Shift4 Payments, Inc. (NYSE:FOUR) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript May 9, 2024
Shift4 Payments, Inc. isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).
Operator: Greetings, and welcome to Shift4 Q1 2024 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Tom McCrohan, Executive Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Thomas McCrohan: Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone and welcome to Shift4’s first quarter 2024 earnings conference call. With me on the call today are Jared Isaacman, Shift4’s Chief Executive Officer; Taylor Lauber, our President and Chief Strategy Officer and Nancy Disman, our Chief Financial Officer. This call is being webcast on the Investor Relations section of our website, which can be found at investors.shift4.com. Today’s call is also being simulcast on XSpaces, formerly known as Twitter, which can be accessed through our corporate Twitter account, @Shift4. Our quarterly Shareholder Letter, quarterly financial results and other materials related to our quarterly results have all been posted to our IR website.
Our call and earnings materials today include forward-looking statements. These statements are not guarantees of future performance and our actual results could differ materially as a result of certain risks, uncertainties and many important factors. Additional information concerning those factors is available in our most recent reports on Forms 10-K and 10-Q, which you can find on the SEC’s website and the Investor Relations section of our corporate website. For any non-GAAP financial information discussed on this call, the related GAAP measures and reconciliations are available in today’s quarterly Shareholder Letter. With that, let me turn the call over to Jared. Jared?
Jared Isaacman: Hey. Thanks, Tom. So, if you’ve already reviewed our earnings letter, then you already know this was a very busy quarter, and there’s an awful lot for us to discuss today. So, we wrapped up a strategic review. We continued to win some of the most coveted enterprise merchants. We added thousands of new SkyTab customers. We cross-sold ticketing to our numerous stadium wins, and we announced a synergy-rich and very attractively-priced acquisition alongside continuing our geographic expansion and delivering reasonably-strong results and record free cash flow. I think the only thing we probably could have done better is help analysts capture the right seasonal cadence of our business. We’re obviously diversifying and growing very quickly.
So, to help with that, we have largely reaffirmed and positively revised our EBITDA and free cash flow guidance, and we broke it out on a quarterly basis for the balance of the year. So, I just said a lot. and I’d like to break it down and expand on it point-by-point. So, with respect to the strategic review, I would encourage you to read my Shareholder Letter if you’d like my complete personal take on the matter. But the bottom line is there was a lot of strategic interest and multiple formal offers materially higher than our present trading price. It should also be obvious that a go-private option is usually available and others have clearly shown that to be the case. However, the go-private option presents clear complexities alongside a competing strategic offers.
And I, of course, always want my interest to be completely aligned with the rest of my fellow shareholders. So now, as the strategic review process progressed, we continued to record some very big wins. And as a result, our price expectations rightfully kept going up. And I imagine after reviewing this quarter’s shareholder presentation, it will be even more obvious why we could never accept an offer that didn’t properly value the trajectory of the business. So, on that note, we did deliver some very big wins. I will go over the full list by vertical shortly. But we signed one of the single largest casino properties in the world, which is Foxwoods, alongside developing a major partnership with one of the largest casino operators in the world.
And we’ll talk more about that soon and we have many more to follow. Our SkyTab growth further accelerated with nearly 9,400 system installs in Q1, which represents a 38% increase quarter-over-quarter. We have continued momentum in our Sports and Entertainment vertical, including notable stadium and ticketing wins for the NFL World Champions, the Kansas City Chiefs. We also announced this quarter the acquisition of Revel, which I’ll speak to a bit later in the prepared remarks. We followed our very important strategic customer into several new international markets, including Albania, Mongolia and soon in several African countries, Fiji and Maldives. And the associated results from all of this met our expectations and set the stage very well for the balance of the year.
