Michael J. Brown
Analyst · Avondale Partners
Thank you, Rick. And welcome to everybody joining us today. We had a very exciting start to 2014. We realized that the recent announcement of our partnership with Walmart has generated some new parties interest in Euronet. So I thought I would start by giving you a brief overview of the company. I founded Euronet almost 20 years ago to make cash more convenient to customers in Eastern Europe through the deployment of ATMs. These ATMs became the basis of our EFT segment, which now includes our own independently deployed and shared ATM networks, ATM, POS, debit and credit card outsourcing services, as well as a host of value-added products. For the full year of 2013, the EFT segment processed approximately $1.2 billion transactions and accounted for 21% of our consolidated revenue, and a whopping 43% of our adjusted EBITDA. In 2003, we formed our second segment through the acquisition of epay. epay was one of the first processers to convert scratch cards to electronic pins for prepaid mobile airtime at the point-of-sale. epay has evolved from a mobile pop-up provider to an electronic distribution and cash collection network, offering prepaid mobile top-up, as well as content from leading global brands, such as iTunes, Google Play, Microsoft, Xbox, Sony PlayStation and Facebook, just to name a few. In 2013, we processed $1.1 billion transactions, which accounted for 53% of our consolidated revenue and 34% of our adjusted EBITDA. Finally, in 2007, we created our third segment, through the acquisition of Ria, the third largest global money transfer provider. When we purchased Ria in 2007, they processed $4.5 billion in money transfers through a network of 42,000 locations in a 13 send [ph] countries. In the 7 years since this purchase, Ria has seen outstanding growth. In 2013, Ria processed $9 billion in money transfers through a network of 216,000 locations in 22 send [ph] countries and accounted for 26% of our consolidated revenue and 23% of our consolidated EBITDA. We recently announced the acquisition of HiFX, a provider of a cap-based money transfers for high net worth individuals and small- and medium-sized businesses. Ria together with HiFX, will be responsible for purchasing around $25 billion in foreign currency this year. Through these 3 segments, Euronet has grown to become a worldwide leader in processing secure electronic financial transactions, responsible for dispensing, collecting and transferring $62 billion in cash across our segments, annually. Now let's move to Slide 13, we'll talk about the first quarter highlights from the EFT segment. Okay, Slide 13. As you can see, our EFT team had another outstanding operational quarter with income growth of 94%. This growth is a continuation of our momentum in this segment, which delivered 40% operating income growth in 2013, and 35% growth in 2012. This strong growth is not a result of a single deal. It is the result of the work we have put in over the last 3 years. To draw on words from our previously issued annual report: These result are the culmination of adding more units, more products in more locations, which yield the strong results you see in EFT. Now let's move to Slide 14, I'll talk about the details. On Slide 14, you can see some of our selected highlights. During the quarter, we expanded our footprint by launching our independent ATM deployed network in Denmark. In a global partnership with American Express, we have started rolling out ATMs in Copenhagen. American Express adds another world-class company to our list of partners, and I'm excited that our plans included installing more ATMs in more markets and providing more value-added services to these devices for discount. As you may have seen in the press release, we recently issued announcing our purchase of Carpatica banks placed of more than 200 ATMs, doubling our independent ATM network in Romania. The bank also signed an agreement to become the fifth member of our shared ATM network there. This is a breakthrough agreement in Romania and strengthens our asset purchase proposition in this large and growing market. In Poland, we signed an agreement with Orlen, the largest fuel chain in the country, to exclusively deploy ATMs at Orlen gas stations. We have already started adding ATMs to these gas stations and plan to continue rolling out additional devices during the second and the third quarters of this year. Finally, we signed an agreement with Veropoulos, a large greek supermarket chain to install POS terminals and provide POS switching services across their stores. This agreement is in addition to the agreement we told you about in the fourth quarter with MasterCard, where we have been deploying contact list POS terminals to a number of the merchants in Greece. Slide #15. Over the past several quarters, we've been telling you about our coupon dispensing agreements with various brands in Poland. These campaigns continued to gain traction in the market. In the first quarter, we successfully completed a campaign with the largest local beer producer and the biggest cable TV service distributing 650,000 coupons on certain ATMs around the country. Additionally, we launched Pure Commerce as DCC acquiring product with DFS, a leading global duty free market and First Data in Hong Kong. This project is being rolled out to all DFS terminals at the Hong Kong airport and we expect the roll out to be completed in the middle of the second quarter. We're excited to partner with First Data and extend our relationship with DFS. We also signed agreement to introduce Pure Commerce as DCC solution to leading hotel chains in Singapore, including Grand Hyatt, Marriott, Holiday Inn and Novotel hotel. We're pleased with this expansion in the Asia-Pac region, which is a vibrant and growing place. We added 247 ATMs in the quarter, net bringing our total ATMs managed to a count of 18,558. The largest increase, these were in India and Europe. The brown label ATMs, we installed during the fourth quarter have ramped up nicely and we except them to continue to our second quarter earnings -- to contribute to our second quarter earnings growth. Between India and Europe, we have an internal goals, a roll out in additional 