Euronet Worldwide Inc

NASDAQ:EEFT

Earnings Call Transcript 2022-Q2

[Operator]

Greetings, and welcome to the Euronet Worldwide Second Quarter 2022 Earnings Call.

It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Ms. Hope Gregg, Associate General Counsel for Euronet Worldwide. Ms. Gregg, you may begin.

[Hope Gregg, Associate General Counsel]

Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Euronet's quarterly results conference call for the second quarter 2022. On this call, 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 power point presentation we'll be making today. Statements made on this call that concern Euronet or its management's intentions, expectations or preventions of future performance are forward-looking statements.

Euronet's actual results may vary materially from those anticipated in such forward-looking statements as a result of a number of factors that are listed on the second slide of our presentation. Except as may be required by law, Euronet does not intend to update these forward-looking statements and undertakes no duty to any person to provide any such updates.

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 CFO, Rick Weller.

[Rick Weller, EVP, CAO & CFO]

Thank you, Hope, and thank you to everyone joining us this morning. I will begin my comments on Slide 5. For the second quarter, we produced revenue of $843 million, operating income of $101 million and adjusted EBITDA of $147 million. We delivered adjusted EPS of $1.73, a 226% increase from the $0.53 in the second quarter of 2021.

These strong improvements include all metrics. In all metrics were driven by revenue growth in all three segments, which includes a strong rebound in domestic and international cash withdrawal transactions in the EFT segment from the continued lifting of COVID restrictions across the globe as travel is recovered.

Next slide, please. Slide 6. As it's been the case for the last two-plus years, the strength of our balance sheet has allowed us to make investments and operate the business in a way that will continue to deliver long-term shareholder value. As you can see, we ended the second quarter with more than $1 billion in unrestricted cash and debt of $2.1 billion.

The increase in cash is largely from cash generated from operations of about $75 million in the second quarter of '22, as well as short-term borrowings to fund ATM cash and certain capital -- working capital needs, which is also reflected in the increase in debt. This increase in cash is partially offset by cash paid into the ATMs in response to seasonal increases in travel trends, share repurchases of $104 million and working capital requirements.

Slide 7, please. Before I discuss each segment briefly, I'd like to draw your attention to the significance of currency change year-over-year. As you may have noted in the press release and on the first slide, reported GAAP revenue grew 18% year-over-year. But on a constant currency basis, that is, if the currency rate this second quarter were exactly the same as that of the second quarter last year, our revenue would have grown 28%. 10% more if no currency translation impacts, that's a big impact.

And the majority of that change developed as the second quarter unfolded. Moreover, had it not been for currency devaluations against the U.S. dollar, we would have delivered adjusted EBITDA within the range we provided at the beginning of the quarter. So bear in mind the significance of FX changes, and I'll comment on each quarter's constant currency results for the quarter on the next slide.

Slide 8 now, please. The strong improvements in EFT revenue, operating income and adjusted EBITDA were the results of increased domestic and international cash withdrawal transactions driven by improving travel trends from lifting of COVID restrictions across the globe. We added more ATMs and reactivated nearly all of our ATMs in anticipation of a strong travel recovery.

On a year-over-year basis, revenue and gross profit per transaction also expanded as a result of improving international transactions, which generate more revenue and profit per transaction than domestic transactions. Epay revenue grew 2% while operating income and adjusted EBITDA declined 1% and 2%, respectively. Revenue growth was driven by continued expansion in mobile and digital branded product payments, together with continued growth of the digital distribution channel.

Similar to the first quarter, the year-over-year revenue comparison was impacted by three items: the previously announced loss of a key German B2B customer in the fourth quarter last year; the India government's halting of certain digital games; and the shifting of promotional activity from the early part of 2021 year to the later part of the 2022 year. For perspective, had these three items been consistent to the prior year on a pro forma basis, Epay's gross profit and operating income would have grown 6% and 10%, respectively.

As we enter the third quarter, we have already started to see an increase in promotional campaigns, confirming our view that this promotional activity was just shifted to the back half of this year. Moreover, while not significant in the second quarter, we did begin to see certain trends in our more discretionarily used products that suggest inflation may have contributed a certain amount of pressure on the segment's results.

Money Transfer revenue grew 9%, operating income grew 3% and adjusted EBITDA grew 2%. This growth was the result of 10% growth in U.S. outbound transactions, 11% growth in international originated money transfers, which included 11% growth in both Asia and Middle East and predominantly European initiated transfers and 37% growth in direct-to-consumer digital transactions offset by declines in the domestic business.

Operating income and adjusted EBITDA growth was lower than revenue growth from continued investments in physical and digital network expansion, higher cost to support technology and certain new product development and advertising costs in the current period. Similar to Epay, while not significant in this third quarter, the Money Transfer segment began to see certain decreases in the average amount of transfers that suggest inflation may have contributed a certain amount of pressure on the segment's results.

