All right, guys, why don't we jump in, and thank you for being with us. I know you have a busy day of meetings, and we really appreciate you joining us. Look, Marqeta's a name that I've covered really since I've known it even before the IPO, but we worked on the IPO. Then Mike, obviously, I've known for many years, even before Marqeta with Visa. Patti, I've known also, with her time at Stripe. With that said, we're really happy to have you both with us. Maybe just a quick introduction on yourselves, if you don't mind, in terms of, you know, your backgrounds with the company and before. Mike, the CEO, Patti, the CFO, newly CFO.
Yeah.
We'll go from there.
Sure. Mike Milotich, I'm the CEO of Marqeta. I've been there for four years, one year as CEO, the three years as CFO. I've been in payments now for 20 years between Visa, PayPal and Amex, so I've been around different parts of the ecosystem.
Right, thanks. Patti, that was probably meant more for you, just 'cause.
What?
You started. Again, just if you can just a quick background.
Well, it's great to be here, and I'm excited to be at Marqeta. I'm in week five right now. By way of background, I started my career in investment banking, and after 10 years of meeting companies and amazing executives, decided I wanted to go into the operating role. Kinda somewhat fell into payments and have been there for the last 10 years.
I started as the CFO of the partner credit card business of JPMorgan, so think United, Southwest, Amazon, Disney, at a time when we were really renegotiating a lot of those contracts in 2014 and then moved over and was the CFO of their merchant acquiring business, which today and at that time is the largest merchant acquirer in North America with over, I think, $2 trillion in annualized volume. I moved out to the West Coast to join Stripe during a time of really hyper-growth and was there when it was 1,000 people to 8,000 people and growing across kind of payments and other. That's when I first found out and learned about Marqeta.
They were really kind of the category creator of kind of the modern card issuing platform. When I started talking to Mike and the board in the fall and kind of reacquainting myself with the story and kind of the momentum and kind of the unique customers that it had, I was really intrigued, and I'm excited to be here and to kinda contribute to this next chapter.
That's great. I mean, what was it about Marqeta in particular that really attracted you to join?
Yeah, I mean, I think it was, again, like, I think the team makes a big part of it, but, you know, when you look at, the customers and kind of what the business that it's built, there aren't a lot of kind of competitors out there and it's pretty unique and, I had worked with a lot of the customers, you know, the DoorDashs, the Ubers, the Klarnas of the world, and, you know, these customers aren't choosing kind of their payment provider very lightly.
Mm-hmm.
It's just kind of a testament to what has been built and kind of the scale that it's achieved. When you think about the growth that it was seeing across kind of so many different kind of aspect use cases, geography, P&L line item, it just felt like.
Yeah
a really nice inflection point at the company.
Right. Mike, last year was clearly a busy year for the company.
Mm-hmm.
Maybe just start off with some of the key takeaways from the last year. Where, you know, where did you see the most success in the business? I know we've talked a lot about some-
Yeah
of the underlying volume trends being pretty amazing in different subverticals, but I'll turn it to you.
Yeah, I think the highlight is really the profitable growth that we delivered. I mean, our gross profit growth was 24%, which was quite strong, and our EBITDA was $110 million, and that was 3.5x what we delivered in 2024. We drove a lot of growth and a very large portion of that fell to the bottom line, so we improved our profitability. That all starts with volume. As you said, our TPV growth was 31% for the year, but it accelerated three points each quarter for the last three quarters. In Q4, finishing at 36%, which is an incredible growth rate given the size of the business that we have now, and that was really driven across a variety of our use cases.
You know, our lending and buy now, pay later use case in the second half grew about 60%. You know, in Q4, expense management was over 40%, the highest growth in three years' time. Even our financial services use case, which is by far our largest, grew over 30% in Q4. There's just an incredible amount of momentum across the business, and the kinds of conversations we're having now as we're talking more and more to enterprises, it's an exciting time at the company.
