On Tuesday, Flywire (NASDAQ:FLYW) discussed first-quarter financial results during its earnings call. The full transcript is provided below.
Benzinga APIs provide real-time access to earnings call transcripts and financial data. Visit https://www.benzinga.com/apis/ to learn more.
The full earnings call is available at https://edge.media-server.com/mmc/p/ohtmu84q/
Summary
Flywire reported strong financial performance for Q1 2026, with total revenue reaching $184 million, up 43% year-over-year, driven by significant growth in education, travel, healthcare, and B2B segments.
The company is executing a multi-year strategy to achieve $1 billion in revenue, emphasizing complex, multi-currency, and multi-method payment solutions, which are expanding its addressable market.
Flywire’s strategic priorities include optimizing its core platform, accelerating revenue growth, deepening workflow ownership, and leveraging AI to enhance operational efficiency.
Notable operational highlights include vendor consolidation trends, geographic diversification, and successful integration of Certify’s hospitality solutions.
Management raised full-year guidance, expecting 18-24% FX-neutral revenue growth and increased EBITDA margins, supported by a strong start to the year and continued investment in AI and data infrastructure.
Full Transcript
OPERATOR
Good day and welcome to Flatwire’s first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. At this time all participants are in listen only mode. After the speaker’s presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question, please press star11 on your touchtone telephone. Please note this call is being recorded. I would like to turn the call over to Masha Khan, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Masha Khan (Investor Relations)
Thank you and good afternoon. With us today are Mike Massaro, Chief Executive Officer, Rob Orgel, President and Chief Operating Officer and Cauzman Tirigoi, Chief Financial Officer. Our first quarter 2026 earnings press release, supplemental presentation and when filed Form 10Q are available at ir.flywire.com Today’s call is being recorded and will be available for replay on our website. During the call we’ll be discussing certain forward looking information. Actual results could differ materially from those contemplated by these statements. In addition, unless otherwise indicated, all financial measures discussed on this conference call are non GAAP financial measures. Please refer to our press release and SEC filings for more information on the risks related to forward looking statements and the required reconciliations of non GAAP financial measures. With that, I’ll turn the call over to Mike.
Mike Massaro (Chief Executive Officer)
Thank you Masha and thanks to everyone for joining us here today. It was a great quarter with significant growth and a beat on both the top and bottom line with broad based outperformance across education, travel, healthcare and B2B. We are building for scale while driving efficiencies into our operations. Our product and tech organization continues to generate high quality, high value differentiated products and services and our go to market teams continue to sign meaningful enterprise deals while also landing and expanding across our global client base. We are executing against our multi year strategy to deliver 1 billion in revenue with impressive financial metrics and I want to spend a moment on why those metrics keep improving. We go where others are unable or unwilling to go. Most companies are built for simplicity. Ours is built for complexity. Multi currency, multi method, multi rail, deeply integrated sector specific payments and software at scale. This is what Flywire is built for.. Every new payment method, every new regulatory layer, every new integration only strengthens our differentiated position. The harder the workflow the fewer companies can follow and that is exactly where we specialize. This is what defines our moat. We have proven the thesis and the execution continues to improve. We are signing larger clients, growing volumes and product attach rates within existing relationships. Our momentum is yet another proof point when clients stay, expand and refer others to Flywire. The market is telling you clearly our model works and the total Addressable market continues to expand 3 years ago Flywire was primarily a cross border payments provider. Today we serve the full suite of domestic and payment flows across major geographies and in education alone. That expansion has grown our addressable market roughly tenfold. Many of our existing clients are still cross border only, moving them towards processing 100% of their payment volume through Flywire is a growth engine that lives within our install base independent of macro conditions. Let me walk you through four priorities, each designed to build long term value. First, optimizing and strengthening the core platform. The most important thing to understand about our platform is that it gets more efficient as it scales. As payment volume grows, our routing intelligence improves, banking relationships deepen, cost per transaction declines. This is not static infrastructure, it is a network that becomes more valuable with every new corridor, every new client and every new additional dollar of volume we process. To put that in concrete terms, our payment platform today moves well over $30 billion per year, adds value to clients in more than 50 countries and accepts payments from 240 countries and territories. That scale funds better banking relationships, better