Good morning. This is Sanjay Sakhrani, and I lead the payments and consumer finance research efforts at KBW. I'm so glad to have the opportunity to have this discussion with Melissa Smith, Chair and CEO of WEX, Jagtar Narula, who's CFO, and Steve Elder, Head of IR. The purpose of this call is to dig deeper into some of the commentary that management provided with fourth quarter earnings, and that included refreshed outlooks for the growth algorithm, and that was lower than previously articulated and clearly caught some in the investment community and us to some extent by surprise. And that obviously sent the stock significantly lower towards historically low valuations. To remind you, the new targets are as follow, revenue growth of 5%-10% versus 8%-12%, EPS growth of 10%-15% versus 15%-20%.
Obviously, contrary to the weaker recent stock performance, management maintains a high level of conviction on the refreshed targets, and we're going to walk through why on this call. We're going to make this call about an hour long. I'll spend half the time asking my questions that I've prepared, and then I'd love to get questions from the audience, mainly investment community, and there's a box, I think, on the upper right-hand side that says Q&A, so please type in your questions. Also, we're going to be discussing forward-looking statements, so please refer to WEX's fourth quarter press release for disclosures, so thank you, Melissa, Jagtar, and Steve. Let's get to the questions. First, let's talk about the long-term targets.
Maybe we could talk about what factors led to the changes, and maybe you can pinpoint when you realized something needed to be changed. I assume over the last several months.
Thank you, Sanjay. It's great to see you. First, I'd like to point out that in terms of our near-term guidance, one of the things that we were really focused on was de-risking the guidance as best as we could. Now, when we step back and look at 2024, we had some uneven performance related to our expectations, and if you put that in perspective, of us having a long history of achieving the guidance we set, we wanted to make sure that we were learning from that, and so I think that's an important context point as we're talking about the long-term guide as well, and I'd also add in our recent announcement to buy back stock is just a display of our confidence, both management and board, in the future outlook of the business.
Getting back to your point on the long-term guide, when we actually gave out the 8%-12%, which was our former organic growth rates, they were proper when we discussed them. It was within the context of the markets at that time, and things have changed. One of the points I think that is getting lost, though, is that the markets that we operate in are healthy. They're fertile. We have an opportunity to continue to harvest those markets. We've made some minor pivot points in terms of the investments that we're making and make sure that we can harvest the growth across those markets. If you look back at how we set the long-term growth targets, there's really two primary things that have changed. The first is in the Benefits business.
So within our Benefits segments, the market growth rate right now, which is HSA growth rates according to Devenir, and think of Devenir as the Gartner equivalent in HSAs, it's low to the mid-single digits. And we have really penetrated within our portfolio the custodial opportunity that we've had much faster than we expected, honestly. And so when we revise the guidance for this part of the business, it's with the view of we've made that migration so that we will continue to add new customers that are using custodial products, but within our base of business, we've made that transfer over. So that's more fully penetrated. So economics going forward will naturally have a slower growth and more aligned to the market growth rate.
And then the second point, which is the lesser point, is within our Corporate Payments business, over half of our business is still in travel and travel-related customers. We've had this tremendous lift over the last couple of years, in part by further penetrating our accounts, but also post-pandemic. And we're in a much more normalized environment right now. So we're saying we expect to see a more normalized growth would be akin to the growth of the travel market and that part of the portfolio. So I want to make sure that I emphasize the fact that we do think that we're leaving some opportunity on the table. That's why we added in more sales and marketing. That's been a combination of both adding marketing dollars into some of our product offerings as well as hiring salespeople.
We have a lot of confidence in the returns that that will derive over time.
I guess you kind of answered a little bit of my next question, but I want to make sure we dig a little bit deeper into this. I think what caught people by surprise is that all the segment growth rates were kind of comparable, right? I think if we've looked historically, some of the segments have grown faster than others. Healthcare was one of them, right? Maybe you could just talk about the growth algorithm as you see it right now. Are all of them 5 to 10? Do you think some? I mean, I know those are long-term targets, right? So over maybe the near to intermediate term, those growth rates vary. Maybe you could just talk through each of those segments and sort of how you see them unfolding over the next three years and then maybe over the long run.
Yeah. So we've definitely had a lot of conversation about this talking to investors. And I think it's a reasonable pushback. If you peel back the onion, I'll talk about each of the individual segments and why we believe they're 5%-10% right now. In Mobility, there really hasn't been a lot of change. There's still tremendous market opportunity for us. Lots of vehicles that are not using a specific fleet-specific provider. They're either paying with cash or general purpose credit cards. So a lot of opportunity for us to continue to penetrate that marketplace. On top of that, we're rolling out new products. We've talked about our 10-4 product, our Enhanced Acceptance product in EV. We see all of those as increased market opportunities, and we will continue to roll out new products into that marketplace.
