Mike Brown
Analyst · Citi. Your line is now open
Thank you, Rick and thank you everyone who's joining today. I will begin my comments on slide number 11. So last quarter we shared with you a little more insight into how we have leveraged our global assets to create a digital integrated payments cloud that allows us to more strategically utilize the range of assets we have accumulated over the years. This payments cloud consolidates all of our assets and allows us to competitively participate in both the traditional and digital payments landscape. Perhaps more importantly, it allows us to be on the leading edge of disruption in the traditional payment space. We are using our technology to actively support parties who are making inroads to disrupt the more traditional players by providing them with state-of-the-art technology and immediate access to our expansive physical network which would take years to build from scratch. Payments disruptors across several payment categories have already taken advantage of our digital integrated payments cloud. Some examples include companies ranging from software and media to card processing and account withdrawal to alternative payments and money transfer. And we've added several new integrations into our cloud this quarter. The first of these integrations you may have seen in our February press release where we announced an ATM network participation agreement with ING Bank in Spain. ING Bank is primarily an Internet bank another one of those disruptors with 3.9 million customers, but only 29 branches in Spain. By leveraging our digital integrated payments cloud to connect to our physical ATM network in Spain, ING can now offer its customers more convenient access to their cash with the same screen flow and experience they would find at one of their own ING bank ATMs. The second example is Poland. We became the first to offer BLIK deposits to our automated deposit terminals. This is a meaningful addition as we have noticed and watched and told you about that BLIK withdrawals are now on a run rate of more than eight million transactions per year and growing fiercely. The third example is Remitly. Following our example with PayPal Xoom a couple of quarters ago, our Money Transfer team signed another agreement with a leading digital remittance provider called Remitly. The agreement with Remitly will allow that largely digital players to offer their customers physical cash pickup at over 73,000 of Ria’s locations across 20 countries. In the Money Transfer industry, the demand for cash pickup remains strong and Remitly's customers are no exception. Over half of the remittances sent through Remitly are collected in cash at a physical location and our technology enables them to meet their customer demands through our expansive network that is so hard to build and develop. The fourth example is Ripple. We signed an agreement with Ripple that gives Ripple access to Ria's global physical and digital footprints while also allowing Ria's customers to connect and transact with the Ripple's network which includes more than 200 financial institutions worldwide. Finally, the fifth example involves Alipay. We have added Alipay alternative payments through our digital integrated payments cloud to Tiffany & Company, GM Cabs and various tourism channels in Australia. And in case you didn't notice, the examples I just recited include connections through our digital integrated payments cloud for all three of our segments. This is not just for the EFT segment rather it runs across all aspects of Euronet's segments products and assets. These agreements are just a few of the ways we are leveraging our assets to further enable digital payments around the globe. Next slide please. Slide 12. You may remember that behind the digital integrated payments cloud is a solution that we call Renaissance or actually Ren we call it. The slide -- this slide details the key features of Ren. Because we developed Ren to run our own business, it has a focus on industry standards and an attention in detail that you don't get from third parties who've just developed software. With an agnostic design that runs on commodity hardware and API that focuses on industry standards and near 100% availability, Ren enables our digital integrated payments cloud to quickly and cost-effectively deliver industry-leading solutions to enable disruption in the payment space. As you may recall from our discussion in February, we have signed an agreement with the Central Bank of Mozambique to implement Ren as a new national payments solution connecting to the country's 21 banks. We are well into the planning and project management of this agreement, and look forward to updating you on our delivery success. But beyond Mozambique, we have received numerous inbound calls after making that announcement. It is exciting to see the positive market response to our technological advancement and the difference our technology can make. Now, let's move on to slide number 15, and we'll talk about EFT. Slide 15, over the last several months, I've met more new investors spaces covering Euronet than I have come across in a while, so I thought it's worth reiterating the significant addressable market opportunities we have across all of our segments. We have included the addressable market slides from our fourth quarter call in the appendix for your reference, as it is the size of these market opportunities that enables us to tell you about what we're doing on the next couple of slides. As we continue to expand our EFT business across Europe, we continue to identify markets with significant opportunity. During the quarter, we launched an independent ATM network in Norway making this the 27th country where Euronet ATMs are available. We also added new outsourcing agreements for SKOK Group banks further expanding the relationship with SKOK in Poland that we told you about last year. As our European network continues to grow at a rapid pace, we are also very pleased with our accelerating growth outside of Europe. During the quarter, we signed an ATM driving agreement with Catholic Syrian Bank in India. We also signed a new ATM driving and debit card management agreement with Faysal Bank in Pakistan. Next slide please. Slide 16, continuing with growth outside of Europe, we signed an agreement with HDFC Bank in India, one of the largest card issuers and merchant acquirers in the country for providing, acquiring and processing services to the bank. Euronet will be responsible for providing terminal driving card processing for both domestic and international cards, and DCC services for high-value merchants in the hospitality and