Really delighted to welcome Paysafe Management Chief Revenue Officer Rob Gatto and then SVP of Investor Relations Kirsten Nielsen. Rob, Kirsten, thanks so much for being with us here today. We really appreciate it.
Thank you for having us.
Thanks.
For investors new to Paysafe, if you could provide an overview of your Merchant Solutions and Digital Wallets businesses and your growth strategies for each?
Sure. Let's start with the Merchant Solution side. We're an acquirer across Europe and North America, soon to be Latin America. The primary verticals are gaming in North America and we've got a very strong small business offering in North America as well. From a strategy perspective for growth, we want to continue to grow in the iGaming space in North America for sure. We definitely want to tackle more broadly the small business area. We'll have a question on that. I can go into more details as well later. We are planning to move in 2024 into Latin America. There's an opportunity for us in the large customer base in Europe. We're our own acquirer in the European marketplace. We've not really spent a ton of time cross-selling to date. That's actually one of the sales strategies since I joined.
Those are the growth strategies on the Merchant Solution side. On the wallet side, you really have three components. You've got our traditional classic wallets, Skrill and NETELLER which are primarily focused in Europe and Latin America in gaming, iGaming, video gaming vertical, FX trading, some Web3 as well. You've got our Latin America wallets, which are typically single-use, cash and bank transfer. Then you have our eCash product, which is cash digitization, which again is primarily in the European and the Latin America markets. From a growth strategy perspective, think about the three of them. In the classic wallet, what we're looking to do is continue to move more broadly across the consumer base. We do target today folks who are regular gamblers, sometimes in our space you call them VIPs.
But we're going to continue to enhance the wallets to bring functionality in, to bring the wallet to more of the mainstream gambler, maybe somebody like me who does it once or twice a month. Things like betting lines and advice and pick of the week and social, bringing a social aspect into it as well. You'll see functionality added on the wallet side. That should expand the user base. In the Latin America area, we're going to try and take those single-use wallets and make them stored value. They'll approximate and become very similar to what Skrill and NETELLER does. Then on the wallet side today, we're in the midst of a transformation of the technology to make the wallet technology extensible and usable for multiple wallets, not just our own, and bring White Label wallets to market.
We have our first White Label client, which we announced in earnings next week. We've got a reasonable size pipeline across travel and hospitality, the gaming industry, and a couple of other verticals that merchants who are really looking to integrate their own White Label wallet in and really are not experts with the technology. You'll see that as a growth option in 2024. Then lastly, the eCash side, which has really been the growth has been muted. We've added three key features in that we think are going to allow us to return that product to growth. The first is Merchant- Initiated Processing, which is a long word for if you put a credit card down on a monthly service like Netflix, it renews each and every month. We now allow PaysafeCard to be used in the same fashion.
You put your PaysafeCard down once and it'll renew in any monthly service orientation. That'll open up opportunities for us in a couple of entertainment verticals. We've also added in on the cash side an ability to top off your balance electronically. We have a portal I can go to to top off. I get the question, why would that make sense? The simple use case would be I might have a 14-year-old son who plays on PlayStation, Xbox. I don't want him to have a credit card or my credit card or my bank card. I get him a PaysafeCard. But when I put $10 on it, as soon as he uses up the $10, how do I refill it?
I can go back to the local store to refill it or I now can go to a portal and fill it with a credit card or bank transfer anyway. It's more of a control of the spend on the video gaming side. Then the last is we're bringing a virtual we've brought a Virtual Bank Account to market inside of the PaysafeCard product line. Now if I'm a PaysafeCard user, I can get an actual Virtual Bank Account. You can sort of think of it as a neo-light type solution. We're not a neobank. We don't have intentions of heading down that path. But for our customer base, we've already seen pretty good adoption in the early stages. That's sort of both businesses together.
That's great. Thanks so much for that, Rob. If you could discuss your go-to-market strategies for Merchant Solutions and Digital Wallets. Then as part of that, on the third quarter earnings conference call, CEO Bruce Lowthers highlighted Paysafe's new sales organization where you doubled your sales personnel over the last 12 months. If you could unpack that a little bit in terms of what your goals are for the new sales organization as well.
I've been busy the last 12 months.
I imagine.
