dLocal Ltd Q2 FY2021 Earnings Call

Hello, everyone. Welcome to DLocal's Second Quarter 2021 Results Conference Call. This event is being recorded. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the DLocal management team concludes their prepared remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. I'm going to turn the call over to DLocal.

Thanks, operator. Welcome to our first quarterly earnings conference call after our IPO. As a reminder, this event is also being broadcast live via webcast and may be accessed through DLocal's website at investor.dlocal.com where the presentation is also available. The replay will be available shortly after the event concludes. Before proceeding, let me mention that any forward statements included in the presentation or mentioned in this conference call are based on currently available information and DLocal's current assumptions, expectations, and projections about future events. While the company believes that their assumptions, expectations, and projections are reasonable based on currently available information, you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from those included in DLocal's presentation or discussed on this conference call for a variety of reasons, including those described in the forward-looking statements and Risk Factors sections of DLocal's registration statement on Form F-1 and other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which are available on DLocal's Investor Relations website. Now, I will turn the conference over to Sebastián Kanovich, our Chief Executive Officer. Seba, you may begin your presentation.

Hello everyone and thanks for joining our second quarter results conference call. Today, I'm joined by Sumita Pandit, our Chief Operating Officer; and Diego Cabrera Canay, our Chief Financial Officer. This is our first earnings call after our IPO on June 3, 2021, and we are excited to present an update on our business and thank you for your interest in our company. Let's get right into it on Slide 3. We are aware that some of you are joining us to hear our story for the first time. So we are providing a recap of who we are, what problems we are addressing for our merchants, and what we believe is our addressable market. We will then provide an update on our vectors of future growth followed by a review of our financial performance. So who are we? DLocal enables global merchants to connect seamlessly with billions of emerging market consumers. Our platform, One dLocal, presents a single API, single integration, and single contract solution for global merchants. We are entirely B2B focused, and we are proud to count some of the largest global merchants as our customers, such as Microsoft, Rappi, Kuaishou, Mailchimp, Wikimedia, InDriver, and Wix. Today, our infrastructure supports our merchants across 30 emerging markets in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Now to the results. The second quarter has been our best quarter ever. Total processed volume, TPV, grew 319% year-over-year when compared to the second quarter of 2020, reaching US$1.5 billion during the quarter. Our TPV this quarter represents a milestone for the company as it's the first time we have surpassed US$1 billion in a single quarter. As you may remember, we grew our TPV 139% year-over-year in our first quarter of 2021. So our growth has continued to accelerate both year-over-year as well as quarter-over-quarter. Our revenues in the second quarter of 2021 increased to $59 million, representing 186% year-over-year growth compared to the second quarter of 2020. Our business continues to benefit from cost discipline and efficiency as we continue to maintain our adjusted EBITDA margin along with high growth. Slide 4, let us briefly compare our Q2 2021 performance vis-à-vis Q1 2021 as well as the full year 2020. We have improved every financial metric we have discussed with you. Our second quarter revenue of $59 million is a 46% quarter-over-quarter growth versus $40 million in Q1. Our Q2 2021 revenue growth of 186% compared to 124% in Q1 and 88% in the full year 2020. We have previously highlighted the net retention rate metric as a key KPI, we achieved 196% net revenue retention in Q2 2021 versus an already impressive 186% in Q1 2021 and 159% in the full year 2020. Our adjusted EBITDA margin in Q2 2021 remains stable at 44% in comparison with our adjusted EBITDA margin for the first quarter and higher than our Q2 2020 adjusted EBITDA margin of 40%. Merchants and consumers continue to evolve in their behaviors as the pandemic goes through its different stages in the multiple countries that we operate in. We are seeing more utilization, less cost, and wider adoption of alternative payment methods. We believe these new consumer behavior changes are here to stay and will continue to have a positive effect on our business. During this quarter, we have seen continued growth in our business from both existing and new merchants using our platform. Our global employee base has continued to thrive and will remain focused on serving our merchants. We have embraced a hybrid model of work, whether in the office or home, as we continue to be flexible about where our employees choose to work from. This is not new for us. As seen pre-COVID, we had a flexible approach to physical location, given our global roster of merchants and extensive emerging market network. For example, the three of us on this call today are based in different locations. I'm calling from Israel, while Sumita is in California, and Diego is in Uruguay. We have continued our efforts on the expansion front, growing our presence in Africa and Southeast Asia. We have launched four new countries in the first half of this year. We have added 10 plus new merchants in the second quarter of 2021. We continue to benefit from the diversification of our business across verticals, some verticals such as retail, streaming, and advertising have seen accelerated growth as this has benefited from the post-pandemic return to work and the gradual opening of economies. Our margins have remained stable in comparison with our previous quarter, even with continued investment in our infrastructure and people. We have continued to hire and strengthen our employee count in key functions. The headcount in DLocal grew 100% year-over-year. We see tremendous opportunity in the markets, merchants, and products that we serve, and we intend to continue to invest in our people, platform, and technology as we pursue above-average growth. Our disciplined approach to growth and profitability to date has provided us with a unique position. We intend to continue investing in growth and therefore our margins may decrease in the coming quarters. We will maintain our discipline to ensure that every new dollar we bring in will contribute to our margin. Slide 5, what are the problems we are addressing? There are three primary challenges that we are solving for our merchants. First, payment methods are local by nature and very diverse in the 30 countries we serve. On top of that, we are seeing a trend of continued fragmentation as consumers adopt newly available payment methods. Cash methods are getting replaced by digital payment methods offering even more opportunities for consumers to participate in digital online commerce. Merchants are keen to access these rapidly growing end markets without building the payments royalties themselves. Second, achieving healthy conversion rates while keeping fraud under control is a challenge in emerging markets. We deliver high conversion rates and lower friction through automatic validation and dynamic routing transactions to multiple acquirers on payment methods. Third, we make complex simple for our merchants. For those of you who have traveled to any of the markets we serve, you would know that no two markets in this region are the same. We enable our merchants to keep up with the changing regulatory and tax frameworks in emerging markets. Slide 6, as you may remember, we offer both pay-in and pay-out capabilities to our merchants. A typical fund flow for a pay-in transaction from an emerging market user to a global enterprise merchant requires smart routing, payments processing, withholding tax collection, FX management, and merchant fund settlement. A typical pay-out fund flow in the opposite direction from a global merchant to an emerging market user, imagine if you will a ride-hailing company driver or a food delivery worker, requires user payment disbursement, income tax management, FX management, payments processing, and merchant fund collection. Our platform enables all of this by leveraging our connectivity to over 600 local payment methods, including cards, bank notes, wallets, and alternative payment methods, as well as local acquirers, banks, and non-financial institutions. We are not an acquirer ourselves and instead connect to multiple acquirers in the local markets where we operate. We have recently launched issuance-as-a-service to our global merchants. We have launched our first pilot with a merchant and expect this product to be highly complementary to our current product offering. Sumita, over to you.