We are pleased with the strong consolidated growth rates, particularly in light of the macroeconomic headwinds we are facing across the globe. We have proven again that our fundamental business proposition is intact and we expect to be able to continue strong growth rates.

Now that I've covered the highlights for the quarter and pointed out the significance of FX translation on the quarter, let me turn my focus to the future. To start that discussion, let's go to Slide 9 to see what happened to FX rates over the last 18 months. As I previously mentioned, FX rates changed a lot, in fact, the single largest item in our list of changes. To that end, we prepared this chart to illustrate what happened to these three -- to the three of our top currencies: the euro, the pound and the Aussie dollar.

You can see the drift in these currencies over the illustrated 18 months, but make note of the acceleration of the drift over the last three months. A lot has unfolded over the last three months, and I'm not sure there's not more ahead. But in early April, we all thought the Russian invasion of Ukraine would be short term. As we have seen, Ukraine has been resilient and Russia has not pulled out. As a result, we've seen adverse impacts on energy supply, and ag and grain supply, which has had a knock-on effect on currency values.

Moreover, the protracted invasion has led to direct impacts on our business within Ukraine, in Ukrainian border countries and Russian sanctions. I'm not going to attempt to analyze all the factors that go with FX rates. But as this graph points out, when the currencies weakened to the U.S. dollar, it shows up in translating foreign currency results into U.S. dollars for our reported financials.

Now that I've discussed FX rates, let's go to Slide number 10. And I'll take you through several items influencing our expectations for the rest of 2022. As we have -- I'm on Slide 10 now. As we have looked at our expectations for the rest of 2022, we see several items that have had a significant impact on our expectations, especially against the expectation to produce earnings in 2022 similar to 2019, which produced adjusted earnings per share of $7.01. That's code for $7 a share.

With that in mind, I'd like to take you through several factors, which influenced our estimates in arriving at our updated earnings expectation range of $6.30 to $6.40 for adjusted earnings per share. On this chart, we've illustrated the discrete impacts on adjusted earnings per share for several items starting with $7 per share and working our way across to $6.35. I won't cover each in great detail but hit on the more significant points.

First, benefit of share repurchases. Since we announced our outlook for the full year earnings in October of '21, we repurchased approximately 3 million shares for approximately $400 million, which benefit 2022 EPS by approximately $0.35 a share. Second, we've updated our tax estimate based on the mix of our business across many jurisdictions -- the many jurisdictions we operate. About a 2% to 3% rate decrease will benefit us by approximately $0.32 a share.

Third, we reflected a 1% tempering of revenue growth in the second half of the year for both Epay and Money Transfer to account for possible inflationary impacts on consumer transactions. This is a hard one to peg but reflects the consideration of an impact on our business.

Fourth, the invasion of Ukraine has had an approximate $0.10 impact ranging from closing ATMs in the Ukraine to curtailment of additional tourism-focused ATMs in the Ukraine, to lighter travel patterns to Ukrainian border countries, to sanctions imposed on Russian flights to Europe, to card schemes, exiting card business in Russia.

Fifth, travel industry inefficiency impacts. As you know, we previously estimated that our high-value transactions, primarily the DCC transactions would come in, in the low 70% range. In fact, through May, we were pleased to see transactions posted nice recoveries similar to 2019 -- nice recoveries in relationship to 2019 levels, supporting our confidence of a robust recovery.

Then in June, we started to see it flatten out. And towards the end of June, reverse trend. Now that we're seeing -- witnessing tourism disruption in airports, hotels, restaurants, et cetera, that has led to capacity capping. We have adjusted our expectations to be in the mid- to high 60s, which ultimately amounts to approximately $0.20 per share.

Sixth, interest rates have gone up dramatically since October 21, 2021. And as you all know, the Fed has quickened its pace and raised the rate to help manage inflation. These higher rates account for about $0.14 a share.

Seven, more revolver borrowings. We've increased the use of our revolver to pay for the Piraeus card business as well as the repurchase of shares. We expect the borrowings to relax as we generate additional free cash flows but this accounts for approximately $0.08 a share.

Eighth, cost of inflation on operations. This one too is hard to peg. One might question what really constitutes greater competition for workforce versus inflation. They likely run together, but we made an estimate. It could be a bit light at $0.23 a share.

Finally, ninth, FX, I've already covered it. But you can see here, it has adversely impacted full year EPS by approximately $0.51 a share.

In summary, when affirming our expectations last quarter, we knew of some share repurchase benefits, some increased interest costs, some tax benefits, some FX pressure, which, for the most part, canceled each other out. But now this quarter, we've seen FX accelerated slide. The Fed get much more aggressive on interest rates to fight inflation and the impacts of the disruption in the travel industry compounded by the lingering impacts of the invasion in Ukraine. We felt it appropriate to give you our refreshed outlook and a better understanding of how we get there.