So, we generated 50% growth in end-to-end payment volume, 27% growth in gross profit and 32% growth in gross revenue less network fees. We also generated $122 million of adjusted EBITDA, representing 36% year-over-year growth as our margins expanded 150 basis points to 46% versus the corresponding year-ago quarter. Our operating margins expanded despite the margin drag from the acquisitions of Appetize and Finera, both of which negatively impacted our margins by nearly 300 basis points for the quarter. Naturally, as synergies are realized, we expect that drag to disappear and contribute to our ongoing margin expansion targets. Perhaps most importantly, we generated $78.2 million of adjusted free cash flow, which is up 34% versus a year ago.
Our blended spreads also remained stable, coming in at approximately 62 basis points despite considerable volume growth. As mentioned earlier, an area we can — of which we can improve is helping the analyst community better model the seasonal cadence of our business. Q1 typically represents the seasonally slowest quarter of the year and 2024 has followed that pattern. Now, if you recall, the Q1 of last year benefited from growing over an omicron depressed Q1 of 2022. That aside, we also know we are diversifying into many new verticals and growing quickly, which makes modeling challenging at times. So, to help with that, we are providing quarterly guidance for the balance of the year to include positive revisions to EBITDA and free cash flow conversion.
Our guidance does not include the recently-announced acquisition, but does account for the accelerating organic growth that we have great visibility into, as well as expense discipline and efficiency gains. From here, I intend to provide the usual double-click by vertical to include our progress internationally, as well as more insights into our recent M&A activity. Now, starting with our core, which, as a reminder, is composed primarily of restaurants, hotel and specialty retail, once again, contributed meaningfully to our growth. We are uniquely advantaged to win hotels and resorts with our 550 plus strong software integration library, including industry-leading business intelligence tools and ever-expanding geographic coverage. With restaurants, we have a very powerful and growing distribution network that includes both our direct sales team and authorized partners.
We are advantaged as we see, really, Toast and SkyTab as the only modern cloud POS offerings capable of servicing table service restaurants at scale. We further believe we have a more effective and lower-cost development and go-to-market strategy, which in turn delivers a lower overall cost of service for our customers. Now specifically, with restaurants, we signed many notable brands to our platform and set new records with SkyTab installations. We signed chains such as Pizza Twist, a growing chain of Indian-inspired pizza with locations throughout the U.S. and Canada, diverse concepts, a professional restaurant management company with seven restaurant concepts and Four Top Hospitality Group, a multi-concept independent restaurant group with 15 locations across the Southeast.
We also signed Grape Street Cafe and Wine Bar with two locations in Las Vegas and Summerlin; VESSEL, located in historic repurposed Lutheran Church in Mid-City New Orleans, the infamous Hog’s Breath Saloon in Key West, Florida and the award-winning Union League Cafe directly across the street from Yale University, which recently celebrated 30 years in business. In the U.S., our SkyTab production accelerated with approximately 9,400 system installs during the recent quarter. Our cloud-based, feature-rich and low-cost restaurant solution continues to resonate with restaurants. In April, we launched SkyTab Business Intelligence, which is a reporting and analytics platform that is free to SkyTab POS customers. This follows the launch of our AI website builder last quarter.
We’ve released many modules, as indicated in our shareholder presentation and we don’t charge for any of them. We don’t believe there is a restaurant out there that is excited to pay POS companies for more modules and instead prefer a lower overall cost of service. So, on that note, we believe our SkyTab POS offering offers the most compelling value proposition in the market with a total cost of ownership that is extremely competitive versus comparable solutions. At the current Q1 run rate, we are on pace to exceed our goal of 30,000 system installs of SkyTab for 2024. Now, outside the United States, our team is building awareness of the SkyTab POS Product in the United Kingdom and Ireland, and continues to sign up new restaurants, including Souvlaki, located within London’s West End and within walking distance of the Prince Edward Theatre.