Yeah. Look, with that said, I mean, despite very strong growth, and even exiting the year a roughly 20-ish percent gross profit growth profile, you know, you're guiding to a level that has about 10 points of headwinds in your gross profit growth rate. I know there's a lot of variables, Cash App pricing and issuance, certain benefits you saw that don't recur and maybe renewals, right? Just help us understand what's happening in the guide because it's really a little bit lower than the underlying drivers of the business, and really we can go from there in terms of what's really the drivers that are sustainable beyond that.
Yeah. I think the way that we broke it down is there are a couple items that are unique to 2026, that you know we itemized. The first being renewals, which you know we do, which represented about 4 basis points or 4 percentage points of growth. We do renewals all the time, and those are business as usual. These are the two last renewals coming out of the fintech boom.
Mm-hmm.
We call that out as about 4 percentage points. The second item, which is the Block tiering. The Block contract was renegotiated three years ago, and it's very structured in terms of kind of pricing tiers at various volume levels. Really, it is a relatively straight curve. The tier that Block just reached was about 2x as large as the other tiers. Really, when we thought about it, was to kind of reward them and to incentivize them for kind of just a new level of scale. That happened in December of this past year, and you'll see about 11 of 12 months being kind of a tough comp because the pricing stepped down in December.
A few other items outside of the unique kind of 2026 items. The first is the diversification of Cash App, which is about 1.5-2 percentage points of growth. There we assume a gradual decline in new issuance in the first half, and then no new issuances in the second half. The second is we had a couple of benefits of non-recurring items last year of about 1.5 percentage points, so that's lapping. Third, we saw really strong growth, particularly in some of our use cases, Buy Now, Pay Later, and lending, and expense management.
You know, we were trying to be thoughtful about kind of lapping that, and so we do see some kind of decline in growth. The combination of those items, and many of them were items that benefited us in 2025, and those are the same reasons kind of we see the impact in 2026. You know, overall, we feel very good about where we are and are achieving kind of higher EBITDA and getting to net income positive faster than we had previously-
Right
expected and guided towards.
Look, I wanna get back to the key drivers in a moment, but just to make sure everyone understands, for Cash App, there were two dynamics, and it's still a 40%+ of the business, right? I think it's important to hone in on this for a moment. You had pricing, meaning the business got big enough that you're scaling to a higher tier for them, and they're getting a better price.
That's right.
Yep.
A, do you see that happening with any other customers now, or is that a risk we have to keep in mind for anything else? Then B, they're effectively diversifying their-
That's right.
their providers, they're moving a little bit off from Marqeta.
Yeah.
I mean, where do you see that sort of, that equilibrium where they've said, "All right, we've moved enough, and we're done with that?" Is this gonna have to be an annual event that we worry about?
We certainly hope not. I would say in the first one, and Patti described the approach to the tiering, you know, quite well. Cash App is very unique on two dimensions. One is they are just really incredible in terms of size, and not just on the Marqeta platform, but really any platform. For a debit program, you know, it's a top five debit program in the whole-
Yeah
in all of the U.S. It's a very unique situation where we agreed three years ago, if you get to that level of volume, then sure, we will give you a little bit of a better price. Just also because of that size, they have, you know, a significant contribution to our business.
Yeah.
When we have a step down in the price that's twice as large as kind of the other tiers, it's just a significant impact to our P&L. This is not something we have in other contracts. This is, you know, we would, I guess, we would love for our customers to reach this kind of size that we have to have this conversation more often, but it's pretty unique to them. In terms of the new issuance, we don't think this is gonna be an annual event. What we've seen from other customers is most of our largest customers have diversified either their bank, their processor, or both.
What we've often found, and this is true in other parts of the payment ecosystem, people tend to have a primary provider, and they wanna give the bulk of their volume to them, you know, 90% or 85%.
Mm-hmm.