If you boil down all these items, you can see that the real business impacting items, such as travel disruption, interest, taxes, essentially offset each other leaving FX or said differently, if FX didn't change, our outlook for the year would not have changed. I know there are a lot of moving parts, but I hope this helps reconcile our expectations. Please bear in mind that if currencies move lower, interest rates move higher or faster or travel disruption becomes more of an issue, these estimates will necessarily change.

Thank you. And with that, I'll turn it over to Mike.

[Michael Brown, Chairman, CEO & President]

Thank you, Rick, and thank you, everybody, for joining us today. I will start my comments from Slide number 12. Well, those of you who have been following us for a while, probably have figured out that Rick tends to be a little bit more conservative, while I tend to be a bit more optimistic. So while his observations on the business and how changes in the economy are affecting our results are all valid, I'm here to tell you that while over the last three months, everything has changed, I'll also tell you, really, nothing has changed.

Let me repeat that, so I really think then, nothing really has changed with respect to the future of our business. We can all open our favorite news site and see the travel and hospitality industries have largely become chaotic. There are canceled flights, airport capacity restraints and who hasn't seen the picture of the baggage room at London Heathrow, Heathrow is one of the largest global travel hubs in the world, and their CEO announced last week that they were capping their capacity at 100,000 passengers a day for the remainder of the summer due to unacceptable service conditions.

For perspective, that is less than 50% of the 220,000 passengers per day that were through Heathrow in 2019. I think it's important to pause there to help you understand what this particular example means to our business. Let's not forget, travelers from the U.K. are by far the largest producer of high-value international transactions on our ATMs because every card has a cross currency component. So the limiting of passengers to and from the British airports has had a more significant impact on our forecast.

Further to the travel demand, we also heard Delta's CEO say during their earnings call last week that they're not going to increase flight capacity for the remainder of the year due to staffing and operational issues. And similar stories have been used to describe major airports across Europe, including Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Paris amongst others.

So while we would have never predicted this outcome only three months ago, when every sign pointed to a robust travel recovery for this year, we have learned a lot from the travel recovery that we have seen, and it is good, maybe even great news. We have seen that when the flights land, our ATM machines light up and the travel chaos in the future will be fixed.

We have seen strong recovery in transactions as well as increased average withdrawal amounts. So we have validated that the underlying fundamentals of our business are still intact, even better. As you may remember, our ATM network is stronger than ever. We called underperforming sites during COVID and we replaced them with better locations. We have added new high-quality sites, and we have expanded into new markets with our eyes set to grow further into Asia, North Africa and Latin America.

And finally, we have further diversified the EFT product line with the acquisition of the Piraeus Merchant Acquiring business. Outside of travel, the other economic factors, like the extended conflict in the Ukraine, rising inflation and interest rates and changes in currency, all drove a pullback to our expected results for the year. However, epay continues to see high demand for branded digital payment content and continues to expand distribution in the digital channel.

And Money Transfer continues to expand and improve its network, driving strong transaction growth rates in both physical and digital channels. So while there may be a bit of pressure from inflation and currency changes, the underlying business is doing very, very well and getting stronger. And let's not forget about the advancements we have made with our industry-leading REN technology platform and our new Dandelion money transfer offering.

Hopefully, you can see here that while all of our assumptions for 2022 changed, driven by external factors that we were not able to control, nothing has really changed in the underlying fundamentals of our business for 2023 and beyond. It is frustrating that 2022 will come in a bit short of our original expectations, but our excitement for 2023 is strong and validated. We are confident that we have made the right investments and are in the right places to continue to deliver long-term shareholder growth.

Now let's move on to Slide number 13 and we'll discuss the segment specific highlights. Here, you can see that we continue to expand the EFT business. This quarter, we launched a new independent ATM network in Iceland, making access to cash. They're more convenient for travelers and locals. In India, we launched a multi-currency prepaid platform for EbixCash. EbixCash has emerged as India's largest end-to-end financial exchange, which includes a last mile network of over 650,000 physical distribution outlets and an omnichannel online digital platform.

EbixCash plans to issue about 1 million multi-currency cards over the next four to five years with an annual load of $600 million. The issuance of these cards will give EbixCash an end-to-end customer experience across domestic and international money remittances, foreign exchange, digital payment solutions, prepaid travel cards, insurance and more. The addition of EbixCash, coupled with the Thomas Cook agreement that we told you about a couple of years ago, means that Euronet powers the two largest multi-currency prepaid cards in the huge Indian travel market.

