Euronet Worldwide Inc

NASDAQ:EEFT

Earnings Call Analysis

Record Earnings, Strategic Expansions, and Strong Revenue Growth

Euronet Worldwide reported record second-quarter earnings with $986 million in revenue and an 11% increase in adjusted EPS year-over-year. EFT segment was a significant contributor, showing 10% revenue growth and a 24% increase in operating income. The Money Transfer segment saw substantial growth in digital transactions, up 24%. Despite muted growth in the e-pay segment this quarter, a robust promotional pipeline is expected to drive mid to high single-digit growth by year-end. Euronet remains confident in achieving a 10-15% earnings growth for 2024, leveraging strategic acquisitions, market expansions, and revenue-enhancing initiatives.

Q2 2024 Performance Overview

Euronet Worldwide delivered an outstanding performance in the second quarter of 2024, showcasing record results across all key financial metrics. Revenue reached $986 million, adjusted operating income was $134 million, adjusted EBITDA hit $178 million, and adjusted EPS grew 11% year-over-year to $2.25. Over the first six months, adjusted EPS increased by 16.5%. The EFT segment was a standout, with a 10% revenue increase in constant currency and a substantial 24% growth in operating income.

EFT Segment Success

The success in EFT primarily stemmed from improved travel trends in Europe, performance from merchant services, new market penetration, and effective expense management. This led to an impressive operating margin expansion of nearly 300 basis points in the segment. The win in EFT was bolstered by strategic acquisitions such as Infintium and the completion of the MEPS ATM network acquisition. Furthermore, Euronet launched ATMs in new markets like Albania, Belgium, and Mexico, and plans further expansions into two new markets in the latter half of the year and two more in 2025.

E-Pay Business Stability

Euronet's e-pay segment recorded stability across all measures compared to the prior year, with the core content distribution business growing 10%. Promotional activities, pivotal to e-pay's growth, resulted in some quarterly fluctuations. Nonetheless, Euronet expects mid to upper single-digit operating income growth for e-pay by year-end, with potential for double-digit growth depending on consumer demand. An optimistic pipeline of promotional activities slated for the latter part of the year, particularly the fourth quarter, promises to boost e-pay’s performance.

Robust Money Transfer

The Money Transfer segment saw an 8% growth in constant currency revenue, driven by near double-digit growth in cross-border transactions. Although intra-U.S. transactions decreased, direct-to-consumer digital transactions experienced a robust 24% growth, thanks to increased marketing spend. Looking forward, Euronet plans to maintain this higher level of marketing and promotional spend but anticipates operating profit margin expansion over the latter half of the year. The company expressed confidence in consistent double-digit earnings growth in the range of 10% to 15% year-over-year.

Strategic Initiatives and Market Expansion

Euronet continued its strategic initiatives, including the deployment of the Ren platform, which supports EFT operations and offers a complete solution for online acquirers and merchants. In the second quarter, Euronet signed significant agreements such as a card management system for ICICI Bank in India, and a payment processing agreement with OmniPro in Brazil. These strategic moves underscore Euronet's dedication to expanding its footprint and enhancing product offerings through continued development and acquisitions.

Enhanced Operating Margins

Consolidated operating margins expanded by about 90 basis points compared to the prior year, with expectations of continued improvement through the rest of the year. This improvement, combined with strategic stock repurchases amounting to $114 million, which is about 2% of shares outstanding, suggests a strong fiscal discipline. These actions hint at a positive outlook for future periods with an anticipated 2% improvement in earnings per share.

Forward-Looking Confidence

Euronet is positioned for continued growth, bolstered by double-digit revenue growth in key segments, efficient expense management, and strategic market expansions. The company remains focused on leveraging growth opportunities across all three segments (EFT, e-Pay, and Money Transfer), with strong expected results for the full year 2024. With momentum from two quarters of double-digit growth and a solid pipeline of opportunities, Euronet expresses confidence in achieving and potentially exceeding its annual earnings growth guidance.

Earnings Call Transcript 2024-Q2

[Operator]

Greetings, and welcome to the Euronet Worldwide Second Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Mr. Adam Godderz, General Counsel for Euronet Worldwide. Thank you. Mr. Godderz, you may begin.

[Unknown Executive]

Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Euronet's Second Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. On today's call, we have Mike Brown, our Chairman and CEO; and Rick Weller, our CFO. Before we begin, I would like to call your attention to the forward-looking statements disclaimer on the second slide of the PowerPoint presentation we'll be making today. Statements made on this call that concern Euronet's or its management's intentions, expectations or predictions of future performance are forward-looking statements.

Euronet's actual results may vary materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements as a result of a number of factors, including those listed on the second slide of our presentation. In addition, the PowerPoint presentation includes a reconciliation of the non-GAAP financial measures we'll be using during the call to the most comparable GAAP measures. Now I'll turn the call over to our CFO, Rick Weller.

[Rick Weller, executive]

Thanks, Adam. I will begin with my comments on Slide 5. We delivered a record quarter -- second quarter on all key consolidated P&L line items. We delivered revenue of $986 million, adjusted operating income of $134 million, adjusted EBITDA of $178 million and adjusted EPS of $2.25. And Leading the way for these results was EFT with double-digit constant currency growth on all financial measures.

For e-pay, results were similar to the prior year, and Money Transfer delivered constant currency revenue growth of 8% for the quarter with a modest increase in operating income on a constant currency basis. Our quarterly adjusted EPS was up 11% over the prior year. And when considering the first 6 months of this year, it's up about 16.5% over the prior year.