1,500 ATMs through the remainder of 2014. It's worth repeating, as this was an outstanding quarter and a great start to the year for EFT team. With such exceptional growth, we expect to see strong results from EFT for the year. Now let's move to Slide 17, and we talk about epay for a minute. The epay segment held its own year-over-year, and ended the quarter with modest transaction growth, which resulted in a slight increase in operating income. While this quarter's results did not reflect the year-over-year growth trajectory, I remain confident that we'll see growth in this segment through our continued focus on providing mobile operators with innovative solution to help them operate more efficiently, and introducing our leading global content in to more retailers across more channels and more countries. I expect epay's results over the next couple of quarters, to be similar to the first quarter until we get to our seasonally strongest fourth quarter. With that, let's move on to Slide 18, and we can talk about the highlights -- some of the highlights of this quarter. Okay. First, we'll start with our core mobile business. In Europe, SIM card activations represent a new customer for mobile operator. In our European markets, we have made a strategic decision to place more focus on SIM distribution. In particular, we've used our technology to create a new SIM card to allow mobile operators a more efficient distribution of phone numbers. This will help solve the issue of a shrinking supply of mobile phone numbers in certain markets. In the first quarter, we launched SIM distribution for Lebara across our network in the U.K. and in Germany. We -- and in Germany, we enabled point-of-sale of SIM activation in Lotto Berlin and Lotto Schleswig, and Holstein locations in Germany. We continue to search for ways that we can use our technology to help mobile operators run their business more efficiently. We also signed a mobile pop-up [ph] and SIM activation agreement with a large national retailer in the U.S. We won a national agreement after a successful pilot program at a limited number of stores. As many of you know that while our segments are functionally different, they have many synergies that allow us to cross-sell our products. In the first quarter, our EFT and epay teams partnered to sell mobile top-up through the VIAMO smartphone app in Slovakia. VIAMO is a peer-to-peer micro-payment engine that is heavily supported by the 2 largest banks in Slovakia. VIAMO allows users to pay their peers or purchase products within the app. Through VIAMO's partnership with Euronet, users will now be able to add minutes within the app on their mobile phone by using funds from their bank accounts. Now let's move to Slide #19. On Slide #19, you can see our non-mobile highlights. We continued our efforts to diversify our epay business with additional non-mobile content. For the first quarter, non-mobile made up 38% of our total gross profit, up from 28%, for the same quarter last year. As you can see on the page, we continue to rollout leading global content to major retailers across the markets where we operate. The most significant contributor to this growth was the continued expansion of Google Play. We added the product to retailers in Austria, Spain and France during the quarter. With the larger number of Android phones in Europe, Google Play is a high demand product that we continue to see increased sales across our markets. For the past several quarters, we've been telling you about our technology that allows our retail and bank partners to digitally distribute leading global content. We continue to execute these deals. And in the first quarter, we signed an agreement with Optus, a leading mobile operator in Australia, to distribute iTunes digital posts [ph] to their online platform. Last quarter, we announced our agreement with PayPal, to allow its customers to purchase our leading global content with funds in their PayPal accounts, online or on PayPal's mobile app. In the first quarter, we continue to run a number of successful campaigns with PayPal, and we're very pleased with how this partnership is developing. In another example of the synergies between our segments, our EFT and epay teams, partnered to distribute non-mobile content. In addition to the POS distribution and switching services agreement with Veropoulos, that I mentioned in Greece -- that I mentioned in the EFT segment, we also signed an agreement to distribute iTunes in mobile pop-up to the same retailers POS terminal. In Germany, we signed an agreement with Finanz-Informatik, the leading processor for all savings banks in the country, to sell iTunes through their online and mobile banking application. This agreement is similar to the post finance agreement in Switzerland we mentioned last year. And we will provide all savings banks in Germany with the opportunity to quickly offer their customers iTunes through their banking application. While we expect epay's results to hold their own over the next couple of quarters, we are excited about the different ways our technology can help our mobile operator partners, more efficiently run their businesses and help our brand partners reach a larger consumer base, quickly and easily. Now let's move on to Slide #20, and talk about money transfers. Slide 20. This was a very exciting quarter for our Money Transfer segment. And we told you earlier in the quarter, we signed an agreement to acquire HiFX, a provider of online initiated international payments and foreign exchange services. HiFX offers account-to-account money transfer services, which is an adjacent markets to Ria's traditional cash-to-cash tight money transfers. We are still awaiting regulatory approval, but expect this agreement to close in this quarter. As you know, we announced our partnership with Walmart, to power the Walmart-2-Walmart domestic money transfer service. Walmart-2-Walmart is an innovative, new money transfer service that offers competitive pricing and convenience for the 95% of Americans who live within 15 miles of Walmart store. We believe, the product's simple transparent pricing structure is competitive relative to other products in the market, and is made possible by