They do that to maximize their economics. Then they have a secondary provider who they essentially use to keep their primary provider honest.
Sure
What we've seen when our other customers have diversified is we've remained the primary partner. One of our largest customers who did this about 18 months ago, two years ago, you know, when they got to 90% of the volume being on Marqeta and 10% on the other provider, then they started giving us 90% of new issuance again. To maintain that 90-10 split. That's the behavior that we've seen from other customers, and we feel like we're well-positioned for that with Cash App for a few reasons. One is, if you just look at the overall install base, there's a you know, huge business with a lot of very engaged users that we don't think they're gonna wanna disrupt.
It would be create potential risk to their business that we don't think that is their objective. They just wanna have some diversification.
Mm-hmm.
also, you know, we have a very unique relationship, talking on almost a daily basis, constantly exploring ways that we can do additional things together. There's a lot of option value to them using our platform, right? We support all kinds of different use cases, so any kind of product expansion they're looking to do, it's very likely that we support it. We also can seamlessly enable, you know, a geographic expansion if they decide to do so, and so there's unique capabilities that Marqeta brings that we can do at scale that, you know, we think will continue to make us a good partner. Once they get to, you know, whatever that equilibrium level that they-
Right. Great
they think fits, then, you know, we can then move forward and-
Okay
not have this conversation every year.
Okay. All right, that's helpful. Look, moving on from that then, if you take out that, those variables, your underlying growth profile is over 20% this year again, right? I've always said Marqeta's been great for vertically, being very vertically differentiated on issuer processing. Knowing verticals like on-demand delivery or expense management or buy now, pay later, just help us understand what exactly is driving that kinda profile, that 20% growth rate, 'cause you're not small anymore volume-wise. Both volume and gross profit is growing well.
That's right. The volume that you know in 2025 our TPV you know approached $400 billion, and we added about $90 billion year-over-year to our platform, and it's really driven by. There are four major use cases that we have. I would say you know right now the star that is you know performing incredibly well is our lending and buy now pay later use case. That's a high-teens percentage of our TPV, and it's a good size business, and you know it grew over 60% in Q3.
Yeah.
It grew just shy of 60% in Q4 as we lapped the Klarna migration in Europe. Considering we're lapping sort of migration on our business and still driving almost 60% growth, it's pretty incredible performance, and it's quite varied in what's driving it. The biggest thing is a shift in how buy now, pay later is being delivered with what we would call a pay anywhere card solution, where instead of relying on the merchant to offer you the buy now, pay later category, people like Affirm and Klarna are giving you a card to say, "We'll just make buy now, pay later a feature of the card-
Right
that can be used anywhere.
Right
That Visa or Mastercard are accepted. That shift, combined with the new flexible credential that Visa has put out, and we were the first processor in the U.S. to enable that, and then also in Europe. That credential is, you know, did, you know, a couple of billion dollars just in Q4, that new unique product that-
Wow
is unique to us, and so that's a big part of the growth. The second thing is, you know, our customers are getting broader distribution from wallets. Five years ago, some companies were saying, "Well, maybe I wanna do my own buy now, pay later," and that's becoming less and less. People are realizing there's scale benefits and specialization, and so that's benefiting our customers and driving more volume. Then there's geographic expansion, particularly Europe for us. The Europe business is just growing really fast in this category, and so that's really the things behind our lending growth. The next big one is expense management. That's about a mid-teens% of our TPV, and that grew over 40% in Q4, which again, is the highest growth rate in three years.
That is really driven by the more modern players just taking share.
The Ramp, the Divvy, those types of companies.
Correct. Those types of businesses. They are, they just have a, you know, a better value proposition than the more traditional players, and so they are driving a lot of share, and the capabilities of our platform allow them to deliver that value proposition. That is growing very fast, and we think, you know, in quite a sustainable way.
Right.
