Okay, wonderful. Welcome back, everyone. Very pleased to welcome Jagtar Narula.
Thank you.
CFO of WEX here. Thanks for coming to the conference. I really appreciate it.
Thanks for having us.
Why don't we jump right in on the mobility segment and just give us kind of a state of the union, what you're seeing? I know on the Q1 call, you called out a little bit of demand push- and- pull related to the tariffs and the OTR segment. What are you seeing on that side of things?
Yeah, sure. Just to recap, everyone, you know the whole tariff situation has been a very fluid dynamic. One of the things we talked about in our Q1 earnings call was that our over-the-road segment, which is about a third of our mobility business, we were seeing really strong volumes heading into the earnings call all through Q1 and the first couple of weeks of April. Then sort of the last two weeks of April, we saw, you know, softening as a lot of this conversation about tariffs and, you know, maybe less boats coming into the U.S. There was some Eastern noise in that, so it was kind of hard to discern what was going on. But, you know, we decided, you know, there appears to be some softening. Let's take that into our guidance for the rest of the year.
I'd say post that period, we've seen things kind of, you know, continue with that, not quite as, you know, as flat as it was in the last weeks of April, but still not as robust as it was in the beginning of the quarter. It feels like we may have had some demand pull forward in the early part of the quarter as people were getting ready for tariffs, and now we're sort of seeing the aftereffects of that.
It's a fast-moving environment.
Yes, it is.
Difficult to track. Maybe in the same kind of context of the last question, I think on the earnings call, you called out some interesting data about the amount of trucking in the U.S. that was sort of domestic versus import-related, and the large majority of it was domestic. You know, are you seeing any weakness in particular sort of slices of the business related to that import piece, or is it more broad-based?
Yeah, so let's start with what we talked about in the call. We had pointed out that 90% of what moves in trucks in the U.S. is actually things that are produced domestically. It's actually surprising when you hear that statistic because you sort of think about, right, all these imported goods of cars, electronics, and manufactured goods. When you actually look at kind of what the top categories by value, like things I just mentioned, they don't actually make it to the top 10 categories by volume. Right? Department of Transportation data, if you look at what moves by volume, it's minerals, gravel, agricultural goods, foodstuffs, so things that we produce domestically, you know, not by value, but by volume. It's really a smaller kind of box that is import-related, you know, that 10%.
If you think about China maybe being 10% to a third percent, you know, one third of that to 10% of it, it really constrains the box. What we saw in Q1, we estimated about a 50 basis point increase in volumes from Q4 to Q1 from the pull forward, just based upon what we saw kind of quarter over quarter sequentially. You know, it's hard for us to really say, you know, we don't measure what our customers are carrying, so it's hard for me to give sort of a perspective on it by vertical or anything. We did see that distinct sort of sequential increase, and that's what we've been tracking closely.
Okay. Okay. You know, one question that I have gotten over the years about WEX and particularly the mobility segment, the fleet business, is just the correlation between freight prices, freight volumes, and your performance. Maybe just, this is a little bit of a back office question, but just to educate us a little bit in terms of how we should think about a correlation or a lack of a correlation between those areas in your business.
Yeah, I would say there is some correlation. You know, I wouldn't call it an R-squared of 9%, but, you know, what you see is when it comes to, you know, freight rates and pricing, there's two types of pricing, right? There's sort of contracted rates and spot rates. Spot rates are really, you know, what you would pay if you wanted to ship something now. Spot rates tend to move up and down with demand because it kind of represents real-time needs of shipment. We will see some volume-related, you know, correlation with the spot rates, but it's a looser, what I call more directional correlation than I would say it's a hard and fast one.
Across the business, there's, you know, maybe still sticking with the mobility segment, but across the business, there is some extension of credit embedded in the models. I guess I'm curious, how big of a lever is that credit box? How flexible is it? Do you, you know, do you respond by opening and closing the credit box to what you perceive to be the macro environment? I guess the answer to your question is today on that credit box, sort of where are we sitting?
Yeah. I love this question because this is actually an area that we've invested quite a lot in the last few years. We have what I would consider a pretty dynamic credit box, right? We invested in the last few years not only people and process, but sort of technical capabilities as well. We invested in data analytics, machine learning models, sort of a set of capabilities that allow us to be more precise, more targeted, and more proactive when it came to the credit box. We are looking at credit statistics on, I mean, a near constant basis. We're looking weekly at what spending patterns are looking like, what delinquencies they're trending towards, right? How is the profile of the customer?
