Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us for Citi's Thirteenth Annual FinTech Conference. For this session, we're excited to host Western Union. With Western Union with us today, we have Matt Cagwin, who is CFO. Thank you, Matt, for joining us.
Andrew, thank you for having me. It's been great to be here so far today.
Yeah, great conference so far. Thanks for joining. I think let's start off maybe, you know, I think most people are familiar with Western Union. Maybe start off with just, you know, going through a brief report card of, you know, what's transpired since you outlined the, the strategy, the Evolve 2025 strategy in October 2022. Maybe, talk about just, you know, some of your outlines, initiatives, you know, how you're trending versus those, and then maybe some learnings along the way, and then we'll get deeper. But just kick off for the group.
Yeah. Awesome, Andrew. Thank you for the question, and you know all this, but for those that may be new to our story, we laid out in October 2022 our three-year plan at our Investor Day here in New York. And in that, we had four pillars. The first pillar was to stabilize our retail business, which we are excited about the progress we've made there. It's probably been one of the things that's been slightly ahead of where we thought we'd be.
So over the last 18-20 months, we've been able to take a business that had been declining on a revenue and transaction basis to, we've actually able to stabilize the transactions the last two quarters through a combination of better customer service for both our agents and our customers, through additional enhancements to our point-of-sale solution. And I'll talk later about the detail of that. And then as well, we started, in the middle of last year, introducing a little more testing on pricing. So that's really our first pillar, is stabilizing that retail business. Our second one was get back to market-level growth in the branded digital business. The digital business, we believe, will grow somewhere between 10%-20%.
We have, over the last year, been able to get back to the point now where we've had three quarters of double-digit transaction growth, with a 13% growth in the fourth quarter. We've been able to get back to having double-digit new customer growth over the last year. We've been able to revert back from having declining revenue to we actually grew revenue in the second half of last year and flat for the full year with a extra rate of 4% going into this year. We believe as the year progresses, the transactions and revenue will converge. It will not be because transactions come down and revenue stays where it is, but we'll continue to see progress in our revenue trajectory throughout this year.
So very happy about that one, too, but we felt really good about that when we had our Investor Day, because we'd already started launching some of the programs that have allowed that to be possible. As you probably remember, we launched a new go-to-market program in August of 2022, so it was three months old by the time of our Investor Day. But that program was a combination of changing our marketing ads and how we engage with our customers and modernizing those, improving our funnel from the point of someone coming into our website, to how you ask for the information you want, because we figured out where the fall-off rates were to have people come further into the process.
We've tested promotional pricing to get more people through the door, and then we've gotten closer to market-based pricing that help them stay in the door.
Right.
We've been really excited about the mic.
Mic, okay?
Okay. We've been really excited about the retention rate on this. When you do a promotional program, you always wonder-
Yep.
Will you be able to retain the customers that you thought you'd be able to get, or that you got? And the actual retention rate we've seen has been actually equal to or better in most of the geographies around the world, so we've been really excited about that. And then the third pillar is expanding our accessible financial services for our customer base. This has been the longest pole in the tent. We've had a long history of having a bill pay business and a money order business, but our goal is to expand the number of touch points we have with our customers so that they stay more higher affinity towards Western Union. And over the last year, year and a half, we've done a few different things. We continue to expand our wallet solution.
We're now in five countries around the world, four within Europe, and then we've launched last year in Argentina. We've launched a new, prepaid business here in the US. We've started to modernize our money order business here in the US. It's currently in the pilot phase or beta phase. We are close on getting our Brazilian and US wallet out in the marketplace, and we've done some lending solutions. So we feel good about the progress we're making. We're learning a lot. This is the one that had a lot of new activity, so we learn, test and learn and make enhancements. So we feel great about where we're going on that, that pillar. And the very last one is optimize our expense base. And we've made some great progress here.
Over the last 12 months of 2023, we were able to save $50 million, redeploy most of that back into our business last year and fund all the things that came in pillar number 3. So feel good about that and feel good about the fact that we have as many opportunities for 2024 and expect to have similar level this year.
Fantastic. That's a great overview, and we'll dig into some of those-
Yep.
in a moment, starting with digital and then retail. But I think first, just at a high level, I think the outlook that you provided seems to suggest that you're on track for what you provided in terms of underlying revenues and EPS. I mean, obviously, they're. You have to parse out Iraq and all that stuff. But is that a fair characterization? Are you on track versus the 2025, you know, trajectory that you outlined previously?
