a tremendous impact on the business overall.
While we're doing all that, we'll see our stronghold states continue to grow faster than the market grows and continue to gain more share there of our already strong market share in the current stronghold states.
That's great. In thinking about the revenue guidance for this year, what are some of the puts and takes as you think about the growth rates for this year versus last year? What about the cadence? How should we be thinking about revenue growth kind of quarter-over-quarter? Because I think some quarters were stronger last year. I just want to make sure we're kind of all on the same page on thinking about the quarterly cadence, too. Thank you.
Yeah, sure. Hi, this is Tony. I'll tell you that the trends that we saw through 2018 are going to continue through 2019, and that is while we're still having very strong transaction growth and volume growth, our expansion into countries that are not Mexico or Guatemala are going to be faster than Mexico and Guatemala, just based on the relative size and the growth opportunity that we have there. I think we've told you in the past that those states or those countries have lower margin opportunity, and that kind of depresses revenue growth just a little bit relative to transaction or volume growth. From an EBITDA perspective, of course, we make that up through operating efficiencies. From a cadence perspective, we see a pretty steady cadence of revenue growth through the year.
You have to keep in mind that in 2018, we had a big spike in the second quarter and the beginning of the third as the average send amount went way up, coincident with the devaluation of the peso in the kind of May, June, July timeframe. Assuming that doesn't happen again, we would see perhaps a little bit slower growth this year in those months year-over-year, but otherwise pretty stable growth.
All right, great. Very helpful. Thank you.
Our next question is from David Scharf from JMP Securities. Please go ahead.
Good afternoon. Thanks for taking my questions. Hey, Bob, obviously the volume numbers, both transaction and remittance speak for themselves, but I would be remiss if I didn't ask, like I did a quarter ago, whether there's anything anecdotal you may be seeing domestically in terms of the slowdown in housing construction and whether that has any impact on foot traffic into your units.
Yeah, I mean.
I assume a good portion is construction.
Well, we've been tracking that. As we've talked about before, there are really at least three main components to the business. The agricultural component, which is typically always going to be stable. There's not a big variance in the amount of vegetables and fruit that's picked. There's a service industry which certainly can have some variance, and then housing and construction. We're seeing housing construction go down a bit, and we would see that typically that can have some impact on the business overall. We're also seeing that in a backdrop of a very strong economy and very high employment related to minority population. We believe that although construction has slowed a little bit, most of that is being offset today by just a stronger economy overall.
As a result, we've been seeing all the way through December timeframe, we were seeing Mexico year-over-year volumes growing at more than 10% all the way through 2018, and Guatemala growing even faster than that. Is there a bit of a slowing that could occur in 2019? I think there could be a bit, but I think part of that will be offset by a general strong overall economy, particularly leading into an election year. We're pretty comfortable with that. There certainly wasn't any great push behind the business in fourth quarter, as we indicated before. In third, there was a bit related to the election in Mexico and the accompanying volatility of the peso. Fourth quarter was a relatively stable quarter, great comparison to the previous. As you saw, that enabled us to deliver more than 30% EBITDA growth with that quarter year-over-year.
Got it. That's helpful color. Hey, just switching to the margin outlook. My understanding is that Guatemala, in comparison to Mexico, has lower margins because there's a less liquid currency, so there's less of an FX markup opportunity. I would've thought Canada with the liquidity of its currency would potentially have, if not as much opportunity as peso, but might have something there. Maybe you can speak to the African markets that you're entering.
Sure.
Is it FX that's the primary reason why you would expect the geographic mix to result in lower margins?