You can see we are well on track to meet our earnings guidance range we've shared with you and lining up for an opportunity to exceed the range. Moreover, this quarter, we continued our track record of producing strong free cash flows, producing more than $80 million and because we didn't have any larger pending acquisitions or other requirements for the free cash flow, we repurchased $114 million of our shares or about 2% of the shares outstanding.

Given the timing of the repurchases, there was only a marginal benefit to the second quarter adjusted EPS, but we know this repurchase will improve earnings per share by 2% for future periods. It also points out -- I'll also point out that our consolidated operating margins expanded by about 90 basis points over the prior year and we expect to see continued expansion through the second half of the year.

Slide 6. On Slide 6, we present a summary of our balance sheet compared to the prior quarter. As you can see, we ended the quarter with $1.27 billion in unrestricted cash and debt of $2.27 billion. The increase in cash is largely due to cash generated from operations of more than $80 million in the second quarter, offset by stock repurchases and a minor impact from the completion of the MEPS ATM network acquisition.

Our next slide has as-reported numbers for the segments. But let's go to Slide 8, where we present the results neutralize or FX translations. I'm on Slide 8 now. On a constant currency basis, the EFT segment revenue grew 10%. Adjusted operating income grew 24% adjusted EBITDA grew 20%. The strong results in the EFT were made possible due to continued improvement in travel trends across Europe, strong performance from our merchant services business, expansion into new markets and the rationalization of our ATM estate together with effective expense management.

Both revenue and effective cost management contributed to nearly 300 basis point operating margin expansion in EFT. The e-pay results were similar to the prior year across all measures, while the core e-pay content distribution business grew 10% across the same range of metrics. As has been the case over the last couple of years, the timing of e-pay's customers' promotional activity can create unevenness in quarterly results.

In the second quarter of last year of 2023, we had strong promotional activity that did not recur in this year's second quarter. However, we have a nice pipeline of promotional activity that we expect to execute during the remainder of the year with more weight on the fourth quarter which coincides with seasonal sales in the e-pay business.

So while these second quarter results show muted growth for the quarter, we continue to believe that e-pay will produce mid to upper single-digit operating income growth. And depending on consumer demand, we could see a path to double-digit operating income growth year-over-year. Money Transfer revenue grew 8%. Operating income grew 2% and adjusted EBITDA declined 1%.

The 8% growth in constant currency revenue was primarily driven by near double-digit growth in cross-border transactions, offset by a decrease in intra-U.S. transactions. Direct-to-consumer digital transaction growth accelerated to 24%, highlighting the benefit of some increased spend on marketing and promotional campaigns in the quarter. Based on the success of these campaigns to acquire long-term customers and our increasing confidence in delivering strong double-digit consolidated earnings growth for the full year of 2024 and we made a choice to increase this marketing and promotional spend by about $3.9 million during the quarter.

Had we not made this $3.9 million promotional and advertising investment, money transfer operating income would have expanded year-over-year producing operating margins similar to the prior year. We will continue to have a somewhat higher level of spend on marketing and promotion but we expect to see operating profit margin expansion over the second half of the year, producing full year operating margins near or similar to 2023.

Overall, we are very pleased that we have delivered 2 quarters of double-digit growth. These growth rates, inclusive of some timing differences in e-pay and the flexibility to spend some investment to make some investments for future digital growth and money transfer give us even more confidence in our ability to deliver earnings growth in the 10% to 15% year-over-year range, and you can rest assured that we are always working to deliver results beyond that range. With that, I'll turn it over to Mike.

[Michael Brown, executive]

Thank you, Rick, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. I'll begin my comments on Slide #10. As you can see, looking at the green trend line a little dotted one on the chart, we continue on our path of double-digit earnings, reflecting the consistency of the consolidated annual earnings results. As I have reflected on these results, I think they provide an opportunity to highlight the success that we have delivered, diversifying and expanding the business across all 3 segments.

Fully accepting that this diversification may result in fluctuations on the timing of when each segment delivers its contribution to the annual consolidated results. In EFT, prior to COVID, our financial results were largely tied to how many people traveled in Europe during the summer months. While the travelers are still important to our annual results, we are seeing the diversification of our revenue and earnings contributions from non tourist related ATM transactions in Europe from ATM transactions in new markets outside of Europe and POS transactions in our merchant acquiring business and the benefit of new acquisitions such as Infintium.

In e-pay, the growth of our core business has remained strong. As Rick said, growing our core 10% this quarter over the same period last year. We continue to grow this core business with new products and new market expansion. We have also found success outside of the core business in running promotional campaigns for some of our large retailers and by making investments in our internal software to productize and sell it to external customers.

These promotional campaigns are not always consistent from year to year, let alone quarter-to-quarter, but our top line, bottom line and free cash flows have all benefited from our success in managing these promotions. And in Money Transfer, we have continued to expand our network, expand our customer base, expand the types of payments available to our customers and expand our channels to get to new customers.

The continued growth in the business has provided us with an opportunity to choose when to invest in certain advertising and promotional spending to drive future growth. Additionally, we have added 2 products, [ Ran and Dan Alliance ] and both have significant pipelines for long-term future growth. As we go through the highlights, you'll see a consistent theme. Our focus remains on taking advantage of key growth opportunities in each of the 3 segments.