Yeah, yeah, we feel very good, if not slightly ahead. So if you go back to what we had shared at our Investor Day 18 months ago, we had talked about having a 2% improvement per year coming out of 2022. So last year, our core results, Iraq, we thought would be down somewhere between 2% and 4% revenue while we solidified the base of our company. We were able to back out Iraq and the incremental pricing we did.
Mm-hmm.
We felt very good about where we were there. This year's guide, if you just kind of walk forward from where we were in 2022, would put you at the lower end of the range. We think that midpoint, you're kind of right ahead, and if you hit the upper end, you're way ahead of plan or way ahead of thought, and we feel great about next year as well. EPS, same kind of concept. We had talked about mid-single-digit EPS growth. If you kind of back yourself all the way up to 2022 and move yourself forward, you'll get to a point where a couple of pennies ahead.
Got it. Thank you for that. And now let's just dig into digital a little bit, and maybe you can level set and talk about how the demographics and use cases are different for digital versus retail. And then I think, I think within digital, there's also different subsets of customers. So maybe drill down just to the demographic and sort of sub-segment level. That'd be great.
Yep, certainly. So holistically, at the highest level, our customer base is for a retail customer is very similar, someone who's crossed borders, someone who's aspiring for more, someone typically at the lower economic status of whatever country they're visiting. So from that aspect, the core is similar. Where they differ is usually when you make the crossing of borders, you don't have access to banks or other financial services, so they typically will find us on the retail side.
Right.
We're able to board about 20 million new customers per year from people crossing borders. Then what ends up happening is once they've been a customer for a little while, they will then start to get a little more cemented in the market. They'll may get a bank account, might get a debit card, prepaid card, things of those nature, and they'll evolve to more of a digital solution. And that's so the same customer, but now they've been in the market for a little longer. They'll move their way into the digital space because now they can fund their transaction, either through an account, debit card, credit card, which you-
Sure.
Can do that on the retail side, but most of that's always cash initiated.
Right.
And then the other part's a little bit unique and different. The digital side, we're making some good headway on this, is you can do any one of those three methods of funding. You can do an account, you can do a debit card, you can do credit card. And then the backside of that is historically, we've been very heavy cash payout. So if someone's sending money back home to Mexico or to wherever else in the world, and it's very heavy cash payout. We've been really emphasizing over the last six months, more an account to account. That's where really a lot of the growth in this business is, when people can really fund to an account, and we're seeing great growth in that space.
I think the other segmentation within digital is what is your pay-in method and what's your payout method ? It's a little bit different demographic, but not massively different.
Got it. That's helpful. And then maybe we could just take a step back. I think the business grew for many years very, very well, and then 2021 hit. And, you know, back half, obviously, they had some pandemic benefit, then the back half started to decelerate, and then we saw a step down in growth and obviously improving at this point. But maybe we just rewind and talk about kind of what happened to sort of cause that, you know, divergence in terms of growth rate before we get to kind of the forward look, maybe another level set question.
Yeah, so, hard for me to say. I wasn't here at the time.
Sure.
But what I can say is we're hyper-focused on turning around that business.
Yeah.
We feel great about the progress we've made. It's really all around having a great customer service, customer experience with a fair market price. And when you do that, you attract lots of different customers. You're able to retain those customers. They're able to work with you for many years. So I can't really tell you what's different, but they did obviously have a very-
Sure
-fast growing through a number of years,
Right
but then slowed down the back half of the pandemic-
Right
where people migrated from retail to digital, and there is a little bit coming back to retail.
Got it. Okay. Maybe if you just jump into unit economics, talk about what you're seeing from an LTV, CAC perspective for the new cohorts that you've onboarded using the new go-to-market strategy versus maybe what you saw historically. And I guess maybe just before we get into that, I remember we, you know, we met several months ago. We talked about sort of your ability to kind of identify and measure customers and performance a little bit better. Can you talk about where you're at in terms of being able to actually, like, measure things like on a customer-specific level, like unit economics, corridor-specific level, and then we can sort of talk about that question about how unit economics are trending?
Yep. Absolutely. So it's what you're alluding to. So we do look at the LTV to CAC on a country level, on a corridor, on a demographic level.
Right.
