Title

Presentation

Pathward Financial, Inc. beats earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $3.35, expectations were $3.33.

Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to Pathword Financial’s Second Quarter Fiscal Year 2026 Investor Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference call over to Darby Schoenfeld, Senior Vice President, Chief of Staff and Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Darby Schoenfeld: Thank you, operator, and welcome. With me today are Paper Financial’s CEO, Brett Pharr; and CFO, Greg Sigrist, who will discuss our operating and financial results for the second quarter of fiscal year 2026, after which we will take your questions. Additional information, including the earnings release, the investor presentation that accompanies our prepared remarks and supplemental slides may be found on our website at pashwordfinancial.com. As a reminder, our comments may include forward-looking statements. Those statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual and anticipated results to differ. The company undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements. Please refer to the cautionary language in the earnings release, investor presentation and in the company’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our most recent filings for additional information covering factors that could cause actual and anticipated results to differ materially from the forward-looking statements.

Additionally, today, we will be discussing certain non-GAAP financial measures on this conference call. References to non-GAAP measures are only provided to assist you in understanding the company’s results and performance trends, particularly in competitive analysis. In order to make our adjusted net interest margin as comparable as possible we have excluded the impact of the gross accounting methodology on our consumer loans included contractual rate-related processing expenses associated with deposits on the company’s balance sheet. The historical numbers in the earnings presentation has also been updated to reflect this. Reconciliations for such non-GAAP measures are included in the earnings release and the appendix of investor presentation.

Finally, all time periods referenced our fiscal quarters and fiscal years, and all comparisons are to the prior year period unless otherwise noted. Now let me turn the call over to Brett Pharr, our CEO.

Brett Pharr: Thanks, Darby, and welcome, everyone, to our earnings conference call. At the midpoint of our fiscal year, we continue to make good progress on our goals and execute on our long-term strategy being the trusted platform that enables our partners to thrive. Our tax season is going very well with tax-related products leading the way in revenue growth for the quarter. Additionally, new and existing partnerships announced last year are developing nicely and the Partner Solutions pipeline remains robust. Net interest income from our commercial finance loans also increased significantly as well. All in all, our core businesses remain healthy, and we are pleased with the results achieved in the quarter. Continuing with some highlights.

We reported net income of $72.9 million and earnings per diluted share of $3.35. Noninterest income in the quarter grew 9% and represented 55% of our total revenue. This was primarily accomplished through numerous successes within tax services and further supported by growth in our core card and deposit fees. Return metrics were also strong for the first 6 months of the year with return on average assets of 2.75% and return on average tangible equity of 40.69%. Just a reminder that these metrics generally hit their high point during this quarter due to the seasonality tax business. Finally, we are maintaining our guidance range of $8.55 to $9.05 earnings per diluted share. Our investments within tax services are paying off, and we are very proud of all that the team was able to accomplish not only this quarter, but also in the planning and preparation that was undertaken to achieve the results that you see today.

This year, we operated with over 48,000 tax offices, which is another record for us and nearly double the number of offices from just 5 years ago. We are thanks to have cultivated such strong relationships with our existing tax partners and independent tax offices as well as new ones that have come on board. It is incredibly important to us especially given the competitive nature of the space that they trust our people and the level of service they receive. We hope to inspire financial confidence and empower more people to navigate the tax system with clarity. Tax season can be the most significant financial event of the year for many families. And through our products, we aim to help individuals make informed decisions about their finances.

This focus on empowering taxpayers and delivering transparent solutions drove increased engagement and improved financial performance within tax services. For the 6 months ending March 31, 2026, we increased total tax product revenue by 13%, led by a 13% increase in noninterest income related to refund transfer products and Refund Advance products. Additionally, Refund Advance originations increased by over $200 million this year. This brought total tax services revenue to $96 million. Loss rates on refund advances were also favorable when compared to last year due to our continued work on our underwriting models and data analytics capabilities. This led us to preincome of $62 million for tax services, an increase of 30%. We believe these outcomes reflect our commitment to empowering people and partners through innovative solutions unlocking potential and fueling success for those we serve.