Similar to buy now, pay later, where that use case is just becoming a bigger share of the volume. You know, financial services, as I mentioned, it's our largest use case. It's over 50% of our volume. You know, that's where Cash App and Square are, but several other large neobank businesses. That grew over 30% in Q4, which was the first time in the year that it had grown over 30%. Again, given its size, is a very impressive growth rate. What I would say separates the Marqeta platform and we feel makes it sustainable is that it's the kind of flexibility and engagement that then the neobanks are doing with their consumer base. Similar to an expense management, the commercial offering is taking share of traditional.
The same thing is happening on the consumer side.
Mm-hmm
With neobanking, you know, many of the largest players are using our platform. Then as you mentioned, on-demand delivery, this is a smaller percentage of our business. It's in the single digits as a percentage of our TPV, and it's growing double digits now, versus the last one to two years, it's been more of a single-digit grower. In the medium term, we would expect to get it to go back down into the single digits. For now, it's growing double digits. What you sort of said in your question, what really makes us unique is the fact that you can come to the Marqeta platform and do all these types of use cases, whether it's credit or debit, consumer and commercial.
You can do it on a multinational basis, and we allow it, our platform is so configurable that to our customer, it feels more like customization, but for us it's a configuration.
Right.
That's what really sets us apart 'cause we mix that then with a lot of expertise. I think a lot of people underestimate the value that we can provide customers. We've seen a lot of programs scale and what it takes to be successful, and it's not an easy card issuing business, and that's definitely something that separates us from others.
Yeah. I was gonna say, I mean, really the differentiation is the product and the vertical know-how, right?
Mm-hmm.
I mean, do you see well, we had a question later about competition, but do you see something that's popping up in competitors that's gonna level the playing field anywhere? 'Cause we've heard more and more concern out there.
Yeah. We don't think so. I mean, what. Again, because of how varied our business is, what makes it unique is a lot of other businesses or industries I've been in at least, you tend to see the same couple of people every time you're bidding for business. You know, if you're in the waiting room, you kinda see the same people every time. Our business is not like that, actually. We, because of the variable use cases that we support, each deal is a little bit different and we see different players.
Right.
If it's more of a commercial use case, we'll see a certain subset of competitors. If it's a consumer, we'll see a different subset of competitors. You know, Europe, we'll see different people than we see in the U.S. Again, what makes Marqeta unique, we feel, is that not only can we do all those things, but we do it at scale. With a lot of other processors, you're, you know, you're picking something that's relatively narrow. As things move into more enterprises, and as the fintech companies that maybe, you know, were once small but have grown up and are big businesses on our platform, they're looking to do a lot more things and a lot more variable either products or geographies, and we just really make that easy-
Yeah
to do versus on a lot of other platforms, then you're gonna have to have another integration, another partner, which just adds to the complexity of their operation, and it also doesn't allow them to benefit from scale. One of the things that we do with all our large customers is we aggregate all their volume to give them incentives to scale on our platform. They might have different types of products in different geographies.
Right
Which means the economics are gonna be different because of the value we're adding, but also the economics of the ecosystem. In aggregate, we will give them the benefit of being operating at scale on our platform.
Okay. Maybe we'll jump to profitability given it was such a major, you know, really ramp we saw over the past year. Just touch on that for a minute. I mean, again, we saw a little bit of a lower gross profit guide, given these nuances, but your EBITDA guide came in well above. Maybe just where are you seeing the most operating leverage, and how's scale and maybe even AI been helping the profitability profile?
Yeah. From a, just as a reminder, we at our last earnings call, we guided towards mid-20% growth in EBITDA and about $10 million of net income in 2026. In general, payment platforms, they take a lot of investment upfront to build, but really scale very nicely. Marqeta's now at a scale where there's very minimal marginal costs as you increase volume on the platform. When you add customers, you know, you can add it at, you know, in a margin accretive way. Then we're also adding kind of value-added services, which is not only kind of a sticky product for our customers, but you really are increasing the yield on every dollar of volume through our system.
