Newsfilter article unlocker

Enter Newsfilter article ID in the field below.
Example: https://newsfilter.io/articles/39be1bef03e66cdc886c08a2a6319c47

Retrieved article
All right. We are going to kick off the next session. Up next, we have CFO of Flywire, Cosman. Cosman, you've been here for the last couple of years. We're very happy to have you back. Awesome. Yeah. Thanks, Will. Glad to be here. So I thought we would open this up high level, kind of a headline from the Q2 call. You laid out the ambition for a billion dollars of revenue and 30% adjusted EBITDA margins over the next few years. Starting with a revenue number, when you build up to that number bottoms up, what are the two or three largest building blocks? And maybe just talk about the decision to put those targets out, you know, at this time, given all the volatility we've seen in some of your largest verticals. Awesome. Two-part question, my favorite kind. So let me start with the first one. So first, in terms of the building blocks and how we thought about it, listen, the billion dollars and 30%, it's an organic target and, and it's our usual approach of being prudent and data-dependent overall. So as you think about the building blocks, I would start with the enterprise client and the fact that a large majority of our both education and travel clients are those clients that we call enterprise, which is above $100,000 in revenue per year. And those clients stay with us. They see the high ROI of our software and a combination of capabilities that we provide. And as you've heard us say, they're lower than 1% churn, so very high retention of those clients. So that creates a sustainable base on which to build. And so that's sort of part one. And then, you know, you go to our sort of biggest, still our biggest vertical, education, strong growth there, but increasingly diversified, you know, components of that growth and the growth algorithm, as we'll talk about it later. And so seeing that cross-sell on the domestic side, you know, that's driving a lot of the growth there too. So that's the second piece. Now, look, travel is now in its own right, you know, sort of bigger than the U.S., nearing the size of the UK kind of education business. And it is, you know, big TAM, the client C, the ROI there, and we have sort of the breadth of clients now with smaller and larger, and also just the depth of product, which, you know, we didn't have before the certified acquisition. So that's great. And then lastly, B2B healthcare, healthcare both big, you knows, sortof growth drivers this year and continuing to deliver. So kind of, you know, firing on all engines, so I figured, you know, so those are the building blocks. Then the second point, you know, why now? Look, it's sort of aligned with my sort of, in our guidance principles, which is, you know, you start with, you know, transparency, and so as we're doing on almost sort of medium-term kind of planning, this is starting, you know, those numbers are trying to come into focus, and they don't require, you know, macro to get better. We actually assumed in that a very prudent kind of macro, you know, environment, you know, from our perspective. So as we think about that billion dollars and the 30% felt that it's coming into focus. So, you know, helping folks kind of plan around that. Second, it's, you know, data dependent. We'll see how things play out and we'll let you all know. But third, I think, notice the balance between, you know, we've always talked about revenue. Revenue is still obviously a huge focus for us in growth, but now we have free cash flow, we have margins, and certainly gap profitability as we're pivoting this year. So those are also important balancing aspects. I wanted to bring that in. But listen, I'll just finish with this financial framework was built to withstand a tough macro. It was not built to assume it gets better. And so we've tried to kind of balance that expectation externally. Great. And the other half of that equation is the expense base. You said transformation investment will peak in 2027, and beyond that, you expect operating costs to stay relatively flat while still funding a lot of your strategic priorities. How do you get the confidence to manage OPEX for a company that's still growing in that way? So I would think of it as sort of structural. It's not a cutting exercise. It's already happening. So, actually, if you look back, so if I start, sort of just go back a few years, as you know, we've grown and scaled, you know. We've invested. We've kind of gone through a large, you known, investment scale kind of cycle. And so, since IPO, that's both organically and inorganically. Now, if You look, then zoom in through the last couple of years, even in 2025 and 26, if you were to, obviously, certify was, you Know, a big acquisition last year. But if you adjust for that to some extent and look organic OPEX, it's actually not growing that much. It's probably single-digit growth. So we're already, even before kind of doing the transformation, we're really growing at scale on a much smaller kind of OPEx level of growth because of that early investment. So now we're sort of today, we'RE in the middle of the transformation that we announced, which has become kind of our mindset internally at the company. then that allows us to drive growth at lower cost to some extent. So the way to think about the drivers there are across a few different areas. One, it's the GNA or functions that we talked about is about a third of the cost. Those are opportunities for us to simplify a lot of the systems, and we'll talk about kind of the transformation project itself. So able to simplify