Flywire Corp Q3 FY2021 Earnings Call

Thank you, and good afternoon. With me on today's call are Mike Massaro, Chief Executive Officer; Rob Orgel, President and Chief Operating Officer; and Mike Ellis, Chief Financial Officer. Our third quarter 2021 earnings press release, supplemental presentation and associated Form 8-K can be found at ir.flywire.com. During the call, we will be discussing certain forward-looking information. Actual results could differ materially from those contemplated by these forward-looking statements. We also will be discussing certain non-GAAP financial measures. Please refer to our press release and SEC filings for more information on the risks regarding these forward-looking statements, risk factors associated with our business and required disclosures related to non-GAAP financial measures. This call is being webcast live and will be available for replay on our website. I would now like to turn the call over to Mike Massaro.

Thank you, Akil, and thank you to everyone that is joining us today on our Q3 2021 earnings call, our second as a publicly traded company. We truly appreciate all the interest so many of you have shown in Flywire and getting to know our business as a recently listed public company. The third quarter was another strong quarter for Flywire. Rob Orgel and Mike Ellis will go into great detail later on. But first, let me start with some financial highlights. Revenue less ancillary services year-over-year growth was 67%, with total payment volume increasing 76% compared to Q3 2020. This growth was driven by our successful land-and-expand strategy in the U.K., strong U.S. education growth in the quarter and the easing of travel restrictions around the world, allowing more travelers to begin taking those long-awaited leisure trips. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $17.6 million, which is an increase of $7.4 million or 73% from last year's third quarter. These great results this quarter have been driven by the continued execution of our multiple growth strategies across industries and geographies. Our performance this quarter is also due to the commitment of over 600 FlyMates around the world who work each and every day to deliver value for our clients. We are so fortunate to have these amazing FlyMates who continue to stay focused and execute exceptionally well in this complex world. Our Q3 results further validate what we have discussed along our journey to become a public company nearly six months ago. First, there is a strong need for Flywire's powerful combination of software and payment capabilities, especially for high-stakes, high-value payments. Second, the core markets in which Flywire operates provide a massive opportunity for long-term growth, representing nearly $12 trillion of addressable market. These sectors are complex and have been poorly served by incumbent payment solutions, providing Flywire a great opportunity to modernize the payment flows within these sectors over the next decade. At Flywire, our mission is simple. We help our clients get paid and their customers pay from anywhere in the world. This combination of software, technology platform and payment network, or Flywire Advantage, uniquely positions Flywire for success in these massive addressable markets. We've been at this for more than ten years. And in that time, we've achieved significant scale and reach. As of quarter end, we accept and settle payments in over 240 countries and territories and in over 140 currencies. Today, we deliver some of the most important and complex payments for more than 2,450 customers around the world. As many of you have noted, our business has numerous defensible moats such as our deeply embedded, industry-specific software, our proprietary global payment network that enables Flywire to mitigate the complexities around the movement of money for our clients and our unique go-to-market approach. We believe the next decade will bring a wave of digitization across the industries we serve and that Flywire is uniquely positioned to lead this trend with our powerful combination of software, payments and our people. Not only do we believe that Flywire is uniquely positioned in the market, but we continue to see positive trends in the industries where we operate. In education, where we serve private and public universities, colleges, boarding schools, language and vocational programs all around the world, we see strong demand for our solutions. Providing flexibility to students and families to pay their tuition and fees over time is truly top of mind for institutions. In Q3, our education clients saw a continued return to normalcy as vaccination rates increased and students returned to campus. This applied to international students as well. This summer, even with the uncertainty around the Delta variant, American consulates issued almost as many visas for international students as during the same period in 2019. In this positive macro environment for education, our software continued to drive value. In a recent survey of finance professionals at U.S. education institutions conducted by Payments.com, more than 80% of bursars at four-year universities said flexible payment plans tailored to individual students can be attractive alternatives to traditional paper-based payments. Our strength in our domestic solutions and the global nature of our education business positions us well for the future. In health care, providing more consumer-friendly and digital-first payment options continues to be a priority for hospitals and health systems. We recently commissioned a survey of more than 2,000 consumer patients in the United States. Our data found that 65% of Americans who paid their medical bills online for the first time during the pandemic plan to continue to make payments online going forward. In addition to the great benefits for consumers, a streamlined payment experience can have a dramatic impact on the financial health of the hospital or health system. We recently completed a Total Economic Impact report with Forrester Research to measure the return on investment of deploying Flywire. Their research found that Flywire can help our clients achieve a 318% ROI over three years and see a payback period in less than six months. Our travel clients continue to see growth as borders open back up and restrictions ease. The United States announced it is reopening to fully vaccinated air travelers from around the world starting in early November. As we approach the holidays, our recent research suggests that travelers plan to spend more money and stay longer. In our recent survey of more than 800 frequent travelers, 65% said they would expect to take a longer vacation than usual post-pandemic. And 75% said they will seek a remote destination that would not be crowded. Speaking of the Flywire Forward event, we were so glad to see so many of you at our inaugural event, where we brought together business professionals from a wide variety of industries as well as leaders in fintech and banking to discuss the future. It was clear from the event that digitized payments are becoming table stakes across every industry, no longer just in retail and e-commerce. The feedback from the event was very positive, and our team is well underway in planning similar events in the future. I would now like to turn the call over to Rob Orgel, our President and COO, to review some operational highlights from the quarter in the context of our growth strategy.