Thanks, Seba. Slide 7. Our business benefits from strong industry tailwinds, such as the increasing globalization of online commerce, the rise of the digital economy along with the rise of digital goods that move even more quickly across borders than physical goods, the aspirational middle class that is expanding and is keen to buy the products and services that users in the Western developed economies have always had access to, purchasing power continues to expand in these countries and there is a trend towards equalization of purchasing power that is driving global consumption trends. Global merchants are meeting their own growth forecasts. They have promised their investors by going outside their domestic markets to pursue growth. As a result, traditional borders of commerce continue to blur. We therefore grow organically with our merchants. The complexity of the markets we serve makes our solution powerful. Slide 8. We commissioned a market study by AMI to measure our addressable market in the countries we serve. E-commerce volume in the countries we serve was estimated to be $1.2 trillion, of which $0.4 trillion is pay-ins and is expected to grow at a 27% annual growth rate. And $0.8 trillion is pay-outs. AMI expects the share of pay-outs to increase versus pay-ins, which implies an even higher percentage growth for pay-outs than 27%. This includes both cross-border and local-to-local e-commerce transactions. This does not include China e-commerce volume because we process minimal volume of payments in China. Also, not all of this volume is comprised of global merchants; however, our TPV at $1.5 billion for the quarter is a very small fraction of the opportunity ahead of us. We grew our TPV at an impressive 219% year-over-year in our second quarter, and we grew 159% year-over-year in our first quarter. In the first half of 2021, we achieved US$2.4 billion in TPV, 15% more than what we processed on a 2020 full-year basis.