So the net of all of that is we expect that to be in the 5%-10% range, normalizing for foreign exchange rates and currency, recognizing, in fact, there is some economic sensitivity in that part of the business. In Corporate Payments, there's a number of pieces in this business, and the growth rates are a bit different. So I want to talk about this just for a bit because I think that there's a lot of conversation around this part of the business. In total, we're saying it's 5%-10%. There's two primary products that sit across this business.
There's the embedded payments product, and think of that as a product where you're doing API calls to create virtual card payments around the world with lots of control at scale and issuing in many currencies, in fact, over 20 different currencies, which are some of the competitive moats that we have. It allows our customers to avoid really expensive cross-border fees that would normally get charged and passed on to them, and if you think about an example of that, the technology would power a customer that could be Expedia. If there's a hotel payment, we're able to keep track of all the chargebacks associated in the details with a high amount of volume as we make a payment on behalf of Expedia to that hotel. Another example would be AvidXchange , which is another customer of ours. We're doing the exact same thing.
It's the same API call, although what we're paying in that point is an AP invoice with our virtual card technology rather than a hotel room. So both these customers are operating at tremendous scale, giving their large volume of transactions. We want to make sure that if you think about this part of the business, some of those larger customers tend to share this platform with multiple providers. That creates some movement in time. And it's one of the things that I know that we hear about not liking. But if you step back and look at it over the course of the year, actually, you see great growth. It's pretty much a fixed cost business. And so our objective function is to grow volume. And think about those contracts.
They're structured in ways that the balance of the volumes, they're wholesale in nature and from a pricing perspective, which means that as our customers get to higher spend volumes or they get to contract renewals, we're doing that at lower rates. And so we've always been okay with the fact that take rates are going to inch down, but we make that up with a tremendous amount of volume because it's such a scalable part of the product. And then with the rest of the Corporate Payments, we have these AP Direct products where we're selling to customers of size of $20 million-$1 billion in revenue. What we're able to do is automate their supplier payments using our virtual card technology. So I think it's the same technology stack with a team of supplier enablement specialists that sit in the background of that.
And so we're making much easier that payment flow for that customer segment. That is a different model where we get really full economics associated with that. So it's a place that we've been adding in more and more of our sales over time. It's still a relatively small sales group, but it's been great. And what we're solving for that customer is making sure that we're the timing of their payments, we're optimizing their working capital by helping them time when the payments are getting made and improve their overall cash flow. So if you look across that business, we say it's 5%-10%. We've got some parts of the business that are growing tremendously, and still anchored by over half of that part of the business right now is travel and travel-related payments. We do think that will change over time.
And then Benefits, we're saying 5%-10% range. And again, that's anchored off the Devenir 5% growth rate. So if you look across, we're at this point in time saying 5%-10% makes sense across all of our segments.
I mean, it's still a pretty wide range is what I would say. So what are the variables that sort of get you between one end or the other?
Yeah. When we think about this business, we think about it almost like it is a revenue roll across the business. What are we bringing in for new customers every year? What do our retention rates look like? And then what's happening with the base of the business? And if you look across the portfolio, what we're bringing in for new business has much more of an impact on future years as opposed to the current year you're in. And so the things that can cause volatility and range. Clearly what's happening with the base of our customers. And then increasingly over time, as we're rolling out new product and product capability, that's a place that we believe that we're going to continue to see an increase of the revenue stream coming from those new products.
We will, over time, as we've increased sales and marketing, we should see a benefit associated with that as well. And so it's really, in my mind, kind of three different variables that can affect that. First, what's happening within the mix of the portfolios. So as the parts of the business outside of Corporate Payments, outside of travel and Corporate Payments becomes bigger, then that will help skew the growth rate up. The second thing is what's happening with the underlying base business in the portfolio. And the third is sales and marketing product investments that we're making right now.
Okay. Great. And then I guess when we think about these investments you're making right now, I mean, do they add to the growth that you guys have articulated? Or how should we think about what? Or are those necessary to sort of get to these growth rates?