We remain diligently focused on delivering on our strategy of being the trusted platform that enables our partners to thrive. As a reminder, this consists of 5 key focus areas in our fiscal 2026. First, we continue to favor asset rotation in areas where we believe we have a competitive advantage to deliver higher return on assets. With an asset limit of $10 billion to remain below the Durbin amendment exemption, we remain focused on creating balance sheet optionality. This should deliver increasing net interest income without growing the overall asset size and generate sustainable fee income in the form of secondary market revenue. Second, we invest regularly in technology and our run rate to help ensure that our platform undergoes the evolution and scalability needed to support our partners’ growth as they expand their reach with new products and markets.

Third, we believe people and culture are Pathword’s most important assets, which is why I’m very proud to share with you that we once again earned the — great Place to Work certification in 2026 for the fourth year in a row. Our culture is just as important as the outcome of our efforts. At Pather, we are guided by our core values, lead by example, find a better way, help others succeed and dare to be great. These core elements along with our talent anywhere approach is what we believe sets us apart. Fourth, the consultative governance approach we take when it comes to our risk and compliance framework helps our partners manage an area that is often complex and difficult to navigate. We also continue to invest in this area to not only evolve with the regulatory environment, but also allow for scalability with our partners.

Finally, our focus on the client experience is about supporting our partners for greater successes and revenue enablement. Our pipeline remains full, and we are diligently working to bring more partners into the Pathward family and help those that we are already working with the door. We are also happy to announce that in April after the quarter closed, Path word executed a 3-year extension pay, a leading money movement platform. Now I’d like to turn it over to Greg, who will take you through the financials.

Gregory Sigrist: Thank you, Brett. Overall, we are pleased with the financial performance in the quarter. As Brett mentioned, our tax season is off to a great start. This is the product of thoughtful planning and teamwork, and we’re proud of what the team is accomplishing again this year. We’re equally pleased to see growth in Partner Solutions, which I’ll dive into a little deeper in a moment. First, let me start with revenue. As expected, the sale of the consumer finance portfolio back in October did impact net interest income given the elimination of the gross-up accounting for that portfolio. Having said that, our strategy of balance sheet optimization continues to deliver solid results with growth in our core commercial finance business.

Other parts of our strategy have enabled to report solid results in noninterest income, particularly in our tax products as well as in core card and deposit fees. In our consolidated tax services which consist of both our independent tax offices and tax partnerships. We saw an 18% increase in noninterest income from Refund Advance and tax fees and a 7% growth in revenue from refund transfers during the quarter. This is the direct result of significant work to grow this business, increase market share and evolve the underwriting model. CoreCard and deposit fee income, which excludes the servicing fees we earn on custodial deposits grew 22%. We’re seeing a lot of growth through existing partners as well as increasing contributions from new contracts signed last year.

Due to the continued backlog from the first government shutdown, we fell short of our goal range for secondary market revenues but we believe this is primarily a timing impact, and we expect to make up the difference in subsequent quarters. Noninterest expense improved in the quarter, Outside of the impact from the sale of the consumer portfolio, the primary driver was lower card processing expense due to lower rates, partially offset by an increase in compensation and benefits. Given the value we place on our people, we remain committed to investing in them as well as processes and technology, and we were still able to manage expenses well when compared to the prior year quarter. This led to a net income of $72.9 million and earnings per diluted share of $3.35.

Deposits sales on the company’s balance sheet at March 31 were relatively flat versus a year ago. This is consistent with our balance sheet optimization strategy, lower-yielding assets such as securities declined and partner deposits were strong in the quarter. This allowed us to have over $250 million more in average custodial deposits than in the prior year quarter and also generated higher servicing fee income in the quarter. Loans and leases at March 31 grew 9%. Our focus on ensuring we have the right loans on the balance sheet was the primary driver of the increase with a $588 million increase in our core commercial finance business, particularly in renewable energy and structured finance. Additionally, Origination volumes were strong during the quarter with $367 million in commercial finance at yields higher than the March 31 portfolio yield and $945 million in consumer finance.