We have three primary vectors of growth: commercial efforts, product expansion, and geographic expansion. On the commercial effort side, we are focused on three levers: organic growth of our merchants, availability to cross-sell through account management, and availability to add new clients. On the product front, we continue to enhance our product portfolio with improvements in our features for pay-ins and pay-outs, together with the development and launch of new product lines. On the geographic expansion vector, we are constantly deepening our presence in the countries where we currently operate, together with significant efforts to expand our offering into new countries. An example of the latter, we have added Vietnam, Malaysia, and Guatemala to our platform in Q2. Our financial results reflect the power of our platform, the operating leverage of our business, and the stickiness of our merchant relationship. Our revenue growth plus EBITDA margin, The Rule of 40, as some of you may call this metric, was 129% in 2020, 168% in Q1 2021, and 230% in Q2 2021. We believe that the strong cash flow generation of our business also supports an inorganic strategy that will accelerate our time to market. We plan to pursue inorganic opportunities to accelerate any of our three growth vectors, including commercial efforts, product, or geographic expansion.

Let's double click on these three growth vectors. Slide 10, commercial vector. We saw expansion in our relationships with existing and new merchants. We are actively targeting merchants globally, including in China, that are looking to expand outside their local market and expand into Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Our net retention rate, shown on this slide, is a function of organic growth of our merchants, increase in share of wallet of our merchants, increase in products per merchant, increase in countries per merchant, and increase in payment methods per merchant. We continued to improve our net retention rate to 196% in Q2 2021 by improving our commercial efforts with our existing merchants. We calculate net revenue retention by measuring the dollar revenues from existing merchants we had on our platform on a year-over-year basis. Therefore, $100 of revenues in Q2 2020 from the same set of merchants became $196 in Q2 2021. This is a key KPI we obsessively measure as it indicates the strength and predictability of our merchant relationships. We've onboarded 10 plus new merchants this quarter, including a merchant that is a U.S. content provider that launched in 13 countries with us, change.org, a global short video sharing app, and a social network platform that develops a lip-syncing video that launched in four countries with us. Revenues from new clients amounted to $19 million in Q2 2021, versus $1 million in Q2 2020. Revenues coming from merchants onboarded in the last 12 months are considered under new clients for this KPI, and this is a rolling measure for a year-over-year comparison. Slide 11, product vector. Our product innovation journey is never static. Emerging markets are always changing and we believe we need to remain agile as it is our biggest competitive advantage. In this quarter, we continued to bring enhancements to our pay-in solution with new features such as the FlexibleScheduler enabling dynamic fund transfers. We improved our TaxManager to allow tax handling by payment methods, both debit and credit, we added new integrations to add redundancy in our card processing in existing markets, and we added new payment methods. We also enhanced our pay-out solution, expanding our instant pay-outs in more countries. We added direct connections with new partners and banks, and we went live with fixed mobile app in Brazil through our own APK. We improved our fraud and data capabilities with new machine learning models tailored for retail and gaming verticals. We added profiling and fingerprinting tools and went live with device ID among other KYC improvements. Our issuance-as-a-service solution enables merchants to create new lines of revenue and easily issue prepaid cards in local currencies to reach millions of consumers in emerging markets. Slide 12, geography vector. We’ve added four countries to our network in the first half of 2021. Our strategy is not to innovate in a vacuum and to the extent possible have a merchant ready when we open a new country. This is an example of our disciplined growth strategy. Our expansion strategy is both merchant-led, meaning we go where our merchants ask us for a solution, as well as locally-led, meaning markets where we know that there will be demand. We are not dependent on any single country for our performance. We also don’t forecast our performance by country. We are solely focused on measuring our performance by our merchants. Slide 13. We see strong growth across verticals with a 319% year-over-year TPV growth as our business benefits from diversification. Our business model is not dependent on the performance and outlook of any single industry vertical. We see continued growth in verticals such as ride-hailing and travel that started seeing a strong return in volumes in the first quarter of 2021. We are also seeing accelerated growth in multiple verticals such as streaming, retail, advertising, and financial services. I’m now going to hand it over to Diego to review our financial highlights.