Thanks, Mike, and good afternoon, everyone. As Mike indicated in his opening comments, we had an excellent Q3. Our results this quarter reflected continued execution of our growth strategies. Let me summarize the quarter's success before going into some details. Revenue grew across each of our verticals. New client signings were strong with 94 new customers in the quarter. And we were successful in hiring, bringing our year-to-date total hiring to over 200 FlyMates. I'll now go into a bit more depth on the dimensions of strength across our growth levers in Q3. To begin, we continue to see growth with our existing clients. Our net revenue retention has rebounded strongly in Q3 and for the year-to-date period, achieving levels at or above our performance over the last three years. This strength in NRR reflects our success with our clients as they recover from the pandemic as well as the value of our broad product suite. One example of this in the quarter was moving Manchester Metropolitan University, or MMU, from our cross-border solution, which was implemented in 2016, to deploying a fully integrated software suite to improve efficiencies across the campus. MMU, based in the United Kingdom, has over 30,000 students. This is our first fully integrated solution in the U.K. And we are providing broad and deep functionality that spans from online payments, monthly payment plans, accommodation payments and deposits, e-stores and also supporting their on-campus Met Card. We're managing all domestic and international payments for MMU. The ability to meet our clients' needs illustrates how Flywire's platform lets us serve and grow with our clients. In U.S. higher education, we expanded our presence at Northeastern University through the addition of payment plans for both international and domestic students. This top 50 university according to U.S. News & World Report was originally signed as a cross-border client in 2016. To illustrate our ability to expand with clients in our health care vertical, Flywire is deployed broadly across the Banner Health System, including 30 of Banner's acute care hospitals, 50 urgent care centers and hundreds of health care centers and clinics. In our emerging B2B segment, we have benefited from the expansion of our clients as they recover from the pandemic and as they increase their use of our services. For example, an existing advertising technology client has recently committed to use Flywire as their single digital accounts receivable solution for all customers, marking a significant expansion of our existing relationship. Our expectation is that this will allow us to increase our revenue in this account while providing a high ROI service and simplifying their accounts receivable function. As we move to our second growth lever, we also continue to win new clients at a rapid rate. The quarter was particularly strong in education and travel, representing the majority of the new clients in the quarter. In travel, we have continued to invest in client acquisition despite the impacts of COVID and are especially happy to add clients like Nordic Visitor, a large DMC in Iceland, where we completed an enterprise-level deployment. We replaced all payment options and are now the only way to pay Nordic Visitor. We added many new clients in the education space as well, including wins across multiple geographies. An example of a competitive win is our exclusive agreement to manage cross-border payments for the University of Portsmouth, a top-ranked university in the U.K. We also recently went live with our product at Vanderbilt University, a top 15 university according to U.S. News 2021 report. We are seeing great interest in our ability to help enterprises simplify accounts receivable, reduce costs and increase collections. In total, we added over 300 new clients year-to-date as of September 30, with continued success in all verticals in Q3. As we move to our third primary growth lever, our channel partnerships continue to be a significant source of growth for the company. During the quarter, we announced our new partnership with Finvi, a leading provider of enterprise workflow automation software for accounts receivable management. We also continue to add partners around the world that are providers of core student information systems in the education space. We signed a partnership agreement with Adapt IT, a primary student information system in South Africa, further increasing our global partners and integrations in the education space. As you can see, on top of the encouraging trends Mike mentioned earlier, we are enjoying success across all areas of our business. I would now like to turn the call over to Mike Ellis, our CFO, to review our results for the third quarter and guidance for the remainder of the year.

Thank you, Rob, and good afternoon, everyone. Today, I'll be discussing our non-GAAP financial metrics for our third quarter of 2021, including revenue less ancillary services, adjusted gross margin and adjusted EBITDA. Revenue less ancillary services for the quarter was $62 million, which represented a 67% growth rate compared to the third quarter of 2020, driven by an increase in total payment volume. As a reminder, Q3 and Q1 are historically our strongest quarters of the year. This revenue growth exceeded our expectations due to very strong performance across the business, including all our verticals. While the business was broadly strong, we would particularly call out the strength of our U.K. and U.S.-based education business. In addition, we continue to see improvement in the travel industry. As Mike mentioned, we processed $5.3 billion in total payment volume during the quarter, an increase of 76% from the $3 billion we processed during the third quarter of 2020. Adjusted gross margin was 71.9% for the quarter, which represented a decrease of 90 basis points compared to the 72.8% reported for the third quarter of 2020. In the aggregate, we generated a very strong adjusted gross margin given the 67% revenue growth achieved during the quarter. We are pleased with the reported results for the quarter. Our adjusted EBITDA was $17.6 million compared to the $10.2 million generated during the third quarter of 2020. This improvement was due to the contribution from our incremental adjusted gross margin, driven by the 67% revenue less ancillary services growth rate realized during the quarter. However, we will continue to pursue growth opportunities and invest meaningfully in future quarters to drive revenue growth. I would now like to turn the call back over to Mike to wrap things up before taking your questions.