Depending on the country, some have different demographics than others. As you probably have seen, we made incremental investments in the fourth quarter marketing. And as we did that, we put that into the markets that had the best LTV to CAC ratios. I'm not going to highlight this for my competitors, but there are obviously some that have higher.
Sure
Levels than others. So we do look at it that way. We also look at it by what is the way that you actually attract your customer, and is it better to do one vehicle of communication marketing versus another? And as things work, we're actually doubling down on those, and we're stopping ones that have a lower payback.
Got it. That's good to hear. So, the incremental marketing, yeah, I don't think I've heard that before. It makes a lot of sense, obviously, put behind kind of the best unit economics sort of corridors, where it's going to drive the best return over the next couple of years, which makes a ton of sense, obviously. Okay. I guess the when we think about just the competitive environment, has it been. It's interesting because, you know, post-pandemic, there's been a little bit of a shakeout from the sub-scale player. They'll feel like digital not being able to acquire as many customers or invest, and it seems like, you know, that's benefited, you know, other players who are more skilled. So what are you seeing in the competitive environment more broadly?
Yeah, so we're definitely seeing a consolidation. I don't mean through M&A, but rather more consolidation of who can afford to invest.
Right.
What you saw throughout the pandemic and the year after the pandemic, if it's even over,
Mm-hmm
you saw a lot of corridor players, niche players, that would do huge promotional pricing, get 2 transactions free or super discounted transactions. And that was under a period of time where profitability doesn't matter. You can borrow money at a cheap level.
Sure.
As you've seen. It's not really sure if it's a pandemic coming, ending, or if it's more the demand of profitability.
Right.
And how easy to access the capital. But you've seen those uneconomical decisions starting to pivot away from what had been happening, and those players have. You don't even see them in the market as much anymore.
Right. Right. Got it. Okay. And when we think about just marketing expense, so you talked about the tick up in marketing expense in the fourth quarter. What's baked in for 2024? Are you- do you continue to go after, like, the higher kind of unit economic corridors more aggressively? Is there optionality to flex up marketing expense? Maybe talk about the philosophy in terms of marketing expense and returns when it comes to 2024 and beyond.
Yep, absolutely. So Andrew, if I can take a couple steps back.
Sure.
One thing we also talked about on our last earnings call is that we were actually able to reduce our CAC by about 15%.
Sure.
So that has allowed us to spend a little bit less in 2023 than we spent in 2022. So we spent about $190 million. We're actually able to grow our new customers double digit, and the transactions 13%. So we're going to continue to make investments in marketing where we think we can get a good return. We do think there's lots of places we can do that. The spend in 2023, while it was larger in Q4, the full year, again, was slightly down, not meaningfully-
Right.
-million dollars. That was really more moving it around to more of the holiday season and where you actually get the customers that are trying to send money around that.
Yep.
Versus the year before, we were a little more front-end loaded. So I wouldn't say that Q4 was an anomaly for a full year. It's more of a getting it right throughout the year. As far as you think through the 2024 levels, it's going to be slightly more, but it's going to be largely consistent with last, last year's levels.
Got it. And, you talked about the rate of transaction growth and conversion transaction in revenues. I guess first, you know, what do you-- you talked about the digital market growing 10%-20%. I think you're growing transactions, you know, low teens around.
Mm-hmm.
I guess, what's the comfort level in being able to kind of maintain that level of low teens growth? And then, when we think about go-to-market, you know, do you feel like you're at where you need to be from a promotional pricing perspective, or is more needed to kind of keep that transaction rate going?
Yeah. So, so we feel very good about where we are.
Mm-hmm.
We've been able to accelerate our transaction growth in Q4 from where we were in Q2 and Q3. Continue to be able to grow new customers double digit. And then you have to bifurcate my conversation earlier about your pay and payout method for digital matters.
Right.
But what we're seeing is an accelerated growth on the account to account customers. We're actually seeing for our. We've disclosed this, I think, in Q3, but we're seeing growth closer to 30% in that business, which is where a lot of the folks are going, is onto an account to account, where the other portion, other portion of our business is growing more lower double digits.
Right.
That brings you to the 13% range. We think there's enough runway on this. We think the market's growing. We think our pricing is right where it needs to be. As you know, we introduced promotional pricing, but then we also had market-based pricing, which comes in as a cohort basis. If you're a new customer, you'll get the promotion for your first transaction.
Right.
