Earnings Call Transcript - EEFT Q1 2025

Operator, Operator

Greetings, and welcome to Euronet Worldwide’s First Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speakers’ presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. Please be advised that today’s conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Mr. Adam Godderz, General Counsel for Euronet Worldwide. Thank you. Mr. Godderz, you may begin.

Adam Godderz, General Counsel

Thank you. Good morning everyone and welcome to Euronet’s first quarter 2025 earnings conference call. On the call today we have Mike Brown, our Chairman and CEO; and Rick Weller, our CFO. Before we begin, I need to call your attention to the forward-looking statements disclaimer on the second slide of the PowerPoint presentation we’ll be making today. Statements made on this call that concern Euronet’s or its management’s intentions, expectations or predictions of further performance are forward-looking statements. Euronet’s actual results may vary materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements as a result of a number of factors that are listed on the second page of our presentation. In addition, the PowerPoint presentation includes a reconciliation of the non-GAAP financial measures we’ll be using during the call to their most comparable GAAP measures. Now I’ll turn the call over to our CEO, Mike Brown.

Mike Brown, CEO

Thank you, Adam, and thank you everybody for joining us today on the call. I’ll begin my comments on Slide number 5. Let’s first dive right into our results for the quarter, and what a quarter it was. We achieved double-digit constant currency growth in operating income and adjusted EBITDA, highlighted by an 18% increase in operating income over the prior year. We didn’t just tiptoe into double-digit growth territory; we kicked in the door. All segments contributed to these record earnings. As we exited the first quarter, ongoing commentary around immigration, tariffs and the trade war have dominated the headlines. There are a wide range of opinions regarding the macroeconomic impact, but the simple truth is that it’s too early to predict the impact of these policies, as witnessed by the volatility in the stock market. However, we did not see significant adverse impacts on our business from these policy discussions on our first quarter results, and with three-fourths of our revenues generated from outside of the United States, we do not anticipate any significant direct impact to our business as a result. With these strong first-quarter results together with our diversified global business, we are reaffirming our expectation to produce between 12% and 16% earnings for the year. As you may recall from our fourth quarter discussion, our business model is built on two key revenue pillars that will continue to expand as payment functionality evolves and business becomes more and more global. The first pillar is payment and transaction processing, with which we facilitate high volume transactions for banks, merchants, and brand partners, continually expanding our use cases to stay aligned with evolving demand. The second is cross-border and foreign exchange, with which we power FX related use cases and distribute FX services through a mix of owned and third party channels, spanning both physical and digital touch points to meet consumer and business payment needs. While the methods have and will likely continue to evolve, we believe it is fairly safe to say that people will always need to make payments. Euronet will continue leading the way with its innovative use cases. Now, I will hand it off to Rick to discuss the results in more detail.