We're doing this, you know, at a fairly granular level where we can increase or decrease the credit box and what we're seeing down to kind of particular segment levels. If I think about the first quarter, right, we, you know, we expanded credit in some of our accounts where we thought that there was pretty good credit capacity, you know, increased the box to allow more volume to flow. We felt really good about the risk basis of those customers. At the same time, we're reducing credit in segments where we, you know, we think, you know, the signs are pointing to a little bit more challenge. It's a pretty dynamic process. I'm glad we accomplished there because just to remind everyone, right, we've made these investments and you've seen kind of our credit losses improve, right?
We were at 12 basis points of loss in Q1. It's down from 15 points, basis points last year, first quarter, and down quite a bit from when I first joined the company. So we've made really good progress here while becoming more dynamic. I'd say, you know, where we are in the credit box life cycle, I mean, I like where we are, right? We're in, you know, we're seeing kind of a manageable level of losses. We're being proactive to try to drive as much volume. You know, we're kind of in this kind of uncertain macroeconomic time right now. So certainly not a place to suddenly open the taps, but we're just managing it closely.
Do those investments that you made in this improved credit performance, I mean, this might be a leading question, but does that position you better in terms of a hypothetical macro stress to basically weather the storm?
Yeah, I think it does, right? If you look back through the company's history, you know, when we've been through periods of stress, you have sort of seen a spike in credit losses. The biggest spike we ever had was probably back in the 2008 financial crisis, where you saw, you know, credit losses spike to 20-45 basis points of spend. What you see, because, you know, these are not revolver-based products, you tend to see those credit losses then decline pretty significantly, pretty fast. That year, 2008, while one quarter was 45 basis points, the very next quarter dropped down to 17, right? Pretty much where we are at today. For the year, it was like 25 or something. We will see an increase, what we feel is manageable, right? It will come back down.
I think the things that we do, so we, as we talked about, invested heavily in our credit capabilities. So, you know, we have not been through a recessionary cycle with our new capabilities, but I am optimistic that we do better than we have historically. We also do a lot of scenario modeling. So we have, you know, as an organization, we will model recessions, we will model what is the impact to us to get very comfortable in a recessionary environment. Should credit statistics spike, we anticipate it, we have gotten our hands around it, you know, under a variety of scenarios, it does not put the company under any financial stress. And we feel like we have really got a good handle on this.
One kind of theme that was a little bit louder even a couple of years ago is EV. I know you guys have done a lot of great work kind of readying the business for that transition, but maybe we could take a step back and have you just give us kind of an industry update on what you're seeing out there. I know there's been some regulatory changes, both in the U.S. and maybe in Europe, in terms of how fast that transition may or may not occur. What does it look like from your seat? What does it look like from your seat?
I feel like this is a transition we're ready for, but it's slow to come.
You build it, they will come.
Yes, exactly. We've built a number of, you know, solutions for the EV transition, right? It was always our hypothesis that we were going to operate in a mixed environment for quite a bit of time. Because even if you assume the fast transition, there are use cases where EV works great, and there are use cases for a lot of commercial fleets where it just does not work. We were going to live in this mixed fleet environment, which is going to mean that fleet managers were going to want one solution that consolidated all their vehicles, which positioned WEX really well. We invested in a number of solutions, right? We released one for what we call on-the-route charging, which is like filling up your gas, charging your vehicle while you stop at a station.
We released a solution for at-home charging, so reimburse someone at home. We just released one for a depot, so if somebody wants to build their infrastructure. All of these are designed to handle the payments and aggregate the data for the fleet owner. The solutions are built, we sell them, we've got customers that have, you know, some customers that have bought vehicles that are using them, but I would say, you know, it's still in the thousands of vehicles. That is not because, right, the solutions aren't hunting, it's because commercial fleet adoption, both in the U.S. and in Europe, where even in Europe, where EV adoption is much bigger than the U.S., you still haven't seen the penetration in fleets because of the complexity, because of, you know, the different use cases and the challenges that it creates.
We have the solution ready and now it's a matter of, right, the market moving to EV, which is taking time.