We also signed Ram’s Restaurant, just outside of London City limits. Further, we are really excited to have been awarded the online ordering for Pizza Hut in Spain and Portugal. And these early international strides, organic product investments alongside our M&A strategy, inspires confidence in our goal to assign 10,000 new restaurant and hotel customers, specifically in Europe and Canada before the year end. Now turning to hotels. we had a record quarter of major signings. And as alluded to earlier in my prepared remarks, we developed a partnership with one of the largest casino operators in the world that we plan to speak to later this year, as well as signing one of the single largest casino properties in the world, the largest in North America, which is Foxwoods.
We also signed Ho-Chunk Casino Hotel; a Native American hotel chain located in Wisconsin. In addition to these major casino wins, we had a record quarter of gateway conversions. We signed The Ranch at Rock Creek, which is a Montana based 5-star rated luxury spa and dude ranch; Sunseeker Resort on Florida’s Gulf Coast and Acme Hospitality and Operator’s several hotels and multiple award-winning restaurants throughout California. We also signed Tropical Beach Resorts, a collection of boutique hotels in Siesta Key, the River Street Inn, located in Savannah’s historic River Street the Eddy Taproom & Hotel, which is a boutique hotel located in Golden, Colorado; Brasada Hospitality, which is an upscale resort located in central Oregon’s Cascade Mountains and Mohonk Mountain House, a national historic landmark and resort located in the Hudson Valley of New York State.
Our expansion into Canada is also going well and we signed hotels including the Halcyon Hot Springs Resort, which is a spa resort located in British Columbia; Fairways Hotel on the Mountain, which is a golf resort in the mountains of the capital city of Victoria; Coastal Hotels, which is an operator of multiple Canadian hotels and the Lac Le Jeune [ph], which is a hotel that’s located on the shores of beautiful Lac Le Jeune in Canada. In Europe, we also signed Leonardo Hotels, which is a European brand with hundreds of locations throughout Europe and in the UK. And our business development pipeline for European hotel prospects is building very, very quickly. Now, in specialty retail, we signed Russell Stover, which just celebrated its 100th anniversary and Ledson Winery, which is a fifth generation family-owned winery located in the heart of Sonoma Valley.
We also expanded our relationship with Goodwill Industries and will serve as a primary payment processor for their three new Goodwill stores, which opened in Puerto Rico. In Europe, we entered into an agreement to process payments for our online beauty retailer Luxplus, a card present payments provider in Southern Europe’s EV charging network, Aliante and card acquiring services for the digital banking platform, OneMoneyWay. We are also enabling merchants to accept digital wallets such as PayPal, Venmo and Cash App in Europe through a partnership with FOSS. We entered into agreements to provide card-acquiring services for Bravo Tours, which is a Danish online travel agent, as well as Sweden’s DentFriends, which is a network of hundreds of dental clinics and signed a partnership agreement with a couple European PSPs, Paydar and Fabric, which service merchants in the Netherlands, Italy, Spain and the UK.
Moving on to new verticals. Now, in sports and entertainment, we continue to add ticketing volume with our existing clients and successfully migrate Appetize customers onto the Shift4 VenueNext platform. So, we were awarded ticketing from the Kansas City Chiefs, the Chicago White Sox and the Minnesota Vikings. Now, the Vikings and White Sox represented a ticketing upsell to an existing stadium customer. We also converted American Airlines Center, home of the Dallas Mavericks and Dallas Stars, to our platform and signed University of Oklahoma, University of Utah and University of Nebraska, the last of which we will also be powering, ticketing for via our partnership with Paciolan. We also recently hosted an investor event at Yankee Stadium, highlighting one of our largest VenueNext installations that was also a conversion from Appetize.
We signed payment processing agreements with several convention centers, including the Boston Convention Center, all of which were legacy Appetize customers. Now, in Minor League Baseball, we entered into ticketing and concession deals with 10 additional Minor League Baseball stadiums, increasing our total roster to approximately 60 Minor League Baseball teams that are Shift4 customers. And we are really excited to announce two European stadium wins, including the famous FC Barcelona alongside Exeter City and our strategic partnership with FC Barcelona includes deploying a comprehensive technology and payment stack to their iconic new stadium, Spotify, Camp Nou. I often remind investors when we are asked about the organic growth profile of the business or revenue acceleration, to think about literally the dozens of major wins that, I just talked about just now alongside every other quarter.