Rick Weller, CFO

Thank you, Mike. Good morning and thank you to everyone for joining us today. I will begin my comments on Slide 7. For the first quarter, we delivered revenue of $916 million, adjusted operating income of $75 million, and adjusted EBITDA of $119 million, a record first quarter across all three metrics. These results were made possible by contributions from each of the segments, but with a particularly strong earnings contribution from the Money Transfer segment due to double-digit transaction growth led by digital transaction growth of 31% compared to the prior year first quarter and double-digit cross-border transaction growth. Adjusted EPS of $1.13 compared to the prior year of $1.28. However, it is important to look a little deeper. For the first quarter of this year, the $1.13 included a one-time charge of $0.20 per share for the repurchase of the convertible bonds. With respect to the prior year’s first quarter, the $1.28 included a benefit of approximately $0.15 per share due to the reduction of certain tax matters. So on a pro forma basis, adjusted EPS grew 18% year-over-year. We were able to deliver this strong earnings growth due to our continued focus on expanding the business in new and existing markets, adding more products, and continued investments in our industry-leading technology across all three segments. Needless to say, this strong start to the year strengthens our confidence in the 12% to 16% annual adjusted EPS range expectation we provided for 2025. Next slide please. Slide 8 presents a summary of our balance sheet compared to the prior year. As you can see, we ended the first quarter with some increase in cash and debt, which was the combined result of the generation of cash from operations and the use of $59 million of cash for the repurchase of shares and working capital requirements in EFT and Money Transfer to meet holiday business needs. We repurchased approximately $492 million of convertible notes using a combination of cash and debt. However, overall, our net debt leverage remains relatively conservative at about one times EBITDA. While the share repurchases we made in the first quarter will benefit future periods by approximately 1%, the repurchases had less than one-fourth of a penny benefit for this first quarter result. Moreover, as we approach the seasonally strong part of the year, we will see more ATM cash, which will drive more interest expense, which you can see in our historical trends. Slide 9 please. Year-over-year, most of the major currencies we operate in declined at low to mid single-digit rates. To normalize the impact of currency fluctuations, we have presented our results adjusted for currency on the next slide. On Slide 10 now. Building on the momentum from last year, we are pleased to start 2025 with record results across all metrics. All segments played a role in the record quarterly results. Starting with our EFT segment, revenue grew 10%, adjusted operating income grew 15%, and adjusted EBITDA grew 10% when compared to the prior year. This notable growth was fueled by a rise in both domestic and international cash withdrawal transactions, further expansion into new markets, and the addition of access fees and interchange rate increases in certain markets. Operating margins expanded nicely due to revenue growth complemented by effective cost management. Epay grew revenue 8%, and adjusted operating income and adjusted EBITDA grew 5%. The main drivers of growth this quarter were attributed to our payment business, the continued growth of our digital channel sales in multiple markets predominantly related to gaming content and mobile activation increases in Epay USA. Adjusted operating income and adjusted EBITDA were impacted by the payment of $4.5 million during the quarter to resolve an operating tax matter covering multiple years. Excluding the one-time payment related to the operating tax matter, Epay grew adjusted operating income 22% and adjusted EBITDA 20%. Money Transfer revenue, operating income, and adjusted EBITDA grew 10%, 23%, and 17% respectively. The 10% growth in revenue was primarily driven by double-digit growth in cross-border transactions, offset by a decrease in intra U.S. transactions. Direct-to-consumer digital transactions increased by 31%, reflecting strong consumer demand for digital products. On a constant currency basis, money transfers, gross profit per transaction, and the amount sent improved compared to the prior year. Overall, gross profit per transaction remained stable or improved across all segments. Moreover, consolidated operating margins expanded 80 basis points compared to the prior year, driven by volume growth, gross margin improvements, and scale across all segments. In summary, these meet and beat first quarter results further strengthen our confidence in the 12% to 16% earnings growth expectation we have for 2025. With this, I’ll turn it back to Mike.