When I think of go-to-market, I don't think of it as merchant or consumer wallet solutions. I think of go-to-market as one go-to-market. That's the big transformation. Instead of going to market product line by product line, we're going to market holistically. That means that from a seller to a relationship manager to support for a client, they no longer have to talk to five individuals. They only talk to one. That's really the big change on the go-to-market. When I think of transformation, I joined midway through 2022. 2022 was really the architecture of it. 2023 was really beginning to hire the management team in place and the beginning of the sellers. 2024 is really going to be about execution. We have organized the go-to-market into pretty straightforward groups. We have new business sellers, new logos. We have sellers who only focus on finding new merchants.
We have relationship managers who now own the strategy, the book, the growth, cross-sell, upsell for each and every client. We have vertical marketers, which are set up in each of the verticals. I didn't talk about not only are we going together as one rep to market, but we've divided into vertical. We have a gaming vertical, which incorporates iGaming and video gaming. We have a digital assets vertical, which is FX trading and Web3. Then we have an e-commerce vertical, which incorporates things like travel, hospitality, financial services. All of our reps are divided: new business, relationship management. We've got vertical marketers in each of the verticals who support those reps both from a lead flow and a collateral perspective. As far as the doubling headcount, it's sort of the evolution. Like I said, we started with structure.
We've got our leaders in place and now we're just accelerating the actual feet on the street. The whole idea is to get more at bats. From my perspective, there's a lot of white space for us to get into more deals and putting more feet on the street will enable that.
Just picking up on that, talk about the white space opportunities. You kind of laid out the structure of the new sales organization. But what do you see as the biggest kind of new business opportunities going forward that you haven't been able to pursue historically?
They're all over the map. Some of the existing ones, we have a large customer base, 800 customers who are 100,000 or more. There's very little crossover in the product base. We have a wonderful opportunity to cross-sell into that base. That's cross-vertical for sure. In the e-commerce vertical, travel, hospitality, FinServ, it's not been a traditional set of verticals for Paysafe. Focusing on those verticals and bringing the entire solution to market really will offer up a lot of white space that didn't exist before. On the small business side, and we'll talk about this in a later question, but our sales strategy is not comprehensive. What I mean by that is there are multiple routes to market for SMBs. We don't cover all of them across different sizes in different verticals.
We're sort of playing in portions of that SMB market and we will look in 2024 to really expand how we approach. Those are a lot of what I would see as white space. The video gaming area continues to be high growth. Latin America is a fantastic opportunity for us. We acquired two companies down there, PagoEfectivo, which is Peru-based, consumer-led. They really have a strong user base of brand-oriented usage of their product. Then SafetyPay, which is really banking rails and cash in and out distribution areas across the rest of Latin America. I view the opportunity to take our customer base into Latin America as a strong opportunity for us as well, white space.
Thanks so much for that, Rob. In the third quarter earnings call, Paysafe announced 45 new enterprise deals worth at least $100,000 each in annual revenue. What were some of the key success factors in securing these 45 larger contracts? How did you intend to sustain this pace of high enterprise bookings?
The first part, it really is two things. First, we've hired folks with deep vertical expertise across all the verticals that I mentioned. They come with obviously relationships. What we've seen is being in market with folks who understand the market. We've just been able to surface more opportunity. The support organizations, the product org, and the marketing org have all moved into a vertical orientation as well. Now we have the ability to support those deals. How we won the 45 and have made progress is really just getting in market with expertise. How do we maintain it or sustain it? Frankly, you got to have the process and procedure around it and hire more. More feet on the street equals more opportunities, which will equal more deals. It's a fairly straightforward methodology, but a lot of cross-training has gone in.
Folks that came from the eCash side have had to learn wallet and acquiring. But we've hired a large number of folks from the outside who approached this more from a strategic, I've used in some of the earlier conversations. We want to be a cash register, not a payment method in the cash register. Paysafe has always traditionally been a payment method in the register. Now I want to have my API and my technology in as the cash register. Then I want to open up acquiring cards, debit. I want to open up local or alternate payment methods, wallet, cash, all things that we have opportunities to offer that frankly many of the competitors have parts of those, not all of those.
Thank you for that. One of the points that CEO Lowthers made in the third quarter call was the big focus on improving customer experience. In particular, he called out onboarding new merchants 10 days faster than previously. What are your targets to continue to improve the customer experience, including accelerating onboarding times? How important is this to your success in signing new enterprise merchants?
Great question. It's incredibly important when you sign a merchant that you get the merchant up and running and ramped. You have to be able to do it in the timeline that the rest of the competitive set does. Otherwise, it becomes difficult. We've really focused in two areas with the transformation. First is actual lead to contract signing. I'm trying to shrink the time from which I engage a merchant to when I actually have them signed. Then the second is once they're signed, how long does it take us to get them up and integrated and running? We saw a 20% increase across 2023 on the first and a 35% on the second. To answer the question on what's the target for 2024, we're all well within. We're already well within the competitive set.