I mean, we are literally powering the best experiences at the coolest venues from the Super Bowl to the Rolling Stones. And these caliber of merchants are not selecting Shift4, because we were somehow a fraction of a penny less expensive. It’s because the commerce-enabling solution we are providing is the best fit for their business. So, continuing on with new verticals to non-profits, the first quarter should actually be a seasonal low. We are, in fact, seeing the Giving Block transaction volume and donations up quarter-over-quarter, which we estimate will lead to year-over-year growth in excess of 400%. We entered into inspiring collaboration with Cabrini Mission Foundation to power meaningful change through crypto philanthropy. The Cabrini Mission Foundation embodies the spirit of St. Francis Xavier Cabrini, the patron saint of immigrants, and her story continues to resonate notably on the big screen.
We’ve taken our first steps with key integration partners such as Giving Game and Give Lively. These integrations and others to come will dwarf our efforts to process for individual non-profits, unlocking opportunities to process for tens of thousands of charities. Outside of direct relationships with major organizations like St. Jude, these integration partnerships will be the drivers of our success in the non-profit sector. Beyond traditional credit card and crypto volume, we also continue to make tremendous progress growing our market share, processing alternative donation methods for non-profit organizations via the Giving Block, such as stocks and donor advisory fund grants. This quarter, we signed large charities like the Jewish Community Foundation, the Catholic Charity Fund and expanded our relationship with the American Heart Association.
In other new verticals like travel, gaming and Sexy Tech, we signed Grand Canyon Airlines, the oldest aerial tour operator providing sightseeing tours for the Grand Canyon. In gaming, we are now live with SkyTab mobile devices at our first BetMGM Sportsbook locations, National Stadium in Washington D.C., and next month, we will be live at the Cincinnati Reds Stadium. We expect to be live in all 24 BetMGM Sportsbook locations across nine states by the end of this year. SkyTab devices are also being integrated with Passport technology to enable various cashless gaming experiences on the casino floor at casinos such as the Morongo Casino outside of Palm Springs. Separately, we signed several new online gaming clients during the quarter, including launching more states with lotto.com in Nebraska, Florida and Arizona for state lottery.
We signed Prime Sports Betting, an online sports betting platform currently operating in Ohio, New Jersey, and Kentucky, and Kentucky is actually soon to follow. And lastly, 10:10 Gaming, an online gaming and sweepstakes site blending social media with slot and casino type games. We also went live with Rolling Rich’s during the quarter, which is now Live Crossing on Shift4. In Sexy Tech, we teamed up with unified business-to-business commerce platform Pepperi to offer buyers on their platform a more efficient and convenient way to pay. Pepperi powers the front and back office for over 1,000 B2B e-commerce merchants in over 70 countries. We signed a payment processing agreement with VinSeeker [ph], which provides consumers and businesses the most comprehensive vehicle history reports in the industry.
Perhaps most exciting, we continue to grow volume very quickly with our large strategic e-commerce customer and have organically expanded into several new countries that I mentioned earlier. We’ve also built on our various domestic and international EV partnerships, including an undisclosed, but personally a very special collaboration to support new restaurant concepts at EV charging locations. Now internationally, as mentioned throughout our call, we are executing on our strategy to follow our important strategic customer all over the world and then bring all the products and integrations and services into those markets that made us so successful in the USA. We have signed notable restaurants, hotels, e-commerce and Sexy Tech’s providers all over Europe and even into Canada.