Yeah, for us, there's two things that are happening, right? If you look at an apples to apples comparison, our pricing in a stronghold state, our margins have not moved much, and most of the movement that happens relative to margin in those states has a lot to do with the principal amount because they're very stable. Any movement usually has a lot to do with just sort of people sending either larger or smaller amounts of money. When you go to the West in these growth states, we're-
Typically a newer entry with less leverage. Brand is not as strongly positioned as in the East, where some of these states we have a 25%-30% market share to Mexico and 40% to Guatemala. We're not as strongly positioned. Additionally, they're much more competitive and higher velocity states, where the competition has drawn down the average margin to Mexico and Guatemala. In addition to that, though, we have some other countries that are growing, which would be a different geographical, more to sort of where is the money going. Countries like Honduras and El Salvador are growing faster for us than, say, Mexico is, and they tend to have lower margins. Along with even some other countries that are smaller for us today, but have lower margins, like Dominican Republic and Colombia.
All of those countries, because they're growing so fast, is growing at a faster rate than Mexico, and there's some degradation of our overall margin because they tend to have lower margins. You have the country mix and then also the regional mix of where the wires from where they're coming. Now, you kind of asked in that, I think, a second sort of question embedded about Canada and Africa. For us, Canada is an outbound market. We'll certainly focus on Latin America like we do with our U.S. business. In addition to that, Canada is a little bit more diverse business going to other areas of the world and will create opportunities for us to grow our business going to other corridors in addition to the corridors that we currently do to Latin America.
In many cases, Canada actually has better margins because in countries like El Salvador, for instance, or Ecuador, where their receiving payout is dollarized, there's a flip at least from a Canadian dollar to a U.S. dollar, which allows for a small FX gain, which doesn't exist in the U.S. We're excited about Canada. We think the opportunity there is probably about the size of a very large state for us. Not like a California, but maybe fully ramped up the size of what Texas would be fully ramped up. A tremendous opportunity. Very concentrated, although it's a big geographical country. Most of the business is around four or five large metro areas, we're excited about that opportunity. In the case of Africa is a receiving destination for us.
Very concentrated business in the U.S., mid-Atlantic, New York, some in California, but a lot in Texas. We're beginning to put up our agents and beginning to grow that business. We think to dimensionalize it, that business to the core countries, which a huge share of the business is Nigeria and Ghana, is probably fully sized equal to an opportunity like Guatemala. Now remember, Guatemala is a $9 billion market, that's a great market for us to tap into, where we could do several million wires a year to Africa, fully ramped.
Understood. That's helpful. Then just a couple quick cleanup ones. I'll get back in queue. I guess for Tony, can you tell us, you obviously refinanced your bank debt in the quarter, and the cost of that was included in the interest line. How much was the actual cash interest in the quarter? To give us a sense for how we should be thinking about that going forward.
Well, let me just start by, it's probably easier if you just back out the one-timers associated with the transition. You know the new rate, which is L plus 4.5% . That makes it pretty straightforward going forward. We had $5.3 million of one-time fees split between the pull forward of the costs from our previous facility that had been amortized over the life of the note, then we brought them forward when we terminated that note. That plus the early termination fees associated with that. If you back out that $5.3 million, what you're left with would be our true interest expense for the quarter.
Perfect. Thanks so much.
Yeah.
Our next question is from Joseph Foresi from Cantor Fitzgerald. Please go ahead.
Hi, this is Drew Kootman on for Joe. Thanks for taking our question. I just wanted to follow up from two questions ago regarding Canada and Africa. How long do you expect before you start seeing any impact on revenue? What kind of impact? Just anything along those lines to the top line.
Both of those will be certainly impactful. We're seeing impactful with Canada today. We're drawing revenue. In terms of it being something that you'll see moving the needle for us, I think you'll go through all of 2019 with ramping up before there's a significant dollar volume. Remember, we have to do two things. We have to go out and add agents to Africa in specific neighborhoods and then ramp those agents up and actually introduce consumers to a brand that they're not aware of. In Latin America, it's a little easier. One of the leading three or four brands, leading four brands to all of Latin America. A little different mission for us. In Canada, similarly. In Canada, we haven't opened business yet. We're still really in the preparation stages of that.