So the growth of each of those investments that we're making, and they go across multiple categories. I think that's just another important point. We've said we're going to invest $25 million of incremental sales and marketing in this year. And it's pro-rata across each of our segments. In our Mobility segment, it's really primarily directed towards marketing for our small business offerings. It's a place that we've seen really high returns associated with that. And so we're adding more into that. We have more feet in the street in the other two, so in our direct business and Corporate Payments in our Benefits business. We're adding more feet in the street because we're seeing really high, less than two-year paybacks across those portfolios and really high close rates associated with that. So we've been adding in there.
So when we think about that, it's going to take some time for those to pay back. So it's not an immediate return. So we've included it in our long-term range. It's certainly a component of where we sit in that range, though.
Got it. And I'm so sorry, just to the audience, I know there's some technical issues that we're working through. So hopefully, you guys just relog back in and it's working. But there will be a replay available, so not to worry about that. Maybe just moving on, I was planning to ask about being more aggressive with the share repurchase, but with the news this week, it seems you've done that. So maybe we can just talk about where we go from here in terms of capital allocation.
Well, first, I think just to double-click on what you said, the management team and the board have a tremendous amount of confidence in the future of the company. And that's what we're using our capital to demonstrate. So we're excited about the tender offer that we have in the marketplace. I thought it would be good, actually, for Jagtar to talk a little bit more about the mechanics of that.
Yeah, sure. Thanks, Melissa. So it might be useful just for Sanjay, for you, and other folks on the phone from a modeling perspective. So we did announce this week in conjunction with a tender offer. We went into the market to raise $1 billion of debt. We announced yesterday that we've priced the bond offering. We've priced the Term Loan B. We'll close those shortly. On the bond side, we announced that we've upsized it. So it's $550 million on the bond. We priced that at 6.5%. So we got really good demand, really good economics on the bond deal. So we're very pleased with that. On the Term Loan B side, that was the remainder of the billion, $450 million raised there. And I would say on that one, the pricing on that is sort of in line with our existing Term Loan B stack.
So that should give you kind of some perspective on the debt costs associated with this. And then on the tender offer, it'll somewhat depend on what we see from the tender offer. The tender offer will be open until roughly March 25th. And then you'll see what tenders come in. But we're expecting within the range that we've set, assuming full demand for the 750, we'll end up repurchasing on the order of 4.4-5.1 million shares. So that should give you some data for modeling purposes.
Great. And then as we think about other uses of capital, understanding you are levering up to do this, but as we think about other actions you might want to take, including M&A, maybe you could just talk about that. Maybe this part plays a little bit into my next question. That revenue growth target is, I believe, on an organic basis. Can M&A be additive to the growth in the backdrop of some of the capital actions that you already talked about? Where would you consider M&A maybe as well? So maybe you could just talk a little bit about that.
Melissa, you're on mute.
M&A has been an important part of the growth, if you look at the history of the company. So yeah, Sanjay, at the point in time right now, what we're saying is that we think this is the highest and best use of our capital, which is why we're going full force with a share buyback right now. But over time, it is a place that we continue to expect to be active. We have a great history of being able to achieve synergies associated with the transactions that we've added into the portfolio. The places that we're looking are still the same. We're still looking at primarily product extensions. So where in the markets right now, do we want to build or do we want to buy? And then historically, we've looked at scale plays.
It's a place we've been using capital to buy back stock instead over the last couple of years, and then the third place for us has been international expansion opportunities. So it's where can we put a footprint that we don't have right now, but I would say in this next year, we're going to be very focused on delivering from this point forward, and we'll continue to look at product opportunities compared to what we want to build in the marketplace like we have historically.
Okay. Maybe we could just talk about reassessing the growth profile of the business and thinking about the various parts of the business. Have you thought about if some of these businesses don't make sense as a part of WEX? Because I mean, healthcare is one where people have questioned whether or not you're getting an appropriate valuation for that asset because it is a really good asset, as you've articulated. I mean, should that business be core to WEX? And have you thought about the other segments as well?
Yeah. I mean, from a board perspective, we're always stepping back. We're looking at the business. We're going through a strategic review at least annually. And that looks at composition of businesses, including what opportunities do we want to create through strategic transactions both ways, frankly. And we have fielded questions on their benefit business. We'd like the fit of the business to WEX. It's a payment business. The technology processing is really enabled by great technology. So it's a complicated market where we're simplifying it. It's a payments business. And technology is an important part of that. And they're all things that we do well. We monetize the business through our bank, which is a way to create better than market economics associated with that. And we liked the predictability of it.
But to kind of go back to your first question, this is something that obviously our board has regular conversation about.