We feel confident we are well on our way to achieving our 2024 goal of 10,000 restaurants and hotels signed in just international markets, in addition to the 30,000 systems goal we are on pace to exceed in the USA. Now, with respect to M&A to accelerate our growth, especially in the restaurant vertical and international markets, we’ve announced a really exciting acquisition of Revel this quarter. This deal very much follows our playbook of achieving a lower customer acquisition cost, enhancing distribution to accelerate growth in a core vertical alongside talent and other synergies. And Taylor will go over this further in just a bit. So, in closing, for those familiar with the Shift4 story over the last few years, it’s probably not much of a surprise that we’ve been frustrated from time-to-time with the lack of appreciation in the public markets.
It seems like we are always battling one theory after the next to try and explain away our outperformance. And at times, it feels our competitors always get the benefit of the doubt, be that the fastest-growing single vertical players that lack our diversification or profitability profile, or the slower growing competitors that ran out of good ideas or those that will go private at a two or three turn EBITDA premium to our present valuation. Meanwhile, we have the best customers in the most desirable verticals, growing faster than just about anyone else and riding several advantages that make it easier and more affordable for us to win while constantly improving the profitability profile of the business. To put a finer point on it, we’ve grown EBITDA 7x since our IPO and yet Shift4 is only 1.6 times more valuable, all while being more diversified and with a much better economic backdrop than a global pandemic.
And on that note, I don’t know why the long-term weighing machine hasn’t quite kicked in yet, but I do believe those that continue to bet against us are going to quickly be running out of stories to tell as ultimately performance and especially free cash flow prevail. Finally, if you only follow us through earnings, you may think we love celebrating all our wins. and I certainly read a lot of them on this call. That actually couldn’t be further from the truth. We are obligated, maybe more so than many other companies to promote and defend our accomplishments. But day-to-day and in the boardroom, I can assure you, we spend all of our time on the things we don’t do well, our shortcomings and inefficiencies. In fact, I believe it’s our relentless focus on our inadequacies that feel so much of our momentum.
All of our employees know this and we need to embrace ownership, challenge the status quo, delete old and costly parts, proceduralize and automate to the extent possible and always execute with urgency. That is the Shift4 way. And with that, I will hand it over to Taylor.
Taylor Lauber: Thank you, Jared and good morning, everyone. The current operating environment is reasonably favorable for us. While we began the year with some headwinds in same-store sales, merchants exited the quarter roughly flat on same-store sales from a year ago. Merchants also continue to seek out technology that helps streamline the commerce experience. The persistent uncertainty around the consumer spending actually helps steer them towards solutions like ours, which eliminate multiple vendors and help save money. We are also advantaged from a capital perspective and can invest in our business at a time when many competitors are pulling back. I’ll talk more about how we’re allocating capital in a moment. We spent much of Q1 focused on M&A integration.
As seen in our recent press releases and earnings material, our approach to sports and entertainment is resonating well with Appetize customers. As Jared mentioned, we recently had the opportunity to host investors at a Yankee’s game, which was a former Appetize customer and is now using our VenueNext Technology and shift4 payments throughout the state. Our ability to deliver world-class technology into complex environments quickly and in a way that delivers meaningful value for our margins is just one of the reasons we move decisively when M&A opportunities like this present themselves. Similarly, the Finaro business is now operationally and technically integrated into Shift4. You will find numerous examples of European restaurants, hotels and stadiums, who have recently chosen shift4 in our earnings material.
All of which would not be possible without the capabilities brought to us via the Finaro acquisition. Contrary to popular myths, these integrations do not distract from our ability to continue to seek out new growth opportunities. When M&A is done right, everyone knows the playbook from the day of closing and is working expeditiously to achieve combined goals. This includes unlocking revenue synergies, deleting unnecessary parts and repurposing personnel, which is evidenced by the margin expansion we’ve delivered while investing in the business. In that theme, we also continue to invest in our SkyTab product and payment platform, and added thousands of new merchants ranging from SMBs to the largest hospitality enterprises in the quarter. This combination of winning products, a large distribution network, economic advantages and volatile capital markets continues to create excellent capital allocation opportunities for us.