Then you'll move into ongoing market-based pricing. As you do that, there's still going to be a little bit of pressure on our overall RPT for digital, because you're gonna have older customers that tripped, that are at a higher RPT than your new ones at market-based. But other than that, we don't think there's massive further change we have to do other than monitoring the market and reacting, but we've not seen meaningful changes from our competitors.
Got it. And then retention, I think one of the highlights, you called out the improvement in retention last quarter. What's the opportunity to continue to improve that? If it's not pricing, is it service levels? Is it product enhancements? Maybe you get to walk through how we can continue to see the retention go up?
Yeah. So for us, it's all tied together.
Mm-hmm.
So you got to get them in the door, got to treat them fairly on price. But we learned our number one reason we lose customers is not price. You lose customers because you are generally not giving the right customer service. So we spent a lot of time over the last two years improving our call centers, how we talk to people, having empathy and compassion when they call in, understanding that they're not sending money because they're buying a vacation. They're sending money because their family needs support, and that money not making might actually have an impact on how they're able to support their families and get things done. So having that compassion, get their problem solved. That's number one. Number two is, how do you have other touch points with them?
If someone's sending transactions a handful of time or a couple handfuls of time, how do you have other interactions, whether that be through our prepaid card, whether that through lending, not on our balance sheet, by the way-
Yep.
-partners. Whether it be through having a wallet solution, how do you have more touch points?
Sure.
So then that affinity stays, and they become more sticky-
Right.
you're able to push it up. As you know, our retention for digital last year improved by 120 basis points. We think there's still more runway on that.
Got it. Okay, super helpful. And then, and then just back to the pricing conversation. It, you know, and maybe this week, we'll talk about this at retail a little bit more. But historically, Western Union had a sort of a premium in terms of price. Is that still the case, or is it normalized a little bit when you think of it? And obviously, it's difficult because everything's quarter specific.
Correct.
How do we think about pricing strategy?
Yep
In terms of your whose position versus the overall market?
Yes. I have to split this up into two groups.
Yep.
One is, you've got your retail business, and you have your digital.
Okay.
Digital first.
Yep.
Digital, it's easy to go and market shop, and we believe that the brand that we have, the longevity we have, and the trust that our customers have in us, allow us to have a premium price. Now, a premium price can't be 50%.
Mm.
You get a premium, but you can't be-
Right
50% double the market.
Right.
But we do believe that we have a right to play a little higher in market. Then you can go to the retail side, there's even more variability. As you know, there's multiple kinds of agent locations. You can have an agent that's non-exclusive with many competitors in the same location. There, someone walking down the aisle. It may all be in the same machine, like a Walmart or a Kroger, or it could be five machines in the, you know, the agent's location, and they're asking: What's the best rate? What's the FX? There, trust matters, and they may again be willing to pay a little bit more to have someone they trust, but they're not going to pay, again, 50% or double the rate. So that's got to be really competitive. That's going to be fairly priced, right?
Then you can move into an exclusive location where there's a lot of competition on the same street or same block. That's one notch removed from the parity, what we call a parity in a store, but you still got to be somewhat close to competitive, because people will walk around the street and ask. And then you have someone who's in an only location in the city. It's in a rural area, and you have a lot more pricing power. So in all situations, we think we can have a premium price. It's just a level of degree, you have a premium price.
That makes sense. And when you think about the gap between transaction growth and revenue growth, so obviously, you've articulated that should start to close as you lapse from the go-to-market changes this year. Is there a mix component or something else that retains a gap between those two metrics? Or, you know, how should we think about the ongoing delta between transaction revenue growth from a mixed pricing, other perspective?
Yeah. So two thoughts on this question. One is, to your point, they will narrow as we lap the promotional pricing-
Right.
And the new market-based pricing, but that will happen in lumpiness. As you probably know, and the audience may know, we launched the program in August of 2022. We had it fully in the U.S. in the September time frame, took it through Europe in the Q4 of 2022, Q1 of 2023, and then other parts of the world in Q2 and Q3 of the year, later that, later that year. Those will all be chunky as they come through them. The other part for that program is the cohort pricing, where new customers get different rates. That will cause a drag on older client or legacy clients who are attriting off and new clients are coming on at lower prices. That'll cause a spread.
Sure.