Mike Brown, CEO

Thank you, Rick. I will continue my comments on Slide number 12. Today, I want to talk about our business and how our growth strategy continues to produce results. Earlier, I mentioned our growth strategy by the continued global expansion of our leading global cross-border payments network focused on high-value FX transactions. Moreover, the results Rick just reviewed are evidence that our strategy works, producing double-digit growth, or maybe we could say doing double time. As we have discussed over the past few quarters, the strength of our business lies in the diversity of our three segments as well as the diversity within those segments. This quarter was a great example of just that. As the graph on Slide 12 illustrates, over the past ten years, our first-quarter revenue has continued to grow. The continued constant growth year after year is due to our team’s execution of our strategy. Over the last ten years, our first-quarter revenues have more than doubled from $435 million to over $937 million. Whether led by Epay, EFT, or Money Transfer, Euronet continues to produce record revenues. As we discussed, our business was built on two key revenue pillars that will continue to expand and reach more and more customers. First is payment and transaction processing, and the second is cross-border and foreign exchange. Without our diverse revenue streams, we would not have had the ability to produce consistent growth year after year. While our pillars will continue to expand and grow our global reach, we know that people will always need to make payments, and Euronet will continue to lead the way. Now let’s move on to Slide Number 13 and I’ll discuss what makes up our revenue. I’m on 13 now. So, to quickly recap our business, Euronet started with one segment EFT by deploying our own ATMs. Today, we operate three segments that each complement one another and represent a diversified global business with a collection of assets that have positioned Euronet as a global leader in the payments industry. As you can see on the slide, for the full year 2024, only 19% of our revenue was generated from Euronet-owned ATMs. Our first quarter growth and product mix are in line with the full year of 2024 last year. While our Euronet owned ATM revenue is growing, our other revenue streams are growing at an even faster pace. We invested heavily in card acquiring, in Ren, Dandelion, Digital Money Transfer, Epay, and you can see those results. Said differently and simply, while I’m proud of our heritage, we are not just an ATM business. Now let’s briefly discuss the payments global market. Based on a 2020 report issued by McKinsey & Company entitled Global Payments in 2024, the global payment industry handled 3.4 trillion transactions and a revenue pool of $2.4 trillion or just over 13 basis points per dollar processed. McKinsey predicts the revenue pool to grow at a rate of 5% per year. And as we have shared with you, our focus on cross-border payments with seven times the opportunities has enabled us to achieve revenue per transaction at more than 20 times the market average. In addition to getting the more valuable transactions, we are growing at twice the market ratio of growth. With less than 1% of the overall industry revenue pool and a focus on higher-value payments, we have a lot of room to continue to grow. In the past three decades, we’ve built an unmatched set of assets, technology, expertise that have positioned us as a global leader in payment processing, cross-border payments, and foreign exchange. The payments industry is growing, and we are growing at double the market rate. There is that word again, we really like doubles. Now let’s talk about EFT. Next slide please. During the first quarter, EFT delivered double-digit growth across all metrics. Our EFT growth this quarter was made possible by the expansion of core services to banks and FinTechs, including expansion of international and domestic fees, growth in recently launched markets, such as the Philippines, Albania, Belgium, Mexico, Egypt, Morocco, and Malaysia, continued growth of our POS acquiring business, and good expense management there, taking advantage of ATM as a service opportunity. Notable examples in the first quarter of the expansion of our merchant services business in Greece included securing a five-year agreement with Avolta AG, a Swiss-based travel retailer; entering into an agreement with NRG, a leading energy company specializing in power generation and retail electricity sales to assume all the online payments for energy bills from consumers; signing an agreement with Snappi, a local digital bank in Greece to enable card-based top-ups for their digital wallet; and introducing a new revenue stream with the launch of NowPay, a service that offers same-day settlement for our merchants for an additional fee. Lastly, we signed an additional 7,000 new merchants this quarter. What about geographic expansion? During the quarter, EFT launched two new independent ATM networks in the Dominican Republic and Peru through our JV partnership with Prosegur. Let’s discuss how our ATM network helps us grow our service offerings. We continue to add network participation agreements, signing 11 new merchants in Poland for ATM deposits. And what about rent during the quarter? We signed an agreement to implement POS and ATM DCC via rent for Bank of Ceylon in Sri Lanka. The Bank of Ceylon is a large commercial bank with 651 branches and 715 ATMs. We signed an agreement with the Bank of the Philippine Islands, which is the number two bank there, to support the rollout of QR code-based merchant payments on 40,000 merchant POS terminals, leveraging our Ren payments platform. Additionally, we signed a strategic agreement with Yes Bank, one of India’s leading private sector banks, to modernize and transform their retail payments infrastructure. Under this new agreement, the bank will transition to Euronet’s Ren payments platform hosted on our private cloud infrastructure in India. As you can see, our EFT business continues to grow across products, solutions, and geographies, which