From an operating expense standpoint, in 2025, we grew only 1.5%, and in 2026, we're guiding toward overall in the year mid- to high-single-digits , but actually in the second half, low- to mid-single-digits because it's kind of lapping a more normalized time period last year. In that operating expense, we still have a lot of investment capacity for product and tech innovation.
As we kinda scale with kind of the marginal costs and getting the efficiency with AI tools, et cetera, particularly in our tech team, and then kind of growing kind of more globally, we don't need to add as many headcount and expenses for the volume growth. We've really seen operating leverage a lot this year, upcoming.
Okay. Again, from a GAAP profitability standpoint, just remind us the timelines.
In the second half of the year, kinda break even for the first half and about $10 million in the second half.
Right. Can we touch on your guidance for a moment? I mean, Patti if you wanna just unpack the approach, and then what assumptions around macro are embedded in the guide, maybe some sources of upside or-
Yeah
some risks to it, if anything.
Yeah. Well, when we think about guidance and forecasting overall, we do try to be as transparent as possible and accurate when we guide. You know, the main kinda sources of how we think about forecasting is using historical data on use cases, geography, et cetera. We have a lot of data with our customers. We layer on kind of unique kind of program-specific things with our customers, like marketing and timing, et cetera. Overall we get pretty close kind of on an aggregate basis, but you know, there'll be some differences program to program when we have new programs or you know, some of the outperformance that we saw in some of our use cases last year.
From a macro standpoint, you know, we have a lot of underlying data on our system, but, you know, we're not economists. We assume kind of business as usual for that. You know, we do talk about some kind of volatility in the market, but we really haven't seen that so much in our underlying data. You know, the data on discretionary spending and kind of consumer health had been fairly consistent. When we think about kind of upside and risk to the business, I think macro will continue to be kind of our main risk in our business because we're very tied to spending. From an upside I'd maybe mention a few things. You know, one being TPV growth.
You know, we try to be thoughtful and disciplined about kind of lapping a very strong year from a volume standpoint last year, particularly in some of our use cases. So we've tapered that down, but we could see some upside from there. The second is pipeline. We have been engaged in many kind of customer conversations about programs that some of which we'll launch this year. Then we're also kind of experimenting. We always experiment every year with one or two things that are maybe too small and kind of more experimental that we can't really bake it into our forecast, but could be bright spots in our forecast. The third is, you know, customer diversification.
We work with our customers very closely to just think about what their plans are for the year. You know, we may see less impact from that if they don't wanna-
Mm
disrupt, with some movement around in the payment platform.
Okay. Like, put it in perspective, I mean, you, like you said, you have $400 billion of volume. You have a pretty good snapshot on the economy and the consumer. Are we seeing, you know, despite conflict in gas prices and questions around, you know, AI and job displacement, have trends been okay so far for you guys as far as you can see quarter to date? I mean.
Yeah.
Yes. Yeah, we're not seeing any.
Yeah
Any change in the trajectory that's not what we had already assumed, so.
Versus your plan.
Yeah.
So far so good. I mean, things have changed a lot in the last two weeks.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, we'll see if that has some impact as time goes on, but for now, you know, it looks as expected.
It looks like spending trends are pretty similar?
That's right.
Yeah.
Maybe just a quick one on TransactPay, just given I know it has an opportunity to help you get further and further into Europe and enterprise.
Mm-hmm
Mike, just help us understand the opportunity there for a minute and how it's gonna help you guys over the next year or two.
Yeah. Our growth in Europe has been really phenomenal. It's now about a mid-teens% of our TPV, and it is, in 2025, the volume is eight times larger than it was in 2022. We doubled our volume three consecutive years, going in Europe, and so it's become now a meaningful part of our business. We achieved all of that really only offering processing. We didn't have the full suite of services that we provide our customers everywhere else in the world. That's what makes the TransactPay acquisition so significant. Because of the unique licensing structure in Europe, we now have an EMI license which allows us to provide sort of the bank relationship and the program management that we provide in U.S., Canada, and Australia, we can now do in Europe. That enables a few things.