Also on the mobility segment, you know, your business is primarily based in the U.S. I know you have a business in Europe and there's a couple of other businesses here and there. Is there, you know, years ago I thought maybe this U.S. model might migrate to other markets. Do you see an international opportunity outside of the markets that you operate in in mobility, or is that not a?
I think we still see an international opportunity. We've got a nice size business in Europe, we've got one in Australia, you know, where those businesses have done fine. You know, I think for us, it always comes down to investment prioritization, right? We invest where we see kind of our highest return of opportunity. You know, in the U.S., 600,000 customers, nine of the 10 largest, you know, merchant brands. We've got a large sales force, large distribution capabilities. It gives us a lot of opportunity to grow the business, right? You know, with some of the initiatives that we have running now, whether it's expanding into smaller fleets, whether it's attaching additional products, whether it's some of the pricing initiatives, we get a lot of the bang for the buck out of the U.S. It's not to say we don't focus international.
I think the U.S., because of the relative size of the business, just overshadows sometimes what we're doing internationally.
I see. Moving on to corporate payments, corporate and travel. Maybe you can kind of do the same thing, the same place that we started on the mobility side and just sort of give us a state of the union there of the business. You know, what are the trends that you're seeing in the marketplace?
Yeah, sure. Let's divide up the two businesses, travel and non-travel. Travel, think of it as roughly 50% of the business, non-travel roughly 50%. Within the travel segment, obviously, we've been going through a large customer contract migration. That customer is still with us and is a very good customer of ours, but, you know, contractual terms have changed a little bit, which has created a near-term drag on revenue. That is progressing as we expected and we expect to be through that as we get through the tail end of the year. You know, the underlying performance and volumes in that segment, that travel part of the business, has held up relatively well, right? There was a lot of concern about what was going to happen to travel with the macroeconomic environment.
You know, a lot of our travel, 65% of it, 70% of it, is really internationally based and travel volumes have held up really well. That is a travel business. If I go to the non-travel business, we have within that, you know, some business, some legacy business we do, especially on kind of AP payment side, that has been a little slower growing this year, but there is a part of the business that we have been heavily investing in. There are two pieces. There is what we call our embedded business, which is basically taking the infrastructure we do in travel and taking it more broadly. We have invested in that, added product capability, taken our existing infrastructure, putting more sales resources behind it, and we are seeing good traction in terms of the pipeline build.
We're optimistic, you know, going into the latter part of this year and into 2026, we're going to really see the fruits from that. We have our direct business, which is again taking that same infrastructure, but going directly to corporations to help process AP files and streamline that process for them. That's a business that, you know, we had been investing in and now we're sort of ramping up some of the investments. What we saw out of that is really good volume growth. If you take kind of our legacy AP business, where because of corporate constraints was somewhat flatlined, but if you contrast that with the direct business we're investing in, you know, we saw 25% volume growth in that business in the first quarter and we also saw 25% volume growth in the fourth quarter.
We see, we think we're seeing the fruits of the investments that we're making and it's given us more confidence to continue those investments and maybe, you know, put more focus on it. We feel we're seeing really good trends across the business.
In those newer high-growth areas that you are investing in, where are you in the investment cycle? Are you, meaning, is there more work to be done in order to get that to where you need to get it to, or are you now, we've made the investments, it's time to go out?
I think so. There are two pieces to the investments. If I take the direct business, or let's talk about one by one, start with the direct. Product features and functionalities that we've been adding to, things like ERP integrations, improvements in reconciliations, the ability to make payments, you know, kind of multi-channel. These are all investments we're making and we continue to make. You know, we feel like we've made progress there, hence the 25% volume growth. I think we'll continue to make those investments, but we feel the product's in a pretty good place. Now we're, you know, we've been adding to the sales team. We had ramped up a sales team a couple of years ago, wanted to see progress. As we announced on the Q4 earnings call, we felt really good about the progress we made.
Now we're adding additional sales resources and we started that. You know, that'll layer in as we go through the course of the year, right? Because you basically got to hire and train up the salespeople. On the embedded side, the sales team's in place. You don't need a big team for that because you're basically going after, I call it wholesale type deals, right? Like going after large, larger, not super large, but larger kind of consolidators of volume. You need kind of a fairly small team, a handful of people, but then you need the product. We've been spending the last year or so adding enhancements into what was our travel solution to basically go after these new segments. I think we're in a place where we felt comfortable that we start selling, but we're continuing to enhance the product.