As we think about the other segments as well, are there pieces of those businesses that you think don't fit versus others? As we think about the online travel agency business, obviously, it's been a quite significant growth story. Do we feel like it's going to become a lot more competitive on a go-forward basis where it makes sense to sort of build more around it? I'm just curious because I think those are the questions we're getting a lot of, just the sustainability of the growth because it's really competitive and in some cases commoditizing.
So Sanjay, when we look at our travel business, it does create a lot of volatility. We don't like that. And then the market doesn't like that. But when you step back and look at that part of the business, it gives us the scale in order to really operate at tremendous economics and then use that platform as we go into more of the AP Direct offerings and taking that same technology outside of travel into other markets. And we talked about the fact we've continued to build upon that product technology. And now we're offering products in the marketplace that enable a lot more flexibility to the end customer using our embedded payments for workflow management. We've signed five new customers at the fourth quarter of last year. So we think it's an important foundation for the rest of the business.
I see the fact that you see volatility from quarter to quarter. What we're really focused on is making sure that we're increasing the volume of growth that's going through that part of the business because it has such great unit economics. The other point I'd make is we're also going through this kind of extraordinary time where one of our customers is insourcing some of the technology. We really believe that that's an outlier based on the specific both scale and assets owned by that customer as opposed to a market trend. That's certainly clouding some of that conversation right now. We believe that it's a transitional stage that we need to go through. It's a customer we continue to grow with.
We'll grow with over time once we get through this period of reset, which we think will happen through the next couple of quarters, Q1, Q2 this year.
Okay. I'm going to have a few more questions on Corporate Payments later, but let's maybe just segue into the investments that are being made. The 5% headwind to Adjusted Net Income related to the sales and marketing investments. Maybe you could just talk about where those investments will go. I know, Melissa, you talked about the payback being short on the earnings call. So maybe just talk a little bit about that and where the dollars are going and how we should measure that on a go-forward basis.
Sure. Sure. That 5% is about $40 million worth of expenses. $25 million are going to sales and marketing. And again, I think of this as pro-rata across the business. I think one of the misconceptions was that it's all going to Corporate Payments and that it's not. The biggest part is going to our Mobility business, which is specifically increasing marketing dollars. That part of our business, a large amount of new customers are coming through our digital channels. So they come through online all the way through that are marketing-led in terms of their origination. And so that's a place we've got really great returns. We want to add more juice to that. It will be the quickest result of all of the three. The second two areas are feet on the street, both with our Benefits business and with our AP products in our Corporate Payments business.
If you think across each of these, the other two requires us to add the people, build a pipeline, and sell. We still have a very rapid payback period of two years. It's going to take a period of time before you actually see that coming through. Our confidence comes from a deep amount of analysis that we've done across the business to look at where do we have the highest likelihood and highest return so that we feel like we can add more in and harvest more in these markets that we're in because we're seeing in all of those cases, really good pull-through when we put more in.
Okay. And then how have the discussions around these investments been with your board, your larger shareholders? How's the reception been related to that?
The board, we've had obviously multiple conversations with the board, highly supportive of this idea. They're also in the data with us. From an investor perspective, I think that investors want to see the return associated with that, which is fair. The third part I didn't talk about is product investments. It's $50 million of largely depreciation for products that we have been working on in Corporate Payments. Again, it's broadening what we're doing in both embedded payments and our AP Direct offerings in the marketplace. We're in the market in Europe. We're in pilot, been actually selling now in the U.S. for some of those product offerings.
And then more to come, which is really focused on stickiness of that customer segment and pulling through the functionality that we have in embedded payments across to our AP Direct offering as we roll more and more features out this year. So it's a place in the business we're really excited because we see pipelines ramping. We could see the success of at least early success of these products being in the marketplace and sales happening. And so from our board perspective, they have a lot more insight from an investor perspective. Like I said, I think it's much more about I want to see evidence of that. And again, I think that's fair.
Okay. We're starting to get some investor questions. And I'm going to ask one key one that I wanted to make sure I asked and then I'm going to get into some of these investor questions. Just on the Corporate Payments segment, could you just drill a little bit more down into the moats there? As I think about the OTA business, a lot of people have sort of written it off as a commodity business and assume the take rates are going to zero, right? And I know you've talked about how you have to sort of separate the businesses even inside of that to think about where the value is. And then there's obviously an enterprise-level value as well.
And then inside of sort of the non-travel Corporate Payments business, maybe just break that apart a little bit more because I know there's a direct piece that you want to beef up a little bit more and invest in. And obviously, that's a little bit where the puck is headed when we think about some of the growth that the investment community is thinking about. So maybe just talk a little bit about all of that because some people look at that as a piece that's missing inside your story.