This represents significant growth versus the same quarter last year, and we were pleased by the growth in consumer finance originations, which was driven by the new contract we announced last year. In Commercial Finance, our loan pipeline remains strong despite timing delays in certain cases stemming from the October 2025 government shutdown. Net interest margin was 6.3% in the quarter. Our adjusted net interest margin was 5.32%, a 23 basis point improvement over the same quarter last year. This was primarily driven by lower rate-related card expenses. Our nonperforming loans saw a modest increase to 2.39%, and our allowance for credit loss ratio on commercial finance increased versus last year. This was driven by a mix of specific reserves and our CECL model which takes into account a number of factors, including the macroeconomic environment as well as portfolio history over time.

Our commercial finance portfolio metrics are being driven by a relatively small number of loans in comparison to our portfolio size and in different verticals. As we’ve mentioned before, we look at our credit metrics to a full year look back. And on March 31, our going 12-month net charge-off rate was at or below the same metric at the end of every quarter in fiscal 2025, and store remains at the low end of our historic range. Lastly, we continue to believe that we are still in a relatively stable credit environment, consistent with the past few quarters. Our liquidity remains strong with $2.7 billion available, and we are extremely pleased with our position at this point in the year. During the quarter, we repurchased approximately 855,000 shares at an average price of $84.15.

This leaves 3.4 million shares still available for repurchase under the current stock repurchase program. This concludes our prepared remarks. Operator, please open the line for questions.

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Operator: [Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Tim Switzer with KBW.

Timothy Switzer: So the first one I had, you guys took Ceska, but you upped to buy back quite a bit this quarter. Relative to what you’ve been doing recently. You still have a good amount of capital, obviously, a high ROE. Is what you did this quarter, is that kind of repeatable for the rest of the year? And what are your other priorities outside of organic growth and repurchases? Are there any other kind of M&A type businesses you’re in discussions with? .

Unknown Executive: Yes, Tim, let me start and Brett may jump in at the end. But I think what you typically see throughout the years, you’re going to see seasonality in that buyback number of shares in the dollar amount. It typically is correlated to our higher earnings quarter. So second quarter is always our highest buyback quarter on a relative basis. I would say, though, that the algorithm for the number of shares we buy early in the quarter does get updated periodically. And I think this quarter in part of it was we took advantage of lower share prices as well. So if it optically looks like we got a little bit ahead, it probably had something to do with that. Obviously, very pleased with where we landed in the quarter on the buybacks, but I think more broadly on the question of capital and capital allocation, I mean I still continue to believe and we continue to believe that the share buybacks are still the highest use of capital at this point in time.

We obviously continue to look at a lot of things, but — and if that changes, we’ll at some point, let you know, but I think it’s still buybacks.

Brett Pharr: Yes. And Tim, it’s Brett. So just sort of on the strategic elements of M&A I mean we’re always looking to see what’s out there. But with our results, we’ve got a pretty high hurdle rate and obvious reasons, we wouldn’t be involved in much of a bank kind of situation. We look for things that you might buy versus build. But we’ve just not seen anything over time to make any sense. So the kind of capital utilization we’re doing is the highest and best use in our mind at this moment. .

Timothy Switzer: And then the other — another question I had, you guys — I remember last quarter, 2 quarters ago, the new programs you guys announced in ’25 would contribute mid- to high single digits to card fees year-over-year, not including some of the new living partnerships you guys have now that we’re a few quarters then, are you guys still on track for that? What have been kind of the puts and takes over the last few months? And where do you think that can go as you head into ’27.

Brett Pharr: Yes. And Greg can talk about specifics as he wants to. But you look at our card fee income year-to-date, that’s part of the increase in the noninterest income. And that’s — we had those deals. We’ve always talked about some of them take time to come on. We’re now seeing the benefit of that come through the noninterest income line. .