will benefit our results as we move through the remainder of the year. Now let’s move on to Slide Number 15. As I begin my comments on Epay, I want to repeat for you what Rick discussed earlier. Excluding a one-time payment to resolve an operating tax matter for $4.5 million, our core Epay business grew revenue by 8%, operating income by 22%, and adjusted EBITDA by 20%. The growth was driven by expansion in our payments business, growth of our digital channel sales in multiple markets, predominantly related to gaming content and mobile activation increases in Epay U.S. Additionally, we saw broad growth across most of our Epay geography. A notable signing this quarter was a contract with Sony in Turkey for distribution in both digital and physical channels. This is a strong market where Epay has established good digital and retailer penetration. During the quarter, Epay continued to grow its payment processing business with the signing of a payment processing contract with the Munich Airport. This contract will include over 300 POS terminals and provide alternative payment methods as well, like WeChat Pay, Alipay, etc., for vendors at the airport, including retail outlets, hospitality, and parking. We expect to launch this in the late second quarter or early third quarter of this year. Finally, as we look to the second quarter, we expect to see an improvement compared to the prior year from the promotional activity related to our B2B channel that was lighter in the prior year. As we have mentioned before, promotional activity in our cadooz incentive and rewards business is very profitable and will benefit our quarterly results in quarters where these campaigns occur. Now let’s move on to Slide 16, and we’ll talk about Money Transfer. Okay, as we turn our attention to Money Transfer, we achieved double-digit growth across all metrics in the first quarter, with adjusted operating income increasing by 23% compared to the same period last year. What a quarter for Money Transfer. Key metrics include transactions growing at a double-digit rate, continuing to outpace the market by 2.5 times; digital transactions increased 31% compared to the prior year; digital payout grew by 29% year-over-year, accounting now for 55% of our total volume. Our exceptional performance in Money Transfer stemmed from our market-leading digital distribution channels. Strategic growth drivers include our global presence, omni-channel capabilities with established brick-and-mortar and digital experiences, the world’s best digital payout network, a wholesale strategy with Dandelion and our strong competitive stance for the total addressable market. This quarter, we signed 22 new agreements across 20 countries, expanding our network into Iraq and Sudan. We also launched 13 partners in 11 countries. A key highlight is our integration with Visa Direct, enabling customers to send funds within minutes to 4 billion Visa Debit cards. This service also simplifies sending money to a bank account by providing the recipient’s name and debit card number, solidifying our leading position in digital payout, one of our biggest growth drivers. On the send side, we renewed our exclusive agreement with Belgium Post, underscoring the value of our service. Additionally, we expanded our digital offering into New Zealand with our Ria app, strengthening our digital presence in the APAC region. Shifting focus to our platform, Dandelion wholesale continues to enhance cross-border capabilities for major players. This quarter we signed new deals with Moneytrans, a Brussels-based FinTech in the remittance industry, and Skyee, a Hong Kong-based FinTech specializing in cross-border payments for e-commerce businesses. Notably, Dandelion’s easy-to-integrate model enabled Moneytrans to connect to our full network in under a week, allowing them to rapidly scale their international payment capabilities and accelerate their time to market. These new Dandelion deals, together with the ease of integration, are contributing to the 33% transaction growth of Dandelion that we saw this last quarter. The momentum is building. As you can see, we’re hitting on all cylinders in Money Transfer, and we have a robust pipeline of diverse opportunities ahead, giving us confidence in our ability to continue our strong growth. Let’s move ahead to the next slide, and we’ll talk about how we can close this course. As I close out my comments on the first quarter, I want to reiterate that we are a diversified business. We have a leadership team with a proven track record of delivering growth year after year and a revenue mix that continues to shift as we make investments, acquire companies, and launch new products. For the year ended 2024 and the first quarter of 2025, only 19% of our revenue was from our ATM owned network. As we have explained, we have a robust business model that plays in a $2.4 trillion revenue global payments market with endless potential for growth. Supporting our model, we have our core assets, our Ren technology, our Dandelion network, our global footprint of licensed and regulated entities, distribution partners in the form of banks, retailers, company-owned stores, ATMs, and POS terminals. We have a very robust balance sheet that can support future growth initiatives and our people, the best I could ask for, with a consistent track record of delivering growth year-over-year. Our business stands on these foundational assets, and we have a go-to-market strategy for our revenue pillars through our three different segments and multiple use cases, enabling Euronet to reach the world of payments, transaction processing, cross-border payments, and foreign exchange through our network of networks. Our overall business is growing two times faster than the global payments market of growth, and we expect that to continue. As I conclude my remarks, I want to repeat, we look forward to the remainder of 2025 with a strong first quarter and a strong start to the year. We are reaffirming our earnings expectation of 12% to 16% growth for the year. With that, I will be happy to take questions. Operator, please assist.