In Spain, we extended the program for ATMs in the community through an agreement with the Spanish Post Office to install at least 1,500 subsidized ATMs in rural areas across Spain over the next three years. These ATMs will provide more [indiscernible] cash, access to cash in the cities across Spain where bank branches have closed and customers currently have a difficult time getting access to their cash. And because I know you are curious, we have been very pleased with the first full quarter of operations from the acquisition of Piraeus Bank's Merchant Acquiring business.

During this quarter, we signed agreements with approximately 5,000 more merchants in Greece, including some of the largest like IKEA, Attica department stores, TGI Fridays, amongst others. These new merchant additions were in line or ahead of our expectations. Transactions are in line with our expectations and the transition to our platform has gone smoothly with no surprises. This has just provided greater confidence in the quality of the asset that we have acquired, and we look forward to giving you updates in the future.

We continue to add more ATMs to our portfolio. During the quarter, we added 932 Euronet-owned ATMs, bringing our total to more than 1,300 ATMs so far this year. We also added 338 new outsourced machines. We reactivated 4,284 machines that have been previously closed due to COVID or they were in the off-season. Further to what we've mentioned in the first quarter, we have been challenged with supply chain issues related to our ATM deployments. These issues range from manufacturers not delivering the machines on time to third-party resource issues installing them.

Accordingly, we have relaxed our ATM deployment forecast based on supply and install issues, together with the slower than expected travel recovery given the issues we mentioned facing the travel industry. We now expect that we will deploy approximately 2,500 to 3,000 ATMs during this year with more next year as the supply chain issues are sorted out and travel hopefully returns to the pre-COVID level.

We are pleased with the rebound of the ATM business as travel around the globe continues to become less restricted. We are confident in our business model and believe that our growth will continue to improve as the travel industry reestablishes their staffing and operational levels to those of pre-COVID. Our ATMs and our teams are ready to serve these customers.

Now let's move on to Slide 14, and we'll talk about epay. The epay team continues to expand the distribution of its leading content portfolio in both physical and digital distribution channels. While the bottom line epay results did not show this expansion, I'd like to remind you that these results include the comparative year loss of a key customer in our Cadooz B2B business, as well as lower promotional activity in the second quarter than in the second quarter of 2021.

We continue to believe that based on discussions with our promotional partners, that we will see strong growth in our promotional campaigns as the second half of the year unfolds. And while we have started to see some signs of inflation creeping into the epay business and discretionary spending on certain categories of our products, particularly in the gaming category, we continue to believe the epay business will deliver a very nice year of earnings. During the quarter, epay continued to expand digital branded payment sales through digital distribution methods.

We added branded payments through Aircash, a leading mobile wallet in Europe. We also added iTunes on the two largest e-commerce platforms, as well as through the two largest mobile operators in Turkey. In India, we launched distribution of Microsoft 365 through PhonePe, a leading digital payment app in India. This is our first launch of Microsoft products in this huge and growing market. We also signed several new agreements that we expect to launch in the coming quarters, including the distribution of branded payments through OPIA, a B2B promotion company in Europe.

We also expanded our relationship with Disney+ to new geographies and new channels. We will be able to offer Disney+ in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, as well as through digital channels and B2B channels. In India, we signed an agreement to add iTunes to Flipkart, a leading e-commerce company there. Finally, we signed an agreement to distribute Microsoft Xbox All Access with GameXpress, an Xbox console distributor for Amazon in Mexico. We continue to expand our content, our sales channels and our geographic reach in the epay segment.

In fact, in July, we launched Apple's new gift card across 15 markets. Unlike the iTunes card, this new gift card is for everything Apple, hardware products, accessories, apps and much more. The broad offering makes it a great option for gifting. The Apple Card was launched in North America earlier this year and has enjoyed tremendous success. We anticipate that it will complement sales and increase gifting in our self-use markets.

Overall, we are optimistic that it will make a nice incremental contribution through the year. Consistent with epay's history, we've added more products across our markets, which will help us forge through the relatively small inflationary impact we mentioned. We have some exciting products and promotions in the pipeline that give us confidence that epay will still deliver strong results for the full year of 2022.

Now let's move on to Slide number 15. We continue to expand our industry-leading payments and remittance network. Once again, eclipsing the 500,000 physical location mark, despite closing more than 20,000 locations in Russia, Belarus and Tajikistan in the first quarter of this year. These 0.5 million locations are nicely complemented by our network of 3.6 billion bank accounts and 442 million wallet accounts across 182 countries in territories, which increased 8% year-over-year.

During the quarter, we launched 20 new correspondents in 18 countries, including bank deposit service for corporate and individual clients to 30 countries through our partnership with Crown Agents Bank. And we signed agreements with 22 new correspondents across 19 countries that will launch in the coming quarters. And again, reflecting on the view that everything has changed, but nothing has changed, we've expanded our network to more countries, more locations and more accounts where customers can send money. This ever-growing network across more countries is what fuels our money transfer growth.