Having now delivered double-digit growth rates across each of the first 2 quarters and knowing the opportunities that remain for the second half of the year. I remain confident that we will deliver very strong results for the full year 2024. As this chart illustrates the momentum continues. Now let's go on to Slide #11, and I'll give you the updates for each of our 3 segments, and we'll start as usual with EFT. During the second quarter, EFT delivered double-digit growth across all metrics. The double-digit growth was made possible by improvements in tourism in Europe, expansion into new markets and the growth of our merchant services business.

Finally, because I know you will ask, we continue to see increases in tourism in Europe compared to 2023. Europe control reported tourism increased from about 90% recovery rate last year 2023 compared to 2019 to an expected 95% this year 2024, representing a 5% year-over-year increase. Our results through the second quarter were generally in line with the Euro control data.

To highlight the success of our expansion strategy, adjusted EBITDA compared to the prior year second quarter grew 60% across 4 areas: Merchant Services, EFT Malaysia, EFT Philippines and EFT North America. Each of these businesses was new to Euronet within the last few years through either expansion into new markets organically or the acquisition in the case of Merchant Services.

In the last 12 months, EFT has launched ATMs in 3 new markets: Albania, Belgium and Mexico, and closed 2 strategic acquisitions: Infinitum and Singapore and the acquisition of those 800 ATMs in Malaysia. In addition to these acquisitions, EFT has 2 markets scheduled for launch in the second half of 2024 and 2 more in the works for 2025. Beyond expansion into the new markets, EFT has several revenue expansion opportunities for the existing estate of ATMs in Europe.

An example of these expansion opportunities include: first, we rolled out domestic direct access fees in Denmark Norway and Malta in the second quarter. We are beginning to pilot the rollout of access fees in the Czech Republic, Cyprus, the Netherlands and Romania, and we plan to launch access fees in 3 more markets in the fourth quarter.

In all, 10 markets will have domestic access fees by the end of 2024. Second, we launched international access fees in one country in the second quarter, and we plan to launch 7 to 8 in the second half of the year. And third, over the last few years, Mastercard and Visa increased domestic interchange in quite a few markets.

As an example, domestic interchange increased in the Netherlands by 60% and in Romania by 100%, these interchange rates have come into sharp focus over the last couple of years as banks demand increases to match their cost increases. As a result, we expect this trend to continue to more countries in the future. The EFT discussion would not be complete without mentioning our merchant services business has added over 15,000 new merchants in each of the last 3 quarters, and we have a pipeline of additional opportunities for further expansion.

In addition to these revenue opportunities, we also expanded our outsourcing business. In Poland, we signed an ATM outsourcing agreement with [ Alior Bank ] for 120 ATM recyclers capable of receiving deposits and dispensing cash. [ Alior Bank ] is the eighth largest bank in Poland with over 1.3 million customers, and this agreement further expands both our leading ATM cash withdrawal and deposit returns in Poland.

In addition to this outsourcing agreement, we remain on track to add between 3,000 and 3,500 ATMs in 2024. Further, we have removed certain unprofitable ATMs. This, coupled with the ability to add access fees will continue to improve our margins. Our strategy remains simple and has proven to be successful. We continue to grow the business through the launch of new countries, more products, more convenience and strategic acquisitions, as we reflect on the EFT quarter, we should point out that a number of these growth drivers are not dependent on tourism.

Now let's go to Slide 12, and we'll discuss Ren, the best in industry technology platform that runs our EFT business. During the second quarter, we continued to execute our go-to-market strategy for Ren. For those of you who may be new, Ren is a proven product. We trust to run our own payment processing business and a product we sell into the market with many different uses.

Remember, in the first quarter, I introduced Infintium a company we acquired in Singapore to complement rent. Infintium is a market leader providing risk management and payment authentication services to prevent fraud and e-commerce or card-not-present transactions. While Infintium is already contributing, we are excited about how this product pairs with Ren to offer a more complete solution for online acquirers and merchants that require a modern cloud-native online payment gateway.

Now let's discuss Ren market wins in the second quarter. During the quarter, we signed a software license agreement for a card management system with ICICI Bank, Limited in India. If you know India, you know ICICI. It is the third largest bank in India. In Brazil, we signed a payment processing agreement with OmniPro, the company is the chosen provider of Alelo, Brazil's largest employee benefits card program serving 12 million customers.

We are excited about the future of Ren, and we will continue to enhance the product offering through continued to -- continue development and strategic acquisitions like Infintium. Let's recap our EFT segment. Man, what a quarter? What are the drivers of this business? First, the strength of this segment is our Ren platform. Second, we continue to grow our merchant services business, which grew adjusted EBITDA of 32% compared to the prior year and added over 15,000 new merchants.

Third, we have continued to grow our ATM network through acquisition, expansion into new countries and simply adding ATMs to existing markets. Lastly, we have started to expand revenue by adding domestic and international access fees at existing ATMs to optimize our profit margins while maintaining transaction volumes. As we conclude our discussion of EFT, let me remind you, we achieved double-digit growth across all financial metrics in the second quarter and operating income growth of 24%.

The quarterly results, the pipeline opportunities and the tourism recovery data make it hard not to be excited about EFT in the coming quarters. Now I'll go to the next slide. As I begin my comments on e-pay, I want to repeat for you what Rick discussed earlier. Our core e-pay business grew revenue, operating income and adjusted EBITDA by 10% and excluding contributions from customer promotional activity in the prior year.