Operator, Operator

Thank you. At this time, we will now conduct a question-and-answer session. Our first question comes from Pete Heckmann from D.A. Davidson. The floor is yours.

Pete Heckmann, Analyst

Thank you. Good morning, everyone. I wanted to follow-up a little bit on Dandelion, the integration with Visa. I guess, is it possible to get a little bit more visibility into kind of the quarterly trends there or perhaps the year-over-year growth rates in 2024 and what you’re expecting for 2025? Sounds like there are a number of deals getting done, but it’s kind of hard to see through the rest to see exactly what the trends are there.

Mike Brown, CEO

Well, you saw that we had a 33% growth, and I would tell you that virtually 100% of that is without Visa Direct because we just flipped on the Visa Direct switch just a couple of weeks ago. So we don’t have any numbers in there for that. We’re very excited. This is a great distribution channel for our money transfer business. What it does is it makes it much, much easier for somebody to send money digitally. We like that because it costs us less than physical cash payout. All you’ve got to do is give them your name and the name and card number of the recipient, so it’s really easy. So we’re excited about this, but it’s not in our numbers right now.

Pete Heckmann, Analyst

Okay. That’s helpful. And just as a follow-up on your partnership or joint venture in a couple of countries with Prosegur, do you anticipate that being an aggressive rollout or would you consider more of a pilot program? How should we think about...

Mike Brown, CEO

Okay. So as you may know, Prosegur is prominent in South America, Latin America, and also Spain. They’ve got an excellent reputation with all the banks there. So they give us entry into these banks so that we can get licensed in these countries. We want to go into, I’m not saying every country south of our border, but most every country south of our border. So we’re excited about that. Now, how it works is we get those, we light up those first few ATMs, we make sure we’ve got everything working really well, and then we start to blow it out like we have in these other markets. So yes, we’re expecting aggressive rollouts in the Prosegur joint venture partner countries.

Pete Heckmann, Analyst

All right, great. Thank you.

Mike Brown, CEO

And one last thing on that, excuse me, operator. Pete, don’t forget that every country south of our border has a different currency. So we’re not just talking about tourists from the U.S. who might go to Ecuador or something, but it’s about crossing the borders there for those countries, they’re going to need the local currency wherever they go, whenever they cross the border. So there's lots of opportunities for us.

Mike Grondahl, Analyst

Hey, Mike and Rick, congrats on a nice quarter. Curious what you’re seeing over in Europe on the ATM side. Any early read on summer travel or consumer spending over there? How is it coming in according to plan?

Mike Brown, CEO

It seems to be at least with three weeks or so into April, it’s just tracking right according to plan. And I mean, I think that’s the thing everybody’s got to remember is that 80% of our customers who use ATMs where travel makes a difference are Europeans. So they’re still going on vacation. There have been some people who’ve hypothesized that due to the U.S.’s stance towards Europe and some Europeans being afraid to come here, maybe they’ll vacation at home instead of in the U.S. or whatever. But I think that’s all on the edges. What we’ve seen so far is everything seems to be lining up like we thought, very similar to last summer, but there will be more travelers this summer.

Mike Grondahl, Analyst

Got it. And then your 12% to 16% adjusted EPS growth this year guidance, how are you factoring FX into that? There’s been a pretty nice move up the euro to the dollar to $1.4. How are you thinking about that for 2025?

Rick Weller, CFO

Yes. Mike, we generally just expect the FX rates will hold flat. So we’ve not got increases built into our numbers. So if we see a measurable increase, it could give us a little bit of tailwind, but we don’t try to outguess it. You also have to keep in mind that we’ve got a mix of currencies around the world. So you can’t just look at one currency. And then as we said, we do have about 25% of our revenues generated in the U.S. So we’ve definitely seen a little benefit tailwind, but the assumption on a go-forward basis is always that we don’t outthink it or put some projection on what will happen there.

Mike Grondahl, Analyst

Got it. Rick, maybe a better way to ask it, were there any put and takes to the 12% to 16% growth? Anything doing better, anything doing a little worse to call out, maybe there’s not.

Rick Weller, CFO

Yes, well, I think if you really get behind all the math there, yes, you would see we benefited a little bit more from some share repurchases the year-over-year carryovers of that. On the other side of the coin, we had more interest expense because rates were increasing as we went through much of last year, then we started seeing a little bit of a dip in it. So rates and interest expenses are a little bit more, so that kind of offset some of that. Those were probably the biggest puts and takes to call out there. We didn’t have any significant benefit from share repurchases this quarter because they were purchased towards the end of the quarter. So nothing really there. We had just a slight benefit on income taxes, not much. The best thing on the headlines is you kind of sort through some of that math and again focus on 18% growth in operating income. That’s the heart of the business. That’s the strength and the fuel to the business. If we can’t grow our business at those kinds of rates, we won’t have the earnings. At the end of the day, the quality of our earnings, our year-over-year numbers, if we try to cut out a lot of the noise that happens, whether it’s purchase share purchases, interest, tax, or whatever, and you go on a kind of an apples-to-apples basis, we had about an 18%, 19% year-over-year EPS growth, almost exactly what we had in operating income. If I reflect back even to the full year of 2024, you would see the same kind of math there. So I think the real showcase to our strength of the business is the strength of the earnings growth, which I think is very much due to the diversity we have across our business geographically, product-wise, segment-wise, customer-wise. And we feel pretty good about the momentum going in our business.