One is, you know, business that we may have won the processing for anyway, now there's additional services we can sell, and so we can yield more for every dollar volume, similar to what Patti said earlier. The second thing is we'd gotten very clear feedback from the market that the very largest prospects want one provider.
Mm-hmm
Who has the processing, the license, and the program management. They don't wanna have multiple providers, and so there was a certain part of the market that we were, you know, sort of locked out of. Now when you look at our pipeline, it's very different in terms of the kinds of customers and the size of those potential programs than it was in the past. The final thing that I think is very noteworthy is this really makes it. Most of our largest customers are already multinational on our platform, but we didn't necessarily make that super easy. The processing was easy, but, you know, the way we support them in the U.S. we couldn't do in Europe before. Now it's gonna be way easier for our customer in terms of our service being very similar.
Mm-hmm
On both sides of the Atlantic. Someone who's in the U.S. and wants to expand to Europe, that we can make that way more simple for them. Same thing, someone who starts in Europe and wants to come to the U.S., now it can feel very similar in terms of the support we provide. We're excited about what that brings and how it really expands the TAM for us in Europe.
Okay. That's helpful. Let me ask you about AI, just given the topic is so important right now. Help us understand from your perspective, you know, what benefits it could provide the company, and obviously frame the risks?
Mm-hmm
Have concerns over, you know, other competitors catching up or agentic routing to other types of systems.
Sure.
What are your thoughts on that?
First we look at AI on two dimensions. The first we say, you know, how we wanna use it in our products that would, you know, add direct value to our customers, and there's really two areas where we've been looking to do that. We have a whole risk suite of services. Our leading sort of fraud service, what we call real-time decisioning, and we just upgraded that in Q4 to utilize more AI and machine learning capabilities so that not only can it respond very quickly on a per auth basis, but it's really sort of learning the unique nuances of each individual customer's program.
Because, again, we're so varied in use case, that's a real enhancement on the product and we're, you know, we have one customer live and two more customers who have already signed on and are integrating it right now. That's a great example of enhancing an existing service with more of an AI capability. The second area that we wanna incorporate into our products is in rewards. We have built a dynamic rewards platform. We believe that personalization, which has come to almost every other aspect of tech has not really come to the card business at this time, but we believe it is coming. If you and I have the same card, we get the exact same reward, but, you know, almost everything else in your digital life doesn't work that way.
Mm-hmm.
We believe that rewards are gonna become personalized, and that's an area where AI can really help 'cause it can crunch a lot of data.
Sure
make recommendations in real time. That's sort of one aspect of it. The other aspect where we look at AI is more on an internal basis, how do we drive productivity?
Hmm
The leading use case, of course, is more, you know, engineering oriented.
Sure.
We're a platform business. You know, by far or about a third of our employees are engineers. That's a huge productivity play for us-
Yeah
... to utilize AI in the development, and we're seeing, you know, really significant gains. Again, as Patti already mentioned, in 2025 we only grew our expenses 1.5%.
Right.
It's pretty remarkable, and a lot of it has to do with.
Mike, you saw your biggest competitor at a 40% reduction, right?
Yes.
Not competitor, I'm sorry, your biggest customer.
Biggest customer.
Customer.
I should just ask, I mean, you know, you guys may be only growing expenses moderately now, but was there a period before you were public, perhaps, or is there any bloat in the business you should be taking out?
Yeah. I would say we've been pretty disciplined. So certainly three, four years ago, I would've said yes, there was, you know, we probably had, you know, overinvested a bit. Now we've been pretty disciplined the last couple years.