As a reminder, we generally allocate capital across four major priorities: product innovation, customer acquisition, share repurchases and M&A, which can dramatically accelerate our strategy as noted previously with the acquisition of Appetize. In our Shareholder Letter this morning, we laid out this framework along with our growth capital deployed over the last five years. Note that this strategy has resulted in adjusted EBITDA growing seven-fold over the last five years as Jared mentioned earlier. While we are proud of our track record, we also recognize that our work is never done. And we’ll spend a few minutes on how we are positioning ourselves for the year and years ahead. To be frank, we see more interesting capital allocation opportunities than we could reasonably pursue, which is a really fun challenge.
There is still much work to be done in delivering our products across Europe and the rest of the world. Our M&A pipeline is full of compelling opportunities in every flavor we like, capability and geography enhancements, low-customer acquisition costs take out the parts, et cetera. We also can’t ignore our equity as one of the easiest investments we can make at current trading multiples. In that vein, you will see we announced our intention to acquire Rebel POS for $250 million this morning. And while I can’t comment at length given a few steps we need to complete before closing, this is a playbook we execute very well and we’re excited to talk about our plans for the business. Should the transaction close by July 1st, we would anticipate a roughly $15 million EBITDA contribution during the remainder of the year and a more substantial EBITDA growth in 2025.
But of course, we’ll update you, all again, when the transaction closes. In terms of other capital allocation priorities, our strategic review and M&A have prevented us from being an active buyer of our equity in recent quarters, which has been frustrating. Similar to 2021 and 2022, we see our equity as highly attractive at current multiples and have announced the larger $500 million repurchase authorization as a result and are implementing an ongoing repurchase plan to take advantage of the dislocation in our equity value. As always, you should expect us to balance this with the priorities I mentioned previously and also our leverage profile so as to maintain short, medium and long-term profitable growth and free cash flow generation. And with that, I’ll turn the call over to Nancy to discuss our financial results.
Nancy Disman: Thanks, Taylor and good morning, everyone. We delivered another quarter of solid results in line with our expectations, demonstrating again, our ability to deliver top-line growth, while continuing to drive margin expansion and strong free cash flow conversion. Total Q1 volume of $33 billion grew 50% year-over-year. Gross revenue less network fees grew 32% to $264 million. Our adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $122 million, up 36% and adjusted EBITDA margins were 46%. Excluding the impact of the legacy Finaro and Appetize businesses, margins expanded nearly 450 basis points. Our quarterly results were driven by the continued strength of our hospitality and restaurant verticals, momentum across our enterprise merchants, including new verticals, further monetization and conversions of gateway customers and increasingly large contribution from stadiums and ticketing.
The blended spread for the first quarter was 62 basis points, in line with our expectations and consistent with our full-year guidance for spreads to average 60 basis points. While the evolution of our business has been significant since the IPO and certainly over the last 12 months to 18 months as we have moved up market, and diversified our verticals, we believe we are approaching a floor of 60 basis points that we expect to hold for the balance of the year. Any deviation from this will likely be a function of volume outperformance. It is worth noting that the spreads across our core business of restaurant hospitality and specialty retail remain stable. Gateway revenue decreased sequentially in the quarter, reflecting the continued success of our Gateway Sunset initiative.
The remaining gateway conversion population currently represents less than three basis points of spread. This highlights the magnitude of the remaining opportunity ahead of us. Subscription and other revenue in Q1 was up 45%, compared to the same period last year, driven in part by the success we are having in sports and entertainment and with SkyTab, and the restaurant vertical overall. Restaurant SaaS was up 55%. In total, you’ll see that Q1 subscription and other revenue of $52 million, was down sequentially from Q4, reflecting our continued success of converting Appetize and software only clients to acquiring and the timing of one-time hardware revenue. This also serves as a good opportunity to remind investors that we often blow up the legacy revenue model of our acquisitions and pivot them towards our signature shift4 payment field’s value proposition.