Sure. So let me start. Let me talk kind of broadly first. So we think about the segment itself, the places that we really think about from a moat perspective, the technology and product breadth. And then I would say in particular within our embedded payments products and the scale that we operate at, which allows us to have tremendous economics and tremendous leverage around our economics. When you get into the product itself, the fact that we can settle an issue in more than 20 currencies, and we're able to do that, if you look at our technology stack, we have more than 150 combinations of interchange rates and currency that sit within that platform, which allows tremendous complexity to run through at scale.
And so when you look specifically within the travel marketplace, the ability to have that technology stack is really important because these are people that are operating globally and with a tremendous amount of finesse around which individual products they want to use in each of the regions of the world. If you compare that 150 to our competitors, they're typically less than a dozen. So there is actually quite a bit of differentiation across that. If you kind of take that outside of travel and think about that more specifically, we have that same capability. And if you get outside of travel, customers are typically looking for the scale of the economics, but they're also looking for reliability and ease of use. And the ability to come to one person as opposed to having multiple providers is something that we've seen increasingly.
And we see that increasingly as a moat because it de-risk. If you think if you're a customer and you have to work with several different people, including an issuing bank, that just puts more stress into the system, being able to come to one provider and having access to everything and with a tremendous product capability and strong economics and a really strong history of reliability, which is really important, particularly with our embedded payments products because they're integrated into the workflows of our customers. So all of those are really important notes for us across embedded payments, not just within travel. And then when you think about the AP product offerings that we have, we are selling into the marketplace really successfully. We have seen tremendous scale from that part of the business.
I think it's a combination of being able to leverage the scale that we have in the rest of t he business. So that allows us to negotiate tremendous rates from the networks, again, to be able to do this in a highly reliable way. And we've brought in some world-class payment talent that are using their networks in order to add in new customers. So I would say without a hitch in it so far, we have continued to see tremendous growth in our AP Direct offering. And it's a product that we believe that we can continue to build upon over time. But again, the functionality we have right now is selling into the marketplace, and it's hitting more than our hurdle requirements.
I guess just maybe to double-click or press on the take rate dynamics, right? I think what's been very difficult for us and the investment community is sort of pinpoint how we should think about the take rate dynamics eroding over time versus the economic value proposition being there. I know there's a lot inside of the numbers, but how do we get comfortable that it is, in fact, additive to earnings growth in the future? Because I think ultimately, that's what really matters.
I'm just trying to think about how we best get comfortable around that because it would seem like a lot of the competitive issues have been focused on some of the larger OTAs inside of travel, but there's still this long tail of the smaller ones, which I don't know how to think about what kind of competitive pressures could arise in the future there.
Yeah. The way that we think about this is we split the two. And actually, it's not a perfect split in what we show externally because investors have cared more about travel outside of travel. The way that we think about this is embedded payments and then other. And in the embedded payments product, what we're looking for is, are you driving margin growth over time? So you might have some pressure in terms of rate, but are you getting enough volume that's coming through the business so that you continue to see strong scale economics? And again, that may not be perfect in any particular quarter in that part of the business because there is more volatility. But if you look back over time, you've seen tremendous margin expansion. And then with the AP Direct offering, it's almost the flip we're looking at.
Are we continuing to bring in business that is profitable, but we're looking more on that part of the business of what's happening with the rates overall? And so I guess what I would encourage is look at the combination of what's happening with the take rate, but also in terms of what's happening with the margin profile of the business. It's pretty unique to have an asset of that size in Corporate Payments that has the profitability that we're able to accrete. And we're able to do that because we have such tremendous scale that's running through the business and because we have moats that protect the ability to take away all of the volume. There might be pieces of things that you can take away over time, but when we look across that business, it's been a really great asset, excluding the volatility.
Anything you want to add, Jagtar, on that point, or?
I would emphasize that if you look at the margins over the last few years, I mean, if you go back four years, we've accreted margins from mid-20s% to north of 50% last year in the Corporate Payments business. And while there's been kind of fixation on take rates, you got to really think about what's the volume that's happened and what's the resulting revenue and how's that when you have a business, as Melissa kind of emphasized, with fairly fixed costs and high opportunity for scale, our point strategically has been to get more volume into the platform because it costs us nothing more to do, right? And that's inherent in the moats that Melissa talked about. And it's inherent in the economic and business model of that business. And so we've been trying to drive that. The results have been fairly successful as a result.
We think with the investments that Melissa talked about in the Corporate Payments business, both on the embedded and the direct side, we'll be able to continue driving volume onto that platform and continue to see the positive economic benefit that we've seen over the last few years.