the product capability and strong compliance culture of Ria, together with the size, technology and scale of Walmart. Customers using the Walmart-2-Walmart service can send up to $900 between any 2 of the more than 4,000 Walmart locations in the U.S. at everyday low pricing without sacrificing quality. We view this product much as like when we launched ATMs 19 years ago. We deployed these ATMs with a mission to bring secure, convenient financial services to people that never had them before. That was our original mission, way back then. We believe that the strength of the Walmart brand and the U.S. customers' familiarity with Walmart locations, combined with the simple pricing structure, we will appeal to a broader audience of customers needing to send money in the United States. We are very excited about this partnership, and believe it is a testament to our commitment to customer service and also to our financial strength. Walmart-2-Walmart went live in the U.S. stores late last week. And Walmart initiated their full marketing campaign on Monday. While it is still too early to speculate about or discuss the impact to our financial results, we are very pleased with this relationship with Walmart. The addition of HiFX and Walmart will serve to further strengthen our growth for the second half of this year. So now let's move on to Slide #22, we can talk about various achievements in Q1. Okay. Total network locations grew by 10%, the first quarter compared with -- in the first quarter compared to last year's first quarter. This growth combined with the April launch of the 4,000 Walmart locations brings our total to 223,000 locations across 135 countries. Our Ria team continues to do a great job at strengthening our footprint in key remittance markets, while maintaining high quality and reliability. In Bangladesh, we added 2 key correspondent banks, Pubali and Rupali, which are well-known banks within the company with excellent services. Bangladesh is a top-10 remittance market with more than $14 billion in remittance inflows annually. These agreements expand our network to more than 6,000 locations in that important market. Nigeria is another important global remittance market, receiving more than $20 billion in annual inflow. We expanded our network in Nigeria with 700 new locations across 3 new corresponding banks. Our pipeline to add new correspondence across our network remains strong. During the quarter, we signed agreements with 11 new correspondents in 7 countries. These new agreements will allow us to continue to improve our service in Nigeria, Ghana, and Morytania. Finally, you may have seen earlier this week that we unveiled a new riamoneytransfer.com website. This new website offers our customer a more friendly layout, a responsive design for PCs, as well as mobile devices, including tablet and additional features that allow customers to more efficiently send a transfer. As Rick mentioned in his comments, we have made significant investments in our digital solution over the past year. And as this new website provides a secure, easy-to-use option to send money from the convenience of your home or on-the-go, 24 hours a day. On Slide #23, we highlighted Ria's transactions for the quarter. During the quarter, transfers initiated, inside and outside the U.S., both grew at double-digit rates. For the past couple of years, we have presented those numbers separately due to differing economic climates, between the U.S. and the global markets. Now that both the U.S. initiated transfers, including those sent to Mexico, and non-U.S. initiated transfers have returned to double-digit growth, we believe separating -- the separate disclosers really no longer necessary. Money transfer transactions grew 12% year-over-year, with the growths virtually across all markets. This represents the 12th consecutive quarter that we have achieved double-digit money transfer growth. Non-money transfer transactions declined 3% due to the previous explained discontinuation of a high-volume, low-margin product in Spain last year. Removing the impact of this product, the non-money transfers grew a strong 18% year-over-year. As I reflect back to when we acquired Ria 7 years ago, Ria was primarily a U.S, Latin American business. Today Ria is a very different business with about half of all the transfers initiated outside the U.S. This quarter marked the addition of a new chapter for Ria. We continue to build on the existing momentum of the core business plus we are adding domestic money transfer now with Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, our business-to-business money transfer option to our pending acquisition of HiFX and a new online money transfer service. Ria continued to have a very healthy core business. And with the addition of HiFX and Walmart combined with our investment into digital, we are excited to continue to build Ria -- to build the Ria of the future and to expand its opportunities for growth. Now let's move on to Slide #24, it'll wrap up the core. Well, we delivered cash EPS of $0.46, a 21% increase over first quarter last year. We announced 2 new exciting agreements, the acquisition of the account-based money transfer provider, HiFX, and our partnership with Walmart, to power the Walmart-2-Walmart money transfer product. EFT had an outstanding quarter, driven by continued growth of our ATM networks, strong demand for our value-added services and additional cards under management. epay results were impacted by continued declines in Australia and Brazil, largely offset by continued non-mobile growth. Ria entered a new era marked by its strength of its core business, it's entry into the domestic money transfer and large retail and by the pending acquisition of HiFX, a B2B money transfer service. Our balance sheet, as usual remained very strong with great cash flow generation. We amended and expanded our credit facility. The increased facility respects -- I'm sorry, reflects again the strength of our earnings performance and our financial position. Finally, we expect Q2 2014 adjusted cash EPS to be approximately $0.57 assuming consistent foreign exchange rates. With that, we will be happy to answer your questions. Operators, will you please assist?