routing economics and better localized experiences than a smaller platform can replicate. More volume improves the network. A better network attracts more clients, more clients deepen the integrations and deeper integrations make us harder to displace and every capability we build, whether in education, travel, B2B or healthcare becomes part of our shared platform designed to compound across every vertical. Our second priority is accelerating our revenue flywheel. We are seeing clear acceleration across our go to market motion. We are seeing bigger deals, more enterprise wins and time to signature is decreasing across every vertical. Clients get more more conversion, more AR visibility, more staff time on high value work and less of everything that slows them down. Fewer payment failures, less reconciliation burden, less bad debt, less inbound questions. That ROI is what drives retention and retention drives expansion. Our land and expand strategy drives gross profit growth and paired with very low revenue churn across education and travel. It reflects a platform that once adopted becomes foundational infrastructure for our clients. Our third priority is innovating to deepen our ownership of critical workflows. What keeps clients with us is not just the payment, it is everything Flywire does around it. The software, the workflow, the visibility, the operational efficiency. We are continuously expanding our software platform to reduce operational burden and strengthen revenue management for our clients. This quarter in education alone, we enhanced our solution capabilities to better automate student communications, improve due date visibility and scaled our US loan disbursements for UK institutions. Similar innovation is happening across every vertical in healthcare travel B2B we are removing the complex workflows that our clients have managed manually for years. Clients trust Flywire with their most critical workflows and look to us to deliver new products, features and payment methods. One of our key moats is the network of integrations, compliance infrastructure and operational connections around the transactions embedded into ERP systems, bank networks and systems of record in ways that are genuinely hard to displace. As payment complexity increases, our relevance grows because clients do not want to solve orchestration, reconciliation and compliance themselves. They want a trusted platform that absorbs that and streamlines operations for them. That is exactly what Flywire does and our fourth and last priority. AI is an enabler for Flywire, not a threat. AI increases the value of whoever owns the workflow and the data. At Flywire, we own both. Generic AI solutions do not have our transactional data across education, healthcare, travel and B2B. They cannot replicate our deep ERP integration and our regulatory licensing or the years of client specific behavior data that underpin what we do. So as AI becomes more powerful as a category, we believe our position becomes more valuable to our clients, not less. We are also already seeing internal AI benefits emerge in our cost structure and the opportunity ahead is significant. We’ve seen approximately 40% of customer inquiries auto resolved without human intervention with 30% reduction in support, handling time and cost per contact. We are also seeing faster onboarding thanks to AI assisted implementations that increase throughput without a linear increase to headcount across the business. The impact is broad engineering teams shipping code faster, product teams innovating more quickly and incorporating client feedback more rapidly and a finance team automating routine analysis so they can focus on higher judgment work. These improvements are already happening even while we continue our enterprise wide digital transformation, re architecting not just our underlying operating systems and data, but also our organization processes and ways of working end to end with an agentic AI future in mind. The winners in an AI driven world will be platforms that own the workflow, the data and the client relationships, delivering results in doing so more efficiently than ever. That is the future of Flywire. So let me leave you with what defines Flywire. We run toward complexity. We operate a network of global and local payment methods coupled with regulatory expertise all around the world. We manage the deep software integrations that most payment companies cannot build and most software companies cannot operate. We have built the capability, the team and the infrastructure to go exactly where others cannot or will not follow. We focus on underserved large industries, education, travel, health care and B2B which have massive addressable markets with long term structural growth tailwinds. These are not cyclical bets. They are durable expanding opportunities and Flywire is built to capture them at scale and we deliver innovative technology paired with exceptional client service, removing complexity for our clients so they can focus on their mission while fundamentally improving how they get paid. Flywire is uniquely positioned to do this. Our industry leading software, our global payments platform and our flymates, genuine experts in the industries we serve who execute every day to deliver real outcomes for our clients. That combination is rare. It is hard to replicate. It is what gives us confidence in where Flywire is headed. Rob will now take you through the further evidence of what I’ve described, the wins, the GO lives and the client outcomes that are compounding into durable growth. Rob thanks Mike.