Okay. Thank you. So let me switch a little bit to the investor questions. And I guess just following on the line of questioning I had at the end here, there's a question about the travel and the Corporate Payments business. And say the question is basically, there's maybe less than a dozen competitors that can realistically service the travel payments companies on a global basis. I don't know if you agree or disagree, but how has that number changed over the past five years? Is it relatively small, or has that number grown? And has the product set improved, or has the gap narrowed between what you guys can offer and the others can offer? Maybe you guys could just talk about that a little bit.
I'd say the list of people who can service those global customers is much smaller than that. We have seen more competition over time, and I would say incrementally more as opposed to lots more, has been individual country, like very specific, much more simplified workflows. And so we do see some of that. But I'd say largely, if you look across the markets that we're in, from a competitive perspective, it's largely the same people. It's mostly the bigger banks that I would say that we compete against, and that's been true over time. In terms of development we've done in the platform, when we bought eNett, we combined the functionality that eNett had with the functionality that we have.
What that's enabled us to do, and we did it in an even more modernized way, which allows us to really work with the customer in a way that allows them to maximize the spend volume that's going through the network and tying up the least amount of capital to do so. It's incredibly complicated because we're doing that across the world and consistent with all the different compliance requirements that are needed. So from a, I'd say, from a competitive perspective, it has been a place we have been investing. It doesn't just help our travel customers. It helps across the portfolio because that's functionality we can use anywhere. But we have continued to invest in that. From a competitive perspective, I feel as good, if not better, than I would have historically about the position we have in the marketplace from a competitive perspective.
And again, we have a great team that's very focused on continuing to work opportunities we have across the globe and make sure that we're maturing the relationships that we have with our existing customers.
Those handful of banks or maybe even smaller than that that can sort of do what you guys do or have been there, can they do what you do, or is there a difference there as well?
Yeah. I mean, there's a difference both in terms of when I talk about the number of products that sit in that across. No one has the product depth that we have in our currency capability. When I think of the combination of those plus the scale by which we operate, all of those things are distinguishing for us. And in particular, the ease to use our platform and the complexity that we remove that enables our customers globally to have access. We hear consistently that our underlying technology is the best.
Okay. Great. I'm sure there's going to be questions on the economics, but we'll talk about that later. There's another question about delivering. Do you expect to deliver via growth and EBITDA only, or do you expect to generate meaningful cash flow to be used to reduce actual dollars of debt? Free cash flow has been kind of volatile for you guys.
Yeah. I'll take that one, Sanjay. So we generate a healthy amount of cash flow. If you look at earnings reports that we published the last couple of years, $500+ million of free cash flow generation, adjusted free cash flow generation, last couple of years. In 2024 was higher than 2023. I think, and that cash we will use with the announcement of this week. As Melissa said, we intend to deleverage, and we intend to use our cash to reduce debt. So cash will be used to reduce debt over the next 12 months or so. I think the reference to the volatility of cash flow may be looking at our 10-K filed financial statements or our Q, which consolidates the WEX Inc in the bank.
There's a lot of activities that go through the bank from a funding perspective that maybe muddy the waters a little bit when it comes to what's the actual free cash flow of the business, which is why we provide the disclosure on what is the Adjusted Free Cash Flow that WEX Inc and management actually think about, which is, I think, more consistent on a year-to-year basis.
Then maybe just on, there was a question on the buybacks. Just if we assume, could you just talk about if you do exhaust the whole 750, the assumption is you probably couldn't do more for the year. Maybe you just talk about sort of pro forma leverage. I'm not sure if you mentioned that before, Jagtar.
Yeah. So pro forma leverage, so if we take Q4 leverage, 2.6 times pro forma for the debt raise was taking us to 3.3, and our range is 2.5 to 3.5, and we will be focused on deleveraging, as Melissa said.
Okay, so we would probably assume any additional would happen next year to the extent.
Yeah.
Correct?
Yeah. And we'll be running up against board authorization. So obviously, that'll be a conversation with the board as well.
Okay. Great. And then there's another question about a statement saying, "Very appreciative of the Dutch offer, great capital allocation." But just on the growth, you talked about the untapped growth potential on the fourth quarter that these investments unlock. I think the timeline piece you've kind of talked about a little bit, but is it next year or the following year? How long does it take to reach the 7.5% long-term midpoint? Is that gradual, and to what point is it dependent on? And I kind of asked that before, but just how is it dependent on these investments paying off, or do you think you could do that without it, and there's some upside if these investments pay off?