In Belgium, we launched Money Transfer, currency exchange and VAT refund services in the Brussels airport. This is a nice example of our ability to use our industry-leading product portfolio to allow our partners to provide their customers with a one-stop shop for their payment needs. And we further expanded our relationship with Walmart through the launch of Walmart2Walmart money transfer app powered by Ria. Now our digital customers can enjoy Ria's world-class money transfer service at Walmart's everyday low price.

On the digital front, our direct-to-consumer digital transactions increased 37%, and our account deposit transactions grew 24%. You may remember that Ria has the world's best bank account deposit network, and these transfers now represent 32% of Ria's total international outbound volume. Our Money Transfer business continues to gain ground and deliver results, and I will reiterate my first quarter comments that despite seeing some of the early signs of inflation pressure on our transactions, we expect that the growth rates and the operating margins of this segment will improve in the second half of this year, as we lap some of the investments we made in our technology last year.

Now let's move on to Slide number 16. And I'll provide you with an update on our technology platforms beginning with Dandelion. Dandelion continues to be the world's largest international real-time payments network and is garnering more and more interest from banks, fintechs, money service businesses and payments companies. Our goal is to disrupt and replace the ancient Swift B2B system with a real-time modern alternative.

During the quarter, we signed an agreement with Atlantic Community Bankers Bank, known as ACBB, to improve their product offering for their 400-plus U.S. financial institutions, representing $500-plus billion in assets. Dandelion will enable ACBB to expand their bank-to-bank cross-border payment network and complete customer payouts in real time. In turn, ACBB will make the capability available to the more than 400 financial institutions that they power and our sales pipeline continues to build.

We have been in conversations with more than 50 global regional and local banks, including four of the top 10, and 12 of the top 50 global banks. I can tell you that we're encouraged by their interest and these are meaningful and productive discussions. The banks are recognizing the power of Dandelion's platform, network and technology. We will continue to work hard to add more countries, bank accounts, cash locations and mobile wallets to our network, while continuously improving our service. I'm excited about the continued uptick in interest in Dandelion. And I look forward to sharing the pipeline success with you as we move into the second half of the year. By the way, the little picture on this slide is our Dandelion offering at Money20/20 Europe.

Now let's move on to Slide number 17. We'll talk about REN. As we told you last quarter, digital banks continue to see the value of our REN technology and its modern architecture. This quarter, we signed GXS, an open loop issuer processing and switching agreement. The GXS is a joint venture between a subsidiary of NASDAQ-listed Grab Holdings and Singapore Telecommunications Limited.

In November 2021, the monetary authority of Singapore issued GXS a digital banking license. The entire payment stack there is REN and Euronet will now be considered the preferred provider as the joint venture expands through Southeast Asia. We also signed an issuer processing service agreement with Union Digital Bank in the Philippines.

Union Digital Bank is a digital bank that aims to empower the country's digital economy. It enables Filipino communities, businesses and regulators to leverage FinTech, blockchain and open finance technologies in order to make digital banking and virtual assets accessible to everyone. Under this agreement, Euronet will again provide the entire payment stack for the bank.

In Indonesia, we signed a digital payment and issuer processing agreement with Bank Neo Commerce or BNC. BNC is a digital bank that is a buy now, pay later type company with more than 13 million users, making it one of the fastest growing digital banks in the country. Here, we will deploy our REN payment platform to provide end-to-end digital payment and issuer processing services. Euronet has been providing payment processing services to the local market from its PCI-DSS compliant Indonesian processing center for more than a decade, which has helped our customers launch programs in an accelerated manner.

As we expand the capabilities of our REN platform, which is designed to be cloud native with all the major cloud providers, such as AWS and Google, we continue to gain more and more interest, particularly from these digital banks. We often get questions on the significant increase in our EFT transaction. A large majority of this increase are these transactions through real-time payments network that are convenient for users and are in very high demand. While these transactions may be lower price, judging by the growth and the number of transactions, we know we're in the right place.

So now let's go on to Slide number 18, and we'll wrap up for the quarter. As I close my comments, I hope you can see why I believe that really nothing has changed despite all the changes in the macroeconomic environment. We have a strong balance sheet that gives us stability and flexibility to continue to make sure we can expand in the right places to continue to deliver strong growth rates in the future.

We've seen a robust travel recovery and corresponding increase in our transactions, despite within the travel industry, providing -- transactions despite issues within the travel industry, providing confidence in our underlying business model. And our ATM network is stronger than ever and ready to go as travel demand continues to return to pre-COVID levels. Epay continues to expand its mobile and digital branded payment products together with its digital distribution channel and has exciting new products entering the market.