Because as we continue to enhance the product, I think the market there will continue to open more and more over time. That is one of, we feel good where we are today, but there will continue to be incremental improvements as we go through the next couple of years.
Give us your thoughts on the kind of competitive environment in this, maybe on the corporate payment side.
Yeah.
You know, it seems like there's a lot of players out there who are active. You know, who are you running into? How do you position WEX in your competitive advantage versus your competition?
Yeah. So, you know, I think when we think about our competitive advantage here, we built this infrastructure to service the travel business. The travel business was an extremely complex, multi-geography business that required us to not only handle complexity, but high availability and high resiliency, right? So, you know, we invested to process more than 20 different currencies. If you look at the permutations between currency and interchange rate, you're talking about 150 plus permutations. We can roll out new permutations of, right, interchange pricing, you know, what's offered by like the associations. We can roll that out to a new customer requirement within days, where some of our competitors would take weeks to roll that out. You have that, you have the scale that we've built worldwide, the compliance infrastructure, et cetera.
As I mentioned, we've built this high availability. These are mission-critical applications for these online travel agency customers, right? If we're down, they're down, right? They can't take a hotel booking. High availability is really critical. We've built all that and now we're taking that to new markets. When you talk about our competitors that are starting in one of these markets, right, they're starting from ground zero, trying to build up all this capability when we already have it, and now we're just refining, maybe some reconciliations or some ancillary pieces to make it more applicable for a new market. We feel like we're really competitively positioned.
I also wanted to ask about, also on the travel side, I kind of wanted to ask a similar question on the competitive dynamic. On the travel side, it sort of seems like you guys are the, I mean, I think people forget that you actually organically kind of founded this business in a sense decades ago.
Right.
You know, what is it there that sort of cements you in place with some of these large customers? I know some of the contract terms have been changing, et cetera, but, you know, are you still kind of the only game in town?
Yeah, I think, you know, we are, as I mentioned earlier, the scale and sophistication, we have years of working with these highly sophisticated customers, right? So, you know, and these customers have needs in multiple geographies, they want to expand geographies, they want to roll out new pricing options or new, you know, packages to their customers. They need the scalability and we bring that, right? I think that positions us very well. We have been capturing, you know, market share in the space. I think when you look at some of our competitors, you know, a lot of them are tied to one particular geography, right? They do not have the global scale and reach that we do. I think that is truly what sets us apart because we can handle the most complex needs of these very sophisticated clients.
I see. Benefits. You know, you guys actually saw a nice step up in the number of SaaS accounts in Q1. Maybe talk a little bit about the driver of that result. I think you mentioned stepping up sales investment, maybe that was part of it, but.
Yeah. So we saw very good results. We saw a 6% increase in SaaS accounts and it was broad-based, like HSA accounts increased 7%. It was a pretty broad-based increase. It was a result of a very successful open enrollment season, which had me feeling really good because that sets us up for a really positive year in the benefits segment. I would say, you know, we've talked about increasing kind of the front-end sales effort in the benefits segment. I would not say that this really was a reflection of that. That sales investment, you know, we announced at the beginning of this year. You know, it takes time to get salespeople onboarded, trained, build a pipeline. That investment's really going to impact 2026 and beyond.
This really reflects the focus we put last year on winning new business and having a successful onboarding season this year. We were pretty pleased with that.
Okay. Just on HSA in general, maybe give us an idea about, you know, how that market is evolving, you know, trends in that business, the demand environment for that product over time.
Yeah. You know, it's still a very good market. I mean, from a, you know, regulatory standpoint, this is something that's advocated by, you know, politicians on both sides of the aisle. It's advocated by employers. It's good for the consumer for all the tax advantages they get. It's good for, you know, employers because it helps them control healthcare costs. There is, you know, a very strong rationale for continued growth of HSA. Now we've seen, you know, growth slow down in the number of accounts the last few years from, you know, double-digit growth maybe, you know, three, four, five years ago to more, you know, single digits now. That's okay. I think, you know, we've guided that in our guide.