And the other thing that will cause a potential spread is mix. Is the transaction happening in that rural location I talked about before, in some place where they have a high rate because they have more pricing power, or are they happening in the independent, non-exclusive location where you have a parity in a store? That'll cause a difference. And then the last one is a mix on, are you driving account to account, which come at a lower yield than a cash to cash. Now, from a profitability standpoint, the profit margins are much better on an account to account, but your profit dollar is a little less. So all of those play into the mix.
Right. Right. That makes sense. And before I switch to retail, I want to talk about the ecosystem play, because I think it's really important. But maybe this is a related question before we get to ecosystem. I think one of the items that evolved in 2025 was reducing the number of app instances globally, so you can iterate faster, roll out changes quicker. Where are we in that process? And maybe we can also talk about kind of after that, the wallet, in terms of where we're at, in terms of expansion there.
Those two things are good questions to ask together.
Yep.
Because what we've talked about publicly, that one of the things we've learned through our European launch is that having two apps in a market is confusing to a customer.
Right.
We knew that was likely to be the case, but we wanted to move at pace, so we put in the wallet app in the market. Some customers moved over, and if they wanted to move back, they had to both, and it made it clunky.
Sure.
So what we've done, back to your initial question, is on the going to regional patches, we had talked about having 6 regional patches so you can make quicker improvements on APAC or Middle East.
Right.
And then for that, we've actually rolled out 12 locations so far. Heavy concentration in the Middle East. Last year, we took about most of the Middle East onto the Middle East patch. We've not moved as fast on Europe and Latin America because there you're going to have, start having the one app solution rollout. You don't want to have a the regional patch in there, and then you have to get rid of it because you're putting the one app solution in for the wallet.
Right.
Those two things are happening-
Hand in hand.
hand in hand, as you're moving forward. But our goal is still the same concept of you're going to have a one app solution for a region, or you're going to have a wallet, or you're going to have a remittance solution for the region and have both those things there so you can move faster, right? And it's going to continue this year and progress.
Maybe we talk about just the ecosystem of products. Obviously, one part is a wallet and money management, you know, pretty table stakes things. Maybe not for your core customer, but in general. But then you can build things around it. Like you mentioned, lending, liquidity products. Maybe talk about some early observations about how customers are using the product. And then I think one thing that's interesting is if you have a wallet, theoretically, you know, you - I guess you need to have both sides of the transaction, but there is potential to do kind of on-us transactions. So maybe you talk about, you know, the variety of products that you can support and the roadmap, and then the ability to kind of do on-us and transfer within the ledger versus outside.
Yeah, certainly. Andrew, just a reminder, we have five countries live right now. We have the four countries in Europe, Romania, Germany, Italy, Poland, and then we've taken Argentina live. I'm giving you those four because there's different learnings from each of them.
Sure.
I'm going to work my way backwards. On the Argentina one, we plugged it into our bill pay solution. So now people can take. If I'm sending money to my family back in Argentina, they can take it into their wallet, and then they can pay their bill, pay their bills through our bill pay solution plugged into the wallet for that market. We're seeing an uptake of people diverting funds from cash pickup, then going into one of our locations and paying a bill.
Mm-hmm.
So it matters a little less for ones that are company store, but for non-company store, you're able to save on commission expense. So that's a learning that we had a hypothesis for, and it's now starting to pan out in that market, where you've plugged in another solution where they can actually use the funds-
Yeah.
rather than taking cash.
Right.
In Europe, you talked about, because people do P2P, we're seeing transactions actually 2x-4x higher in Europe for the four countries that have the wallet, than we're seeing in other markets of similar size and similar demographics. That's usually largely driven by two things. One is it's happening because you're using your debit card to buy something, and you have money in your wallet. Or two, there is a high uptake in P2P between people in the same country, even though there's only four countries currently live. Those are two illustrations of where we're seeing some progress.
Got it. Super helpful. Maybe we switch gears to retail. And I know there's a lot of things going on that you're doing, whether it's, you mentioned customer service enhancements, you know, point-of-sale enhancements, there's many other things. But maybe talk about, you know, some of your initiatives, how those are being absorbed in the market, and then bring us up to speed in terms of the assumptions for what you're targeting for retail revenue improvement in 2024 and 2025. Because I think it's. I think, you know, there's broadly a question about stabilization, but what does that mean for you?