I don't see that as an inhibitor at all for us to drive additional merchant sales. We'll continue to focus on it and I'd like it to be additional improvement, but I don't have a specific target. We're in an area that I'm comfortable. At this point, I think it would be tweaks to try to make isolated improvements, improvements in a given vertical. But overall, we're in great shape in that area.
Thanks for that, Rob. In your consumer-facing business like Digital Wallets and eCash, if you could discuss your ongoing initiatives to continue to improve your funnel optimization and payment gateway experiences? Then related to that, if you could double-click on your plans to maximize merchant checkout conversion through optimization of merchant integration, simplified login, and so forth?
We're going to see if the honey worked.
It took some honey to get the cough under control. Yeah. On the Digital Wallet and eCash side, I kind of characterize it as, for one, where we've kind of seen the green shoots and where the work isn't done. We're continuing there. But the first is probably on the consumer experience and product enhancements. It's nothing that sounds overly heroic. It's been a lot of smaller things to reduce friction. Improving the way we deliver error messages is the next best payment option or path forward, clear. Improving the registration flows, some improvements just to the overall interface of the app. We've seen a nice reduction in the ratio of customer service cases and contacts to customer service in a way that's more kind of optimized.
All that's actually helped to drive the improvement as well in the merchant checkout conversion rate up several percentage points year-on-year, which is really the revenue behind that. Fairly kind of small, but cumulatively impactful changes that we're continuing to drive. The other is on kind of some of those funnel metrics. I would say where we've seen some early success is from some rework we've done around marketing and acquisition. It's still early days, but we've had some successful initial campaigns to help drive not only signups, but converting those signups to first deposits and first usage of the application. We've seen some improvement both on the classic wallet side, Skrill and NETELLER, and also eCash. But we're really still in the early stages of that to help improve that top of the funnel.
Then the other thing will be more on probably the product side where I think Rob mentioned some of the product additions that we've made on the eCash. That's helping to offset some of the softness we've seen. It's helping to improve retention and engagement with users that might otherwise graduate to another payment type on the eCash side. Then I think you also touched on earlier just a broader initiative to make sure that the wallet isn't just a fun and rewarding experience for a high roller or a VIP, but also for maybe a more casual gamer and player in our complementary vertical. That's kind of what's on the horizon.
Great. Thank you for that, Kirsten. If you could discuss your strategy to drive increased consumer and merchant adoption of Digital Wallets and eCash in the U.S. and internationally? I know about a year or two ago there was increased competition internationally from ACH-based methods, which have arisen out of open banking, PSD2- type initiatives by the European Commission.
On the first, Kirsten talked a lot about the consumer side, but I'll add we've really adjusted our consumer acquisition funnel. We're really at a three-step process. We've got always-on campaigns now. We've got very targeted, specific campaigns. Then we're trying to run campaigns around events, whether they're events in market like a new game being launched in the Sony PlayStation or Xbox Arena or an event around World Cup. You'll see our acquisition strategy on the consumer side. On the merchant side, it's really broadening what we offer. It goes back to that wanting to be the cash register. Especially in the gaming space, we were traditionally wallet-driven and cash-driven. What we've done now is opened up card processing and we've opened up the wallet to all the local payment or alternative payment methods.
Your discussion about BLIK in Poland or SOFORT in Germany or Pix in Brazil, what we're doing is integrating them into the process. I as a consumer can manage my wallet with multiple pay-ins and pay-outs depending on what it is that I find to be interesting based on where I live. Then the wallet becomes a mechanism for you to control your spend in that particular vertical. I think the enhancements that we'll make to the experience to drive more content in and make it more experiential, if any of you've seen our new brand launch, we talk a lot about experiences. We really believe that the experience around it is what really will drive the usage. The payment will just become secondary to the experience. Having all of those payment methods in and out is the benefit we bring to the table.
Now adding content and increasing the experiences will create stickiness.
Thank you. That's very clear. If you could talk about the outlook for the North American iGaming business. I'm thinking in particular about the legalization of gaming in more states. I know you haven't reported earnings yet, so I'm not going to ask you about 2024 guidance yet. But maybe if you could talk about how you expect the legalization of gaming to proceed in the year ahead.