that to reduce a lot of those manual costs. Second, you have kind of the R&D and engineering areas, which, you know, again, we can do a lot more in those areas with a lot less. And third, one that we sort of talked about it, but not as much as the enterprise versus non-enterprise client approach. So how you tier support and how you look at kind of enterprise clients, given that we are, you now, we're so focused on that and that's one of the big drivers of growth even in the future, you can obviously change your client support models internally. So that makes your sales and marketing, so kind of the other component, also pretty manageable. So as we look ahead, feel pretty comfortable that OPEX, as I said, will be kind of growing a little bit into next year as you kind of peek through this transformation investment phase, but then managing the growth, again, and in line with the organic kind of assumptions on the revenue side, which have been, again, pretty prudent. So talk a little bit more about the Digital Transformation Initiative, Project ADAPT. You talked about kind of bottoms-up redesign of processes, systems, data, structure. Where are you in that journey today, and what have you found to be some of the biggest unlocks so far? So I would think of us as being sort of right in the middle of it. We still have about 18 months ahead of us, so we're not sort of done per se, but we, you know, if I look back, we sort of started a little bit last year. And I think the important part is to think about when you do one of these large transformations, you know you can say you're replacing systems and things like that, but that's not the hardest part. The hardest part is org and process changes, and that's kind of where we started, brought in the right talent, a lot of folks with that transformational mindset, Having seen it at scale, again, one of the reasons even I joined is to bring that scale mindset and how do you scale. And so brought in a lot of the talent, and you've seen us do some of the org changes that we've done, but then also just redesign processes, which is usually the hardest part of any transformation if you talk through. And so that's been kind of the journey so far. Now we've started to – we're in the middle of sort of the systems consolidation, so the same as many of our clients. We're looking at how do you consolidate 20, 30, 40 different systems into a lot fewer. That reduces cost, reduces complexity, reduces kind of handoffs between different departments. And so that is kind of where we are. The data side of it is the other aspect where, again, the opportunity to do so much more with data. We all talk about AI, but at the end of the day, I'm a data person. I'm an machine learning guy, as we talk about. And so for me, it's easy to put a wrapper of AI on top. It's the substance underneath that then gives you more value out of any kind of AI capability. So that's where we're spending a lot of time now. So you'll see us obviously continue to get benefits from this. But I would say over the next 18 months, you'll See more of it. And so it'll be kind of showing up in all these different areas. And the way to think about productivity from this and just in general is in sort of three tiers. AI is a big component of it. And so if you were to do nothing and you just handed everyone, you know, some of the most, you know, most recent AI models, the most advanced models, I think, you know, I know I'm certainly a lot more productive than I was to, I think, the disappointment of my team who is now realizing that every time they send me something, it comes back in about five seconds later with an answer. And so you start to skip levels in terms of how you make decisions and how fast you can move through things that you never thought were possible. So that was just a sort of individual-level productivity. But then you have functional-level and enterprise-level productivity. For those, you actually do need to invest in transformation. So if you're going to make the IR function more productive, it does need a bit more work and so forth. So that's what we're working on. But anyone sort of wondering, can you be more, you know, should you aim to be 20%, 30% more productive as an organization? I think it is, you Know, with the tools and capabilities that if you're working on the substance and underneath the foundational area like we are, I think that should be definitely achievable. Yeah, that makes sense. Let's talk about business diversification. You mentioned it in the upfront question. Five years ago, Flywire was largely a cross-border education story. today you've got a large domestic education business. Travel, as you mentioned, is now a very large business in its own right. And B2B healthcare, still smaller, but still growing. How would you frame the growth rates across the different verticals? And, you know, where do you think that mix settles out as you approach the billion dollar milestone? Yeah, so if you look back at IPO, yes, I think most still thought of us as a cross-border, probably, you know, mostly kind of in the large, you know, big four markets kind of player. And now I think hopefully everyone's seeing that this is quite a very different business certainly this year and going forward. And a lot of it has just been diversification into the other verticals of travel, B2B healthcare, you know now kind of adding, but even within education, you now have the domestic SFS cross sale, which is driving, you know, growth that is above the company average. So as I think about where we are today and where, you know, how to think about the billion dollars even in the future, it's growth from these other verticals. So it's grow from travel, it's grown from, again, B2B, but also domestic EDU growing faster. So those will become a larger share of the business and key growth drivers. And so that to us is kind of, you now, it is obviously good. Still cross-border will still be an important component. We still see that as a key underlying sort of feature of the platform that enables you to cross-sell into some of these other areas. But the others are, in their own right, strong contributors. So I would say those have become – so those assume they grow faster than the company average, which by definition, if you look at the mix last year, it'll shift towards – if you just look at cross-border, which is mostly basically a portion of the U.S., mostly outside the U。