Money Transfer continues to produce double-digit transaction growth on the U.S. and international initiated transfers, as well as a whopping 37% direct-to-consumer growth in digital transfer. We have a strong pipeline of signed REN deals that we expect to deliver approximately $110 million in revenue over the next six years. And our Dandelion prospect pipeline continues to fill with top-tier financial institutions.

I would also like to reiterate Rick's summary comments regarding the netting of all the items impacting our earnings expectations for 2022. Really, if not for the FX changes, our outlook for the year really wouldn't have changed much. And let's not forget that even at the low end of our guidance range, we are still 70% better than last year, clearly highlighting that we are on the better side of the pandemic with our results improving as quickly as the travel recovery can happen.

With that, I will be happy to take questions. Operator, will you please assist?

[Operator]

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Pete Heckmann from D.A. Davidson. Please go ahead.

[Peter Heckmann, D.A. Davidson]

Hey. Good morning. Thanks for taking my question. On the FX headwind, it's certainly larger than what I was calculating. And I think maybe one of the issues is I'm kind of straight lining the country percentages across the quarters where seasonally, clearly, you have a much greater percentage of euro transactions in the second quarter. But did I hear you say that your guidance for the second half essentially is based on current spot rates or essentially little change from the second quarter?

[Rick Weller, EVP, CAO & CFO]

Yeah, kind of current run rate going forward, Pete, we don't try to outguess what's going to happen with it. So kind of that 101, 102 range for the euro as you're seeing it today.

[Peter Heckmann, D.A. Davidson]

Okay. So that makes sense. And then in terms of the capacity issues in the travel industry and you talked about airports, I mean, do you find that that's like discouraging currently planned travel or just limiting days of travel? I guess what are the primary impacts and which countries -- yes, like you certainly cited the U.K., what other countries might be impacted there?

[Michael Brown, Chairman, CEO & President]

Well, virtually -- I mean you can just Google it. And virtually every country with a big airport has got problems. And they're limiting flights, they're canceling flights. They're doing all those kinds of things. We did bring out the problems in the U.K. because all three of the London airports Luton, Gatwick and Heathrow all have the same problems. They're limiting customers to like less than half of what they had in 2019. And these are very lucrative customers for us, So -- and also, let's not forget, we were cooking (ph). March was great. April was better. May was even better than that. And then we watch things start to flatten out a little bit in June that got regressed by about 1% because of these travel issues.

And if you look at our revenue profile for the quarters, we do about 10% of these travelers transactions in the first quarter, 25% in the second, 45% in the third and then 20% in the fourth. So you can tell that every year that we've ever done this prior to COVID, we see this big inflection in Q3 over Q2, where it's almost twice as many travelers and transactions. So with them capping the flight, we don't expect that to occur this year. So we do see that they're going to work through this, but it's going to be next year before we get the full benefit of that.

[Peter Heckmann, D.A. Davidson]

Okay. Okay. I got it. And just...

[Michael Brown, Chairman, CEO & President]

It's -- I mean, it could -- timing couldn't have been at a worse time. I mean, people weren't -- they weren't hiring these people for the airports until March, and it takes six months to clear them through security, it's just crazy.

[Rick Weller, EVP, CAO & CFO]

Pete, I would repeat one of the comments that Mike made earlier and that is, again, what we see is very good correlation here with activity on our ATMs. And so you could almost kind of follow our transaction meter with the news reports of the disruption in the airports throughout Europe there. So it again validates our view and understanding of the business is that when the airplanes unload, people will go to the ATMs and take out cash. So it again just restores our confidence that as these kinks get worked out of the system and the travelers there you read about the pent-up demand and things like that, we're very encouraged by it. We certainly would rather not see it, but we see that it's very consistent with our -- with the behaviors that we've seen before.

[Michael Brown, Chairman, CEO & President]

And just a little added thing. We saw another article where the average plane fare is 30% higher than it was in '19. And part of that is supply and demand, there's just not enough supply. And so that's also limiting the number of travelers because it just costs so much more to bring your family to a vacation spot.

[Peter Heckmann, D.A. Davidson]

Fair enough. I appreciate it.

[Operator]

And your next question will come from the line of Joel Riechers of Truist Company. Your line is open.

[Joel Riechers, Truist Company]

Hi, guys. Thanks so much for taking my questions. I was just wondering if you could provide a little bit of insight into what the revenue contribution was for as for the quarter and what that might look like for the rest of the year? And kind of whether or not that was a source of margin pressure? And then my last question, I was just a little bit surprised to see the cost structure suffer given cross-border trends. And it looks like volume and revenue per ATM were strong, but like I said, kind of margins disappoint a little bit. Is this the cost of new ATM locations, renewing leases on existing locations or something entirely different? And is there anything you guys can do on your end to address that? Thank you.