Thanks, Mike. We believe here at Flywire that we have a clear and compelling value proposition that will continue to help us win. We have built a business that has exceptional unit economics, a highly defensible business model, and we could not be more excited about the future. I would like to wrap up by thanking over 600 FlyMates, our team members around the world. We have an outstanding group of people made even stronger by the over 200 new additions that have joined us so far this year. Our global nature, flexible work environment and fast-paced growth positions us well as an employer of choice in this challenging time. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to the operator for questions.

The first question comes from Bob Napoli with William Blair.

Congratulations on great results. Well done. So just looking at the profitability that you generated in the quarter and as we think about 2022 and 2023, I mean, you're well ahead of any expectations that we had for the full year of 2023. And I know the third quarter is a seasonally stronger quarter for you. But how should we think about the profitability of the business versus investments? Obviously, you overperformed, and I know you're investing aggressively for growth. So how should we think about balancing the two?

Thanks, Bob. This is Mike. I'll go first. I'd say a few things. One, obviously, again, great quarter results. And you see the flow-through through the business model, which again, we're really proud of. One thing I'd just highlight, we are looking for growth investments in multiple areas. You see the number of FlyMates we're hiring. We have aggressive hiring plans throughout the year and into 2022. So we're looking for those growth levers and continually expect us to pull the trigger on those. At the same time, it's a very healthy business. So expect us to keep investing in growth. Don't expect us to be transitioning to focusing on EBITDA. It's not our direction. It's going to be continued investment across all industries and all geographies.

As a follow-up regarding the education business and the transition to domestic clients like Texas A&M and Northeastern, could you provide insights on the revenue per client? Specifically, what does this transition mean for revenue growth? Additionally, can you share information on the average revenue per client by segment or guidance on how to model your business in this regard?

Thanks for the question, Bob. What you see from the expansion of domestic in these accounts is a real revenue multiplier for us. When we move to serving the entire campus community rather than just a relatively smaller percentage in cross-border capacity, that really results in a revenue increase for us. So it's a revenue multiplier for us. You see the revenue per account go up significantly.

And Bob, the only thing I'd add to what Rob said is we are really encouraged by what we're seeing in the pipeline as well. These new capabilities that we didn't have years ago are helping drive that great NRR number we've discussed.

Fantastic results. I had a question on education in particular, trying to understand how much of the outperformance came from the education vertical that's bouncing back, and how much are we at normalized levels when looking back at 2019? Are we seeing a return to normalcy as Mike mentioned?

This is Rob speaking. It's really a very healthy combination of both. If you hone in on the education piece, what you'll see is that we are benefiting from very good growth in new clients across both the '20 and '21 cohorts. Those cohorts are contributing meaningfully to our success this quarter. So we are seeing strong growth due to our execution in bringing more students in contact with our platform.

The only thing I'd add is that we're also seeing parts of the world that are still not back, like Australia and New Zealand, as they come out of their pandemic restrictions. So again, we believe '21 into '22 will see things come back by geographies and by industry, and that continues to hold true.

Nice job. Can we follow up on the education side, specifically on cross-border dynamics as borders reopen? What do you see as the opportunity in the upcoming year?

For the cross-border flows, we are seeing a macro trend of increasing appetite for international studies. The environment is better than we anticipated many months ago, allowing students to come back to participate fully this year. So there's still significant portions of the world where travel has not returned, which presents ongoing opportunities for us.

We're enhancing our product and capabilities to drive more payment volume, and we're focused on both domestic and cross-border opportunities.

As we look at next year, does it feel like your growth rates could still be in the 25-30% range despite difficult comps? Are you seeing strong indicators for continued growth?

We're excited about our growth prospects. We will have more details as we finalize our planning for 2022, but expect us to keep investing and focusing on driving our business. These industries we're serving have a strong digitization trend that we expect to materialize over time.

This concludes the question-and-answer session. I'd like to turn the conference back over to Mike Massaro for any closing remarks.

I appreciate everybody's time. Thanks for all the thoughtful questions and efforts to follow Flywire. I look forward to continuing to talk to many of you in the coming weeks and appreciate your engagement tonight.

This concludes today's conference call. You may disconnect your lines. Thank you for participating, and have a pleasant day.