Unknown Executive: Yes. But as I said in my prepared remarks, year-over-year, the significant increase versus a year ago is largely organic. But as you would expect and as we talked about, we started to see some of the benefit of the new deals — but it’s all about the speed to revenue. It still takes some time after you’ve signed the deals to — depending upon the product to get those programs live, and get the programs ramped and get them fully loaded. But the guide we gave previously about what that looked like on a fully loaded basis still applies. We still think it’s going to be a measurable increase into next year as those programs fully ramp. .

Timothy Switzer: And then the last one I had, and it might be a little too early to ask the question, and I don’t know if we have enough details, but there’s been a proposed executive order about banks being required to obtain citizenship inflow. And it seems like a tricky situation, I guess, with some of the [indiscernible] banks and like what’s the risk needing to perform that for all the bank accounts you guys have and that comes out that cost? And then I know there’s a lot on your like on the other side of it, is there an opportunity at all for like your prepaid card products, like do we know if those would be required to attain to obtain citizenship into as well?

Brett Pharr: All right, Tim. So let’s get in the weeds just a little bit. Obviously, we don’t what the rules are, right? So that’s part of it. You probably know that for any known owner of account, you have to collect something called CIP. So we already have documentary and nondocument pieces of information about our customers that we’re required to get An exception to that is if it’s unregistered like an unregistered gift card that would not apply, and I would suspect, in this case, it would not apply. But — so we already have the processes in place with our partners to collect the necessary information like that. there’s something else that has to be collected, then we, like everybody else would have to go and do that. But to we know what the rules are, we don’t know what the implications are, but the highways already exist to get that kind of information.

Timothy Switzer: Are you able to tell us maybe like what percent of your deposits or accounts would be part of that funded registered prepaid card business?

Brett Pharr: Yes. So I’m getting the heads that say we don’t disclose that here, right? But you can think about our business, right, in general, the kinds of things we have. And if you’re in the gift card, it doesn’t apply unless they specifically register it. payroll card, obviously, you know who it is. There’s various kinds of things. So we would have it on some and we would not have it on others. .

Unknown Executive: Yes. And I think as we say broadly on just the topic of deposits, it’s a well-diversified deposit base — so it’s going to be different — it’s over time, it evolves and over time as we continue to bring on new partners, it continues to diversify. So hopefully, that helps you.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Joe Yanchunis from Raymond James.

Joseph Yanchunis: So I’d like to start with credit here. And I know you touched on in your prepared remarks, but NPAs ticked higher again this quarter. Can you provide some color on the underlying credits that drove this increase? And I know you often count your workout process, which can take time. So do you have a sense for how much of this bucket was resolved in the quarter?

Brett Pharr: So let me go through a big picture. So you recall, we’ve got different asset classes. We always do collateral managed transactions. So there’s no uncured and we stay out of certain kinds of verticals that we do not think have good collateral attributes over time. We measure these things through cycle, and Greg in his comments even talked about that. You always have some one-offs, right? So you have to go through a workout. Workouts can be short workouts can be long, and they’re uneven as you go through them. So, I don’t know that we could answer the question if there are any been resolved. They’re all consistent with the way that we approach our collateral management program, and we’ve had consistent results with that literally for years that you can trace through — so again, the great comments, I think in his remarks, we’re not seeing anything changing in the credit environment. It’s just one-off stories that happen in various asset classes.

Gregory Sigrist: Yes. And Joe, just to walk you through a few of the is there just broadly on the credit side. You probably saw when you get into it that on the past due side, the 30- to 59-day bucket increase, it went up by about $40 million. That was due to a limited number of loans that frankly came after quarter end. So that kind of factors into this equation, too. So you kind of get back to a more normalized level of past dues in that bucket. And then when you take that into account, overall past dues are pretty moderate. And then when you get — you mentioned the NPL ratio ticked up it did, but then you need to disaggregate that a little bit. When you look at the nonaccrual balances in the earnings release, those nonaccrual balances actually came down about $5 million.

that’s the bucket that had some of the larger loans in it that we’ve been talking about in terms of resolution over the last couple of quarters. What drove the NPL ratio in the quarter though is that greater than 90 days past due and still accruing bucket, which that’s really the broad stuff in a normal course, collateral management and collection piece that Brett is talking about. So it’s a number of just our normal process, a number of smaller loans kind of drove that. So in the quarter, what drove it up was that bucket. Not anything that’s larger in part of the resolution.