Thanks, Sumita. Let’s start with Slide 15. Since we started our operations five years ago, we have on average almost doubled our TPV year-after-year. We see an acceleration in our TPV growth with 319% in the second quarter of 2021 compared to 60% in the fiscal year 2020. This growth benefits from specific verticals such as ride-hailing and travel that were affected in Q2 2020. We are also seeing tremendous growth in all the other verticals such as streaming, retail, advertising, and financial services. Let me highlight that even in Q2 2020 during the heart of the pandemic, we still grew 17% year-over-year. While we expect to see continued strength in our business in the remainder of the year, the percentage growth may normalize as the comparable quarters in the second half of 2020 had already seen significant growth. Let’s move to Slide 16. Our revenues in the second quarter of 2021 reached $59 million, 186% year-over-year growth from Q2 2020, and 46% quarter-over-quarter growth from Q1 2021. Our revenue over TPV ratio or take rate was 4.1% in Q2 2021 versus 4.3% in Q1 2021. This is equal to the take rate we had in 2019. This ratio changes based on the underlying business mix. In 2020, pay-in had swung to a larger portion of our overall business, resulting in a higher revenue over TPV ratio of 5%. This ratio also decreases as the volumes with some of our largest merchants increase, given that we set prices in tiers by volumes in our merchant agreements. Higher volumes with our largest merchants typically decreases the ratio but it is great for our business as they bring incremental EBITDA. Let’s switch to Slide 17. We are very pleased with our continued improvement in adjusted EBITDA. In Q2 2021, our adjusted EBITDA grew to $25.9 million, 213% year-over-year growth and 45% quarter-over-quarter growth. Our adjusted EBITDA margin remains stable at 44% since last quarter and improved 384 basis points year-over-year. We have achieved this while we have continued to invest in our people, platform, and technology. We intend to continue investing in growth and therefore our margins may decrease in the coming quarters, maintaining our discipline to drive profitable growth with every additional dollar that we process. Cost of services dropped to 2.6% of TPV in the second quarter of 2020 to 1.7% of TPV in the second quarter of 2021, mainly as a result of business mix. Operating expenses grew $11.2 million year-over-year, mainly driven by expenses related to the secondary portion of the initial public offering for $3 million, stock-based compensation for $2.1 million, and salaries and wages that grew $3.7 million as we doubled our headcount and brought key talent on board. Let’s continue with Slide 18. Of the 186% year-over-year revenue growth in Q2 2021, $20 million came from existing merchants and $19 million came from new merchants. The comparable numbers for Q1 2021 were $15 million and $7 million respectively. Revenues from existing merchants are those revenues that are driven by merchants that were already processing in the same quarter of last year. Revenues from new merchants are those revenues that are driven by merchants that started operating with us after the same quarter of last year. As mentioned, our net revenue retention rate continues to improve with 196% in the second quarter of 2021 compared to an already outstanding 186% in the first quarter. Switching to Slide 19. When we look at our KPI per merchant, we see that they have sequentially continued to improve. The average number of countries per merchant in the second quarter of 2021 reached seven compared to six in the first quarter. Given that we have already built our payments network in 30 countries, there is significant capability to continue to bring our merchants to more geographies. The same applies to the payment methods per merchant, which reached 62 compared to 53 in the first quarter, while we offer more than 600 payment methods in the countries that we operate. With that, I will turn it back to Seba to conclude.

Thanks, Diego. On Slide 20. In conclusion, our five strengths are as follows. First, we have a large and expanding addressable emerging market ecosystem. Second, we have a direct integration with some of the largest online merchants in the world. Third, our scalable single API technology infrastructure makes complex simple for our merchants. Fourth, we are diversified across verticals and clients. And fifth, our rapid growth is combined with our disciplined profitability. And this is just the beginning. We continue to remain focused, humble, and agile as we enable our global merchants to connect with billions of emerging market users and execute our growth strategy. Thank you for joining us today. I will now request the operator to open it up for questions.