[Rick Weller, EVP, CAO & CFO]

Yeah. The first piece is on the margin of the EFT there. Yes, that's just the cost of ramping back up those ATMs. As we said, we restored nearly all -- I mean there's a few that hadn't been reactivated, but we're bringing those ATMs back online, putting cash in them and things like that. So that's a natural kind of an output of the business. Let's see, the first part of your question was...

[Michael Brown, Chairman, CEO & President]

What do you expect the margin to be -- margin profile going forward?

[Rick Weller, EVP, CAO & CFO]

Yeah. I mean as we continue to add more and more of our high-value transactions, the margin numbers will improve. As I've shared with people before is we won't achieve the margin number this year that we did in '19 because we still are going to be short 30% or more of the transactions that are our highest value transactions. And so as those transactions come in -- and they contribute at an 80-plus kind of a percent gross profit margin. So as those transactions come in, they really enhance the margins. So as we go through this year at being less than what that '19 level was, we won't produce that same level of EFT margin.

But as we get back into next year and we start seeing the full recovery, then we'll make nice move toward that. We've also shared with folks that we wouldn't anticipate that our full year, let's call it, on a comparable '19 basis margin would be quite as high as what we had in '19. Because we've added more and more of our own ATMs. We've replaced some of the outsourced ATMs, but our new ATMs, they may not give us as much margin when you're just talking about a mathematical calculation, but they certainly give us more profit. So that's why we've continued to add ATMs. So you'll see a little bit of that show up in the margin, but you should also then start seeing it show up more contribute on the profit line.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] Your next question is from the line of Andrew Schmidt of Citi. Your line is open.

[Andrew Schmidt, Citigroup]

Yeah. Hi. Good morning, Mike and Rick. Thanks for all the details. This is helpful. I want to start off with a question on just international transaction mix. Is there any reason to believe that high-value ATM transactions as a percentage of the mix, the total transaction mix shouldn't get back to where we were in 2019? Or do you think when all these issues are sorted out, we should be pretty close to back where we were in 2019. Just curious to get your thoughts on just the high-value part of the ATM transaction mix in EFT. Thanks a lot.

[Michael Brown, Chairman, CEO & President]

Yeah. So Andrew, thanks for the question. No, I mean every single data point that we see says that if we fix the travel chaos, we'll have the same mix that we had in '19 with the only very minor, minor exception that right now Russian travelers, their cards don't work anymore. And -- but that's just a little tiny bit so...

[Rick Weller, EVP, CAO & CFO]

And I would add, it won't change it much, but I think it will start moving it in the positive direction. As Mike said, we're continuing to expand in the Asia, the Northern African and Latin American markets. And we should just bear in mind that those markets are all essentially different currencies. So as we see users of the ATMs there, we would expect that there will be a greater mix of transactions taken out that are going to be cross currency than if you're, for example, at an ATM in France because you've got a lot of euro-to-euro transactions there, whereas when we go into the Asian and Northern African markets, those are going to be separate currencies. So I think that kind of all lines it up to seeing an improving mix as we get back to being a full recovery.

[Michael Brown, Chairman, CEO & President]

And also our -- prior to COVID, data from these more developing economies where we put ATMs in South Asia and Egypt, as an example, those are very profitable for us because a much higher percentage of the traveler spend will be with cash. So we found that these ATMs are sometimes as much as twice as profitable as our European one. So as we expand into these new markets, first of all, as Rick said, each of these markets are in island (ph) currency. So every single traveler comes from abroad has got cross-currency potential for us. And second is they're just going to have to spend more, a higher percentage of their spend will be with cash. So that's why we're really excited about these expansion opportunities and how that will change our margins over time.

[Rick Weller, EVP, CAO & CFO]

And I would just -- P.S., if you're doing the math of just dividing the revenue numbers by transactions, bear in mind, we've had a lot of transactions come into the EFT segment because these real-time payment transactions that we're processing based on the success of our REN platform sales, so they kind of skew, if you will, the revenue or profit per transaction. That's not because of lowering amounts that we're getting on our ATM withdrawals, it's just that we've got a lot of these lower price transactions. And we also debated a bit, we from time to time, have called them low value where they're really very high value because they come to us through and they all drop kind of to the bottom line, if you will, but it reflects the acceptance of our REN platform as well.

[Andrew Schmidt, Citigroup]

Got it. That's helpful. Yeah, it'd be good at some point to get an update on the mix of the overall EFT segment just because you have added some -- a lot of new products there, but we can connect off-line on that. I wanted to -- it's a little bit early to talk about next year, but I think it might be helpful just to level set how you think about earnings growth in a "normalized environment", whatever that means these days and then what factors above and beyond what would we consider normalized earnings should we consider for next year? Obviously, you still have the travel recovery to go next year, which should be incremental to add up boost. But just curious to hear your thoughts and the potential framework and how to think about that going forward. Thank you.