Yeah. Why don't I take that one? So the range is there because of a range of scenarios, right? So I think the impact of these investments, product investments, etc., will put us one end of the range or the other, but I think we're very, very confident within that range. Melissa talked about that a portion of the investments are going into the digital marketing area in our Mobility business, which is fairly easy for us to flip on. We'd spent a lot of time getting ready for this last year. So fairly easy for us to flip on. The other areas where we're kind of ramping sales teams and they're building pipeline, that's a little more time to get going. So what we've sort of set expectations are as these sales investments go into place, we expect the impact to start hitting in 2026.
Really, the bigger piece of it, I think, will be the back half of 2026 because especially on the direct sale side, as these salespeople ramp up this year, as they ramp up their pipeline, as they start to close deals, we see them closing deals going into late this year, beginning of next year. So that's where you'll start to see their revenue impact go into the back half of next year.
Okay. I guess there's another question that's sort of similar to this one, but about the investments you've made as a result of the cost cutting. So you've talked about $110 million of cost cuts over the last 18 months. About half of that was invested back into the business in the second half of 2023 and I think the first half of 2024. So are we seeing the benefits of those investments come through in 2025, but the growth rate still sort of lagging? Is that the way we should look at it? And how do we measure that on a go-forward?
Yeah. So one of the big areas that we invested in, for an example, is our credit and fraud capabilities, right? We saw back in 2022 some elevated fraud losses. We invested heavily there, right? Machine learning, kind of AI-type capabilities. So we could more proactively adjudicate credit decisions, more proactively monitor the portfolio, and adjust credit limits to avert any potential fraud, avert large credit losses. And I think we've absolutely seen the impact of that in the portfolio. We've seen credit losses come down pretty dramatically over the last couple of years. I mean, even if you look at the credit environment today, a lot of other companies are talking about consumer defaults increasing. We've been seeing credit losses decline, and I think that's an outcome of the investments we've made in that area.
Okay.
Sanjay, just to kind of keep in mind, we put this in the supplemental information we put out there, but this year's results are being impacted more by the transition from our online customer to in-sourcing some of their services. That has a pretty dramatic impact to profitability. So we're buffering that, and part of how we've been able to buffer that, which has impacted both 2024 and 2025, is through some of the cost work that we had done and continue to do, frankly. And it's just a muscle that we have across the business. We're really focused around this as a program. We're very focused around places that we can create automation that creates better customer experience at a lower cost. And there continues to be a lot of opportunity for us on that front.
It's something as a management team that we talk about on a regular basis and have action steps against with the idea that we think that we can use technology to be our friend, but also to create a better experience for the end customer that's using our products.
Great.
And I wanted to double on that kind of supplemental material. We did provide a walkthrough guidance section that shows the puts and takes of revenue and EPS relative to that one customer transition that Melissa mentioned, as well as the investments we're making this year. It does show the underlying growth of the business, very healthy, very much in line with the guidance rates that we put out there with striking distance on the revenue side. So we feel really good from where we are from the starting point to achieve what we've set out.
I mean, along the lines of this discussion, there's another question about just the volatility in the travel business. I mean, we've talked a little bit about it throughout this conversation, but just as we look ahead, right? Now, we've got this one-off transition in-house, understanding not many of the rest can do that type of stuff. People are worried about another large participant, and maybe there's another renewal coming up. How do we get comfortable that there's some stability in that business on a go-forward basis? Understanding that take rates over time just come down and their scale offsets, but just thinking about revenue growth and profitability growth in that part of the business, it's been quite volatile. How do we get comfortable with that, and do we need to worry, and I'm asking this question again, Melissa. I'm sorry.
Do we need to worry again about a renewal anytime soon of a large OTA?
So we're always going to have things that are renewing. And when I think about that part of the business, we should expect as they go through renewal that we are going to renew things at lower rates. That being said, we have made some pretty significant adjustments over time. And so the degree of those changes becomes smaller just by default. And so if you think about those larger customers that come up from renewal, yes, that will happen, but it won't be quite as painful as what it has been historically because what's happened over time is the net take rates have gone down.
The other thing I'd say is when we put together our guide, we were very thoughtful about any of those things that we thought could impact the year because we were really focused on de-risking the guide that we put out for the year and doing it very intentionally.
Okay. That's helpful. Maybe we could just let me see. And obviously, audience, please continue to send in your questions if you have any. There is a question on stock-based compensation. Some of the peers have started removing that. I mean, is there any thoughts around stock-based compensation that you guys have? Because the industry sort of convention now is more going towards GAAP anyway, but just curious if you have any thoughts on that. That was a question I got.