E-pay had a strong pipeline of promotional activities for the remainder of 2024. We delivered gross profit growth in most geographic markets, including digital channels, payment processing, PREs, which is our branded open loop prepaid debit card and core content in existing and new retail Simply put, unevenness and the timing of our promotions business resulted in flat year-over-year segment results.

We believe that it takes -- it makes a lot of sense to continue leveraging our assets that generate free cash flow. I understand that the market prefers more consistent and predictable results, but I would encourage you to think beyond a quarter and consider the full year. I want to provide a quick update on 2 of our own product offerings, Conductor and Skylight. During the second quarter, we signed an agreement to issue Google Workspace on the Conductor platform to be sold across both online and physical retailers.

Moreover, we have a pipeline of opportunities we are pursuing for Skylight so stay tuned for future updates there. We also signed an agreement to provide our extensive retail network to transport Canberra for the [ MyWay ] project in Australia. The [ Myway ] card is a form of electronic ticketing used for public transport including light rail and buses. Customers can recharge their [ MyWay ] card at any of our participating retail locations.

And now we want to highlight some of the agreements that we launched during the quarter. In Belgium, we launched branded payment content with ALDI. In the U.K., we launched B2B distribution of Sony PlayStation and the [indiscernible] gift cards. In Turkey, we launched branded payment distribution through [ Migros ], one of Turkey's largest supermarket chains, along with gaming content into Bina game, a leading gaming website.

In Germany, we launched B2B content distribution with [indiscernible] rewards and incentives platform. And lastly, we launched Xbox Game Pass distribution on PayTM and Fan Pay in India. And as you can see, e-pay is more than just a content distributor. It is a diverse business with a strong pipeline of opportunities. While some of these new products will take some time to make an impact on the segment results, I remain confident that e-pay will continue to produce strong growth into the future.

Now let's move on to Slide #14, and we'll talk about Money Transfer. Slide 14. In Money Transfer, we have developed the world's most strategic payments network for both consumers and businesses. We didn't become the second largest player in the world overnight by accident. We have consistently diversified our business including who we sell to, the products we sell and the channels through which we sell our products.

Our money transfer business is so much more than the immigrant money transfer business that we acquired in 2007. To understand what drives money transfer, you need to understand the who, the what and the how, who buys from our Money Transfer segment. What do we sell and how do we sell it? Over the years, we have been successful expanding the who on who buys from us. When we acquired [ Ria, ] it was largely a U.S.-based immigrant remittance business, providing cross-border payments to family members in Latin American countries.

We expanded the network globally through the acquisition of [ XE, ] we expanded that customer base to high net worth individuals and small to medium-sized businesses. We then further leveraged our network expansion through fintech and financial institutions. While we still sell cross-border payment transactions, we have expanded from simple remittance payments to family members, to include payments to a broad array of cross-border payments ranging from general business payments, worker payments, cross-border payroll and online purchase settlements.

The question of what is simple. We sell the movement of money or payment from point A to point B. Our network gives our customers access to send money to 198 countries and territories by the way of nearly 600,000 correspondent locations, 4 billion bank accounts and 2 billion wallet accounts. Finally, how do we sell? We started with 42,000 physical bricks-and-mortar locations 17 years ago and expanded that to digital send options through our apps and web channels and expanded to banks and fintechs through APIs.

Today, we have a multi-brand strategy, helping us find growth outside of our traditional core by leveraging our [ XE ] brand to penetrate adjacent high-income consumer market and small- to medium-sized businesses, we are expanding our total addressable market. In addition, our capabilities, combined with evolving market trends and need our positioning dandelion payments, our Payment-as-a-Service brand as a preferred partner for banks and fintechs who are trying to close the gap in global reach.

The World Bank has estimated that the remittance market will grow by 2.3% in 2024. In prior quarters, you've heard me talk about how we have been growing 3x faster than the market. We continue to outperform the market and take market share. Our transactions grew by 9%, in the first quarter and by 11% in the most recent quarter. You can do the math. That is over 4x faster than the market growth rate.

I am often asked whether I believe that this growth can continue. My answer is a resounding yes. As I've said many times, this is a huge market, and we only have 7% of it. So there's still plenty of market share to gain. We can continue to outpace the market by continuing our geographical expansion of our network, both on the send and receive side of the transaction by continuing to enhance the usability of our network with more use cases for remittances and by continuing to compete for larger customers in the marketplace that our competitors never had to defend and finally, by continuing to make investments in digital expansion.

So what about our digital channel. A lot of people ask that. Our digital channel has become increasingly important as emerging markets continue to modernize, creating increased financial inclusion and expanded use cases leading to demand for digital send and receive payment methods. While others have struggled to modernize their payments infrastructure, our strategic enhancements and digital capabilities have positioned us to embrace these market trends.

Our digital transactions growth accelerated to 24% compared to last year, and our new customer acquisition grew to 44%. We now have digital presence in 24 countries and we'll be adding a new market in the coming weeks. Our execution of these strategies are highlighted by the market wins included on the slide. Some of the more significant ones include during the quarter, our core business signed 16 new correspondent agreements across 14 countries, 21 new correspondents in 15 countries.