Joseph Yanchunis: And then just kind of moving over to the provision, and then we’ll move on to a different topic. So the provision increased pretty materially in this quarter. How much of that increase was due to seasonal tax changes, organic growth versus underlying crises?

Gregory Sigrist: I think the line I focus on the most. I mean I think we isolate the tax services provisioning in the document. I keep coming back to the commercial finance, which I addressed in my prepared remarks, right? Yes, it was a mix of — there’s certainly some specific reserving related to everything we talked about on the NPL side, but it’s also just driven by our normal CECL process. many quarters is driven by increase in the loan book, but this quarter, it was more driven just by looking through and just taking a pragmatic view of where we’re going to land on some of these credits. But with the benefit of looking forward, we still believe this is a very — my word is benign, very stable credit environment. So we’re not seeing anything special in that.

. I think the other thing I pointed to in my prepared remarks, though, was — you’ve heard us say this for quite a few quarters now. We always look at the trailing 12-month NPLs or net charge-offs because that’s a better barometer for this business given how lumpy some of our workouts are and some of our recoveries are — so when you kind of apply that backward-looking 12-quarter view to the net charges this quarter, and frankly, the things driving some of the credit metrics, it’s benign. It’s well within our historic averages.

Brett Pharr: One of the things that’s very important about our asset classes, Joe, is while in some industries, nonperforming loans are a leading indicator and the net charge-offs are a lagging indicator. If you look at the correlation in our book for the past literally decade, that’s not what happens. And so while you have nonperforming loans, they generally tend to be more tightly secured. And even if you get a charge off, you get a recovery. So look at that history through the cycle, and you’ll see our net charge-offs are disconnected from our nonperforming loans.

Joseph Yanchunis: I appreciate that. And I’ll ask one more before hopping back in the queue. So the — you had mentioned, subsequent to quarter end, you reached a contract extension with a partner. And then sorry, I didn’t catch the name during it. Speaking, how the economics change during the recontracting process. I understand that if the partner grows during the contract, you’ll get more volume. But does the recontracting generally result in lower margins?

Brett Pharr: Every contract is different. And there’s a lot of contracts where you trade 1 thing for the other because that’s what the partner wants to do. So the classic example is if there’s deposits involved and somebody wants a higher percentage of what we call contractual card service payments on it, but then we just charge more transaction fees. So the net economics for us are the same. And a lot of it depends on whether they want to take interest rate risk or not. — and we can manage interest rate risk or they can manage it. So there’s always trade-offs. There’s also trade-offs. So if you want a longer, that will probably be better economically if you want it shorter, probably not as good economically. So — that’s a general comment on them.

So every contract negotiation is different, and there’s not a standard sort of book approach to it. And no, we’re not seeing things generally go south on the margin side because that’s and we did this a few years ago. That’s the reason we didn’t do a lot of transactions at 1 point was as the pricing was silly. Now we’re seeing the kind of pricing we want to have.

Gregory Sigrist: And part of that, too, is we feather in the discipline to do risk-adjusted returns every time we do either a new partner or 1 of these renewals. So there’s a pricing team that looks at it to make sure it makes sense, and it’s sensical for us from an overall enterprise perspective.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Manuel Novas from Piper Sandler.

Unknown Analyst: Is there any more color you could add — is there any more color you could add about the partner pipeline — you said it robust? Just anything you could add there?

Brett Pharr: Yes. Well, we’ve been through these last several years where there was a period of time I alluded to it a minute ago, where there were some things that were going on in the industry that we really didn’t want to participate in A lot of that’s gotten washed out. And we’ve started talking in the last year, 1.5 years that is really picking up and it’s actually coming through with contracts. . And yes, our pipeline is very strong. Part of that has to do with our breadth of product approach with our partners, where we’ll do multiple kinds of products with the same partner. And that’s an advantage, I think, we have in the marketplace. We’re continuing to have lots of new opportunities and new partners as well as existing partners bringing on new products and new programs. So pipeline is very strong and part of it is because we think the dynamics and economics have returned back in our favor.