You know, we continue to put emphasis on how we continue to educate the consumer, expand adoption of HSA, expand them to use some of the other offerings that we have available. We still feel very good about that market.
You guys make some foot income in that business. You also have some corporate debt. Talk about, this is maybe dovetailing from a conversation about the benefit segment, maybe to some impacts on the broader business, but, you know, in this higher, presumably this higher for longer rate environment that we're in, how should investors think about sort of the relationship between rates and your results?
Yeah. So, you know, at the top line on revenue, and, you know, by the way, we provide some disclosures on it. We published a supplemental information pack. Part of our earnings, we started doing this last quarter. We did it again this quarter. It's on the WEX Investor Relations of our website. You can see, you know, what does a 100 basis point change in interest rate do to both the revenue line and the EPS line of the company. So, you know, put in whatever interest rate assumption you'd like and you can see what you think would, how it would impact our results. I will say, you know, top line perspective, a 100 basis point, if it kind of went in today, would be about $40 million up or down.
That is really the result of there are two areas where interest rates impact the top line. It is in our mobility business where we have escalator clauses in our contract that tie to rates. That will impact the mobility segment. Then there are the HSA accounts, our non-bank custodial business where we invest those HSA cash assets. 75% of that is in fixed instruments, but 25% of it does float. There is some revenue impact to the top line. You know, higher for longer would presumably be a top line benefit for us relative to what we assumed at the end of April, which is we looked at what, right, what, you know, the options market was basically saying for future rate cut expectations and used that as our basis for determining what the forecast looked like.
I would say, you know, on the EPS line because of the corporate debt, which you mentioned, the sensitivity flips. Lots of benefit on the revenue side if interest rates are higher. It's, you know, worse for us on the EPS side because of the corporate debt. You know, we always try to look to that, manage through that to see how much we should hedge, but we're really comfortable with where the sensitivities are right now.
I want to compliment you on the disclosures. They're actually excellent.
Thank you.
Kind of best in class at this point.
Thank you. Great team at WEX has done the work. A lot of hard work, but it came out really nice.
You know, we have a couple of minutes left. I want to ask a broader question about the kind of industrial logic of the company. You know, you have three different segments. There's, you know, and maybe you correct me here if I'm speaking out of turn, but there's not a ton of revenue synergy between the different segments, but there's this bank basically that sort of is the thread that maybe connects the, you know, the ecosystem. First of all, is that the right way to look at it?
I think we, you know, I think we've tried to thread a number of synergies through the business. Yes, clearly there's the bank and each of our businesses, you know, leverages the bank in some regard, right? Whether it's an issuer of cards or whether it's using the bank for deposits and then NBC business, all of the businesses use the bank. We've also, you know, done work to focus on cross-selling across our different businesses. You know, some results were there. I mean, you know, it's work we continue to do. We've done work on the back end of the business structure. You know, we've got, you know, when we service a customer, we leverage a common infrastructure to do that under common leadership so we can drive as much synergy as possible and efficiency.
When we look at the technology development in the technology side of the businesses, right, we also leverage common teams to try to use as much shared technology infrastructure as we can. There has been some work to drive synergies across the business.
I see. There's more connectivity.
Correct.
Underneath the hood, as it were. Maybe lastly, just on capital allocation, you recently consummated, you know, the $750 million Dutch auction tender offer. Does that, you know, is that sort of a big card to play in terms of capital allocation? Do you have flexibility to, you know, to pursue further M&A or?
Yeah, I think, so, two questions there. Do we have flexibility and will we? I mean, from a leverage standpoint, the company has been higher in the past, but at this point, right, our focus is on paying down, getting the leverage back down to historical levels or, you know, more comfortably in the middle of our range. You know, not concerned about the leverage levels where they are, right? Like I've said earlier, we've done a lot of scenario modeling. The company produces a large amount of cash even in a recession scenario because of the structure of our bank, like fuel prices dropping suddenly releases a lot of cash to the corporation. The result of that is we're really resilient from a leverage standpoint in multiple economic environments. That being said, we still want to continue to produce leverage ratios.
You know, in the near term, our focus is not M&A. Our focus is getting leverage down.
Fantastic.
All right.
Out of time.
Thank you. Thanks a lot for the time.
Appreciate it.
Appreciate the questions.
Thank you.
Yep. Take care.