Mike Brown
Analyst · Autonomous Research
Thank you, Scott, and good morning. And thank you all for joining us today. I'm excited to be able to tell you that we considerably exceeded the earnings expectations that we had set in July as a result of double-digit year-over-year growth and our Epay and Money Transfers segments, together with better than expected ATM transactions as we've benefited from a much quicker return to travel than we initially anticipated. As you will see as we go through the quarterly highlight, these results are testament to our diverse product and geographic revenue mix, our flexible and scalable technology, our strong balance sheet and our dedicated and talented employee base who are working harder than ever to drive this business forward. There's no better example of this and I announced like yesterday that, Ria is now Kroger's second money transfer provider. In EFT, we benefited from a stronger than expected resiliency of ATM cash withdrawal, and we saw local and international government, ease their movement restrictions in countries open their borders to some international arrivals. In Epay, we continue to see strong sales of prepaid self-use content in both the physical retail and digital channels as well as mobile increases in digital channels in certain markets. In fact, our digital channel transactions grew at triple-digit rates on a year-over-year basis. Finally in Money Transfer, we continue to deliver strong growth rate as a result of very strong 22% growth in U.S. International outbound remittances, as well as 26% increase in International cross border remittances, partially offset by declines in the U.S. domestic business and in Malaysia. Digital transactions initiated through our website or our mobile app also continue to accelerate delivering an exceptional 126% year-over-year growth in the third quarter. I am extremely proud of the strong double-digit earnings growth in two of our segment and the flexibility of our EFT team to enable ATMs on short notice to take advantage of the changing travel trends which resulted in significantly better results conveyance than we expected. All of which was made possible by our strong balance sheet. Now let's move on to slide number six and I'll give you some additional details on how we achieved this remarkable performance in the quarter. Slide six, so we got four graphs here for us to look through. Because over half of Euronet's 2019 profits came from our EFT division and a little over half of those profits came from travelers, we get questions about the recovery of this segment. Here on this slide, we want to give you a perspective of how responsive our ATM transactions are to the lifting of restrictions by focusing on what we have seen on our own branded ATM networks across Europe. To that end, the three most relevant questions are: Number one, after COVID-19 will people returning using cash in their daily lives, both while traveling and when at home? Number two, how fast do you think EFT will return to transaction in cash levels we saw in 2019? And finally Number three, are there any lessons that we can learn from 2020 that can be extrapolated to 2021 and beyond? So first, I will try to answer the question on domestic transaction. Certainly in March through May, we stop virtually every country in Europe establish was very tight domestic lockdown. Bars or restaurants, businesses and offices were closed, and even leaving one's home or apartment could be met with police question. As you can see in the first graph, Graph number one. Even without a cure for COVID-19, we saw domestic transactions come back very quickly once the shelter-in-place restrictions were lifted. This did varied by country ranging from 85% to 95% of last year's transactions. This is a substantial recovery considering that virtually every country still has some COVID restrictions in place, including limited restaurant seating, reduced bar hours, mandated work from home orders, and no long-term cure or vaccine. I would also like to point out that for one country, which we did not included in the graph statistics, we saw incredible growth in domestic transactions, where we had a 43% growth over the prior year because the banks closed their branches or didn't load their ATMs. So while we don't expect all bank branches to close, or all bank ATMs to be left idle without cash, we continued to see opportunity to meet the cash needs of customers. To answer the rest of the questions, let me remind you of the timetable associated with various cross border changes. Through April, May and even into June, virtually all European countries had closed their borders to all other countries around the world. Surprisingly, on June 15th, the EU agreed on opening their borders to one another beginning July 1. These borders work to remain closed to all non-EU travelers and are still closed. Euronet gets about a quarter of its European traveler transactions from folks visiting from outside the EU. So even in the best of situations, we did not expect to achieve in the third quarter even roughly three quarters of 2019's volume. Accordingly, that part of our transactions will be dependent upon borders being fully open. What we found was that with such short notice periods, vacationers were more apt to travel by car to their holiday destination. And as you can see in the Graph number two, beginning on July 1, there was a steady increase in transactions through August, resulting in about 50% of 2019's transactions. As September came upon Europe, more COVID related restrictions were added. And that number fell to about 30% of 2019 level. Being that three quarters of all 2019 Euronet owned ATM, European transactions were from card holders within three quarters within Europe, this shows amazing resilience. Here in Graph number three, we see countries in which air travel brings in most of the tariff. Bear in mind that flying