Gregory Sigrist: 22% increase in core card fee income from last year. That in part is new products with existing organic partners. No, I don’t have the numbers to split it out for you. But again, that’s just 1 outward sign that we’re having success with our existing partners doing the multi-threaded approach on the product side, as Brett mentioned, in addition to, as he also mentioned, new partners, new products. So we’re really pleased with where we are right now. .

Unknown Analyst: That’s helpful. Can you speak to there was some loan decline this quarter? I understand some of the seasonality there. How should we think about loan growth going forward? You talk about healthy pipelines in different of your loan lines — can you speak to perhaps the mix of that growth as well going forward as you kind of reset the loan book to how you want it to end up? .

Gregory Sigrist: Let me work backwards on that. I mean I think we like the verticals we’re in. We’ve done some resetting over the last couple of years. We’ve exited a couple of verticals. But when we think about the asset classes that we’re in, we’ve been very purposeful with them. We’ve obviously used a risk-adjusted return approach with looking at credit through the cycle. I think the variance you saw in the quarter, though, was more of a timing issue. On the USDA side, there’s probably a bit of a slowdown in the quarter just related to the government shutdown, the first shutdown with the government, led to some slowdown on the USDA side, but I continue to believe that’s just a timing issue. . When I think about the rest of the asset classes more broadly, I think it’s just more of a timing issue.

I would say our pipelines are very full across the verticals. So when I think about the balance of the year, I tend to focus more on the origination than I do the relative point estimate or average on the loan side. Why? And this goes back to our — the treasury led model and the fact that we’re focused on the balance sheet velocity, which really means we can be down quarter-on-quarter to just because old a lot of stuff purposefully as part of that process. This quarter, I didn’t have anything to do with that, again, because the SDA was — they’re still a little bit groggy, — they’re still a little bit gummed up. But when I think about going forward, I would expect to see some modest continued uptick in the quarters going forward in the products we’re in with an eye toward, again, risk-adjusted returns across the verticals we’re in at this point in time.

Unknown Analyst: I appreciate that. Any near-term guidance on the direction of the NIM, it stepped down on both the full version and then the adjusted level — just kind of how should we think of it going forward on either metric?

Gregory Sigrist: Yes. Adjusted NIM is the 1 I would recommend. It’s the 1 I look to because I believe it’s the more accurate representation of the interest rate risk on our balance sheet. — because it kind of neutralizes for things that are not sitting in net interest expense, the contractual rate related fees we paid to partners on deposits. That one was down in the quarter. But if you kind of go back, I think we have a time sequence some place, it will show you that metric kind of back in time. you tend to always see seasonality in the March quarter because of tax season. The balance sheet grows. And as a result, we tend to do some borrowings, wholesale borrowings at the margin to fund that. We don’t need to fund it 12 months of the year, but we do fund it for 45 to 60 days of the year.

So that tends to cause a little bit of a downtick in the March quarter. Looking ahead though, I mean — and I appreciate you weren’t on last quarter’s call and Emanuel say now, I really appreciate you joining the team here joining the party. I still continue to believe we’re stable to up slightly trending up on the net — adjusted net interest margin. Why? I think we’ve proven even look at the ether metric over the last year, rates are down approaching 100 basis points on last year. The adjusted yield back to the adjusted NIM a year ago were up. And that kind of — I think it’s proof that we’re not sensitive to the short end of the curve. And as we’ve said consistently, we are more sensitive to the middle part of the curve, 3- to 5-year because that’s where we price the fixed rate loans that we do have a price there.