Yeah. So the first one is the product enhancements. So we still think there's tons more we can do on the product side to make our agents and customers' lives easier. The goal is really: how do you keep removing friction? How do you speed up the line? How do you help your customers understand how their transaction's working? And as you highlighted, and everybody knows, we've put into market four or five things last year, whether it be one-step refund, which has taken out millions of calls from our call center. We've put into market the Remember Me, which saves the level of data you have to get when you come into a transaction-
Right.
-which helps both the customer and the agent side. Quick Resend, which remembers the last couple transactions you've done. We're working on a solution called Track and Transfer, which allows the receiver and sender to be able to look and see what the transaction is in the process flow. If you're sending money to me, which you can do anytime you want, please do, you can then watch where I pick it up and say, "Hey, I saw you got your money. What are you buying with it?" So it just helps, helps enhance the, the relationship between the two.
Sure.
To the second part of your question, what are we expecting about revenue for 2024 and 2025? As we highlighted earlier, we're expecting the transactions and revenue to continue to converge. Our expectation is at the end of our 2025 journey-
Yep
that we'll get back to flattish revenue and flattish transaction growth.
Got it.
They're faster on transactions, but room to go on revenue.
What do you think is the biggest opportunities and risk associated with achieving that? Because and the reason I ask is, this is obviously a big question you get, that I get from investors in terms of, are incremental price investments needed? Because we saw some small amount. We saw some needed to kind of stimulate transaction growth. So, that's not, you know, on the risk side, that might some, you know, additional pricing might be needed, but on the opportunity side, you have all these opportunities that are coming in that can improve retention, can improve, you know, customer service quality, which can support repeat transaction rates and things like that. So how do those two balance? Yeah.
So. You actually answered the question for me, which is awesome. So thank you. If I point you to the second half of that answer-
Yeah.
If you go back and look at our transactions, we've shown in our earnings call the last two quarters, last maybe two quarters, we've shown six to eight quarters of where's our transactions gone. And you can see the first half of that horizon in the late 2022, first half of 2023, we've been able to make meaningful progress in reducing the decline in our transactions. That, none of that was pricing related. That was us working with our agents. I haven't even highlighted it here today, but we've also been working on how to stop giving upfront signing bonuses and moving them to more performance-based so that we can grow together versus they buy a yacht, and they're sailing in the Caribbean or Mediterranean or wherever.
Right.
And be gone.
Mm-hmm.
We've now, almost everyone who I've been part as I got here, we've now pivoted away from signing bonuses to some kind of performance bonus. I'm not trying to make them make less. I'm just trying to first both feel hungry to make it better and bigger.
Yep.
That's making a difference. Working with them on how they advertise. We've not only improved our marketing for the digital side, we've also improved on the retail side. So all those are starting to make progress. Then we put in on the technology enhancements I talked about before. A lot of those started hitting the market in the first half of that year, and then we started doing the pricing. We had the upside from Iraq, and they made August timeframe, and that's continued to make progress. I can't actually split for you the difference between what would Q3 and Q4 have been, had I not done the pricing.
Mm-hmm.
But we're happy that we've seen good progress in the corridors and the cities or DMAs, we call them, where we've done the pricing. We're happy with those, but it's not the- it's just extra fuel on the fire.
Right.
It's not a-
It's not the-
It's not the fire. Correct.
Yeah.
You need, you need a little bit of both, but the first one is the biggest driver.
Right. Biggest driver is what I think what you're saying is fundamental in terms of making secondarily, like, price adjustments to sort of, you know, make the premium a little more-
Correct
-appropriate. Understood. That, that makes a lot of sense. And then, you know, we talked about the digital market growing 10%-20%. What do you think the retail market grows? I always think about remittance market, obviously, total growing, you know, some combination of economic growth and migration trends, somewhere to, you know, low- to mid-single digits. Where- but where do you see kind of the steady state growth of retail?
Yeah. So, so people are still migrating over. So the overall remittance market's growing somewhere in the low single digit.
Yep.
When you look at the split between digital, which is stealing from banks. So it's hard to look at just the core digital growth and say, "Oh, that means you're dying over here, and that's 3% down." You've got to take out the banks first, put part of that in here. We get back to a flattish number, so call it negative 1 to positive 1 type any given year on the retail side. We've been a share donor for years.
Yep.
We think that the progress we're making allows us to not be a share donor. We actually have grown share in Mexico for the first time in the last four months-
Sure
and years. You can see this with more competitors, what they've been doing. So our goal is to get our fair share of both digital and get our fair share of retail, and we think that gets back to flattish. Keep pointing it out here. It gets it back to flattish on the retail side and gets us to double digit on the digital side.