requires advanced reservations, more preparation and travels surety as well. Accordingly, we were pleasantly surprised to see these levels reach about 20% of 2019 volumes. Finally, in Graph number four, you can see the international transactions indexed with European international flights. On a real time basis, you can see that our international transactions outpaced but roughly correlate to flight information. This serves as another data point to demonstrate the desire travelers have to withdraw cash and use cash when they travel abroad. So what is our conclusion? Unfortunately, I can tell you that none of us know exactly what 2021 will bring. But what is empirically clear is that people in large numbers are ready to go on holiday even right now, if the governments only would lift their travel restrictions and open their borders, both for European and perform passports. It is also a message to governments on how much thoughtful planning is essential to ensure a full recovery. The economic disadvantage to Europe is huge. So we are cautiously optimistic that in 2021, it could be a good year for EFT, assuming governments see past summer as a guide to opening their borders for those who are anxious to go on holiday. Now let's go on to Slide number 7, and we'll discuss some of the recent EFT highlights. Okay, Slide number 7. Just this week, we launched a new IAD network in Egypt, the fourth country outside of Europe, where we have deployed Euronet branded ATMs. Prior to COVID, when asked that we were able to continue to deploy 4,000 plus ATMs a year, I always answered yes with the belief that the opportunity outside of Europe is just as big or bigger than the opportunities in Europe. We maintain this belief and have not stopped pushing forward to be ready for the post-COVID world with new ATMs in new markets. In Europe, we launched a new initiative that we are calling ATM for the community, which aligns with our mission to bring payment convenience to everyone. Despite the reports that cash is becoming extinct, it is estimated that cash still accounts for 60% of the transactions used across Europe. With this initiative, we are working with leaders and communities across several countries, primarily in more rural areas to ensure that their citizens have convenient secure access to cash, as these communities have been impacted the most by Europeans continuing trend of bank branch and ATM closures. We also launched demand services agreement with IDFC First Bank, a leading private sector bank in India, and we use our technology to launch digital banking services for IMG Bank in the Philippines. In Spain, we signed an ATM Network Participation Agreement with Cajamar Bank, whereby Cajamar Bank customers can now use Euronet branded ATMs under similar terms as their own bank's ATMs. These agreements reflect the value of our ubiquitous ATM network, which allow customers to access their money wherever they are. This is also a strategic advantage for Euronet, as we're the only player in the market with ATMs across all of Europe. We also launched acceptance of Postcards on our Euronet branded ATM networks in Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, Romania and in the UK, and we launched ATM POS and card management outsourcing for ABI bank in Albania. Finally, we ended the quarter with 43,956 active ATMs. This sequential increase includes a reactivation of 3800 ATMs that were closed at the end of June, to capture the increase in ATM transactions as movement restrictions were lifted and 444 new ATM deployments were across the business. These were offset by the removal of about 1300 outsourcing ATMs, and 563 low margin ATMs which were removed due to the acquisitions by larger banks and then desire to in-source ATM operations. It's important to note that this in-sourcing is due to M&A activity and doesn't diminish the outsourcing pipeline we continue to see within this segment. We also expect a decrease of another 2000 very low margin Indian ATMs in the fourth quarter, the income of which to us is marginal. In summary, there's no doubt that COVID has had a profound impact on our EFT segment results, but the resiliency of our ATM transactions as restrictions were lifted, together with our ability to continue to launch new markets, diversify our product portfolio, and sign new agreements underscored the health of our core EFT business and that the post COVID growth prospects for this segment remain intact. Now we'll move on to Slide number eight and we'll talk about Epay. It's worth repeating that I'm thrilled with Epay's double-digit earnings growth in the quarter driven by continued growth trends in digital media content and expansion of mobile content in certain markets. This growth came from continued strength in our physical retail network, as well as triple-digit transaction growth in the digital channel, which resulted from our ability to deliver both mobile and digital media product to a growing list of mobile wallets and e-commerce sites due to our industry leading technology. Our transactions through mobile wallets continue to grow at a very strong triple-digit rate. As an example of continued growth in mobile wallets, you may remember a few quarters ago that we told you about our partnership with Amazon Pay in India. As you can see in our transaction count, we continue to see tremendous growth in transactions through Amazon Pay. This quarter, we have furthered this partnership by adding two billers of bottled gas, a key cooking utility in India. We now have all three billers providing bottled gas in India and are processing 30,000 transactions to-date through Amazon Pay just in this one category. During the quarter, we also added credit card bill payment services, and Google Play recharge codes with the Amazon Pay wallet, and are seeing nice transaction adoption in these other new categories as well. Our technology has allowed us to further