Our first question comes from Jorge Kuri with Morgan Stanley. You may proceed with your question.

Hi. Good afternoon, everyone and congrats on the numbers. I have two questions, if I may. The first one is on your new merchant growth of $19 million; it was pretty spectacular, more than 2x what you did the previous quarter. Can you give us a little bit of a sense of who those new merchants are? How big can they be? Could any of them potentially be one of your top 10 merchants? That’s evidently a very large uptake in new merchant growth. So I’m assuming there are some really large clients there. And then the second question is on your net revenue retention rate of 196%, which is evidently well ahead of what you did last year, well ahead of the soft guidance you had provided of around 150% to 160%. How do you see this number trending in the second half of this year? Thanks.

Thanks, Jorge. Thank you very much for joining us. On your first question, I think that an important clarification to make is that this is a trailing metric. So we are taking into account every customer as new merchants that were not on our platform a year ago. So you'll see that number continues to evolve. Having said that, yes, this was a very strong quarter. Sumita talked in her remarks on some of the merchants we've been able to win, including a social network and a U.S. content provider short video sharing app. For us, Jorge, what we believe is more important is the trajectory rather than the starting point. Yes, we are extremely excited about the customers we've been able to onboard. By having the ability to onboard them if they want, then it's where we need to make sure we continue adding value into new geographies and products, and that's where our net revenue retention starts to trigger and compound. We are definitely excited with the current ones we've been able to onboard, but hopefully we'll be able to see their growth in the next many quarters to come. Your second question around net revenue retention, Sumita you want to take it?

Yes, sure. Happy to step outside, and Jorge, regarding your question, I want to make sure that we understand the methodology carefully here. So when we see revenues from new clients, that number was $19 million in Q2 2021; that number used to be $1 million in Q2 2020. The reason you see that increase is that the revenue from any new clients in the last 12 months aggregates into that $19 million number. And so that's why in comparison to Q2, that number looks so big, $19 million versus $1 million. On your question about guidance, what I would say is that this has been a fantastic quarter for us. If you look at the year-over-year growth rate numbers, the reason the percentages are so high is that Q2 2020 was right in the middle of the pandemic. We are benefiting from a slightly lower base last year in the second quarter. I think that as we look out over the next two quarters, we expect our dollar numbers to look good, but I would not predict percentage growth rates that are similar to what we've been able to achieve in the second quarter because Q3 and Q4 of last year were stronger quarters than Q2 of last year.

Thanks. Sorry to push back. But again, my first question stands: what type of merchants are you adding that they're ramping up their revenue so rapidly? And are they bringing such a large amount of new revenues, and whether or not this could be much bigger, like top 10 revenues; we're trying to understand how your revenues can ramp up from here? And I think it would be really helpful if you can help us understand who these clients are, what they do, how big they are, even the names would be very useful to try to get a better sense of how revenues can go up from here. Thank you.

Sure. Okay. So first of all, I think it's worth conceptually discussing who we focused on. We are serving some of the largest companies in the world, and many of those names you can see on our website. Obviously, we would prefer to state confidentiality with them, and those are the names that we've been able to disclose. But these are companies that have ambitions to operate in more than one country and are some of the world's leaders in their respective areas. We’ve announced some of those partnerships during not only the last quarter but during the year. So many of those customers are out there. We obviously have expectations for them to become much larger as Sumita was touching on. We believe our numbers will be very impressive, and we are extremely proud of them. We are clearly still a drop in the ocean of the opportunity we have ahead. We are of the idea that those volumes in emerging markets are going to be driven by the type of burdens we serve, which are the largest companies in the world. So that’s how we're – that’s it; I would love to give you the names, but that’s it – I hope some further clarification of who those merchants are.

Thanks. That's fine. Congrats again, great numbers. So all the best, thank you.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Tito Labarta with Goldman Sachs. You may proceed with your question.