Mike Grondahl, Analyst

Great. Thank you.

Operator, Operator

Thank you. Great question. Our next question comes from Chris Kennedy of William Blair. The floor is yours.

Chris Kennedy, Analyst

Good morning. Thanks for taking the questions. Can you just talk about consumers’ willingness to pay ATM surcharge or access fees in Europe? It’s kind of a new concept over there. Any observations in the data?

Mike Brown, CEO

Well, I think the data seems to say that they – first of all, you’ve got to understand, we’re not the only ones doing this. Much like the United States, if you go to any ATM that’s not your own bank’s ATM, you will pay what, $3.50, $4 or whatever it is here, right? It’s exactly the same in Europe. Once Visa and Mastercard have allowed it in a given market, we do it, but everybody else doesn’t. So when you think about it, people really don’t – if you want the cash, that’s just kind of the common denominator. And so we don’t really see a change in the price elasticity curve you might say.

Rick Weller, CFO

Yes. The other thing I would point out is, what is very common practice in Europe is that the banks charge their customers what they call a disloyalty charge. All of these banks have €2 or €3 that they charge their customer any time they use an ATM other than on their network. So for the most part, customers are quite accustomed to paying a fee if they’re using an ATM that’s other than their bank's. Additionally, we see that the practices are pretty consistent where banks charge customers off-bank fees. This is good for the customer and it’s good for us.

Mike Brown, CEO

And it does two things. First of all, once you’ve got — and that’s, we call it, a surcharge here on ATMs. It opens up for us more ATMs in that potential market because then we can go after the local transactions where we might not have pursued that ahead of time. Secondly, as Rick says, we signed network participation agreements with banks so that they use our network, our Euronet branded network as an extension of their own and they basically buy transactions from us at wholesale. The first country in Continental Europe that did this was Spain, and we have around 30 different banks in Spain who have contracts with us so that their customers have access to our ATMs with a no fee agreement. This actually lengthens our runway for the numbers of ATMs in Europe as more and more surcharges come into the market.

Chris Kennedy, Analyst

Right. Very clear. Thank you for that. And then just a quick update on the merchant services business. It seems like you’re expanding into new geographies and Mike, I think you mentioned tight expense management in that business.

Mike Brown, CEO

Well, yes, our goal is to expand into Portugal, Spain, and Italy. They have a hyper-competitive environment, and we’re kind of starting from scratch, but we understand how to have a value proposition that’s good for the small merchants in these Mediterranean touching countries. So that’s our goal, to take the tricks we’ve learned in Greece and export them to those three other countries. We’re just at the beginning of that right now. We’ve hired sales forces and we’re going out selling to the merchants and trying to dislodge them from their current providers because we’ve got a good value proposition.

Gus Gala, Analyst

Hi, Mike. Hi, Rick. Thanks for taking our questions. Could you talk about the Ria digital shift? Two areas I want to dig in on. Can you talk about maybe efficiencies around digital marketing and so far as driving the strength in the branded digital? Then any commentary around how you’ve maybe gross profit dollar retention has been trending, anything to qualify on that front would be helpful. And then on a similar front and money transfer, could you talk about how you’ve dealt with more entrants into the independent channel domestically in the past? It sounds like a larger peer is more actively pursuing that space here in the U.S.? Thanks.

Mike Brown, CEO

Well, I mean, you just look at our money transfer results and they speak for themselves. I mean, we are absolutely crushing it with our Ria business up and down the value chain. We start with Ria at bricks and mortars, we have riamoneytransfer.com on the online side, you can see that our growth there is 30%. We continue to grow at that kind of rate quarter on quarter and it keeps on happening. We do see some entrants, but we also see people becoming obsolete. I mean, this is a hyper-competitive market. Last year, we saw two of the major mid-sized players just evaporate; one in Europe, one in the U.S. So it is competitive. One of the things we’ve got going for us is that we have an omni-channel strategy. That means you can have the same customer number and the same relationship with us whether you use bricks and mortars or you go digital. This strategy has helped us continue to retain these customers as they may migrate from bricks and mortar to more digital areas.