S., then that becomes a smaller portion while the rest becomes a much larger portion over time. Yeah, makes sense. Maybe sticking with the cross-border business, we're sitting here in August right in the heart of U.F. enrollment peak. What are you seeing in your own data? Maybe help clear up the always headlines on the status of getting visas in any given market. What are YOU seeing on the ground? Yeah, so we are now pretty much past the U.S. peak, getting into September. We've seen most of it, and so far it's played out sort of okay for us. I would summarize it, but to give you some components, we look at external and internal data, as you know. Externally, the data, we've gotten our data through February and sort of trending more negative, but we've assumed 30% already negative in our numbers, and we're not seeing that level of decline in our own first-payer data. Some of that is just, you know, if you look at a couple of things. One is the selective institutions, so those schools that are sort of higher-ranked or able to be more selective are able to do quite well. So the headline usually is, you Know, Student Can Make It, into whatever the school may be. I think if you double-click into that, usually it's a graduate student, and sometimes it's, you know, it's less selective institution. So we've seen that mix of quality for us and more selective institutions along with kind of we tend to lean more undergraduate. Those, you knows, those are still doing pretty well. So if you look at 30% decline, we still feel pretty good that we've captured that. Now, the channel that's,you know, that remains negative, We talked about it. You see it in the visa data as incoming from India in particular. But even with that, again, we've taken a pretty prudent approach. So if I was to then step back and summarize what we've seen so far for the U.S., as you know, we guided the full year U.s. growing in the low single digits with the assumption of sort of a 30% decline in visas. And so far, you know,, for the peak at least, we're done sort of in line or better than that, you now, modestly better than not. So we're, you know, we're comfortable as far as kind of the U.S. performance, you know, within that. So for peak and again, you Know, more and more to go in the year, but feel feel pretty good so far about the U S. No. Great. Okay. And then the other one was the UK. I think this quarter you flagged higher rejection rates on visas. And I think you took a more conservative stance on that market. What do you think is causing that? And how do you pick out the range of outcomes in the UK? Yeah, I think there's similarities there too. So the headlines tend to be a bit more negative than the reality on the ground, and certainly for us. And so if I was to separate the headlines versus what we see. So in the headlines, again, the more, you know, there's very specific corridors where compliance is forcing some high rejection rates. So we're, you now, we're seeing that. And again, when you look at it, it's mostly kind of the graduate, the one-year, sort of these specific programs. It is not our sort of higher quality undergraduate, you know, kind of programs that we tend to be in the U.K. So, again, a little bit different. Then even if you look at the external data, what we're seeing there is very choppy, right? I think it was in the first quarter, it was something like, you knows, 30% plus down. But then in July, I think, it Was down maybe 11%. Now, we're not going to take, again – that's my approach is I'm not going to take one data point and say, oh, now it's gotten better or something so we're sort of remaining prudent as you saw and as you pointed out we've taken a you know usual prudent approach assumed second half decelerates in the uk that's baked in um and so we'll we're going to continue watching we're early in the UK cycle the UK kind of goes from through the end of um you know this quarter and into October it's one of the things we talked about on the earnings call just around that timing where you can have just even before you know a holiday season or a holiday timing in China, I can sort of move, you know, one or two points around because of that. But that aside, which again, we've tried to capture quite clearly well, we'll continue watching it. And it's less, you Know, listen, we're very prudent around this on purpose, and it is for this, you Now, with the views of this year, and these things tend to play out over academic years. We tend, you now, everyone tends to look at what did this month do, what did other month to do these things tend to play out over academic years what we're seeing in the UK is you know political change and but the general kind of focus remains on high quality students you know kind of you know being something that they you know every every sort of large market will want to to try to remain continue attracting yeah that makes sense so sticking with the UK how do you think about the growth algorithm there and specifically an SFS how much of the UK growth outlook is now SFS driven versus being more cross-border? Yeah, I mean, the UK has gone itself through an evolution, I would say, as we, and I think the SFS definition is important, because if we define SFS as just the latest integration that we started piloting last year, that's not a huge driver. But what we've seen the UK is transform itself from, I think if you look several years back, It was, again, mostly cross-border. It's kind of transaction-based. And then what it's shifted to is a combination of new logos, but then integration-based cross-sell on the domestic side. So whether that was the, you know, you saw the WPM acquisition enabled Unit 4 type integrations. Now we've got, sorry, Tribal, and then we've Got Unit 4 Aggresso as part of SFS. So as we expand the number of integrations that are available, you know, and that captures, you know, more of the market, we're able to increase utilization. So then the growth algo of the UK becomes less of just new logos, which now we're, you Know, quite penetrated, and it's more about utilization. And there, we've kind of given you this metric of our aim is to process, you at least 90% of student payment volumes and we I think we gave a number last year it was around 12 this year is about 20 that we do that for but there's a number of schools where we can continue to grow that that level of you know penetration and utilization and so then the way we do that is through those you know having more of those integrations which then embed us deeper into the school's ecosystem. And so that's where you have that stability and long-term kind of client retention from that. So again, much more diversified in terms of the growth algorithm for the UK. It's more growing that utilization. So the cross-sell internally, you still have some new logo growth, but I would say that's a lower component of the grow. It's just more utilization that's driving it. Got it. Okay. So sticking with domestic education and SFS, in Q2 you signed three new U.S. SFS deals. You said it was double the ARR of the same quarter in 25, and I think the attach rate is still only 10%. So has there been a change on the competitive side that's allowing you to accelerate the momentum there? Is it just getting the word out? What's leading to the acceleration in domestic wins in the U.F.? and then how are you thinking about the trajectory from here? Yeah, I mean, in general, we're seeing win rates go up, and I think there's a few things happening. One, I think, yes, the perception of us as just cross-border has shifted to, okay, well, we are actually domestic and cross-boarder, so we can help you with all your sort of back office and operational complexity issues, especially as schools now are struggling financially in many cases. One of the ways, as I talked to you about ourselves, is how do you consolidate vendors and simplify your back office? And so we bring those capabilities through the software that we sell. So that is one part of it. And then you have reference clients. So to some extent, Penn State and others and many other names that you've heard us talk about become those reference clients for us that others look to. So again, mostly now we talk to the CFO usually and not just the back office Bursar folks, but now we're talking a different level. And that's because you have enterprise sales folks. That's the other component that we've talked about with the U.S. SFS is just having the right enterprise sales talent enables you to have those relationships and those conversations at a different level. And then the last thing, and actually maybe it's the most important one, is that we increasingly do full suite sales. So it's not just you go in and you sell just the collections capability or just the payment plans or something. It is now full suites. You have collections, you have payment plans, you have the actual domestic tuition payment processing. And so 529s, again, all the innovation that we build into our product suite now. And so that becomes a much larger kind of dollar value that then is built behind that sort of, you know, increase in ARR. So, again, really excited, you now, obviously, durable growth and that consistency of some of these larger deals and the sustainability of it over the long term is quite exciting. So we see that, you known, domestic part of the sort of about a third or so or the U.S. business should continue to grow above sort of company average for a while. That's great. Maybe we could talk about just the student life cycle that uses Flywire. It's a question we've gotten asked a lot. I think when a student pays year one, they're often before they have local connectivity, local bank accounts, utilization tends to be higher. How does retention trend thereafter, and, you know, how has that trend of seeing lower retention in subsequent years changed or improved over time? Yeah. It's a three-dimensional question. Yes, yes. We're going to start. So I think maybe just framing it for those who don't know is our U.S. education business, I think of it in, you now, sort of three different components, all about a third each, which is a third is sort of the domestic business that we talk about now that it's growing faster that we just talked about. And then the other two-thirds is about half and half, so about a third of it is first years and about a Third of it Is, you know, existing kind of, you Know, the rest of the cohorts of students. And so if you look at that first-year, kind of first- year payers dynamic, what we see there is, you Now, think