In Q1, total general and administrative expenses increased 25% year-over-year to $107 million, driven by the impact of the acquisitions completed in Q4. We remain highly-committed to a disciplined approach to cost management, while continuing strategic investment for growth. Our goal of keeping overall headcount flat while investing in talent upgrades remains in place. We are quickly progressing on the overhaul of our operating model, which will further drive efficiency and scalability across our platform. As a reminder, stock-based compensation expense of $23 million is higher in Q1 than other quarters as has been customary due to the timing of our annual rewards. Our first quarter adjusted EBITDA margins were 46%, representing over 150 basis points of expansion compared to Q1 2023.
As I previously just mentioned, but worth saying again, excluding the impact of acquisitions, margins actually expanded nearly 450 basis points. We have high conviction on the many opportunities to further improve margins that are still on the horizon, including remaining M&A synergies, utilization of AI technology, implementation of new internal systems and the ongoing streamlining efforts to enhance scalability throughout our business operations. Our adjusted free cash flow in the quarter was $78 million representing an adjusted free cash flow conversion of 64%, well above our current full-year guidance. As a reminder, there will be fluctuations in our conversion rates on a quarterly basis due to the seasonality of our business, the timing of interest payments and the deployment of capital to support growth.
But the improvement in our unit economics and operating model give us confidence in our ability to deliver annual year-over-year expansion in our conversion rate. Net income was $28.5 million for the first quarter. Diluted earnings per Class A and Class C share was $0.31. Adjusted net income for the quarter was $50.5 million or $0.54 per A&C share on a diluted basis on a 93 million average fully diluted shares outstanding. Our balance sheet remains strong and as of the end of the quarter, we have approximately $700 million of available liquidity. Our total indebtedness has a weighted average cost of 1.35% and we do not have any maturities until December 2025. Our net leverage at quarter-end was approximately 2.4 times. Our strong balance sheet growing EBITDA and expanding free cash flow afford us many options to fund strategic priorities, opportunistically buyback stock and satisfy year-end 2025 maturities without being punitive to our equity.
Now, turning to guidance. For full-year 2024, we are tightening our guidance range for end-to-end volume and now expect a range of $167 billion to $175 billion, representing 53% to 61% year-over-year growth. We are also increasing the low end of our adjusted EBITDA range and now expect adjusted EBITDA to be in the range of $640 million to $675 million, representing 72 basis points of year-over-year margin expansion at the midpoint, which includes the drag from acquisitions. We are also increasing our adjusted free cash flow conversion expectation to 60% from 58% previously, which yields $395 million of adjusted free cash flow for full-year 2024 at the midpoint of our adjusted EBITDA guidance. Our expectations for gross revenue less network fees remain unchanged.
And as mentioned on our last earnings call, we expect organic growth of gross revenue less network fees to be north of 25%. We are also providing a quarterly breakdown of our annual guidance to help investors better understand the impact of seasonality on our business, which can be found on Page 19 of our Shareholder Letter. A couple of call-outs as it pertains to our guidance, we continue to expect a stronger second half in 2024 due to factors, I will elaborate on in a minute and secondly, our full year and quarterly guidance do not include any contribution from Revel. Once we receive the customary approvals, we will update our guidance at that time. There are several things to note relating to our guide. First, I would like to highlight several initiatives that contribute to growth accelerating through the back half of the year.
While most of these points should be obvious by simply reviewing the numerous wins featured each quarter, it is worth emphasizing. SkyTab system installs continue to accelerate each quarter and we are ahead of schedule on our 30,000 goal for 2024. Many of the wins featured each quarter, especially stadiums and related ticketing opportunities, major enterprise resorts go live several quarters after the announcement. We are particularly fortunate to have won several multi-billion dollar opportunities in the hospitality industry that we expect to contribute meaningfully to the back half of this year. 2024 marks the first year, we are really able to offer our services in Canada and across Europe, and early traction in both hotels and restaurants, including this quarter’s Leonardo Hotels announcement, are confidence inspiring.