And we launched them. These launches include we launched a partnership with Banco Activo in Venezuela, augmenting real-time bank deposit capabilities to all bank accounts in the country. Remittances and Venezuela exceed $4 billion, which is more than 5% of their GDP and are received by around 29% of the Venezuelan households according to the remittance industry Observatory.

We launched our partnership with Al Fardan Exchange and U.A.E., which connects us with one of the largest exchange houses in the region. According to Nomad, the U.A.E was the second largest remittance send market in the world. We launched a partnership with Al Mula in Kuwait, the tenth largest send market in the world according to Nomad. Al Mula International Exchange Company is the largest exchange house in the country. Lastly, we signed an agreement with WeChat in China. A lot of you have probably heard of WeChat. WeChat is one of the largest mobile wallets in the world, and China is the third largest remittance receive market in the world. As we head into the second half of 2024 with momentum and optimism, we are confident that our strategic investments will drive future growth.

We have a lot of opportunities in the money transfer pipeline including our scale and continued investment in new capabilities, new use cases, new geographies and continued expansion of our real-time payments, which will drive our growth. Now let's turn to the next slide, and we'll talk about our dandelion network. Throughout the second quarter, we continued to win in the marketplace, technology, connectivity and global banking are evolving quickly.

And it is shifting market needs. Our global payment network is positioned to meet those needs, not just for today but for the future. Simply put, Dandelion capabilities are unmatched by any single competitor. It is the heart of our Money Transfer segment, and it has enabled us to outpace the market growth in our RIA and X product. Dandelion's existing client base continues to expand their use of Dandelion rails, including HSBC, which grew transactions by 170% sequentially just since Q1 of this year.

In addition to the strong demand that we have seen from our existing clients during the quarter, we also signed agreements with Wire Barley, a leading South Korean fintech and digital money transfer company with LifeNet a high-growth Singapore-based payment service provider, serving consumers and businesses and [indiscernible] a U.K.-based company, which processes cross-border payments for small businesses.

Moreover, in the second quarter of 2024, we also launched Flash Payments and innovative Australia-based fintech that provides payments and FX services to SMEs as well as Arc OPay, a payments company based in Lithuania, which supports SMEs in Europe for the import-related and business-critical payments. I also see a robust pipeline that I look forward to updating you on as soon as we close those deals.

To wrap up our Money Transfer segment, our growth trajectory is healthy profitable, and we are well positioned to capture market opportunities with our expanding pipeline. Now let's wrap up the quarter. Going to the last slide. I can't emphasize enough my excitement about the growth our teams continue to deliver another record-breaking quarter. And as I mentioned earlier, one of our strengths is the diversity of our 3 segments. While we continue to strive for double-digit growth in each of the individual segments, our goal is to deliver consolidated double-digit growth results for the company.

This quarter, EFT was the biggest contributor to our growth. However, we have a strong pipeline of opportunities for all 3 segments to grow in the future. As we turn to the second half of 2024, and what has driven our growth and what will continue to fuel that growth for the remainder of 2024 and beyond. Our strategy for growth is proven, and we have executed that strategy for the last 30 years.

We will continue to take advantage of market opportunities and execute by making strategic investments like the MEP investment in Malaysia, expanding into new countries like we did this quarter in Albania, growing and expanding our existing businesses like we have with our merchant services business, adding access fees to certain domestic and international transactions, closing deals in our pipeline of opportunities in all 3 segments by adding new correspondence in the money transfer business by continuing to grow our ATM outsourcing arrangements by adding e-pay content and digital to both digital and physical channels.

And making good capital allocation with a focus on growth, acquisition and share repurchase as appropriate. As I conclude my remarks, I want to repeat, we look forward to the second half of the 2024 with a pipeline of opportunities to drive our results. Our management team's proven history of delivering these opportunities is great. We continue to be optimistic about the remainder of 2024. And for 2024, we affirm and remain consistent with our expectations that earnings will grow in the 10% to 15% range.

And of course, you know us, we are driving to be beyond that range. With that, we'll be happy to take questions. Operator, please [indiscernible]

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Andrew Schmidt with Citi Global Markets.

[Unknown Analyst]

Rick, appreciate all the comments. So I just want to start off with money transfer. Good to see the continued share gains there. Maybe you could just discuss what you're seeing in the competitive environment. I've heard that there's been some more positive market structure changes in the U.S. maybe you could put some points on that? And then just more broadly on the marketing expense.

If you could comment on where that's being deployed, whether it sounds like it digital, but if you confirm is digital versus retail? And then the expectation for the remainder of the year there.

[Rick Weller, executive]

Well, with respect to the competitive dynamics of the industry, you've got to understand the money transfer business is hypercompetitive. Always has been. We really haven't seen much difference. You can see that our revenues per transaction or margins per transaction really haven't changed over the last couple of years. So even though we hear about competition, we really haven't felt it. And maybe one of the reasons for that is we're growing 4x faster than the market, I don't know.

So with respect -- I don't see much change there. With respect to your second question of where do we spend the money? Most of that was digital. You saw that our digital growth was 24% over prior year with 44% growth in our new customer acquisition. We've realized that our marketing is working. We've got actually a new set of executives been working on that over the last few quarters. We see the results. So we thought that would be worth making additional investments. So mostly in digital.

[Unknown Analyst]

Perfect. And then maybe on the EFT segment, I appreciate the comments about the travel recovery. But if you could put a finer point on how the tourist ATM performance came in relative to your expectations? I know last year, we had some fluctuations in transactions. I'm wondering if trends, any early observations in the third quarter?

[Rick Weller, executive]

So last year, we didn't miss transactions. We misspend per head, okay? And so this year, it looks like it came in about where we thought it would. And as far as this whole travel recovery and everything, I think that's pretty much somewhere at 95%, and we'll probably grow a little bit past that. At the end of the day, this whole travel question is finally in the rearview mirror.

So I think from this point forward, it's about network expansion. It's about making that network more effective by getting rid of the ATMs that aren't as effective. And then, of course, with EFT there, we've got a big chunk of business coming from our EMS, from our merchant services business. And did you hear the word access fees? I mean -- that's what I've been hoping for, for a long time.

And what that means now is that when you get travelers, within the Eurozone going from a euro-to-euro country in that country, the recipient country now gets that traveler and their access fees there is possibilities for me to make 2x to 3x as much on that transaction as we did before. And that's in multiple countries now I think we lit up 3 countries or something this quarter. We've got several more in the offing.

That's going to give us a nice little boost in margin because it's the same transaction, the same number of transactions, you're just making 3x as much money as you used to make.

[Michael Brown, executive]

Absolutely. Yes, I've been talking about those for some time. So it's good to see those come through.

[Unknown Analyst]

Appreciate the comments, Mike.

[Operator]

Our next question comes from Pete Heckmann with D.A. Davidson.

[Peter Heckmann, analyst]

Following on to the ATM access fees, I think you said 3 more countries are potentially going to roll that out potentially in 3 more countries later this year. I guess so far, the countries that have rolled it out don't appear to be big where Euronet has a big footprint. Correct me if I'm wrong there. But do you see some of the countries like Poland, Spain, any of the countries where you have a very large footprint also considering allowing those ATM fees.

[Michael Brown, executive]

So yes, they are a little bit of smaller countries. Some of them are really good little tourist countries like those island countries of Cyprus and Malta, et cetera. But so -- but -- and they were all euro countries. So being able to add access fees is a great thing for us. With respect to the bigger countries, you mentioned Spain and Spain, we already have surcharge and access fees in Spain. So that's not going to change too much.

I think access fees for locals may come, too, but that's going to be later in the year, we would expect but the point is it's coming now, finally, after hoping for a long time, we should be able to have access fees in most countries. It'd be nice to get it in Poland. I don't see that happening this year, but we'll have to wait and see.

But yes, it's all pure margin, Pete. I mean that's the nice thing. And in a lot of these markets, you can make money on a cross currency transaction, but the locals get buy for $0.30. So that's -- that will help us. And the interchange and also, I'm sorry, the interchange increases are happening as well. There is -- I mean, the reality is we're not the only ones who own ATMs in Europe. The banks own them. The big banks with the big -- with a lot of overhead are over here allowing Internet banks to utilize their ATM infrastructure at 1/3 or 1/5 of what it really cost them.

So they're basically subsidizing their competitors. So the big banks are pushing for interchange increases. That's why we're starting to see that happen as well.

[Peter Heckmann, analyst]

Okay. That's great. That's great. And I just wanted to follow up on the -- within money transfer, I think there's a comment that some competitors were either exiting markets or something about competitor consolidation and you had new agent accounts were up 35% year-over-year. Can you just give a little more color on that?

[Michael Brown, executive]

Okay. So yes, that's happening. But you know what, to be honest, that's always kind of happening. It's a hypercompetitive market. We saw 2 larger guys kind of go belly up this last quarter. But there's always somebody and their transactions, their money transfers get spread out across the industry because we're growing faster than everybody else, we kind of get more than our fair share.

[Peter Heckmann, analyst]

Got it. Okay. I'll get back in the queue. I appreciate it.

[Operator]

Our next question comes from Charles Nabhan with Stephens.

[Charles Nabhan, analyst]

With the acquisition of the ATMs in Malaysia this quarter, I was wondering if you could just kind of level set for us and give us a sense for what the fleet looks like from a geographic standpoint in terms of how much is in Asia, how much is in Europe? How you think about that fleet from a travel versus local or domestic concentration standpoint?

[Michael Brown, executive]

So we got a little bit of a mixed bag here. The ATMs we just bought in Malaysia are focused more on locals, but of course, there are international travelers to that. In the other markets where we deploy our own ATMs. We're really focusing more on travelers, but we're catching a lot of the locals too, because those developing markets are just under ATMs, you might say.

So both the locals and the international tourists do need access to cash. As far as the total number, Rick, maybe you can help me here.

[Rick Weller, executive]

In Malaysia, it was about 800 ATM and they're all in Malaysia. And none of those are in Europe or whatever.

[Michael Brown, executive]

Right nut as far as outside of Europe versus inside of Europe, we mentioned Asia, we mentioned North Africa between -- across all of them, we must have 3,500 ATMs ish, something like that. I imagine outside of Europe.

[Rick Weller, executive]

Yes. And I would tell you that the concentration of ATMs deployed during the first half of the year, it's been a larger focus outside of Europe than inside of Europe. And we've been talking about that for some time that we see a number of new markets to go to. We see good opportunity in the Asian markets, those North African markets, the South American markets, and I would expect that we'll continue to see that kind of progress.

[Charles Nabhan, analyst]

Got it. Helpful color. I appreciate that. So as my follow-up, I believe you had commented on e-pay. The comp is getting a little easier in the back half of the year and potentially exiting '24 at a mid- to upper single-digit operating income growth. I guess, first wanted to make sure I heard that correctly. And then secondly, I wanted to get some color around the revenue side of that equation.