Good afternoon, also congratulations on a very strong result. Two questions, kind of piggybacking a little bit on Jorge's questions, but first on the growth of new merchants, given the strong growth at the IPO, you had mentioned you didn't – most of the growth expected to be coming from the existing merchants. So are there more new merchants going forward from here on out that you can boost that growth from new merchants more than you initially expected? I guess maybe to rephrase it, post-IPO has something changed where you think you can maybe capture more new merchants than before, which should boost that growth? And then the second question also on the net revenue retention rate, I guess, following up on Jorge's question, right? You had guided for that 150% to 160%, and you're well above that. I mean, looking back, do you think that 150% to 160% was too conservative? Can you accelerate even from here, the 196%? I understand you have soft comps last year, but just to get a sense, right, the 196% is well above that 150%; it looks like there should be upside to that 150% to 160% guidance you provided at the IPO. Is that fair to assume? Thank you.

I can start with, I can question Tito, which is on your question on net retention rate, and then let's come back to the new merchant question. On the net retention rate, if we look at our cohorts over a period of time, the reason we've spoken about the 150% to 160%, by the way, that was also our net retention rate number for our full year 2020, as you may remember, when we look at cohorts over a slightly longer period of time and we look at the trends. We see that the 160% number is actually quite stable. So I think in the medium term, we still think that that is the right net retention rate to consider as those cohorts mature. In the initial years, when we add a merchant, our NRR could be really, really high, but it stabilizes as we've discussed with you in the past. So we think that the 150% to 160% are still the right medium-term net retention rate. And therefore it's still what we've modeled. In terms of your first part of the question, which was related to your new merchants, we actually think that that number will come down because we've added some very large merchants in the last 12 months. As I mentioned, it's the rolling measure. So keep in mind, these are not new merchants we’ve added only in this quarter. These are any merchants that were not in our local business in Q2 of 2020. So it's a rolling measure of any new motions in the last 12 months. And so we've added some merchants in the last 12 months that are contributing to that new client number. We expect that number to come down in the next two quarters as that rolling measure changes.

These are on – just to complement that, sorry, the other driver for new merchant growth is having the ability of adding new products, both – sorry, new products in new geography. So you had a question around, are there more customers to be won? And what we expect is that through additional geographies, through additional products, and through additional capabilities, we expect to continue adding merchants—not necessarily at the pace we did this quarter. But yes, we do believe there's plenty of opportunity ahead in terms of new logos to bring into the platform.

Great. Thanks, Seba and Sumita. That's helpful. Maybe one follow-up, then on the net revenue retention rate, again. I understand in the midterm, yes, it should trend lower to the 150-160. But I guess in the shorter term, it looks like that should be running higher, right? So midterm, and maybe I guess to quantify the midterm is that like in two, three years. In the shorter term, there seems to be some upside or is the midterm next year, just to try to quantify that in the midterm a little bit. Thank you.

Yes, I think that it's about two years from the start of when a merchant comes on board. So it's a cohort-based measure, Tito, and I think we discussed this with you during the IPO as to how those cohorts trend out. We've added some pretty large merchants in the last 12 months. We expect them to stabilize in about 24 months from the beginning of when they come on our platform. So I would say it's in the next 12 to 18 months is where we see the 150% to 160% to be a stable place.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Neha Agarwala with HSBC. You may proceed with your question.

Hi, congratulations on the earnings, very strong results. I had a clarification mostly on the revenues and TPV, does that also include the impact of the PrimeiroPay acquisition that you closed in April of this year? I believe some of the new merger revenues might be driven from the acquisition of PrimeiroPay. Is that right to assume?

Yes, this includes PrimeiroPay.

Could you tell us what the TPV and the revenues look like without PrimeiroPay – without inclusion of PrimeiroPay this quarter?

We – I don't think we're disclosing the information, Neha. But I would say that it is – it's not significant enough to make much of a difference to the numbers. But we are not disclosing the PrimeiroPay numbers separately because it was an asset deal, as you know, we acquired the assets of PrimeiroPay.

Okay, perfect. And then again, on the operating expenses, this quarter was a bit high because of some extraordinary items. But going forward, should we expect costs to be a bit elevated as you mentioned you expect some pressure – you could see some pressure on margins? What are the expectations in terms of costs? Given that revenues are already coming very strong so far, should we see a pickup in the cost? Do you plan to have stronger geographical expansion in the coming quarters? Any color on that?