We've got licenses approved and banking relationships, haven't put people on the ground yet actually adding agent locations. I think they'll be significant contributors in 2020. This year will be sort of the building and investment, and that's in the earlier when I presented, I talked about that although that we, in our core business, it's easy to understand these economies of scale, that we're going to continue to invest in future opportunities that will sustain that growth. You ought to think about in 2019, Canada outbound, Africa inbound, as opportunities that will continue to sustain our high level of growth over time, but not necessarily be great contributors to either revenue or profitability in 2019.
Okay, perfect. Just a second question. Any recent trends you're seeing that you could point out within immigration? Are there any concerns on any recent regulations or anything that's coming up?
This administration, not from a political perspective, but the facts are that, as we understand them, in terms of legal immigration, it's actually been increased. There were more people crossing the border in fourth quarter, legally and illegally, than had the previous year. There's been less people sent back to their country of origin because of illegal in Latin America than there has been at times during previous administrations. Whereas there's been a lot of controversy and a lot of, I guess, political wrangling over the border, we don't see any great impact on the business.
As a matter of fact, it seems more vibrant than ever. The economic factors have been so forceful relative to high levels of employment here in the U.S., high levels of the need for labor in various aspects where we just don't have the labor force to take care of it, that that pull has far offset any kind of tension at the border that you might hear of. The facts of it are that actually more people have been coming in both legally and illegally than previously had been happening.
Perfect. Thank you.
Our next question is from Brad Berning from Craig-Hallum. Please go ahead.
Hey, guys. Congrats on closing out the solid 2018. I wanted to follow up and get your thoughts a little bit more on same store sales growth versus agent growth in 2018, fourth quarter, and talk about what you think your agent growth in 2019 kind of looks like, and what are the main constraints and drivers of being able to drive additional agent growth. There's obviously a lot of agencies you've talked about from an opportunistic standpoint. What is the main constraint to be able to get out there and win more agents?
Yeah. This is Bob Lisy. I'm going to have Randy Nilsen, who is our Chief Marketing and Sales Officer, address that question.
Yeah. Thank you. We anticipate this year we'll see very similar new store growth. Our constraint really is limited to manpower, and we, as Bob has mentioned, we really do add agents by zip code where we think the opportunities are greatest. We'll continue to put our resources against the zip codes where we have the greatest opportunity in terms of foreign born. We anticipate we'll end the year with about the same amount of agent adds as we had last year. Regarding same store, I think we'll put some strategies in place this year that we didn't have last year, that will actually help us get stronger production out of our same store sales.
To be a little more specific, what was the agent adds this year, and what was the same store sales growth rate?
We don't disclose the agent adds. We're very careful about our agent additions and where we put them because our agents are so different than the marketplace. I will tell you that on average, we know that our average agent's about four times as productive as the average agent in the market, and we try to keep that as tight to the best as we can. In terms of same store sales, though, we continue to exceed the rate of growth in the market, so it's well into the double digits. That's a combination of agents that have been with us for years and years and agents that are in their second or third year, which are ramping up at a very fast pace. Overall, we're growing same store at a level that's, let's call it 12%-15% or more. You have a component of that sales, that growth of 27% that comes from our new stores, would be the remainder.
Yep. That's very helpful. Appreciate that thought and respect the competitive environment. As far as the things that you're doing to help drive production this year, would that encapsulate like the direct bill pay, or is there other initiatives that you're thinking about?
Sure. We are rolling out a bill pay product, if that's what you're referring to, and we'll continue to leverage our CheckDirect processing option with our agents. That is significant for us. Additionally, we've got a stronger effort on the agents that we see slowing in growth and even seeing declining growth year-over-year and our underperforming agents. We've been focused on agents that we've signed, that we just haven't seen the productivity, that we know there's wires in their stores, and we're focused on getting more share in those stores moving forward.