And as importantly, we still have roughly $200 million for the next 12 months in the securities portfolio that we will — it will reprice and it will reprice likely into loans over the horizon. And there’s still a bit of fixed rate loans that were put on before rates released went up in 2022 that are subject to repricing — and that last 1 is becoming a smaller and smaller bucket, but it all leads down the path of, yes, I still believe there’s a most tailwind there for us. I don’t see with the current rate environment, current rate outlook and the mix we’ve got anything that would suggest otherwise.

Unknown Analyst: One last question on the tax season. What’s kind of I know there’s about a month left in terms of what you haven’t reported yet. But like what are some of the learnings that you’re going to apply to next year? Anything on new tax laws, where you can gain market share? — kind of any of the priorities that you think you might set up for the next tax season?

Brett Pharr: Over the last several years, we have really done a good job of focusing on customer service with our — and because of some disruption going on in the marketplace, it’s given us a great opportunity to grab market share. And we would hope we would continue to do the same thing next year. Now this year got quite a boost from the new tax laws and interest in refunds and the size of it and a lot of those kinds of things, and that may not come next year, but we still continue to believe we’re having a better experience for our EROs. And so therefore, we retain more and we’ll be grabbing more in future years. .

Operator: [Technical Difficulty] Your next question comes from the line of Tim Switzer from KBW. Tim your line is open. Please go ahead.

Timothy Switzer: A quick 1 here. There’s obviously been a lot of pullback from some competitors in the banking as a service space due to the regulatory environment. Now that we’re a few years through that, can you quantify — maybe not quantify, but discuss if you’re starting to see more competition coming in? And are there different types of players or more players in the space than they were previously in terms of like this is coming from beyond banks now as you guys also expand your offerings?

Brett Pharr: Yes. So let’s talk about the elephant in the room, right? Which is everybody is going and getting a bank charter right now. I might as well just hit that head on. So generally, in our pipelines, we are not seeing the effect of that. There are those, including some of our partners that are getting charters, but in many cases, they’re getting sort of limited purpose charters and acknowledging to us, they’re going to continue to do things with us. So we think there will be certain cases where people get charters and do that. Those that are going for full national charters, some of those things. there’s a long way between here and then actually getting a bank opened and getting something up and running. So my view is we’re a couple of years out and they’ll probably arrive just in time from what might be the next administration, which will be an interesting experience.

So I think we’ve got a period of time here with runway on pipelines, and we’re not seeing any impact yet from some of those kinds of things. I do believe there will be some that are successful in 2 or 3 years from now, we’ll have some more competitors that are in this space. But we’ve been there before. And it’s 1 of the reasons we’re making sure we’re serving partners well, giving them a wide breadth of product opportunities, which are not easy to duplicate, typically getting longer-term contracts where we can, switching costs are high. And we think that will help us even if we hit another competitive wave that may happen here in a few years.

Timothy Switzer: Interesting. Yes, you did get ahead of my follow-up there on some of your partners going to get. So I got just 1 more here. And I think I asked this a couple of quarters ago, too, but there’s so much movement happening in the space right now. And the current administration is very open to it. Any recent developments you guys can share or talk about your level of interest in partnering with a stable coin or some other digital asset company?

Brett Pharr: Mean we’re in the payments business, so we have to pay attention, right? So we have our own views [indiscernible], how we’re going to deal with that, think about that, et cetera. But we are a partner-led model, and we’re watching our partners. And as our partners come to us, we’re engaging in various things, and that’s not just stable coin. That’s many other different kinds of payment mechanisms that are happening — and so we’ll continue to do that. But we’re watching it and participating in the dialogue, but it’s not the kind of thing we’re announcing, and we’ll watch how our partners lead us. .

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Joe Yanchunis from Raymond James.

Joseph Yanchunis: So a few more questions for me here. So I understand your pipelines — your partner pipeline is pretty full. Cross-selling remains a big opportunity. Over the next, call it, 12, 18 months, do you expect to have more success cross-selling products or signing up new partners.

Brett Pharr: It’s hard to answer that question and a lot of it depends on — I mean we’re going to be doing both, right? New ideas come in, et cetera. When you do a new partner and a new program, ramp-up is slow. There’s no doubt about that. Greg alluded to it earlier, organic growth has been an awful lot of our growth recently, but we’ve got new things coming in. So I don’t know that I could put a 50-50 on or something like that, but it’s — both of them are key parts of our overall strategy. .