First, the business itself through Q3, year-over-year, 50% growth. NFL, 60%+ growth in the fourth quarter. Seven new states. I think Florida launched or relaunched, I guess, again in Q4. We expect that we'll see growth over from all the states that have been launched that we only saw half a year of revenue. We expect that you'll see more states legalize. That'll be additional runway for growth. Then I think the thing that we've done extremely well in North America is our gateway, which now supports all of the different payment methods, is now in at most of the major providers. If you work at all with operators in North America, there's a tight window of which you can get technology integrated. March Madness ends at the end of March. Football season starts in the U.S. in August.
You really have April through July to close a deal to get it integrated because they shut off technologies to get into August. The gateway being integrated from a single API perspective that opens up all of our payment methods now have the ability to go back to each of those operators and sell additional items. Last year, we sold a lot of Interac up in Canada, which is bank transfer. We'll launch ACH in 2024. I think that Apple Pay was a number of operators integrated. We'll see opportunities for natural growover, natural growth from additional consumer adoption. We'll see new states. Then I think we'll see new products that we can bring to those particular merchants. We're pretty excited. While the business is still relatively small, it definitely is a fast grower.
Great. Now within North America, e-commerce remains one of your strongest growth drivers. How can you leverage strength in e-commerce to drive higher iGaming revenue growth?
From my notes on your questions, I probably combined these. But for us, it's new states. It's new products inside of the existing client base. Then I didn't mention we really have begun to go into adjacent. There are sweepstakes. There's social gaming. There's fantasy. Those are all huge opportunities for us for growth that mimic the iGaming operators just in different areas. We've got a robust pipeline across all three of those areas.
Great. Then any callouts in particular on e-commerce growth drivers that we should be paying attention to?
In the non-traditional Paysafe verticals, travel, retail, hospitality, a little bit of financial services, those are all areas we've grown significant resources in and we view as white space. Whereas North America gaming is something that we understand well. We are moving into a number of other entertainment verticals that we've traditionally not played in that offer up opportunity. Then we haven't talked at all, which I know we've got a question coming up on the small business side. But the small business side offers a large white space. I think our penetration rate is less than 1% at this point. There's a lot of white space for us in the SMB area.
Great. Let's talk about how you're kind of going after the SMB space.
Yeah. Today, while we do have some direct efforts and we have partner efforts, the direct efforts are primarily focused on micro SMBs that are acquired via online advertising. They typically look and feel 1/3 of the size of what we get from our partner group. In the partner area, we primarily focus on ISOs. ISOs themselves aggregate agents. If you look at our strategy, it doesn't cover all routes to market and it doesn't cover all verticals and all sizes within the SMB marketplace. What we're attempting to do is really fine-tune both the direct and our partner strategy to make sure that we're covering small to large inside of the SMB and in the verticals that we play in well. Then do the same thing on the direct side. You'll see us add feet in market. We've got our telesales group. You'll see us pursue agents direct.
You'll see us continue to focus on ISOs. Nobody, from my perspective in the sales strategy, loses in that scenario. We'll have all of those routes to market. We just want to optimize them and invest in them.
Great. If we could really kind of drill down into eCash solutions, the third quarter revenue declined in this product line. Can you kind of double-click on your plans to improve performance in eCash solutions?
We touched on it earlier, but there's a handful of things. The first is the three feature sets we've brought to market on the eCash side. The Merchant-Initiated Processing, the Virtual Bank Account, and the Digital Top-Off. All three of those will drive additional stickiness and growth within the traditional eCash verticals. They also open up opportunities for us in some of the other verticals, specifically in the streaming and entertainment space. They also open up opportunities in Latin America. I think the combination of added feature sets along with some additional verticals that have been opened up. We also have our version of cash that we've been targeting to neobanks as a cash in and cash out, as well as some bill payment area, which is not a target vertical for us, but it's a byproduct of having the cash product.
On this topic, can you talk about take rates? Historically, this has been your highest take rate business. How have conversations with your merchants gone around take rates? I mean, do you think the take rate is sustainable where it is? Historically, it's been up around 7%.
I do. The best way to think about it is in the eCash environment, we own the consumer. I bring the consumer to the merchant. Built into my rate structure is really the cost of acquisition and the cost of managing the distribution network. We have some of that in the wallet space, but not quite as much in why the take rates are lower because they may bring consumers to us in a credit card environment. We don't bring any consumers at all. I think that in different portions of our business and product lines, we're more upstream into the consumer acquisition and we get paid to be in that stream. That's why I think they're sustainable because I think that we continue to maintain that servicing of that consumer base. Whereas in the credit card processing, we're not servicing the base at all.