expand our mobile distribution in Brazil. This quarter we added mobile distribution services to the Itau Card App, the mobile app of Itau Bank, Brazil's largest private sector bank with over 50 million accounts. Additionally, we further expanded our mobile distribution in the U.S. through the acquisition of the covenant contract with AT&T, allowing Epay to activate and distribute their prepaid mobile airtime. And finally, our technology also allowed us to expand our long-standing distribution agreement with Microsoft. Epay will now manage the monthly recurring billing between Microsoft and select telecommunications retailers for the sale of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, and Xbox All Access subscriptions worldwide. This is Epay's first gaming subscription service and the first gaming bundle distribution agreement with Microsoft. Our Epay segment may provide the most evident example of how powerful our technology suite is continuing to attract customers from both new and longtime customer. Our pipeline of new launches remains robust, which we expect to drive similar year-over-year growth rates in the fourth quarter, as we saw in the third quarter. Now let's talk about MoneyTransfer in Slide number 9. Slide 9, I couldn't be more excited to talk to you about Money Transfer on the heels of the last couple of days of announcements, including Kroger, which has expanded its financial services marketplace, and has selected Ria as a second provider of money transfer services inside approximately 2000 Kroger locations here in the U.S. You may remember last year that Epay implemented a new customer service solution for Kroger, which greatly reduced the complexity of financial transactions for Kroger staff and the transaction time required of Kroger's customer. While we've wanted to partner with Kroger since we acquired Ria in 2007, and the success of Epay SAP solution demonstrated to Kroger our superior technical capabilities, which combined with Ria's secure, affordable product offering an unyielding commitment to compliance led Kroger to choose Ria through a competitive RFP process. We are very excited to work with Kroger to provide their customers with the Ria MoneyTransfer experience. The service will be live inside Kroger stores in the next couple of weeks, and is a significant addition to our U.S. Money Transfer network. This is a remarkable accomplishment achieved by teams from both our Epay and Money Transfer segments. We also signed an agreement with Fiesta Mart, a large Texas based grocery store chain to offer Ria's Money Transfer service in Fiesta Mart's in-store customer service centers across Texas. This agreement builds upon a 10-year retail model partnership Ria has had with Bodega Latina, which owns both Fiesta Mart and in Texas and also El Super-branded stores in California. And this was another competitive win for Ria. We look forward to helping Bodega Latina build similar customer push traffic, transaction volume and growth rates at Fiesta Mart that we've been able to achieve in El Super over the last decade. We continue to expand upon our success of adding post offices to our expand and receive network. Let me remind you that outside the U.S., post offices are the equivalent of large chain retailers here in the U.S. with the largest volume of transfers going through these locations due in a large part to their ubiquity. Like many large retailers, these post offices have historically had exclusive agreement with our competitors. And this together with the Kroger agreement are two more data points that highlight that large retailers and post offices are opting for growth and responding to their customers preferences for choice and competitive pricing. This quarter, we added both spend and payout services for the Post of Serbia, which has more than 1300 locations across the country. And we launched payout services of more than 250 Jordan post branches. We also signed agreements with the Indonesian post and the Moldova post, which we expect to launch in the coming month. Aside from the post offices, we added MMBL in Sri Lanka which has been exclusive with one of our competitors for nearly 25 years. We also added Asia Commercial Bank in Vietnam, LuLu Exchange in Kuwait and several others. In addition to this physical distribution expansion, we also launched Payout services to M-Peso wallet in Mozambique through Zeepay as well as Airtel wallets in Malawi, Rwanda and Tanzania through our recently announced partnership with Thunes. With these countries, our mobile wallet network provides access to a 160 million users across 17 countries. Another exciting agreement Ria launched during the quarter is a digital money transfer service partnership with French neo-bank Nickel. Along with this online money transfer platform partner Monisnap, Ria will offer digital capabilities and its network to customers of both companies wishing to send money abroad. I would like to put our strong money transfer growth numbers into some kind of a perspective. Ria has about 5% market share, of the roughly $700 billion plus International family remittance market. By our estimate, roughly 25% of this market is acquired digitally. Of the 75% remaining all through bricks and mortar agents, Ria have almost 6 of those 75% with our agent revenue growth in the mid 20% range compared to last year. We are positioned for total market share and total market share a heck of a lot bigger. This brick and mortar business is performing extremely well perhaps arguably better than any pre-COVID quarter that we've had in years. We are growing roughly five times as fast as the World Bank says the market is growing. And that is not even including our 126% year-over-year digital growth in the third quarter. And all of this, by the way, is without Kroger, without BSA. [Technical Difficulty]. I apologize. Operator, would you just tell me if I'm still on the line?