Gregory Sigrist: Yes. I’ll answer just from a revenue growth perspective, not even numbers, what’s signed up. And to Brett’s point, I think you always get to even faster with existing partners in part because of just the third-party risk management you have to do once they’re onboarded, it makes a little easier, there’s less. But I think you also typically — when I think about the next 18 months, I still think that you’re going to have a fair amount of revenue growth that are going to come from existing partners, whether that’s cross-selling to your words or multi-threaded to ours, I think when you get out past the 18 months is when you’re still going to have the tailwind from new partners, new products. .

Joseph Yanchunis: And so in that answer, you talked about onboarding partners and how it can be — to take longer for new partners I guess how has the time to onboard a new partner changed over now versus, say, 3 years ago? And I understand you have different products, which might have different times. But just generally speaking, has that speed to market, has that changed at all?

Brett Pharr: We’ve had a focus on speed to market, and that’s part of what we’re doing. Some of that is process improvement. Some of that is — we’re investing in technology and those kinds of things that will help with it. And sometimes, we’re waiting on partners, right? So you’ve got both of those things are going on and you sort of took the words of my mouth, and it depends on the product. There’s a few products you can turn on in a matter of weeks, right? and there’s others that can take quite a while to do it. So it varies, but we have been focused on improving the speed of that. But we just got to remember, third-party delivery, in fact, third-party delivery, and there are frameworks that have to be put in place when you set that up, and that’s an important part of our overall program.

Gregory Sigrist: Yes. And speed to launching is different from speed to revenue because, again, we’re not lifting and shifting programs that exist. These have not been transfers, right? So then you’re then you hold into the partner to actually ramp their programs. And that, again, varies by product. But that’s the other dimension that we work with partners on, but that’s their — the way they manage the program.

Joseph Yanchunis: That’s fair. And on the technology front, I mean, you’re one of the major players in the Bang as a service space — can you talk about value of building your own technology receiving a third-party vendor?

Brett Pharr: Yes. We spend a lot of time talking about that. Part of the issue is that the requirements for this business are fairly unique. And the ability for, say, a service bureau to provide them, there’s not sufficient scale for them to be interested in developing. So we have to do a lot of things ourselves. I have done a lot of things in the past and are rebuilding a lot of things now. The other thing is, and I’ll just kind of go ahead and use the word everybody needs to use, which is AI is being used a lot in our engineering space to help speed up the time to develop various capabilities. . And that makes it even easier for us to build things ourselves internally, and I think that will be a key part of the future. I’m not saying that software service providers are going away. I just think that there will be different kinds of use cases for different things. And the things that are unique to our business, we will likely build ourselves.

Joseph Yanchunis: Okay. And then one more for me here. Just kind of taking a step back and looking at the broader bath space. I mean, what do you view the biggest potential risk to the industry? We have — JPM seems to be focused on small businesses are kind of doubling down on that segment. But I mean, how do you indicate the risk of stay one of the G-SIB starting to target lower end consumers?

Brett Pharr: Yes. I mean one of the key things here for the big banks is there sufficient scale right? And I don’t set that a and I worked for 1 of those at 1 point. So I kind of know the conversations that went on in that space. So I don’t see that happening. I do think as we become less interchange product dependent oriented, which could happen over time, we’ll face different kinds of competition. But again, being small, fast and nimble is something that I think is of great value and is particularly important in this third-party delivery environment. . And so we will have to adapt to change as product desires are coming in from our partners, which we’re doing. It’s why we like that wide breadth of products. But I don’t see 1 of the big banks coming in and trying to take over the low to moderate income or the digital first, very young folks, it’s just not enough scale in it.

Operator: At this time, there are no further questions. I will now hand the call over to Brett Pharr, CEO, for closing remarks.

Brett Pharr: Thank you, everyone, for joining the call today. Have a good evening.

Operator: This concludes today’s call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.

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