We're really servicing the merchant in that scenario.
Share some of that 7%- 6% with the distribution network, right? We don't keep all of that. Some of that goes into the cost of goods sold. But like you said, they're customers that they may not otherwise just have access to. It tends to be pretty sticky.
If you end up with more digitization that's done at a non-storefront environment, then I think there's an opportunity for that to adjust because you don't have the distribution cost in. But as long as you're going to have here in the U.S., the local CVS or drugstore or grocery, you're going to have that cost.
Great. Thank you for that. In the third quarter call, CEO Bruce Lowthers highlighted his twin goals of improving efficiency and maximizing revenue growth. How do you strike that balance of becoming a lot more efficient and accelerating revenue growth at the same time? In particular, what are you doing to support those twin goals?
On the revenue side, they're very complementary, right? Because as I begin to ramp up and grow the size of the sales force, optimization is key, right? I have to have processes in place to hire, processes in place to ramp them, processes in place to make sure that the folks we've hired are appropriate. Ones that are performing, I can continue to push. Ones that aren't, I can exit the business and replace. Efficiency is all about revenue growth on the revenue side. For me, I look at it as a process, process, process. Bruce drills this into me every week that if you're going to go from, and I'm just throwing a number off, if you're going to go from 10 to 1,000, you have to be able to do it with a process. I think where we're at is we've transformed who we want to be.
We've put our leadership team in place. We've put our processes in place. Now we're at a stage at which we can begin to accelerate because we've got the foundations in place to make sure that as we add people, they'll be productive and they'll be a strong return on investment.
Thank you for that. What do you see as some of the most underappreciated strengths of Paysafe's sales strategy? What do you think is not apparent yet to the market given this kind of rapid headcount expansion you've been through?
I grew up, my career has been almost holistically in the software industry. I have sold point solutions and I've sold entire platforms. What you find is that point solutions work for a while, but ultimately the platform wins. It's because any merchant or company ultimately wants the lowest number of integration points and management to manage their technology. I think the underappreciated part of the strategy change is that we really are moving from a point solution environment where we sold point solutions. We're really selling an entire platform. The platform's integrated all those point solutions. I think that the leverage point around that, we don't have to be the best in each individual point solution.
What we have to be is the best platform offering to the merchant to give them the easiest way to integrate, the easiest way to add new payment methods as they come to market, and to create a user experience that drives high conversion rates. I think that's the most underappreciated part of the sales transformation we've gone through.
What are the business risks that you're most actively monitoring and trying to mitigate on the sales side? Then maybe extending that question, let's say to the CEO level at kind of the highest levels, what do you think management is really trying to mitigate from a risk standpoint?
I think from a risk mitigation perspective, I'll start with a non-answer, which is we really control a lot of our own destiny. This is really about execution at this point. When I wake up at 3:00 A.M., what keeps me awake at night is am I executing and am I putting a process in place to scale? Certainly beyond that, we look at the macroeconomic environment. We're in all across Europe, Latin America, North America. We do look at the individual local economies. We're fairly distributed so that we feel we can overcome individual countries or areas that may have some economic challenges. Then I think the last would be regulatory for sure. But we've become experts on the regulatory side. I would actually turn the table and say that I think regulatory is an actual positive for us.
Today, let me give you two examples right now. There's a regulatory environment in Portugal, Peru, and Brazil. Peru is the one that comes to mind the most. The law is being written over a period of quarters. It's not in place yet. Each and every one of our merchants is engaging with us because I have one foot on the street in Peru. I have expertise in the gaming industry in Peru. I have expertise in the product area. They're coming to us looking for advice on how to navigate the process. I view regulatory, while a risk for sure, I view it as an asset for us because it's why merchants work with us. We have expertise in that area.
Thanks for that, Rob. If there are any questions, please raise your hand and we'll have someone come up to you with a mic. We'll just pause for a minute to see what questions there are among investors.
Hi guys. Thanks for coming. I know that you work with PENN. They're formerly with Barstool. Now they're with ESPN. Can you talk about that opportunity next year and what that looks like for you guys?
Sure. We have our gateway integrated at the PENN. As it moved into ESPN, that gateway moved over. The traffic routes through us. We think of it as a great opportunity. It's a great relationship. There's no reason we wouldn't expect as they grow that we would grow with them.
Terrific. Thanks.
Any other questions for management? Great. Well, Rob, Kirsten, thanks so much for being with us here today. We greatly appreciate it. Kirsten, hope you feel better.
Thank you.