Yeah
Been utilizing these tools. I think you know, you saw that in 2025. I feel like we're sort of ahead of the curve in that sense. In terms of our business is still growing really fast, and we think we can support the growth of that business without necessarily growing our expenses particularly fast because
Okay. It's more a matter of just maintaining your headcount more or less.
That's right.
Okay.
We also use AI in things like we do a lot of customer service, so we will provide, you know, cardholder support directly on behalf of our customers, and we do a lot of dispute and chargeback management for our customers.
Right.
These are also areas where AI can drive a lot of efficiency.
Okay.
In terms of the risk to the business, I think that I said it earlier. I think a lot of people really underestimate the know-how that's required in issuing in particular. I mean, even competitors of ours who maybe traditionally were on the acquiring side and try to come into issuing it, I think it's surprisingly difficult, and I find people regularly underestimate that. I think the know-how that we have, you know, even if you could get AI to somehow replicate what we've achieved kinda technologically with our platform, there's still a lot of know-how involved. The other thing is scale.
I think that's the other thing that's, again, unique about a payment platform business, is that you need very high reliability, so, you know, four nines, and you need we measure responsiveness in milliseconds. That's what makes payments also a little different. The ability for your platform to support a customer at scale and be highly reliable is a big part of the decision-making process. Even if someone were to use AI to somehow, you know, create technology, doesn't mean it'll get wide adoption because you have to be proven, and people don't wanna take that risk. Because in other businesses, you know, a one-minute disruption like is inconvenient, but it's not the end of the world.
Right.
In payments, that's a big deal.
Sure.
Like a minute is a long time. There's just a different bar that I think, you know, makes it a little maybe harder for us to be disrupted than maybe other software businesses.
Yeah, I think that's probably right. Guys, I think we have time for maybe one question if anyone has one in the audience.
I'll ask a question. Mike, maybe more for you given your background at Visa. Obviously, you know, value-added services are a huge part of their growth story.
Yes.
Your two examples talked about, you know, risk and personalization. How do you differentiate your services relative to maybe theirs, which are often similar?
Yeah, maybe I'll repeat the question just for the benefit of those dialing in, if you will. Yeah, the question is for value-added services, which is a growing part of our business, how do we, you know, differentiate them compared to, you know, the networks or other competitors who may be offering something similar. I think there's two ways. Well, one, we've had a lot of success. So if you went back four or five years ago, again, scaling a payment platform is very challenging. You know, four years ago, we were just trying to deliver for our customers, very focused on scale, and we didn't have a lot of engineering effort to expand the kind of capabilities we had from a value-added services perspective.
In the last couple years we've made a lot of progress, which is why, you know, we shared in 2025 the contribution to our gross profit was 7%, which was about double of what it was in 2024. We're starting to get that traction with adoption from some of our largest customers. The way we think about it is twofold. First, where do we have the right to win, right? Where can we add very unique value or have unique insight? That's one thing we look at. We're quite choosy about where we're gonna invest, where we feel like there's something unique we bring. Then the second area is that it can be very issuer specific.
When you look at a lot of j ust because of the nature of the way the payment business works, a lot of value-added services start on the acquiring side because there are a lot more players. There are millions and millions of merchants. Versus in issuing, it's very concentrated, right? You have, particularly within the banks, only a very small number of players that drive the bulk of the business. What we try to do is really think about what issuers need very specifically, and then what are the learnings we have and the data we have that can allow us to do things that enhance a service for an issuer specifically, and that's where we've gotten, you know, better traction. Like in risk, many of our customers, of course, use a network score.
We can enhance that score quite a bit with data that's very specific that the issuer sees that necessarily the network doesn't capture. That's how, you know, how we've gone about it to make sure that, you know, our value proposition stands out.
Great. Guys, thank you very much. Appreciate you joining us. Next up we have, PayPal CFO in the room next door. Thanks, guys.
Thank you, guys.
Mike, thanks.
Appreciate it.
Patti-
Thank you.
Thanks again.