luxury shopping segments. We also signed a MasterCard and Visa contactless issuer agreement with the United Bank of Egypt. We expanded our digital presence by launching a digital wallet and customer authentication for Raiffeisen Bank in Europe. And we added 41 new POS acquiring and duty-free merchants in Italy and the UK. Finally, we finished the quarter with 42,034 ATMs, a 10% year-over-year increase. During the quarter, we added a net of 874 high-value ATMs, and we reactivated 837 ATMs in advance of the travel season. These strong deployment rates in the first quarter give us a head start on the 3,500 to 4,000 new ATM deployment goal we told you that was possible for 2019. Before I wrap-up EFT, I'd like to give you a preliminary view of the Visa DCC performance on our ATMs. We activated Visa DCC for all non-European cards on our European ATMs on April 13, consistent with Visa's announced timeline. While it is still early, the initial results have been largely consistent with our expectations. With continued growth in Europe, accelerating expansion outside of Europe, strong ATM deployments and the addition of Visa DCC to our ATMs, the EFT is off to a tremendous start for 2019. So now let's move on to Slide 19 and we'll talk about Epay. Slide 19, for years, we've been telling you about Epay strategy to diversify from mobile top-up by adding more content and more locations and more geography. As you might have seen in our earnings release, during the quarter, the Epay team adopted the term Digital Media to describe all the content not related to mobile top-up. This change aligns our terminology with the reinvention of Epay business that has occurred over the last several years as it relates to the product mix shift towards digital content, which accounted for more than 70% of our gross profit in the first quarter. With that background, let me highlight a few new agreements for the quarter. In Germany, we took over full gift card mall offered by REWE stores, the second largest grocery store chain in the country. This was a competitive win, and we were able to add Digital Media including Adidas, Ikea, About You, Douglas and others. We also expanded our relationship with Amazon by adding Amazon and Amazon Cash through Lekkerland in Germany. In Italy, we added Nintendo, Microsoft and antivirus bundles in Euronics, a large electronics retailer. And finally, as further evidence of the significance of our digital integrated payments cloud, during the quarter, we launched an agreement with SIBS, the national payment switch in Portugal to provide Sony products to more than 12,000 ATMs connected to their switch. Slide number 20, please. Here you can see that we signed several new agreements across multiple countries that will continue epay's growth in the coming quarters. We've signed an agreement to distribute Microsoft Xbox and Office 365 in Singapore. In the UAE, we signed an agreement to distribute Google Play. And in Australia, we signed an agreement to distribute Kaspersky and Symantec software. Our epay business continues to reinvent itself, by adding new digital media and enabling digital payment technologies for our partners. With double-digit constant dollar operating income growth in several new agreements, this was a great first quarter epay. Now let's move on to slide number 23 and we'll talk about Money Transfer. Our Money Transfer network now reaches 377,000 locations across 155 countries, an 8% year-over-year increase in locations. During the quarter we launched, 15 new correspondents in 13 countries. And in addition to that we signed agreements with 14 new correspondents in 13 more countries including an agreement with Inpay, which gives us access to the Bulgarian Post Office network. We have expanded our partnership with Walmart now to include domestic payout of Ria transactions in Walmart stores across the United States. As you know since 2014 Walmart and Ria have been offering customers a low-cost convenient money transfer alternative through the Walmart2Walmart Money Transfer service powered by Ria. With this new agreement, Ria's customers can now send money through any Ria agent worldwide, including agents in the U.S. and pick up the cash at any Walmart store nationwide. This agreement provides Ria with an expanded payout network in the U.S., while also driving more customers into Walmart stores. That's a win-win if you ask me. We also partnered with Turbus, the primary transportation service company in Chile to offer, send and payout services at more than 400 locations across the country. Turbus has been providing money transfers for nearly two decades, so they understand the business well and their locations are well adopted by money transfer customers in the market. This was another competitive win and offers Ria customers even more convenience and service availability in Chile. And to touch on our continued digital expansion, while we have seen a delay in the transfers out of the U.K. as influenced by the indecisive Brexit matter, we are pleased with strong acceptance of new transfers following the re-branding of our digital payments business from HiFX to the single XE brand. With very significant and growing addressable markets, the Money Transfer team continues to deliver strong results in both the physical and digital landscapes. Now let's move on to slide number 24 and we'll wrap up this quarter. My hope is that this update gives you insight into our very healthy core business, which allows us to continue to grow at stunning double-digit rates, while also enabling us a plant the seeds for future growth. To summarize the quarter, we delivered adjusted cash EPS of $0.85, a 16% year-over-year increase in our weakest quarter of the year. EFT delivered exceptional results while also adding 874 new ATMs in advance of the busier travel season. And it had constant currency up income growth of 54%. epay's double-digit earnings growth resulted from continuing continued expansion of our digital media product. Here constant currency up income growth of 15% over prior year. And finally, Money Transfer continued to deliver strong earnings growth from expansion in both the physical and digital channel. Here we had constant currency, up income growth of 22%. We successfully issued $525 million worth of a 0.75% interest convertible bond to essentially refinance our 1.5% convertible bond. And we had generation of free cash flow which continues to strengthen our balance sheet. And finally, we expect second quarter adjusted EPS to be approximately $1.69, assuming consistent foreign exchange rates. And with that, we'd be happy to take questions. Operator, will you please assist?