[Michael Brown, Chairman, CEO & President]

Probably the biggest hit -- the biggest contribution to our earnings growth next year is going to be travel. As we work through this chaos and when we get more normalized travel trends, I mean that's just -- like Rick says, we get 80 percent plus of that next transaction revenue fall straight to the pretax line across that same ATM estate. So that's our -- that's our -- will be our single largest contributor next year. But let's not forget, we're going to end up with a very good second half for epay, Money Transfer continues to gain market share. We're getting closer and closer to closing some big Dandelion deals there. REN continues to pick up. We see the Piraeus Bank Merchant Acquiring business growing very nicely. So I mean, we've got a whole lot of growth levers for next year in addition to which is kind of like low-hanging fruit and that's just getting the travel industry back on its feet.

[Andrew Schmidt, Citigroup]

Got it. Thank you, Mike. Thank you, Rick. Appreciate the comments.

[Operator]

Thank you. And our next question will come from the line of Vasu Govil from Keefe, Bruyette, & Woods.

[Vasundhara Govil, KBW]

Thank you very much for taking my question. Apologies if I missed this, but can you revisit your assumptions on the EFT segment in terms of the return of the high-value transactions. It sounded like you saw a full recovery to 2019 levels in sort of May and June and then it rolled over in July. And now you're expecting it to sort of be worse, continually worse. If you could just like revisit those assumptions that you're making in the guide.

[Rick Weller, EVP, CAO & CFO]

Yes. No, I'm sorry, if we misstated it, we did not see a full recovery in April and May, but we saw that the recovery was moving in the direction that we had expected in those high-value transactions. As we've said in the past, our assumption for the full year, recognizing that in the early part of the year would have been yet still in more of a recovery mode following the Omicron variant, if you will, that led to some more restrictions. But what we were seeing in the May and June period was a continuing improvement against the '19 levels. And then we saw that flatten out in the early part of June and then kind of reverse in the latter part of June. So we have not yet got back to a '19 level, but we were seeing progress right -- well in line with our expectation of that low 70% number that we had talked about.

And now, as we've said, we've kind of adjusted our thinking just simply by taking a look at what we're seeing in the current trends to say that, that recovery rate of those high-value transactions will be kind of more in the mid to the upper end of the 60% range. So not a big difference, but you can even tell if you want to do some like grenade math and assume that low 70s would have been something like 72%, 73% and mid to high-60s could be something like 67% to 68%, you can put your own numbers in there, but that will give you a delta difference of about 5% or 6%. And so you can see that in our articulation of the changes in our EPS number that the travel congestion impacted us by about $0.20 a share.

Even to Andrew's further -- other question about looking forward to 2023, if you then just said, well, if that $0.20 might be roughly equal to 5 to 6 percentage points, well, take the 30 delta between that and 100 and divide it, you've got about 5 turns on that. We'll take 5 turns at $0.20. You're in the $80 to $100 -- $0.80 on $0.20, you take that 5 turns, you're getting in the $0.80 to $1 improvement on our earnings per share if we get to that full recovery level. So if we said that we were at full level in May and June or April and May, we just misstated that. But it was certainly approaching the expectations that we had previously set out.

[Vasundhara Govil, KBW]

Understood. Thanks for all that color. And I guess my follow-up is just on your total -- how you've sort of approached guide. It seems like you're taking the conservative start at least on some of the factors that you called out. Is that sort of a fair read of how you've laid out the guidance? And where do you think you've laid out so many drivers that are sort of headwinds, where do you think you might have some buffer if things don't get worse from here?

[Rick Weller, EVP, CAO & CFO]

I think that the potential upside, they fall in several areas. One is we've continued to have nice REN and Dandelion type of sales. We may be we're a little bit intimidated by all these travel loads that you see out there, maybe the airlines get their acts together quicker. But as Delta said, they're going to put a cap on their flights through the rest of the summer. So that's probably going to put a little bit of pressure there. Our -- Mike made a comment about rolling out the new Apple card product, I think that we've been -- we've appropriately considered that in our expectations. But we know that it had very good traction here in the United States. So it's got a possibility of helping us out there. I don't see any kind of one silver bullet that we've been too conservative on. We try to come up with that number right down the middle of the fairway. There's probably inherently a little bias towards conservatism, but I don't think that we're undershooting it much.

[Michael Brown, Chairman, CEO & President]

There are -- some people believe that they because of these travel woes, that the travel season may be elongated a little bit this year. So that might provide us with some upside as well. So we'll just have to see.

[Rick Weller, EVP, CAO & CFO]

And we did see some of that last year as we went from the third to the fourth quarter.

[Michael Brown, Chairman, CEO & President]

Operator, I think that's the last question for the day, so you can kind of close this down. Thank you, everybody, for joining us. Really appreciate it.

[Operator]

Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you all for participating. You may now disconnect.