Rob Orgel (President and Chief Operating Officer)
The pattern across our business is consistent. We go where payment workflows are fragmented and operationally intensive, we embed deeply and we expand as clients consolidate more of their financial operations onto our platform. Let me walk you through three themes that defined Q1 strategic vendor consolidation of these workflows, geographic diversification beyond traditional markets and accelerated software led monetization across travel B2B and beyond. Let me start with vendor consolidation. Clients are choosing to consolidate fragmented financial workflows onto a single trusted platform. We are leveraging this dynamic across our verticals and the reason we win is that we are the only platform that can handle all the complex workflows they need. As an example, Cornell University has committed to a long term agreement for our full student financial software suite. Cornell is a large institution, tens of thousands of students, significant international enrollment, multiple funding sources including sponsor billing and load and disbursements, and a collections operation that touches separate debt types. Simultaneously. They are consolidating their billing payments, payment plans, refunds and collection processes onto a unified global platform that only Flywire can provide. This reduces the complexity and cost of managing multiple fragmented vendors while giving Cornell a simpler, more automated and uniform view of their student financial activity in the uk. Our SFS is delivering measurable results at institutions facing similar operational challenges. Kingston University reduced manual financial suspensions by over 30% this quarter through automated workflow management. We signed three additional UK SFS clients this quarter, all attracted by our ability to manage their unique operational needs separately. The University of Edinburgh, one of our largest UK cross border clients, achieved approximately 1 million pounds in savings in under a year by consolidating their international tuition flows and doing reconciliation via our platform. In healthcare, we expanded with Endeavor Health. We where we are now managing their pre service point of service and post service patient payments deeply integrated with EPIC across this multi system organization endeavor operates across multiple hospitals and care sites, each with its own billing environment and requiring us to support a high degree of specialized workflows. Our certified integrations with epic, Cerner and Oracle, combined with our regulatorily compliant vertical software workflows are barriers that keep most payment providers out of this market. The second theme we are seeing clearly reaffirmed in 2026 is that demand for our solutions is truly global. Using education as an example, our solutions are proving themselves outside of our traditional Big four markets being the us, the uk, Canada and Australia. Education revenue outside those markets grew over 40% year over year in Q1 and more than 60% of new education clients signed were from outside the big four. In Europe, we are seeing momentum in Germany, Spain, Italy and other markets as international students continue to diversify destination markets. These are not simple markets to operate in. Each requires navigating local requirements, including integrations, translations, reconciliation requirements and payments infrastructure. Institutions need a platform that can absorb that layered complexity and that is what we provide. In Asia, we are seeing the same strong demand this quarter. We went live with the top global university in Singapore and now have the majority of the country’s universities using flywire. Singaporean institutions are managing multiple currencies, regional payment rails and local compliance requirements on top of international tuition flows. Having the majority of this market using our platform also creates compounding network effects. That’s shared corridor economics, deeper regional banking relationships and routing intelligence that improves with every additional dollar of volume we there. We see lots of needs in Singapore and many other markets that are addressed by our software capabilities. Wrapping up my comments on why we win in global education in Canada, where the broader market remains under pressure, our revenue has turned positive as we continue to expand our installed base and win competitive RFPs. This quarter for example, we started processing payments for University of Calgary, a major Canadian university with over 30,000 students and we see continued opportunity to take share in that market. Finally, our software led approach has been a key catalyst for capturing and monetizing payment volume in travel. Our Hospitality solutions, formerly branded Certify are continuing to grow well. Payment attachment is increasing and more volume is routing through flywire as we replace legacy gateway processors with our solution. The complexity these clients face is specific to high value hospitality contracts involving multiple signatories, card not present, fraud prevention, multi currency deposits, refund and chargeback management across jurisdictions and reconciliation against property management systems. All workflows a generic payment gateway was never designed to handle. Unlike a gateway, we sit inside the contract workflow itself. Our sign and pay capability collapses the contract and payment into one moment. The client signs, the payment is captured, the booking is confirmed. For operators running high value cross border transactions that reduces chargeback exposure at the point of transaction, a level of workflow ownership no generalist processor can replicate. We estimate there is still an additional two and a half billion dollars of payment volume within our existing US Hospitality clients alone that we can capture and we are investing also in an international rollout this year as we see the same fragmented workflows exist in other major travel and hospitality markets. In luxury and experiential travel, Q1 was our second largest quarter for ARR signings with 15 deals over $100,000. Car, golf and Traveling the Fairways both left large horizontal processors for Flywire drawn by operational efficiencies and the ability to replace a separate invoicing tool with a single workflow. The reason we win in luxury travel has not changed competitive rates, automated reconciliation and a level of service generalist processors cannot match software. LED monetization is also working well in our B2B business studycast, a cloud based imaging workflow platform for healthcare came to us with unique invoicing scenarios across multiple markets. They were seeking to improve low cash flow visibility and improve an entirely manual AR process. We are giving them invoicing payments and global settlement in one workflow. That means automated reconciliation, faster collections and better working capital visibility. CNC and Lula Life, two other clients that went live this quarter are variations of the same story, complex billing and operations that are perfectly suited for flywire. Across every vertical the logic is the same. We go where others are unwilling or unable to go, we embed deeply and our platform becomes critical infrastructure once deployed. Kauzman will show you what it looks like in the numbers and with that I’ll turn it over to Kosman.
Kosman Tirigoi
Thanks Rob. I’ll detail our financial performance for Q1 2026, discuss our margin dynamics and provide our updated full year outlook. Q1 performance strength was broad based and results exceeded expectations. Total revenue reached $184 million up 43% on a spot basis and 37% FX neutral growth including 7 points in organic contribution from Certify. Almost half of the 9 point out performance versus the midpoint on an …
This post was originally published here