Hi, Neha. This is Diego. If you look at Q2 2021, the main one-off expenses that we have were the IPO expenses for roughly $3 million and some M&A expenses mainly related to PrimeiroPay around $300,000. So everything else is organic and we expect to continue a sequential increase going forward as we continue to grow. So you should exclude those numbers and the rest is the trend that should continue going forward.

Okay. And lastly, on the issuer-as-a-service program, you launched a pilot program. How has the response been so far? And when do you think you can formally launch this new service for your clients?

Neha, hi, and thanks very much for the question. We’ve launched a pilot. The product is readily available to our customers who wish to use it. Obviously, we have enterprise merchants. So the sales cycles, as you are aware, are long. So we see this product the same way we’ve seen pay-outs back in the day; pay-in is highly complementary. We – going forward, don't intend to break down revenue by product, because again, we're always driven by this idea of having more products and more solutions to offer our merchants. The products are readily available for merchants who want to be onboarded. Having said that, we expect the profit ramp-up to take time.

And you separately monetize that. It's not included as the full package. That is a service that merchants can take up on a separate basis, and you can monetize that service.

Exactly. So, exactly the same way we pay someone else; there will be a fee for our pay-in transactions, a fee for pay-out transactions, and there will be a fee for our issuing product. So, yes, it's going to be a new revenue line, if you will, from – you'll see it bundled, but it will be a new source of revenue for our product.

Perfect. That's very clear. Thank you so much, Seba, Sumita, and Diego.

Thanks, Neha.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Ashwin Shirvaikar with Citi. You may proceed with your questions.

Thank you, and congratulations from me as well. Good quarter. You had mentioned the benefit of ride-hailing and travel as your clients recover from the impact of the pandemic. Could you maybe emphasize this or indicate how much more benefit you might get if you just get back to, say, 2019 levels from purely economic recovery?

Sure, Ashwin. Hi and thank you very much for the question. Obviously, we are a very different business than what we were back in 2019. So that normalization wouldn't make much of a change. We are not dependent on any particular vertical or the industry. We are really well diversified. Yes, we've seen some recovery in the ride-hailing and travel space, but we are not counting on any sort of pre-pandemic numbers. If it happens, it will be good news for us. But at the end of the day, we like to believe we've been COVID agnostic. Yes, there have been indices that have accelerated, and there have been others that have been losers. But we believe in the long run we are on a very sustainable trajectory, which will have some losers that are going to lag. Therefore, our performance is going to lag together with them. But we are not counting on any bounce back of any of those industries to move the needle for us.

Understood. And then, a separate question as you ramp many of these new clients that you're signing including perhaps transitioning over some of the PrimeiroPay clients. What should we expect with regards to a margin impact from that? Is that what you're indicating when you say that margins may be a bit softer in the nearer-term quarters?

Yes, I think, Ashwin, thanks for the question. I think on the margin question, as you can see, our margins have stayed stable between Q1 and Q2. We think we will really look to invest over the next few quarters. And we think there could be some margin compression from the 44% levels in the coming quarters. The reason for that is really driven by our expansion plans, and our product plans, and I think our commercial efforts. The other thing to keep in mind is that one of the reasons Diego mentioned this in his prepared remarks where he walked you through what the revenue over TPV number is. It’s at 4.1% in this quarter, down from 4.3% in Q1. The reason we think that there could be some margin compression is as we continue to see tremendous volume growth from our large merchants. I think we've mentioned this; we have volume tiers in our contracts. So as dollar volume goes up and the tiers go up, the pricing comes down, which is actually good for our business. We actually like it because that means we're going to get more volume. Given those two factors, we think that while on a dollar basis, we will continue to grow. From a margin perspective, we expect to see some progression in the next few quarters.

What would you be able to size the level to which, I mean, I am here talking low-40s not lower than that?

Yes, I think we are targeting low-40s. I think if you think about the 2020 year numbers, both for net retention and margin, we think that's a good place for us to plan for.

Great. Very helpful. Thank you.

Thank you, Ashwin.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Soomit Datta with New Street Research. You may proceed with your question.

Hi guys. Thanks very much, and congratulations on very good numbers. Just two quick ones for me please. First of all, just on pay-in and pay-out, which I guess is shaping your take rate to a degree. Are we kind of broadly back to if you like the historic ratios we've seen between pay-in and pay-out? Can we think about this level as kind of being a little bit more normalized or do you still think post-COVID there's likely to be a bit of a reset? Secondly, just on competition, which hasn't been mentioned. Are we seeing anything by way of response from either the incumbents or banks — large banks on anything happening on a competitive front, which is worth flagging? Then just finally, maybe just looking forward, talk a little bit about card issuance as a service, which sounds pretty interesting. And one of the things I was interested in was prepayment income, which is such a source of revenue and profit across Latin America in particular. Any thoughts on whether that is a revenue you could try and pursue going forward? Thanks very much.

Thank you, Sumit. So on the question regarding the split between pay-in and pay-out, we've seen those two evolve over the years, and we believe it's going to continue to evolve. We are still in a micro and macro world. So depending on which customers we are able to onboard and at what speed, you’ll see pay-in and pay-out gaining a different share. So I don’t think we can point you to any mature stage split between those two. Depending on who the merchants are and how they probably use our platform, you’ll see that continue to evolve. On the competition question, look, we believe for many years in a very competitive space. We believe there are many great payments companies worldwide; some of them are public. But we also believe this opportunity in emerging markets is huge, and we are very well positioned to capture hopefully a lot of that opportunity. Some of the competitive advantages that we build include the idea of having direct connections, the idea that our technology has a deep cultural understanding of the markets where we operate; we believe are sustainable advantages. So to answer your question, we are counting on competition to be aggressive, but at the same time, we are confident in the efforts and advantages built into our platform. The third question is on prepayment. I'll start there, and Sumit can feel free to complement. As of now, we don't generate revenues from prepayments the way you would see for other companies, particularly in Brazil. Is that an opportunity? Probably, yes. It's not included in any of our internal forecasts. We are more focused today on continuing with our geographic roadmap and our product roadmap. If anything, that would be a weak or easy win to pursue further down the line.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Domingos Falavina with JPMorgan. You may proceed with your question.

Thank you. Hi, good evening, everyone. As has been said here, congratulations as well; amazing figures. I'm having a little bit of trouble, I think, with Jorge's first question. You guys brought in a lot of new clients. I remember you mentioning that kind of a funnel; that the process is long. If you could give anyone, if it's either quantitative or qualitative comments on how this pipeline looks, for example, you had in the last stage of this funnel 30 companies that have converted 10 of them, and maybe you're moving an additional five to this funnel. We just want to grasp or understand a little bit more about how this pipeline of new clients is evolving.

Hi, Dom, and thanks for the question. We've onboarded 10 new merchants in the last quarter, but that doesn’t tell much of this story. Part of the reason why we've decided to become bilingual and raise awareness in the market authorities stands to our merchants, and we believe we managed to do so to a certain extent. However, that by no means has an impact on our current quarter. If anything, it will help us drive more leads into that funnel that we were discussing. The other thing is that this funnel is fed by opportunities that are based on geographies and products. The more geographies we have, the more products we have, the more we are able to have a conversation with any customer until then we have a service to offer them. So we see a pipeline that is extremely healthy that is full of opportunities across all different stages. Also, if you remember what we discussed at the IPO, there's a two-key funnels for us. It's a new sales funnel. We are going after new merchants, but there's also an account management funnel, which drives the net revenue retention. That’s where we focus the most, making sure there's more opportunities with each one of these customers that are onboarded, as this has never been healthier.

Maybe, one of the – sorry, one of the points, if I may. I would say a big opportunity for us is merchants that want to grow outside their home countries. I think we mentioned that in our prepared remarks; we see tremendous pent-up demand from merchants looking to go outside their home countries, including from China. So as we keep highlighting, we don't actually process significant payment volume in China, but we do work with Chinese merchants outside China, and that's also been beneficial to us.

Okay. Thank you again and congrats.

Thank you. I would now like to turn the call back over to Sebastián for any further remarks.

Thanks, everyone for joining today. We are glad, and thanks for your questions. We are happy to stay in touch in the future. Thank you very much.

Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.