So if we're exiting at mid- to high single-digit operating income growth, how should we think about that from a revenue standpoint?

[Rick Weller, executive]

Yes. We would always say that our operating income will grow at a rate a little faster than our revenue because we enjoy the benefits of leverage and that. But I believe you did hear it right, is that we expect the operating income growth to pick up here in the second half of the year. We're going to get the benefit of the execution of some of these promotional programs that we didn't see in the second quarter.

And we're -- as I said, we would anticipate for the full year of our e-pay that will be in that mid- to upper single-digit operating income growth range for the full year, which then by definition, means that as we go through the second half of the year, we're going to see even stronger numbers to get to that for the full year.

So yes, I think you heard that correct, that we should expect to see more momentum build in the second half of the year for e-pay.

[Michael Brown, executive]

And.

A little bit more as Rick said, it's a little bit more weighted for the fourth quarter. I mean these promotions are signed up. We will implement them. We kind of know what's happening. So we know the timing of them. So there'll be more in the fourth quarter than in the third quarter.

[Operator]

Our next question comes from Darrin Peller with Wolfe Research.

[Unknown Analyst]

This is Daniel Krebs on for Darrin. I wanted to talk a bit about Merchant Services and [indiscernible] has this expanded beyond Greece yet? And how should we think about the sizing and impact of expansion into Spain, Portugal and Italy across the coming years?

[Michael Brown, executive]

Okay. So most all of the growth -- the stellar growth that you saw in the second quarter was in Greece. But we are now expanding. We signed up -- we've got sales forces out there pitching our product now in those 3 countries that you mentioned, which are Portugal, Spain and Italy. So we've got a great platform. It's like it's screaming successful in Greece.

We want to use that and attract similar merchants in these other Mediterranean touching countries. We'll see more of that over the coming quarters because we're just starting there. But in the meantime, with 15,000 new merchants per quarter for the last several quarters, that's pretty amazing. And we'll just keep growing those.

[Unknown Analyst]

Got it. Understood. So do you expect that 15,000 merchant per quarter number to step up now with this geo expansion or kind of more of the same going.

[Michael Brown, executive]

Well, we'll just say that we're growing well faster than the market. And we're going to continue to do our best. We'll find out what those numbers are. Obviously, if we can get into new markets, that would help us because most all of those 15,000 are just in one market. And Greece is a great market, but it's 10 million people, and it's only so big. So being able to get into 3 new huge markets would be really nice.

[Unknown Analyst]

Yes. Understood.

[Operator]

Our next question comes from Ken Suchoski with Autonomous Research.

[Kenneth Suchoski, analyst]

Maybe just on the direct access fees. I mean, did something change in the market that allowed you to introduce those fees? And I guess is there any way to quantify the upside to revenue and operating income either this year or next year from direct access fees and higher interchange rates.

[Michael Brown, executive]

Well, yes, quantification will hold off on that. I mean, we've tried to give you some good perspective that we expect our earnings to be growing 10% to 15%. As we've shown you, we've already grown it well outside that range for the first half of the year, and we feel very good about our opportunities to continue forward. This will just give us more confidence at delivering those kinds of results and putting us in a good position to continue that growth trend into next year.

Because, obviously, this year, we're only going to get a small part of it because we're only getting a part of a year of it. In some of those cases, we may only be getting a month or 2 of it, which means that next year, that's going to be lining up for growth contributors there. So we'll hold off on giving sizings of numbers. But suffice it to say is that it really reinforces our confidence for growth this year and puts us in a very good position to see a path to similar double-digit growth rates for next year.

Again, consistent with what we've done over the last 10 to 20 years.

[Kenneth Suchoski, analyst]

Okay. And just to be clear, I mean, can you go into other markets and add these surcharging fees? Or does the role have to be put in place for that to happen?

[Rick Weller, executive]

It does have to -- there's a complicated kind of web of things that have to happen anywhere from card scheme rules to regulatory rules and things like that. But if you kind of go back several quarters and look, we've been talking about this now for several quarters. We can kind of read the tea leaves. As Mike said, these banks have gone years with cost increases and no increases in interchange rates.

And at some -- and there's more and more competitors that are non-bank competitors in the market, and those guys aren't deploying ATMs. They're just living off of the benefit of their competitor. And so the environment is changing. We're seeing that the banks are kind of getting to the end of their rope on this. We're seeing where like even in the U.K. a few years ago when Link took down the rates and ATMs were pulled out of the market.

Now they've come back in and they said, you must keep ATMs in place and offered some additional incentives for ATM owners to keep ATMs there. So we've seen this kind of developing and we can't tell you exactly how many more countries will be available next year when they'll open up but we really feel confident that the inertia is moving in our direction on both the access fee front and the interchange front.

[Kenneth Suchoski, analyst]

Okay. Great. That's really helpful, Rick. And then maybe just regarding the increased digital marketing spend in Money Transfer, I mean why do this now? Was there something you saw in the market from an opportunity standpoint and you wanted to grow your digital footprint, I think digital is just 12% of transactions. Or was it more of a response to what competitors were doing in the market?

[Rick Weller, executive]

Yes, I didn't really have anything to do with competitors. We've got kind of a new digital marketing team over the last year. The results have been quite improved over the last year. And so we just want to put a little bit more gasoline on the fire of expansion because we saw the results. At the end of the day, digital marketing should bring results. And if they're not bringing enough you use less marketing.