Got it. Makes a lot of sense. And then only a few minutes left, but I want to make sure I touch on sort of the margin expense base profile. So, I think the way you describe the expense base is, you know, fixed variable and agent commissions. You sort of addressed-
Yep
the agent commissions in your earlier comments, but maybe you could talk about where we're at in terms of the operating expense efficiencies across those categories. Obviously, I think you outlined $150 million. It evolved. You know, much of that, I think, is going to be reinvested in the business. But talk us through where we're at now and if there's additional areas that we can consider for the, for cost efficiency.
Certainly. So I've now been at Western Union for a little over 18 months, I guess. And when we laid that out on Investor Day sixteen months ago.
Yeah.
We had ideas where we were trying to go. We were trying to change a culture. We were trying to get people to be more focused on, am I spending money in the right places?
Right.
Before actually knowing every single place you're actually going to go find the opportunities. Now, I've had another year plus since that date, and there's infinite opportunities. The places that we already spent time on is getting our real estate right. That was low-hanging fruit. We've actually done a huge amount of right-sizing there. We've seen the improvements in our CAC on the marketing side last year, and we think there's still some progress to go there, but not necessarily the same degree. We've made a whole lot of headway on having the right people in the right roles. We've right-sized a lot of the support functions. We've added back into the sales organization, the technology organization.
We're in the process now of getting activities in the right locations because you've got things where they're inefficient, where you've got too many vendors involved, and how if you actually go to one vendor, you get a better rate, but you also can get rid of all the handoffs.
Sure.
So there's a ton of further opportunity, and a lot of that, in my mind, is going to come in the technology space. We have a little bit in the compliance, but we are 100% committed to doing the right thing.
Of course.
Continuing the support functions. So I think you should expect in 2024, a similar level of savings that we had last year, which is about $50 million, and then we're well on our way to our $150 million goal at that point.
That's helpful. You know, I always, you know, always had a question in my mind about Western Union and the revenue growth required to drive margin expansion. I think based on the changes you're making, it seems like the scale, you know, you expand margins off a lower growth rate of growth versus historically, but it—where are we in that process? What's the level of growth required to drive sort of margin scale over the long term?
As you know, 60% of our costs are variable.
Right.
So they're going to move. Then you get the 40% part that's fixed or semi-fixed. I think it kind of tells you that if you have no growth, you're going to have-
Sure.
Or if ranking growth is going to be hard, you're going to take out costs, which we've been doing.
Sure.
Once you start getting any incremental low single-digit growth, that could provide margin expansion. But the reason why we gave the range of 19-21 is, for now, we have the leading industry-leading margin in the industry. Sure, you'd always love more—better margins.
Yeah.
But our goal is to make sure we have enough latitude to invest back in the business when we see an opportunity to move back and forth between that range, and then we'll readdress that at our next Investor Day about what the long-term guidance is. But growth will add fuel, as you saw last in the first half of the year.
It's a fair way to put it. I like what you said about reinvesting the business versus just harvesting, because that's important. Maybe we could talk about just this year from a margin perspective. We get a lot of questions because there obviously is a range which, you know, suggests some flexibility. But what are the variables that can drive margins higher or lower? Obviously, one of those is growth. You know, we talked about marketing expense, but maybe talk us through this year as it relates to the expense profile and margins.
To me, there's really two things that can drive where we end up this year. One is to your point, that how fast does revenue grow?
Mm-hmm.
We gave a range for Iraq, we gave a range for the overall business, we gave a range for our consumer services revenue, which we haven't really talked much about today. If any one of those were to go at a faster pace, then the next question is, do we have places where we can invest back or does it go back, return to our shareholders? So that can drive in a large margin expansion.
Right.
The other one would be our pace for our cost redeployment program. Last year, we were able to save costs at a faster pace than we were able to reinvest. If that continues into this year, that would also expand margins.
Got it. Super helpful. And then maybe just any closing remarks you want to leave us with as the session winds down?
Andrew, all I got to say is sitting here now, 18 months in, I am excited about where we are. I think we've got the right strategy. We've got leadership in place right now that is driving it every day, and excited about looking ahead to 2024.
Awesome. Great note to end on. Thanks, Matt, for joining us for this session. And thanks, thank you all for being here. I really appreciate it.