Our strategic e-commerce customer continues to add volume quickly and we have been expanding organically into several new international markets that Jared discussed with strong visibility into the back half of the year. The low end of our guide contemplates modest headwinds in consumer spending, during which we are confident we can continue to deliver best-in-class growth among our peer set. On that note, it’s worth pointing out that we have been very pleased with same-store sale recovery data we have observed in April. Next, the high end of our guide implies a continuation of recent trends in both, our growth and consumer spending, as well as several appropriately-weighted international expansion initiatives. And finally, while the midpoint of our guide implies modest margin expansion, excluding the impact of legacy Finaro and Appetize, margins are expanding meaningfully in 2024.
And to reiterate the impact of Revel is not included in the guide. Before turning the call back to Jared, I want to reiterate that our balance sheet, cash generation and profitable growth position us incredibly well for the current environment of macro uncertainty. With that, let me now turn the call back to Jared.
A – Jared Isaacman: Thanks, Nancy. Okay. This was a long one. So, a lot of ground covered a lot of good wins. Before we go to the analyst Q&A, we did say we were going to select one or two questions from our — from x. So, first one’s from Jared Block. From one Jared to another, why did a deal not close to be acquired? Was it valuation? Do you see that a possible acquisition could happen in the near future? Jared, thanks for the question. I mean, this is really what I dedicated my whole kind of opening letter to in the shareholder note. I tried to give, like the full play by play. There was a lot of strategic interest. And once you have strategic interest, that means, really anything from, like a go-private perspective has to be sidelined.
And I think, look rightfully, price expectations kept going up, because we knew all about these wins. And the market reacted the way they did over the last month. Analyst notes come out the way they do indicating potential price ranges, and that’s what a good independent board and special committee looks at, to make determinations. Do I see a possible acquisition in the future? Look, I mean, a part of my letter was to say, like we’re very focused on our executing on our plan. We outlined our plan and the associated results. That said long-term, I mentioned like, I don’t see my grandkids running a payments business someday. The idea is to make so many problems and create so much frustration for our competition that at some point, they make the problem go away.
I have no idea what that timeframe will look like. Also, just getting real meet quickly Krishna and Mohammed, I think this is like the third quarter in a row that we’ve taken one of your questions. But you have good ones. So, how has the expansion outside of North America been progressing? Stadium, SkyTab’s et cetera. Has Shift4 been able to execute its playbook as expected? Are you facing any significant challenges during the expansion? Look, I mean, I don’t know. We probably rattled off like a 100 names, this quarter, which for everyone’s awareness is not the complete list of our wins for the quarter even though it may have sounded like it, including a number in Canada and Europe, which we’ve never talked about before, because we never could.
I mean, I draw attention specifically to Leonardo Hotels. I mean, that’s several hundred locations. I mean that’s a fantastic proof point, but we listed hotels in Canada, of which we had billions. We have billions of gateway volume in Canada that we’ve never been able to pursue up until this past, quarter or two. So, I’d say traction is great. SkyTab is going really well. Really, we’ve put into our guide. We’ve put some investments in around the middle of the year to kind of ramp up some of our distribution across Europe, because this is really going to be just a distribution game. How we go out, how we go to market to get SkyTab in front of a lot of restaurants. But we are able to have immediate impact just from the hundreds of third-party integrations we have that already accounted for the European market, whether that’s Oracle, Microsoft and Agilisys.
We’re able to kind of hit the ground running pretty quick there. So, all in all, pretty happy with our international expansion right now. So, thanks for those two questions from X. And we will go to the analysts.
Operator: Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Our first question today comes from Darrin Peller of Wolfe Research. Please proceed with your question.
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