So -- but -- we're happy with what we've seen.

[Michael Brown, executive]

Well, we saw those results, which is the first and most important piece. And then secondly, we feel very good about what our earnings contribution for this year is going to be, and we felt that we had the earnings stream to be able to invest in it.

[Rick Weller, executive]

Yes, and still pick up 1 million shares of stock on the side.

[Operator]

Our next question comes from Mike Grandall with Northland Securities.

[Unknown Analyst]

Just a follow-up. The $3.9 million marketing advertising spend for money transfer, any regions to call out where you spent more of that? Or was that kind of even across the globe.

[Michael Brown, executive]

It's kind of even with where our transactions come from, we get the bulk of our transactions from the U.S., and most of it was there, but we spread it out.

[Unknown Analyst]

pot it.

[Michael Brown, executive]

And then -- and by the way, that $3.9 million was an increase of spread. It doesn't mean that we -- if you take that away, we have no spend. That was just an increase this quarter over the run rate that we've had.

[Unknown Analyst]

Yes, the incremental amount. Great. And then, hey, when you say access fees, Mike, is that a fee on top of like domestic interchange.

[Michael Brown, executive]

Okay. So usually -- yes, use of the way these things work is if you're -- domestic access fee is the technical term for a surcharge. And usually in these markets, the way it works is if you can do a domestic access, if you can do a DAF, you then don't get the interchange. Okay? So this interchange of $0.20 or $0.30 or whatever goes away, but you pick up $2 or $3 on the domestic excess fee.

[Unknown Analyst]

Got it. And I know you guys won't kind of comment on a range for, let's say, 2025 from these DAFs. But on average, is the fee going up, I don't know, $0.10, $0.20 per transaction. Is there any metric you can give us to help us kind of size it?

[Michael Brown, executive]

Okay. So you've got to be careful because we've got a mix of transactions. So you don't necessarily DAF like, let's say, you've got a euro card. I don't know, it's issued in France and it goes to Romania or what -- no, Romania doesn't have -- let's say, it goes to Cyprus, which is euro as well, okay? So before that, we would make what is called an international interchange fee, which would be about EUR 1. Well, now we can make EUR 3.

[Unknown Analyst]

Got it. And that's all margin.

[Michael Brown, executive]

But you've got -- you can't say -- you can't multiply it across all the transactions because we have cross-border transactions across currency transactions, local transactions it's a mixed -- network participation.

[Rick Weller, executive]

We had arrangements.

[Michael Brown, executive]

Yes, we have network participation agreements in a lot of these markets actually when DAF comes to a market, it gives us an opportunity to actually acquire even more transactions by signing these network participation deals which allow us to sell our transactions on a wholesale basis to people like these Internet banks. So there's just a whole bunch of different things.

[Unknown Analyst]

Sure. Well, I'm glad you're getting a little bit.

[Michael Brown, executive]

But at the end of the day, it's a pricing pressure up.

[Rick Weller, executive]

And the other thing that this does -- which is so different than interchange. Bear in mind that interchange, we have no just say in what that number is going to be. We have to take the $0.30, and that's it. That's all you get. In the access fee world, we have some decision-making that we can make on the price of that transaction. We could set it at 2. We can set it at EUR 3. We could set it at EUR 1 it really gives us more flexibility to manage our business than just simply take whatever the card schemes are going to give you.

[Michael Brown, executive]

You can really do some price elasticity algorithms to figure out what maximum is for us.

[Unknown Analyst]

Great. Well, I'm glad you guys got that tailwind and it'd be nice to get a little bit more color in the future quarters.

[Operator]

Yes. Our next question comes from Gus Gala with Manus [indiscernible]

[Unknown Analyst]

So I think looking back after the merchant services [indiscernible] acquisition, you talked about structural margin kind of a decrease in. It's now been 2 quarters of plus 60% incremental EBITDA margins, taking all the commentary on what's happening to the ATM fleet beyond the access fee just like the potential for geographic like that mix changing over time? And then Ren, do we think maybe the margin structure is closer or even better than we thought it was going to be going back a year or 2 years?

[Rick Weller, executive]

Going back a year or 2 years, I'd say definitely yes, okay. But I think going back to, let's say, call it 19, in '19, I would say that we had a lot lower cost structure. As you've heard us talk about, the cost over these last few years have been very, very significant. And so my sense is that compared to -- certainly compared to a couple of years ago definitely, yes.

And I would probably be more bullish today on what that operating margin in EFT would look like than I would have been 6 months ago because we're seeing the realization of some of these access fee opportunities come to the table. We've also seen the results of the management team being able to effectively manage costs and deal with that. So I would probably feel -- and the as Mike said, the Piraeus merchant service businesses has been growing nicely.

That margin on that business is probably more right in line with the lower end of the average on EFT business. But as it's growing pretty fast, it kind of helps solidify and anchor that. So yes, I'd probably feel a little bit more bullish about it now. but maybe not quite as strong as what we would have seen in '19.

[Unknown Analyst]

Great. I appreciate that.

[Michael Brown, executive]

Yes, no problem. Thank you and I think we've got a shutdown now because it's top of the hour. But Gus, thank you for your question and for everybody else on the line, thank you very much for listening. We'll catch you next quarter.

[Operator]

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