of it as, you Know, international student comes to the U.S., usually the parents are paying. We provide convenience, trust, you Know, and just the knowledge that you can pay with your own, you know, known sort of instrument and funding instrument connected into your bank and many times also just the documents that are required to move, you know, over $10,000 out of certain markets. There's actually a number of things which, by the way, we've automated with AI is to make it easier to make those payments. Because people think, oh, you just, you know, it's easy to send $10 ,000 out of, you know, one of these countries, and it's actually not. Yeah. And it's one of the reasons it's complex. And so we provide that safety and comfort now. So that that makes it easy. And then we have we have a high percent of those first year payers that use us. And then I think the opportunity and sort of the other third and the existing, you know, once they go into second, third year. Yes. Some of them open a local bank account. So then, you Know, they shift to those payment methods. But I don't see that as leakage and especially coming from my background. When I look at payers, there's a huge opportunity for us in that side of the equation. We talk always about clients. We don't talk quite as much about the payer side of this equation. So here I think it's three things which you've heard us talk about is how do you improve that retention in the second, third, fourth year and so on. And first it's SFS. So the more SFS you have, the more we then capture even the domestic if they would become a domestic payer. So you have that second and third year kind of effect. So we see cross-border go up also as SFS comes in. Second is the checkout experience. Once you can improve that to make sure that parents see the value of, oh, I can keep using that bank account or I can Keep using the instruments that I've used before. And then third is from a local partnership in the countries, the source markets, where we are unique in those partnerships you hear us talk about all the time, but being connected into the top banks in India, the banks in China and other areas, that is a unique aspect of our business and the payment platform we provide, which enables us to then give comfort to a parent or anybody paying then there's an opportunity for them. And then stepping back, not even in our algorithm, is the opportunity to engage all of our payers in a much more direct way, and some of that is data. So again, as the data guy, I'm very much looking at that as an opportunity to better understand payer behavior and how it can... And that's not just the students, actually. Travel, same thing. There's a lot of value in understanding the traveler behavior and helping and connecting the dots between your payers and the clients that they're paying, I think, is a unique opportunity. Okay, another theme recently in the education business has been an increasing amount of new logos coming from outside of your big four markets. How do you frame where you are in that diversification process and how large do you think that opportunity is relative to the top markets? Yeah, I mean, we talk a lot about the big four where, again, we still, you know, there's visa challenges and those kind of, you know, choppy markets there, you know, and yet we still are growing even in the big four and we're gaining share. I think one of the things that if you look at all of the visa trends, we do better than those, you know, whether you look on a revenue basis or volume basis because, you know, we, again different mix and the levers that we have. So even in the big four, we have growth. Outside the big four, you know, you could say some of the negatives there are actually helping us expand our global footprint even faster. So in a way, you know—not that it's great to look at it necessarily that way, maybe it's a glass half full kind of approach, but it is accelerating. Our agents are telling us that students are applying to more destinations. So what you're seeing outside the big four is a lot of these countries are now digitizing And, you know, there are institutions, education institutions, they're having to digitize for the first time because maybe they had two or three international students. Suddenly now they have 20 or 30. So, you Know, if you had one person in the back office who was trying to, you Now, reconcile all these wires or whatever methods of payment, suddenly, You Know, I think it makes sense to digitized your accounts receivable. And we are, You Now, and the second thing outside the, You know, the big four in EDU is the competition is kind of fragmented. So we are the scale player there, so we're unique in that perspective. And so that's the other component that's helping drive that. So again, in terms of numbers, we've said the non-Big Four EDU is sort of share of total revenues around low teams last year. Expect to continue to grow as share because I expect that to continue growing kind of faster than the company average. I think in the first half we said it was growing over 30%. Right. And, again, it works well in our favor, you know, as students diversify their destinations. Yeah, diversification is certainly a theme here. And speaking of, maybe we could talk about the travel vertical. It's been, you Know, it's basically your second largest vertical now. It's balanced between kind of luxury and experiential travel and hospitality, which was augmented by the Certify acquisition. where do you see yourself as being most penetrated today across those different sub-verticals, and where do You think you have more room to push ahead on penetration and drive