What's interesting is we look at it both ways. We'd look at it both in thinking about it. When we look at stock-based compensation, we look at burn rate. We look at total expense as well, and if you look across our peer group, at least right now, they're generally excluding it, but just because we exclude it from ANI doesn't mean that we don't pay attention to the number associated with it, and obviously, that goes into our compensation committee, and as they're looking at what's happening from a market perspective, they're thoughtful of that. The other thing I'd say is a large amount of the, particularly the executive comp, is tied to performance-based incentives, so there is a correlation between what's happening from a performance perspective in terms of how that translates into actual realization of stock.
Okay. Great. This is my question, actually. Maybe we could just talk a little bit about the competitive landscape in each of the segments because I know it's evolved over time. We talked, I think, enough about OTA. Get it. But maybe we could just talk about Mobility, sort of the EV push there as well. It sounds like that's still an important component of the story. Anything that you could talk about in terms of enhancing your market position in either of those segments?
Sure. So let's start with the Mobility. Mobility is a place that if you look at the competitors, think of it as there's two primary competitors here in the United States. There's an entity owned by U.S. Bank called Voyager and then Corpay in the U.S. and then others, obviously, outside the United States. And when we think about our ability to compete in that marketplace, the biggest moat continues to be the closed-loop network that we have because that product is so dependent on data. And I think that the places that we continue to invest in that product is largely around how you can take the data that you're getting associated with a customer, help them have confidence in the payments they're making so that there's elimination of fraud or misuse and doing it in a way that helps actually control costs.
And so if you look at this marketplace, we continue to invest in that moat, not just the closed-loop network, but products that surround it and thinking about ways that we can add in market adjacencies like we're doing with our Enhanced Acceptance product, which takes our open-loop product set and combines it with our closed-loop one and gives our customers kind of the best of both, or 10-4, which is the ability for our customers in the over-the-road space to leverage our discount network in order to purchase fuel.
And so we've been really focused on not only do we continue to really pay care and attention to the things that Jagtar was talking about earlier, which is the credit capabilities, the fraud capabilities, which are increasingly important, and the underlying product set, our digital marketing capabilities, the user experience as they go through the process, but also looking for places we can continue to increase the TAM. So from a competitive perspective, we feel really bullish about the continued market opportunity we have there. Talked at length about Corporate Payments. Then in Benefits business, the two primary competitors that we have are HealthEquity, which investors know more, and then a company called Alegeus, which is owned by private equity. And if you think about both of them, HealthEquity is more of a direct offering into the marketplace. Alegeus is more of a partner offering.
We do both. And so when we think about the competitive advantages we have versus the underlying product in the marketplace, the ability to have multi-account types on one technology stack, which enables an employer like WEX, who has multiple types of medical plans with different account types that sit behind it to easily leverage one technology base, continues to be a core differentiator that we have in that market. And then on top of that, we have just breadth of distribution. And so that both in Mobility and Benefits, we have just tremendous breadth of distribution because we're going into the marketplace both with partners and directly. And so you just have lots of options for cash or for customers coming to us.
And so from a competitive perspective, I would say across the business, there have been some new market entrants over time that generally are subscale and just don't have the breadth of offering that we have in the market. And so it's primarily that we're competing against the same people that we've been competing against for many years.
Got it. There's a question on tariffs. I think mobility, obviously, the over-the-road trucking business has been in a recession for some time now. And obviously, that's been a headwind on the segment. But as we think about tariffs and all this discussion of tariffs, have you seen any changes in behavior? How do you guys plan for that? Is that built into the ranges that you guys have articulated?
Yes. When we think about we're in this interesting land where you wake up and every day is a new day. For us, tariffs is certainly one of the things that we're working through. If you look across the over-the-road business, which is where you'd see the largest impact, there are specific ones that sit within our portfolio that probably have an impact as opposed to being kind of broad-brushed across everything. And so when we think about the guidance ranges, it's certainly something that could impact overall. I think in general, what we're seeing, although again, it's the minor, not the major, but maybe a little bit more pull of volume into kind of pushing forward and having shipments coming through earlier as opposed to later in the year to avoid some of the tariffs. But it's on the fringe for us.
It's just not a big enough part of the portfolio to have a meaningful impact.
You don't think it extends the pain in the over-the-road segment?
I think it could extend the pain for certain customers that are more reliant on cross-border trucking. If you talk to that customer base, they feel more bullish on rates than I would say on.