Just to further highlight that, what Randy's speaking of, it's an ongoing process. Every year we have agents that, in the mix of agents we have, some that are performing better and worse than others. This is just an ongoing of digging deeper into that because we've added some resources in our inside sales department that now we have the opportunity to dig into the niche of that really deep. Unlike a lot of our competitors, we know an agent and what their performance is year-over-year on a particular day of the year, the comp day. Now with greater resources inside, we have the ability to actually respond and head that off as we see that agent's performance begin to dip, and that's what Randy's speaking of.
Additionally, we put some more people out on the road, on the street, on our outside sales team in Randy's group, and that's always been a function of our building our new store sales is, how many people do you have working at it, and how many people do they do per month in terms of additions? That's always going to be guided by our ability to balance high growth with hopefully what we bring to our shareholders, which is a great return and a great EBITDA and great cash flows of business. If we were to put another 20 or 30 people out there, we could grow a bit faster, but you would see a degradation of EBITDA.
We balance that in terms of our efforts, but that certainly is a factor, and that's one of the things we're doing more of this year is that because of the size of the business, we've been able to invest in more people at street level, adding new locations as well.
Yep, understood. Scaling the revenue source to drive more revenue.
Absolutely.
Appreciate that. I'll get back in the queue. Again, congrats.
Thank you.
Thanks.
As a reminder, if you'd like to ask a question, it is star one. Next question is from Mike Grondahl from Northland Securities. Please go ahead.
Hey, guys, congrats on the quarter and the year.
Thank you.
First question is, can you quantify the sales adds in 2018 and what you think they'll be in 2019 approximately?
Okay. Yeah, Mike, it's Randy. As we talk about the agent adds in 2018, I can tell you that it was very, very similar to 2017. As we review what that group of agents did year-over-year, they were right about the same level of productivity as well. As Bob talked about, as we put a few more heads on the street this year, we think, number one, we'll add more locations, and number two, we'll be able to keep or exceed the level of productivity from those agents.
Mike , if you look at it and you want to dimensionalize it, where we don't disclose how many agents we have or how many we add specifically, in terms of the end game, transactions, growing 27%, a little more than half of that came from our same store and a little less than half of that came from our new store. They've been tremendously productive, and the new store is adding about 12% to our year-over-year growth on an annualized basis. What we see is when those agents, which typically when we add a new agent averages about 140 transactions within their second or third month, because we vet them very carefully. We're not adding guys that aren't going to do wires.
We see them typically in year two double their transactions and then continue to grow at a very high rate in year three and four. They start to level out a bit in five and six, but they continue to grow, usually at a rate that's faster than the market overall.
Got it. I guess I wasn't asking agents, just IMXI salespeople.
Oh, okay.
Sort of serving agents. Is that a number you'll disclose? I was more curious there.
Sure. We can do that. Go ahead.
Yeah, sure. Last year, we averaged feet on the street right around 40, 45, Mike. This year, fully staffed, we'll have maybe 10 heads above that, 50, 55.
Perfect. Got it.
Okay.
Maybe for Bob and Randy, whoever wants to take a shot at it, what one or two items are you most excited about for 2019?
Yeah. Two things, Mike. We really are excited about the commercial sales, the GPR sales. We think there's some really great opportunity associated there. We've got a couple guys selling that now, and we're still kind of getting our feet under us and the learning curve under our belt. A few of the sales calls that we've had already just lead us to believe there's going to be some great opportunity there. Secondly, we've got more resources in some of these growth states than we've had in the past, while we've seen tremendous growth from those states, now with even more manpower there, we think we're going to even fuel the growth stronger this year. Excited about that as well.
Perfect. Thanks, guys.
Sure. Thank you.
Thanks, Mike.
Thank you. No more questions. This concludes the question and answer session.
Yeah.
I'd like to turn the floor to management for closing comments.
Well, thank you all. We're happy to have finished a great year, our first half year as a public company. We appreciate all you participating in the call. We look forward to talking to you soon. Thank you. Have a great day.
This concludes today's teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.