durable growth? Yeah, so on the experiential or kind of our legacy travel business, think of it as multi-day bespoke travel, which nowadays I think it's fortunately an area of growth that we've seen an interest. so we started with you know destination management companies and tour operators so things like safaris started there but now as you said we've sort of expanded both geographically but also in sub verticals so geographically we see a lot of growth in Asia so and in Europe increasingly so in parts of Asia so you know Indonesia Thailand or Japan so seeing a lot of growth there and then in And sub-verticals, I think, think of it as kind of high-touch and high-cost type of, without saying luxury, but it's sort of high cost and those kind of more extended opportunities for when you take kind of a curated experience. And so a lot of those can be hiking experience, cycling, biking, all sorts of fun activities that I think increasingly require somebody to help you manage that trip. And so we, of course, have the ROI that is well proven with these clients. And now, again, we have the name that's, you know, kind of getting out there, so it's easier for us to make those cross-sell, and those guys all talk to each other. If you get one heli-skiing company there, the others are going to follow. So, you Know, same thing we're seeing elsewhere. Yeah. So maybe you can touch on Certify a bit, largest deal ever in the company's history. I think you've consistently said that that deal is running ahead of plan. where's that outperformance coming from and and then you know where does the focus sit over the next 12 to 18 months yeah so initially I think so we talked about certify as the opportunity being on the you know to again expand into larger clients as we started into smaller clients that you know allowing us to go into larger clients and then depth of product the payment monetization is the biggest outperformance we've seen and that's one of the reasons we've talked about it kind of ties into the gross margin story a little bit for this year and to next year. And we see that as continuing to be a big opportunity. So we said $3 billion of payment modernization acquisition. And at the time, I think we said the mix, it was about 70% software, 30% payments. We've made some dent into that and still have about $2.5 billion to go. So, we see datas continuing to be a big driver of growth in the future but increasingly uh going global is you know as a big component of that i think uh we've seen about sort of 42 or so i think international locations um for us and you know it's certified that they're starting you know so we're starting to kind of pick up um you know more on the international side um and then um and and again i think it's it's an opportunity for us to cross sell this you know this opportunity this kind of capability And then lastly, I think, is once you integrate the two platforms, you can imagine the strength of kind of what we provided before, which was that cross-border capability in these international markets with the kind of the document signing and workflow digitization that Certify brings in. So we see a lot of opportunity in that cross sell. But that's sort of the third piece. So over the next 12 to 18 months, and as part of the billion dollars, we see that opportunity kind of, we see, again, sort of travel growing faster overall between those. Yeah. Okay. We've got a minute or two left here. I want to maybe squeeze in one on healthcare. So Cleveland Clinic, just a marquee win, reinvigorated the healthcare business this past year. You know, I think you made the comment, like, there's only so many Cleveland clinics out there, and you'll be lapping that next year. How do you think about the organic growth rate of that business, kind of ex-Cleveland, and then what is the pipeline and, you know, what kind of opportunities does a large win open up for that business? Yeah, I mean, Cleveland Clinic was certainly and is a marquee name that has opened up a lot of conversations with, you know, larger enterprise-sized kind of clients. I would say, though, keep in mind that, you know, as we talked about, Cleveland clinic was kind of at ramps this year. As we get into second half you kind of sunset that ramp size you get into next year i would think of you know just again to take a prudent approach i would take a think of health care is growing below the company average over time but it can be very choppy because if you do get you know another large enterprise that could change the trajectory but these are long enterprise sales as you can imagine if you think education is slow health care as you know is even even slower in terms of making these big, big, big decisions. But once you're in again, you're end for the long, long haul. So we feel good that at least healthcare is now back to, you know, return to growth, scalable with, you know, a great market client behind us. Got it. Well, in the last couple of seconds here, any final thoughts you'd leave the group with? Look, I think, you know, we're going to continue growing the top line as you've seen us, you know, lean into that. But also, you know, don't forget the free cash flow profitability and the, you know, durability of the model in terms of the consistent cash flow per share and the focus on dilution and the other parts of the P&L that matter to kind of the balance valuation and the things that we control. And that's what we're going to focus on is the stuff we control and execute. And, you Know, I think that's, that's always done and we'll continue doing it. Great. All right. Well, Cosman, thanks for joining us. Glad to have you again. Thanks.

...