Rick Weller, CFO

Yes, you also asked about gross profit. As I mentioned earlier, we saw a little increase in our gross profit per transaction. So we feel pretty good about the stability of the market out there. And to further Mike’s comments about the other guys in the business, look, we purchased this Ria business; it’s been in our group now since 2007. There’s rarely an agent that we have where you don’t see four or five other brands competing. This has been the nature of our day-to-day operations, which have been hand-to-hand combat that Juan and his team manage every single day. We do see sometimes the names of the brands that we compete with change; however, the competitive nature of the independent channel hasn’t changed in the past fifteen years.

Gus Gala, Analyst

Got it, appreciate the comments. Yes, sorry. And then one on the EFT. Can we talk about the LATM opportunity a little bit? Maybe is there a way to quantify what the opportunity could be in terms of ATMs, transactions? And then a second layer, could you — in the past you’ve talked about the productivity of these ATMs outside of Europe being much higher. Could you put a finer point on how the Prosegur ATMs compare to those numbers? Anything of note there would be helpful.

Mike Brown, CEO

Okay, so some of this is too early to give you exact numbers. We’ve used Prosegur as our JV partner in two new markets: the Dominican Republic and Peru. We’re just starting, so we don’t have any data yet. However, we entered into Mexico on our own and these are extremely profitable. One thing to remember is that bulk of Europe uses Euros, and these are Euro to Euro transactions, so they’re not cross-currency, meaning you can’t make a currency spread on those transactions in Europe. Conversely, virtually, every transaction that we do in South America or Latin America is cross-currency. There are lots of DCC opportunities, which gives you the ability to earn more than just a couple of bucks on a surcharge. There’s an ample opportunity there, and we see the same potential in North Africa with Morocco and Egypt and also in Malaysia and the Philippines. I can’t tell you exactly how big it’s going to be, but we know the opportunity is large.

Gus Gala, Analyst

Got you. Appreciate all the comments as usual.

Operator, Operator

Thank you for your questions. Our next question comes from Rayna Kumar from Oppenheimer. The floor is yours.

Rayna Kumar, Analyst

Good morning. Thanks for taking my question, and good results here. I think earlier you had mentioned that 80% of tourists in Europe are Europeans. Are you able to break that out a little bit further and talk about what percentage you see are U.S. tourists?

Mike Brown, CEO

We know that 80% of our customers in Europe are Europeans. Of the 20% that’s left, about half comes from Britain and the other half comes from the U.S. and all the other countries. I don’t have the exact number off the top of my head, maybe Rick does, but I would say the U.S. might be half-ish of that last 10%.

Rick Weller, CFO

Yeah, pretty close. We’re in the right zip code.

Rayna Kumar, Analyst

Understood. Okay, that’s really helpful. And then I just want to ask about money transfer. How much benefit do you guys think you got from just the FX volatility in the quarter versus, I guess, what your competitors are doing?

Mike Brown, CEO

I don’t think that we got much benefit in the first quarter. We didn’t see much volatility until around the end of the first quarter. We have seen more activity in the first part of April here. However, I would say that on balance, there wasn’t much impact in the first quarter, but again it looks like April has picked up, likely coinciding with a lot of the press. If you remember, April 2nd was a significant announcement date on tariffs. I think this is when you really started noticing volatility moving.

Rayna Kumar, Analyst

Understood. Okay. And just finally on the ATM business, it’s good to see the Dominican Republic and Peru up on your ATM. Can you just comment on how many ATMs in general you expect to add this year?

Mike Brown, CEO

Well, as we said before, we would probably start moving away from providing that specific number just to avoid it being another statistic to measure. However, we also announced that we signed a transaction in Eastern Europe that’ll add quite a few ATMs from an outsourced basis. So I would tell you that we would expect to add ATMs consistent with prior years, but we’re not wanting to place a specific number on that. You can expect that we will continue to put in about the same number of ATMs. If we see more traction somewhere or sign larger outsource deals, we could exceed that. Our momentum would remain consistent with prior years.

Rayna Kumar, Analyst

Great, thank you.

Operator, Operator

Thank you for your question. Our next question comes from Darrin Peller with Wolfe Research. The floor is yours.

Daniel Krebs, Analyst

Hi, thanks. This is Daniel Krebs on for Darrin Peller. Just wanted to follow up on the merchant services outside of Greece. I know it’s early efforts now, but in your view, how long is the typical sales cycle and ramp period until we could start to see some material contributions from these countries?

Mike Brown, CEO

I would say that that will be just material in comparison to Greece; probably not until late this year or early next year. But we’re working hard and we see the opportunity.

Rick Weller, CFO

Well, I think another demonstration of that is the credibility of what we have to offer. As we mentioned earlier, we just signed the Munich Airport. This is a major player in Europe. The Germans have exacting standards of quality, so I think this speaks to the quality of what we have to offer. We’re not just a household name out there in the merchant processing. We have more strength in Greece, but we’ll continue to grow. That’s a good example of people recognizing the quality of our technology.

Daniel Krebs, Analyst

Got it. Yes. Thank you. That’s great.

Mike Brown, CEO

It’s also recognizing the quality of our technology because really these folks are wanting to be able to process payments from all people that come through that airport. They aren’t just carrying traditional Visa or Mastercard products. They have QR code type products, and this is where the non-traditional card processing technology we employ makes a difference to help serve their customers better.

Daniel Krebs, Analyst

Understood, thanks. And just a quick follow-up maybe on the travel trend. Do you potentially see a scenario where if there’s slower inbound to the U.S. and U.S. domestic activity, that some of that travel activity could end up shifting to Europe? I’m not sure if you’ve seen any of that in early bookings data perhaps?

Mike Brown, CEO

Haven’t seen anything showing up in the numbers. I think you raise a good question, but we just haven’t seen any data on it. To the extent that someone from outside the U.S. who planned to come here feels like they don’t want to make the trip, the next largest tourist location is Europe. We have deployed in some of the other Asia-Pacific markets and Northern African markets, so we have those places covered. If consumers do shift their preference or behavior, we might get some benefit.

Operator, Operator

Thank you for your question. Our last question comes from Zachary Gunn of FT Partners. The floor is yours.

Zachary Gunn, Analyst

Hey there. Thanks for taking the question. Apologies if I missed it. I just want to ask, were there any incremental geographies that launched direct access fees this quarter? I know there are a couple expected to come on in 2025. Is there any way to think about the contribution of incremental countries and what that’s expected to contribute to that EPS guide for the full year?

Mike Brown, CEO

I don’t think we had any new ones come on in the first quarter. We had some that came on in the fourth quarter, so we’re getting benefits from those in the first quarter. But I don’t remember anything past that.

Rick Weller, CFO

I don’t recall anything in terms of new additions in the first quarter. As Mike said, we’re getting some full-year benefit from those others. We have some that are on the radar screen that we would expect this year, but we’re not the folks that make those announcements, and we don’t want to disclose any names until the card organizations make those announcements. We do expect more this year, but nothing new came on board in the first quarter.

Zachary Gunn, Analyst

Got it. That’s helpful. Then just quickly as a follow-up, I just want to ask on the regulatory environment. Obviously, Money Transfer came in strong this quarter, but we saw specifically FinCEN put out some geographic targeting orders on zip codes in the U.S., and it’s probably a small proportion of overall volume. But what are you seeing in the regulatory environment today? Do you think that there’s a risk that these types of restrictions on filing CTRs expand further? Any commentary on that would be helpful.

Mike Brown, CEO

Look, I think it’s always hard to outguess that, but if we reflect a little bit on the world we operate in, we’ve generally been taking IDs on folks and we’ve seen these kinds of things before. We haven’t seen any significant difference show up out there. Our general view at this time is that we don’t anticipate any adverse reactions from that. It really depends on what kind of action could be taken in the future, but we operate on an ID basis around the world. When people send money, they’re generally accustomed to that. So again, we haven’t seen anything now, and as we see in the market today, we don’t expect anything significant in that respect.

Rick Weller, CFO

Aside from that, or because of our very diligent view on compliance and regulation, we have a pristine compliance record. Our larger competitors cannot brag about that. We certainly can, over our 30 years of operation. We don’t get into trouble because we play by the book and we’re very conservative. With that, we’re going to have to cut it off. Thank you, everyone for your time today. I look forward to seeing them in about 90 days. Thank you.

Operator, Operator

Thank you, everyone for your participation in today’s conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect.