Welcome to the FLEETCOR Technologies EV Strategy Update Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Jim Eglseder, Investor Relations. Thank you, Jim. You may begin. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today for our EV strategy update and discussion call. With me today are Ron Clarke, our Chairman and CEO, and Alan King, our Group President of Global Fleet. Following the prepared comments, the operator will announce that the queue will open for the Q&A session. Please note our presentation associated with this call can be found under the Investor Relations section of our website at FLEETCOR.com. I need to remind everyone that part of our discussion today may include forward-looking statements. These statements reflect the best information we have as of today. All statements about our outlook, new products, and expectations regarding business development and future plans are based on that information. They are not guarantees of future performance or the future, and you should not put undue reliance upon them. We undertake no obligation to update any of these statements. Our discussions today are subject to numerous uncertainties and risks, which could cause actual results to differ materially from what we expect. Some of those risks are mentioned in our forward-looking statement in the presentation and in our annual report on Form 10-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. These documents are available on our website and at sec.gov. With that out of the way, I will turn the call over to Ron Clarke, our Chairman and CEO. Ron. Okay, Jim. Thanks. Hi, everyone, and thanks for joining our EV update call today. I plan to start off here with a brief update of the Plugsurfing EV acquisition we announced last week. I'll run through first what it is, second why we acquired Plugsurfing, and then lastly the expected financial impact of the deal. Plugsurfing is a ten-year-old European EV network and software provider specialist. They help EV drivers find and pay for EV recharging. They've got a mobile app that basically lays out, identifies recharging locations so you can find them. Profiles the equipment that's there, you know, think fast charger. Provides real-time availability if the charger's in use so you don't wait, and provides the cost per kilowatt. Plugsurfing's got a proprietary EV recharging network, super important. About 300,000 accepting charge point locations across continental Europe and the Nordics. Their primary customer is the consumer, which they sign up either directly or via vehicle OEMs or even through charge point operators. Let's say you bought a new EV vehicle in Germany. The manufacturer may give you the Plugsurfing mobile app to help find recharge locations to avoid range anxiety. In addition to the consumers, Plugsurfing also serves the charge point operators. They've got roughly 40,000 of their 300,000 charge point operators that are in their acceptance network who use their white label driver software or a basic operating system to help them run the charge point. Let me make the turn to why we make the decision to acquire Plugsurfing. Really two reasons. First, to repurpose Plugsurfing's mobile app and recharge network for our commercial fleet business. That'll allow us to better serve our fleet clients, you know, when they're out and about and need public recharging. Then second was really to open up the prospect here of building a new consumer EV business so that we can go on offense during this energy transition. The Plugsurfing deal gives us a fast start really on both fronts. They've got a modern tech platform. This 300,000 + acceptance network. At last count, 150,000 active EV users or drivers, and an employee group that knows EV. Even though the EV transition will likely be a multi-decade process, we're investing early upfront here to make sure that we succeed in the transition. In terms of the financial profile, Plugsurfing is a single-digit million revenue company. We're estimating roughly $0.04 dilutive to our rest of year cash EPS. Fortunately, that's offset by a $1.3 million FLT buyback that we did post our Q2 earnings. Basically a wash. With that, let me turn the call over to Alan King, our Group President, Global Fleet. He'll talk more broadly about our EV strategy and progress. Alan. Thanks, Ron, and hello, everyone. My name's Alan King, and I'm the Group President of our new Global Fleet organization that we created three months ago. Global Fleet is a combination of our North America fuel business and our international fuel business, which I've been running for the last six years. We've got a great opportunity now to take a much more unified global view of the many vehicle and mobility-related opportunities around the world, which can be quite similar regardless of geography. I'm talking about opportunities like greater digitization across the customer life cycle, cross-selling a broader set of FLEETCOR products and services to a customer base of over 600,000. Of course, the emergence and adoption of EVs in many markets and the need for us to go after that space with pace and energy. That's today's topic. I'd like to give you all some more color around our EV strategy and direction and why we get very excited about the opportunity ahead of us to tap into new markets and customer segments that we haven't been able to do in the current ICE world. Let me start off with slide five of our presentation by spending a few minutes on the EV ecosystem, which is similar but also different to what we've been used to at FLEETCOR. On slide five, you can see the EV ecosystem is evolving. It's still developing with established players participating alongside new market entrants. That's creating a lot of innovation, and it's also driving new opportunities. I've been in payments for 25 years, and in some senses, I would compare it to what happened in mainstream payments from 12 or 13 years ago with a major growth in mobile payments, e-commerce payments, and fintechs. We had a payments market spanning players with entrenched positions like the big networks and processors, and a bunch of new disruptors and innovators trying to take a piece of an evolving value chain. From major tech players like Apple and Google to OEMs like Samsung. Then there was mobile network operators and a bunch of fintech startups trying to disrupt. The market evolved over the subsequent decade, but what we saw was that the established players and new entrants all thriving as new opportunities continued to emerge and consumer behavior evolved and partnerships in the marketplace increased. There are analogies with what's happening here in EV, and on this slide are the key elements of this evolving ecosystem. Vehicle manufacturers spanning both traditional OEMs covering ICE and EV, as well as new players focusing exclusively on EVs like Tesla. On the energy side, we're going from traditional oil companies playing the main role in ICE to utility companies being key in EV. In retail, gas stations have obviously been the only channel for fueling. In EV, they remain relevant with the ability to retrofit EV charging stations. We also have dedicated charge point operators too, who are installing chargers on the street and destination locations like malls and in private homes and workplaces. Payment networks will be quite similar across both ICE and EV. With open loop, private label, and proprietary networks. These will exist in both worlds. Finally, new software opportunities will emerge over and above what we already see. In addition to having card management systems and driver apps remaining relevant, there is more in EV. The driver apps have much greater feature functionality, so they capture all charge point locations, but also key real-time insights like availability of those charge points. Then we have home charging to deal with. For commercial fleets, this involves measuring, reporting, and reimbursing employees for home charging. All of this applies both in the consumer and commercial space. Although for commercial fleets, there are even more complications given the need to manage mixed ICE and EV fleets for some time to come. The ability to simplify vehicle payment management across conventional fuel and EV becomes really quite key. That's something we're very well-positioned to support. Moving to slide six. When we think about our EV strategy going forward, our focus is on using the EV assets we've already built and assembled to deepen our penetration of the commercial fleet segment, while also taking the opportunity to enter the consumer EV market too. Ron touched on Plugsurfing at the top of the call, but let me just expand on that and lay out for you what we have today and how that stacks up against the segments we're going after. First of all, we've applied our core network model to the EV space. In Europe, we now have a proprietary network of over 300,000 charge points. In the UK specifically, that's around 7,500 charge points. In the US, we leverage Mastercard acceptance, and that gives us 125,000. All this enables drivers to access seamless on-the-road charging. Secondly, we wrap this up with some market-leading EV software capability. We have driver apps that deliver mapping, charge point availability, and payment. Both in Europe and the UK, that's facilitated through Plugsurfing and Zapmap, who are the industry leaders, innovators, and the benchmarks. For CPOs, we can now provide them with an operating system to manage their charge points and associated payments, which in turn further drives our network capabilities. We also have dual ICE and EV card management systems and fleet management UI that enable the driver products and add significant value, especially in a mixed fleet environment. This includes all the data, reporting, and dashboards that the fleet manager would expect to get and fully integrated across ICE and EV. The third block on this slide is the new part for EV, which is the home and work recharging software capability. This SaaS capability allows us to integrate with charging hardware to measure and reimburse for charging done at home and work. The home use case is especially important given the need to accurately reimburse. We do this in the UK through Mina. In Europe, we will do it with Plugsurfing, and in the US, we will initially leverage our investment and commercial partnership with Motorq. These three blocks of capabilities will allow us to serve our existing commercial fleets with new EV solutions, but also mixed fleet solutions. We believe we can also attract new fleet customers with unique assets that will allow us to win mixed fleet customers even where we don't already have conventional fuel card volume. More on that a bit later. Now, we're quite excited about the offensive opportunity here that the acquisition of Plugsurfing and the other investments in Zapmap and Mina are giving us and will continue to provide. That includes, first of all, entering new customer segments and specifically targeting consumers directly and through partners like OEMs, for example, with on the road charging solutions. Secondly, expanding into serving CPOs with the Plugsurfing SaaS product, including our traditional fuel merchants that are looking to get into the CPO business. The consumer opportunity here is huge given how important it is to deliver a compelling driver charging solution that includes a broad and reliable charging network, mapping charger availability information and payment which is interoperable across different charge point types. Moving on to slide seven. I'd like to explain a bit more about why we see EV as a good opportunity to defend and expand our existing relationships. As I've said before, there's a great deal of complexity for a fleet in moving from ICE to EV fleets, and this complexity is amplified when managing a mixed fleet of both types of vehicles, which really will be an inevitability for years to come. We believe the transition to EV gives us an opportunity to do more for our existing fleet customers with our new EV-specific products and services. Our clients are looking for us to help them manage the transition to EVs and remove complexity for them in the day-to-day management of the fleet. Today, we're already spending a lot of time advising and consulting to fleets on these topics, and we already have solutions in place that are simplifying mixed fleet management, delivering single platforms, unified data, and simplified payment experiences. We call this the one-stop shop, where we bring all the fuel and EV solutions under one umbrella and make it easy for the fleet. We've already had years of experience with EV solutions and so have a good understanding of the economics we're able to get. Our EV revenue per account is broadly similar to ICE, and that's helped by brand new revenue streams like SaaS subscription fees for at home charging. It's also important to remember, of course, that the market economics are still evolving. Energy prices keep swinging. We've seen that recently with both crude and electricity and gas rates. EV is also underpinned by unsustainable tax policy over the long term, and MDR rates are still dynamic for charging. The market will continue to move, but the strength of our solutions, regardless of fueling type, does provide us with a good position. Turning to slide 8 now. This is where we believe we can start to go after more, and it's quite exciting. We're going to be able to win many more new commercial fleet customers with the solutions and assets we have on the EV side. Now, let me tell you why. Firstly, this ability to deliver a fully integrated one-stop shop is quite unique and will help us win not just new EV business, but also the old-fashioned fuel card customers too. Those that don't want multiple providers that add to the complexity. We've already won some deals in the UK with Allstar from the fuel card competition because of our EV assets and our ability to simplify something that is highly complex. Secondly, our EV solutions can also be standalone, coexisting with incumbent fleet payment methods, be they bank cards or oil company cards. A fleet might wish to continue using regular bank cards for fuel and gas, but that won't help them when they need broader roaming solutions for EV charging and to manage home charging measurement and reimbursement. It means we have more prospects to sell to that would not have typically selected an ICE fuel card, and that's potentially a very big upside. Going to slide nine now. The major opportunity we now have through the assets we've assembled is to go after the consumer EV opportunity, which by 2030 could be worth some $2 billion. We've based this on the likely adoption rates of EVs in these key geographies you see here, using external sources of info and the data we have through Plugsurfing and other players on what to expect in terms of revenue per driver. Consumers today typically use an app to access and pay for on the road charging. With the CPO market so fragmented across all these geographies, the ability to provide a broad multi-network charging product with a simple app that helps the driver locate the charge point, check if it's available in real time, and then pay for the charging means we're opening up a major new channel and customer segment to go after. The Plugsurfing acquisition and Zapmap investment gives us these assets and means we can deliver a complete mobility experience for EV drivers, regardless of whether they're consumers or commercial fleet drivers. This slide shows the expected growth of the consumer EV market in these geographies and also what we expect the conservative revenue could be per vehicle per year based on existing experience. Again, we're quite excited about this given our experience in Brazil with our tolls business, and we see many similarities here in building our more mobility related services around the vehicles themselves. On to slide 10, and before I close, I've included a brief slide on a key customer of ours in the U.K., Virgin Media O2, a major mass media and telecommunications company. They are an existing FLEETCOR fleet customer and are transitioning part of their ICE fleet over to electric vehicles. They chose us to help them because of our market leading ICE and EV solutions. They're using our on-road Allstar card and mobile app solution for drivers to charge on the go and also using our Allstar Homecharge product for their drivers, which allows them to directly reimburse a driver's utility company for any charging undertaken at home, meaning that the driver is never out of pocket. With energy prices so high, that's a pretty compelling proposition. Let me close now with a recap of the last ten minutes here on slide eleven. We believe we're very well positioned to ride the EV wave and capitalize on new revenue and growth opportunities. It's a space that gets us excited as it allows us to do new things with new customers and in new segments. We're participating in an EV ecosystem that is both established and new players taking positions. We can take advantage of the assets we've assembled and built to penetrate deeper in the commercial fleet segment, both with our existing customers and go after brand new ones at scale. We can also now open up a brand new consumer segment too, with some pretty unique capabilities, and that's huge in terms of potential scale. We're already making good progress in our traditional commercial fleet. We have thousands of EV clients already, including large, sophisticated fleets. Our one-stop-shop capability, which includes conventional fuel cards, on-road charging, and home charging solutions that can be bundled together, reduces complexity significantly for fleets as they make the transition bit by bit. With that said, I'll now open it up to Q&A. Thank you. Thank you. We will now be conducting a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment please while we poll for questions. Thank you. Our first question is from Bob Napoli with William Blair. Please proceed with your question. Good afternoon. Thank you for doing this. It's very helpful. Good information. Just a question on the growth or your strategy on the marketing of the consumer business, your confidence. I mean, I know Ron, you know, I don't think you do anything unless you're generating good returns, but just the unit economics down to the EBITDA line as you look out over the long term. Is this more defensive or offensive? I guess some of both. Yeah. Hey, Ron, it's Ron. It's a good question. The first thought back is, we've seen this movie before in Brazil. In Brazil we've got, you know, that toll network and an IT system, and we repurpose it for both, right? We've got, I don't know, five to six million consumers on it and then a bill or so employees of businesses on it. This model of having kind of one set of assets and then two different kinds of customers is something we kind of get a little bit. The answer is, I think, twofold. One is we think we'll get a lot through the partners. So you take like the OEMs, obviously no one has an EV car, so someone has to sell them one. To the extent that we could have a quarter or a third of the people that make EVs use our app, that gets us to a lot of people that have EVs. Then B, the same thing with charge point operators. We've got a relationship, either acceptance or software, and the only people that go there are people that have an EV yet, and they're trying to get them. That'd be the first thing that I'd say initially, we're expecting some fair amount of the consumer business to come to us from those two partners. I think we'll get just some jump in the boat. Like the brand, you know, it sounds kind of funny to you guys. It did to me when I met the company, but the brand is like pretty well known over there. People actually talk about this brand. We'll get some jump in the boat where people will just, you know, it comes up on search and they'll come to the site. We're not gonna have some massive, you know, consumer advertising campaign initially. Although if the thing lifts up, it gives us an opportunity, right, to once in a while kind of push the thing in some markets. That, that's the idea, is kind of partners first, get some jump in the boat, and then selectively look to when we're gonna push on it. I think just to add in there, Alan, that when you buy an EV, and you've had no experience of having an EV, you're obviously anxious about your new life with an EV. One of the first things you go and do is download an app that gives you a mapping capability, so you can find charge points. Once you know you can find charge points, you then get the anxiety about whether that charge point is available. That is literally, you know, as a kid, when you learn to walk, it's the first thing you do when you buy an EV. You wanna get that capability. Having a brand that's already established in that space and, you know, having in some cases OEMs pushing that for us, you know, is a terrific outcome because it's literally the first thing you do after they hand over the keys. People look for it, Bob. Mm-hmm. You know, for the network. Great. The unit economics, if any commentary on unit economics. On the consumer side or just generally? I guess, I don't know, how do you look at it? How do you think about it? Do you think about it separately, or do you view this as a must-have capability for your commercial clients? This is incremental, but just how do you think about it. I mean, do you look at the consumer side and say this, I mean, we can generate margins of this over the long term, or, I mean, how do you think about the approach? Yeah. I got the question. Yeah, obviously we're getting out super in front of this EV thing because of the commercial business we're in. We've got a ton of clients. We sell a ton of clients, and so we just believe we need to be in it and be a winner in it, not get run over. The aha moment, I think, was the Brazil thing again, and we have all these assets. We're spending money to do stuff in networks and apps and stuff. Why not just market it to this other group, particularly if we can go to businesses like car makers and stuff. I think that we think it's kind of a lot of marginal economics, like what you were on, right, that it's more on the sales side, that the back office side of the thing is kinda coming along almost for free. That would only change your point if we decided to do, you know, significant kind of direct consumer marketing, which I'd say is not obviously at this point in the transition, not a big part of the plan. I'd say we think of it as mostly kind of incremental. Great. Thank you. Appreciate it. Remember, it's coming first. I mean, our own bet is, right, that it's super-duper hard to make, you know, commercial, you know, specialty vehicles like big trucks, obviously the power problem or refrigerated or something weird, tree-cutting trucks. You know, the trucks that we have, dump trucks. The stuff that we service with old-fashioned conventional ICE stuff isn't gonna be the first thing that EV guys make, right? They're gonna make kind of standard sedans and stuff like that. We wanna try to be in the game where the people are making stuff that we could service basically, that we could sell. The other incremental piece is obviously the home charging. You know, that's something that doesn't exist in the commercial fleet space today. I think with our home charging capabilities, that becomes an incremental piece and highly valuable for large fleets that have their drivers go home and charge at home, but they need to be able to reimburse them and reimburse them accurately. Having the capability to do that for them allows us to, you know, to charge recurring fees, subscription-based fees in order to deliver that capability. That for us, especially in that complex fleet segment is, you know, an incremental piece. Yeah. I don't know who's on the call, but Alan's point is a super good one that, you know, the two big incremental things here of why this is bad news is A, there's consumers who will buy more of these things we think short term than anybody, maybe we can get some money. Then B, there's a whole new set of gas stations called the one million or two million commercial employee guys' homes that are gonna have a transaction or something every other day. Those two things are brand spanking new, right, to us, that there's economics to go grab in those two places. That's a big part of the excitement for us is holy moly, there's some new places to monetize this thing. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Our next question is from James Faucette with Morgan Stanley. Please proceed with your question. Thanks a lot, and huge thank you for spending the time doing this for us today. It sounds like most everything that FLEETCOR will be doing will be on payments and information technology side, et cetera, but I just wanna make sure that that's correct. Would you foresee or under what circumstances would you foresee actually getting into the business and operation of setting up CPOs, et cetera, or being a CPO, et cetera? Sure. Okay. Zero. Perfect. Yeah. Yeah, I just wanna make sure I was understanding that. James, we wanna run a low capital intensity company. I've said it a million times. Where our game is, yeah, minimal balance sheet and minimal capital. We are not gonna be a retailer. The interesting thing is being a software within the CPO, which is we, you know, which we build that capability through Plugsurfing. Yeah, let me jump on that thing Alan just said, James, which is interesting because you brought it up. This company, and we're still kind of doodling on it, has made like yet a third business, right? Beyond what I said of, hey, you know, consumers are at home, which is there's gonna be hundreds of thousands of brand new entrepreneur people making charge points, right? That have never made them before. Some regular merchants who are already friends of ours trying to retrofit the thing. "Hey, I'm gonna put in six chargers at my gas station or whatever." Certainly the first group has kind of no idea how to run a charge point, right? How to market it, how to do payments, you know, how to check maintenance. There's a whole bunch of operating things. There's a whole kind of new software opportunity, which I mentioned we've got in this company. We bought about 15% of all the European charge point sites use the tech stack from Plugsurfing to kind of run. It's kind of their, you know, their operating system basically. That adds kind of another new stream. We may chase that harder because, you know, the company's done super great, right? Getting 15% of it, you know, this early in the game. I do wanna call that out, that maybe is another angle for us. That's great, and I appreciate that's incremental. My follow-up question is that, you know, Ron, you and your team have a well-deserved reputation for integrating acquisitions and making them quite successful. When you look at this and it being so nascent, how are you and how should we be assessing, like, the ramp, what that should look like if it's being successful and contributing? Just wondering what kind of metrics, even if just qualitative that we should be watching coming out of this initiative. Yeah, I think that's a super good question. I think it's mostly a function of the adoption pace. Like we're kinda getting out of the blocks here early, trying to assemble some assets like this one we're talking about today. The amount of energy that we'll spend on marketing and selling, you know, Bob's question earlier is kind of tied, James, to the pace of the thing. If it picks up pace and there's more opportunity on both sides, the side we're in, the commercial side or the consumer side, you know, we'll work at the thing harder. If the thing kind of stagnates 'cause utilities can't, you know, get the power in and, you know, people don't buy the thing and the economics get worse to buy. If it slows down over the midterm, we'll probably also go slower. I think a lot of it's calibrated, you know, really on the pace of this thing. Again, there's just not that many people. We've obviously had this thing in our gunsights for a couple of years and scoured the landscape here in Europe for every asset we can own to get ready. You know, take a look at this thing. This is a 10-year-old company. I don't know if you picked that up, that we bought, and it's EUR single-digit millions. It's been working hard at this idea in this place for 10 years now. Maybe I'd say kind of they were a company before their time or before its time, whatever. It just gives you know, again, another idea of just, you know, how long this transition could likely run. The message we wanna give today is we ain't missing it. Just don't think that, you know, we're a bunch of ICE and our heads are buried and we love the old smelly, you know, fueling and that's it, and, oh, we're worried and all that. We are freaking studying this thing, buying, building assets, getting going, and if that game heats up, we're gonna be there either with the new retailers that come online or even the consumers. If those two businesses get bigger before the commercial side, maybe we can make a bit of a business before the commercial thing comes, you know, comes to roost. That's how we're thinking about it. Thanks, Ron. Appreciate all the commentary. Thank you. Our next question is from Tien-Tsin Huang with JP Morgan. Please proceed with your question. Hey, great. Thanks so much for hosting, guys. I like a lot of the info and the analogies you guys talked about. Ron, I just wanna ask you on the B2C front. I mean, I think loud and clear what you're talking about longer term, but is it more about the economics or just being in the game and being tested to work with the consumer to be comprehensive in owning the category and that's why you're doing it? 'Cause you've been saying for a long time that, right? FLEETCOR is a B2B company. You're not B2C. I know you and I have talked about, right, why not open up whatever Fuelman or CFN network to consumers? It just didn't make sense, but in this case it is. Just trying to understand the, you know, the prioritization on the consumer side, and the bet you wanna really make here. Yeah, it's a good one, Tien-Tsin Huang. Good to hear your voice too, by the way. My pleasure. The first thing, which I don't think we said earlier, I wanna be as clear as I was with James Faucette, is we're taking no credit risk. Yes. On the consumer side. A, if you, Tien-Tsin Huang, bought a, you know, some EV thing and you took our app and went to our network, we're gonna embed, you know, a la Apple Pay, we're gonna embed some other, you know, crazy credit issuer to you, right? Into the capabilities we have. That's kind of the first thing. I think the second thing is right along. We believe that every business is a consumer, and so getting some brand recognition and some consumers and our name at the network and stuff could be super helpful for the awareness, you know, among our fleet. You know, Alan, who's sitting here with me, was telling me even a year or two ago, they're taking all these. Specifically from our Nordics and UK clients who are actually getting EV vehicles. I'm like, what are they mostly calling about? They're like advisory. They're calling their brother, you know, their broker to get some info about what the heck to do and what goes on with EV and stuff. When you hear that, you're like, we wanna make sure that they really think of us, that we have some modern EV attention, that when they call us, they think of us as maybe a super good provider to them, you know, on the commercial side, and that we're not somehow some Johnny come lately. Some of it to me is getting out there, which we think is gonna happen first, the consumer thing, and using that, you know, to our advantage with the commercial guys. No, that's clever. I didn't think about it that way. Yeah, 'cause it's the blurring of the lines between the home and the branding, so, no, that makes sense. Alan, I- The economics again. Like, right, you've seen this, the Brazil thing, right? Like, when I look at the cost structure of that business, the two giant pieces of our cost structure, which is the network, right? Signing up all the tolls and the settlement infrastructure and all that kind of stuff, and then the IT that's specialized to run it. The same thing, we use that exact same two pieces of platform for the guy going to his, you know, summer home in Brazil as we do the commercial guy. When we run the numbers here, to Bob's point earlier on, that provides super good marginal economics basically on the consumer side versus doing that alone. That's the other part that we like about it, is we think we could probably generate some revenue, certainly through the partners profitably. Yeah. I do wanna be clear, we're not gonna be some, "Hey, watch us announce we're gonna spend $50 million on, you know, consumer TV trying to do EV." That, that's not our game plan. Yeah. No Super Bowl ads for FLEETCOR, I hope. Oh, unless you're gonna fund them. If you fund them, we'll do them. Nah. Well, maybe we'll bet on some EV stocks and do it together. Well, I think if you don't mind me asking one more, I don't wanna hog the call. Just with Alan, I like the 'cause I've been thinking about this a lot. The analogizing it to the whole eCom mobile shift in traditional payments and slide five you laid out in ICE versus EV. If we were to do the same thing against or overlay it against payments and the introduction of eCom mobile, where would FLEETCOR be listed relative to where you are today in the traditional payments world, not in this ICE world? In other words, when I think about FLEETCOR today, right? You're an issuer, you're also a network, right? You can do some acquiring capabilities as well, depending on where you sit within the fueling site, things like that. Is it different in the EV world, if I wanna lay it that way? For example, would we put the CPO in the same place as a tablet, right? In the omni world? In Verifone, that terminal would be the old world before mobile came into play. So I'm just trying to think about, like, how do these different players fit if we wanna bring it back to eCom mobile being this equivalent of EV taking over ICE? Do you follow my logic? I don't know if I did a good job of asking the question. Yeah, no, I follow the logic, and it's a good question. I've been thinking about it a lot as well, in that, 'cause I lived through that in my previous lives. When I was at Mastercard, you know, Right. You know, the 2009, 2010, when all this started exploding, it was part of our whole journey. I remember, you know, the concern around being disintermediated, the, you know, global network with unique assets, by all these potential disruptors that were coming in to, you know, to try and, you know, do what we were doing, candidly at the time. The way I look at the analogy with us is, where do we fit in, you know, we're more than just a network or the network is a huge amount of power for us, and competitive advantages is, first of all, we know how to build networks, so we know how to run and manage networks. That's what we do today in the fleet business, and we're already doing it in the EV business. We were doing it before the acquisition of Plugsurfing in the UK. We've already built an Allstar electric network in the UK that's a proprietary network that plugs into, you know, a good proportion of the chargers in the country. Then obviously, now with Plugsurfing, we've got a foothold in continental Europe. That proprietary network piece is important with an EV. Having the knowledge, the tech, and the capability to build a proprietary network is very important because it's not just about the act of making the payment for commercial fleets. There's also a whole load of other things that are important to that. Like, you know, the capturing of the very specific data they need in order to be able to manage their fleets competently and efficiently, the kilowatt hours, the price, the type of charger, et cetera, et cetera. Our ability to capture that data by connecting a proprietary network into CPOs is very important. I'd say, first of all, one competitive advantage or kind of the foothold we still have in this new ecosystem is we know how to do networks. Secondly is we understand the customer. We have customer relationships. I mentioned it in my preamble, the 600,000 customer relationships. We have them today, and we have them in geographies that are, you know, transitioning to EV. Those customers are coming to us. Rob made the point just before. They're coming to us asking us for help. We're going to them, you know, offering our help at the same time. You know, our ability to capture what we're doing today in the fuel card world and marry that with what they need in EV makes their lives easier. On that sense, the analogy would be, hey, we're a, you know, an issuer, a bank that still has a customer relationship. Again, going back to my old world, that still has a customer relationship that we can do more with. Mm-hmm. You think about our ability to enable the driver experience. We have now with Plugsurfing, and again, you know, already have launched it in a couple of other markets, an app. We've done it in the UK in partnership with Zapmap, who we just invested in as well. We have an app that enables the driver experience. That's the end user experience. We're mapping, finding availability of chargers, finding the price, and, you know, making sure that you know where to go in order to get charged quite quickly. That end user experience, whether it's for a driver, who to Ross' point is also a consumer, or now we can provide it to a consumer directly, makes us, if you like, the Apple Pay, you know. Yeah. equivalent or the analogy there of providing a customer experience in a UX or a, you know, a mobile app that actually provides a significant amount of value to the end user. I think, you know, if you overlay that time with this time, we have a multidimensional role to play over and above what, you know, when I was at Mastercard, we were just worried about, hey, how do we make sure we still process a transaction. Then you look at how Mastercard have expanded themselves, you know, we're kind of thinking about it along similar lines. Hey, Tish, the analogy I use is OpenTable. Mm-hmm. Think about it. You and your wife going to dinner tonight, you know, you're bringing whatever card to pay for the dinner. The first thing you do is you fire up the app to see if it's available, so you can actually go there. First of all, where you wanna go, find it, and then go. That's really a big part of the idea here is irrespective of the payment, there's other stuff you kinda need to know. Plus the price volatility is massive between the different charge point guys, right? One guy's at $0.20 per kilowatt, one guy's at $0.50. I tell you that we think that this info that wraps around the payment is kinda super-duper important here. No, that's all good stuff. Thank you both. You got it. Thank you. Our next question is from Pete Christiansen with Citi. Please proceed with your question. Thank you. Good evening, gentlemen. Great call. Ron or Alan, I'm curious, like, to what degree do you have a relationship or you can build a relationship with the utility? Because I'd imagine, you know, as EVs get increasing scale, there's certainly an opportunity for distributed energy storage, demand response, things like that. And to me, that sounds like it could be potentially even a larger opportunity down the road. Just wondering if you could comment to any thoughts on that. I had a quick follow-up. Yeah. Hey, hey, Pete. I'd say not so sure. We actually bought this company from a utility called Vattenfall. That's a pretty big utility. I think it's unclear to the utilities how they wanna play. I think they're sitting there going, "I got a ton of business coming my way," right? There's gonna be way more energy needed, you know, on, off the street and stuff than there is here in 2022. I'm loving that. I'm just getting ready to get my capacity up. Probably your point is, you know, how they provision it, just what you said, how do they get, you know, energy to all these, you know, weird different places that maybe aren't set up for it. As we've had conversations with them, that's one of the dilemmas of where to put the charge points, right? Do you locate them where people are? Are they, you know, on grids that can easily supply the energy? I'd say it's just from our conversations, it's super unclear to us how they wanna play. Some of them have talked about being charge point operators to us. Hey, you know, a little bit like to me, the perfect example is obviously the oil companies who decided to vertically integrate, right, and become retailers. Mm-hmm. Hey, I'm gonna go make a gas station to retail my product. Well, theoretically, a utility could copy that. Hey, I'm gonna be the charge point because I'm the vertically integrated guy. The answer is we're not super sure because I don't think they're super sure. It's quite interesting, just a couple of additional thoughts for the U.K. specifically. I mean, utility companies are our customers today on the fuel card side, and some of them, or a couple of them in particular that are quite big in the U.K. are our customers on the EV side, i.e., they're using our products today or our partner products to charge their EV vehicles on the road and actually using our products to charge their drivers' cars or vehicles at home as well, you know, to measure and reimburse, et cetera. We've got an interesting relationship with these guys already. In the U.K. as well, it's a very deregulated market, if you're familiar with it. It's highly competitive or, you know, before the prices started going up, at least it was, and some companies started going out of business and utility companies. We also, you know, think about services that we can provide to our fleet customers and their drivers in the context of tariffs, i.e., if you think about, again, how the market's going to evolve with the amount of energy that a vehicle consumes, there are different tariffs at different times of day associated with charging your vehicles. If you know, charge vehicles during nighttime, for example, it could work out cheaper for you than charging it during the day. These plethora of tariffs and packages. As we're thinking ahead, we're thinking, how do we take some of these, you know, capabilities and bundle them up potentially for our customers to, again, just make life easier for them as they think about transition. Because it's quite a difficult, complex animal for a fleet to transition to EV. There's so much to think about. Anything that we can do to kind of simplify that journey and have less impact on their driver who actually, you know, is taking that vehicle home and plugging it into the same electricity supply as their, you know, their cooking and heating. You know, if we can make that simpler and cheaper and more efficient, it adds value to our existing relationship, but also to future potential relationships. No, that's interesting. Thank you. That's a good color. As a quick follow-up, you know, and Ronnie mentioned it, you know, obviously with what's going on in the tolls business in Brazil. I mean, it certainly seems like there's an expanding payment use cases for mobility and the vehicle, and certainly a larger data opportunity. To me it sounds like, you know, the world of compliance in a way is kind of going from know your client to almost like know your machine. I mean, are there any impediments from that point of view and has that changed the paradigm in terms of data usage and need and all that stuff? I just. I think it almost comes across like that could be a competitive moat for you guys, that aspect. Yeah, I'm not sure I totally call it, Pete, but I would say the following, that this EV thing I think raises the stakes even more on the data in the network. If you think about our current fuel card business, obviously all the universal networks here in Europe can buy fuel. The proprietary networks we have wrap incremental data, right? Like gallons or liters, or have controls and parameters and premium fuel and all that kind of stuff. I think it's the same idea here that there's this proprietary data around type of chargers and speed, and is it available, and obviously pricing in advance. You know, the OpenTable stuff again. That's what I would say is, like, super interesting to us is that if this thing gets stood up, someone's got to, you know, get that data, has to. Which is why this company took so long, by the way. It was why we bought it. One of the reasons we bought it is it took a long time with all those freaking connections. There's so much technical work, right? To go out to some faraway, you know, charge point and connect it technically into a host computer in almost real time, grab all that data stuff. I tell you that that's the. One of the big ideas here is we got a super head start on people in getting this data, which we think is gonna be, like, really important not only to the commercial guy, but to the consumer guy. I don't know how it's gonna be regulated. I mean, again, it's not data related per se to the company or the consumer. It's really mostly data related to the sites, what's going on at the site. Just to follow up on that point real quick, does that mean that we need some type of enhancements to just Level 3 processing? I mean, you're obviously limited in the amount of data you can send with a Level 3 processing kind of product. You know, do you need innovation to happen at that level to handle that much data? It is that, to your point. I mean, you know, we always call it out again in the fuel card business because there's an incremental data set for fuel cards. I think, you know, obviously we know our partners, you know, Visa or Mastercard well, and they're not necessarily in that game initially because there's no business, right? There's hardly any vehicles. People like us that are used to building proprietary networks are building the connections, inspecting the data fields, and then turning around and offering that data back to people, right, back to customers. I mean, effectively, we're setting up the Level 3 data system for EV. In fact, it was one of my first diligence questions when we looked at this company was, you know, "Send me, you know, the data model. I wanna know every piece of data that you collect and how many of the sites you collect this from." When the guy showed it, I said to our guys, "Wow, this is like this is why the company's been around for 10 years." It's gonna take if you start it up tomorrow. It's gonna take you back to the moat thing, a super-duper long time to go out and connect to all these people and have some contract to get this data real time. I'm looking. I mean, just to. Yeah. Just to deal with some, you know, the specifics. I'm looking here at the sheet that I've got in front of me. 28 data points that can come out of a CPO that we're able to capture because of our connectivity to those CPOs today. Before the PlugShare acquisition, we went and integrated with CPOs in the UK with our Allstar business to create the Allstar electric network. Just to give you a sense of the different type of world we're in versus fuel and why having that connectivity, and to Ron's point, setting up that connectivity is valuable. I mean, we can collect everything from what you would expect, the site ID, the type of charge point, the address, the times it's operating, all the way through to parking restrictions around it. We can collect pictures that come out of it about the quality of the sites. All can come through from that charge point, including its availability. Is it being used? Is it not being used? We're Expedia for EV guys. You know, sometimes as a consumer, all you need is to charge. You need to get there, you need to tap your card. If it accepts an open loop payment, which not many do, except if they're the very fast ones, you don't really care about some of these things. Certainly in the commercial fleet world, it's completely different. They care about these data points, and being able to deliver those is clearly an advantage. We've seen this already. It's an advantage. That's great. Ron Allen, great conversation. Thanks so much. Thanks, Pete. Thank you. Our next question is from Trevor Williams with Jefferies. Please proceed with your question. Great. Thanks. Good afternoon. So on the consumer business, I just wanna make sure I'm understanding just how the monetization works. If you could walk us through the revenue model there, and I think Ron, just with the OpenTable analogy, that might have cleared it up, but if you could clarify if there's any revenue actually coming from the consumer or if we should think this is mostly coming from charge point operators, if it's all subscription-based or if there's any kinda usage, payments-based component that could layer in over time. Any more detail would be great. Thanks. Yeah. That's another good question, Trevor. The answer is kind of all of the above. There's two sides of the wheel here, just like in our current business. Clearly we're looking at capturing, you know, wholesale rates or what we call MDR or what we call interchange, right, for merchants. We're gonna bring them customers, either our fleet customers or consumers, you know, to their location. Obviously we wanna get paid for it. Then on the consumer side, forget the commercial side, all those ways that you named, we could have some kind of monthly or annual subscription right to use the thing. We could have some trans fee, hey, it's $1 or EUR 1, you know, to do it like an ATM fee. We could have a convenience fee like we do in tolling. Hey, the thing is, EUR 8 for the thing, but we're gonna mark it up 5% or 10% to EUR 8.80 or something. The company's actually experimented with a number of those different things. My guess is we probably would start on the side of market share, of having stuff more tied to transactions or convenience fees than we would try to get a lot of subscriptions before we prove ourselves. There's plenty. I mean, the great thing here is there's plenty of value to both sides, which is what pricing is ultimately driven on. We're being super helpful to the merchant 'cause we have customers, and we're being super helpful to the consumer because we have information that most other people don't have. Like, is the thing available? I think, you know, we wrote in this document today, you know, think about maybe $25 or EUR 25 a year from a consumer based on those different things. You know, if the business gets up to 50 or 100 million consumer vehicles, you know, in whatever, 5 or 8 years, it's a pretty big new business. You know, the numbers start to get pretty big. We're not really worried about, you know, hey, we don't. It used to be eyeballs. We're not sure how we're gonna get paid. It's really just metering in, you know, the appropriate price that matches up to the value people are getting. All right. Great. Understood. The other thing I wanted to ask was on Telematics, which is a business I know you guys exited a while back, and I'm just wondering kinda as more of the value, and this is more on the commercial fleet side, as more of the value you're providing is coming from the data, the unified data you're able to provide mixed fleets. Maybe you can just remind us or refresh on kinda why Telematics is not the best way to do that, kind of where you see your moat in providing vehicle-level data if you're no longer helping facilitate the payment. I'm thinking more of vehicles being done at home or at a central depot. Thanks. Yeah. The Telematics exit was super-duper simple. It was basically, an old kludge ball, retrofitty way of getting the stuff into the vehicles. Although the software was cloud-based, it required retrofit gadgets, you know, in the cars, which required cost to get from the client, time to go implement the thing. We hated all that. It dramatically slowed the sales implementation cycle. Second is price collapse. Our view, my view is when that stuff became part of the connected car, which obviously it has, right? There's computers now in the cars, that you're not gonna get priced for all that weirdo stuff. You're only gonna get priced for the software. You know, buying or owning a business that would go in half or in a third if that part of the cost structure and price came out was just not interesting to us. That's why we exited. You're right. The analogy that is right here is the benefit of that was the information and the software, that it helped the business, the plumbing guy, you know, do better dispatch and see if this guy's left their house at 8:00 A.M. It helped him manage, you know, his workforce and the customers. You're right, this is a bit of a similar thing. We wanna help our business guys not have a guy sit for an hour. Can you imagine that someone that, you know, bills at $100 or $200 an hour and he's sitting at a charge point because he didn't, you know, he didn't get charged up at home or he went to the wrong place? We think the information, you know, is gonna be super important to him. Again, we like businesses where the model doesn't have that baggage that I talked about, where that. You know, so much of that stuff is gonna go away, that old school implementation stuff. I think, you know, in the new EV world, first of all, every car is connected. So you don't need telematics kind of devices, you know, installed in the vehicle anymore. Every car that rolls off is connected. I think, you know, I mean, we've also invested in this company Motorq here in the US, but our connected strategy, connected car strategy, I didn't get a chance to talk about in any detail earlier, but that has very much part of our thinking as well. Motorq, how we work with Motorq is they're able to aggregate that connected car data from the manufacturers and send it to us to help complement the data points that we have already. So we're pulling data from CPOs, mentioned it before. We can pull data from in the UK through Mina from the home charging, and then we've got the connected car data that we can all pull together to validate the accuracy of the data, to also cover where we have blind spots or maybe the data doesn't come through properly through one device, but another device. We can also help with fraud, right? We can make sure that the vehicle is at the charge point and triangulate that to make sure that there's no fraud going on if, you know, if that sort of fleet wants to help manage. Yeah. Hey, I don't know if you guys know this, but this was an aha for me. Every certainly EV vehicle, maybe modern vehicle is literally talking back to the manufacturer or host, like every two seconds. When you buy a new car, you sign in all that paperwork and agreement to let the manufacturer have, you know, location information, charge or fuel information, maintenance information. All that lights to come on and off in your car are also going remotely back to Ford or GM to help them build better cars and stuff. To Alan's point, like there's a treasure chest now of information. For like EV, if you're one of our business clients, we literally know every two seconds what the charge level is of your 10 cars. Like, how cool is that? Like, the guy doesn't have to look at the thing. We tell the boss that, you know, Jim's running it, and he's at 10%, you know, charge or whatever, or he's at 90, and he says he has to pull over and charge. Hey, Jimmy Bones, I don't think so. I see you're at 90. It's pretty cool. I mean, the ability to grab that stuff out of every car and repackage it is, you know, Star Trek and Star Wars-y. All right. Great. Much appreciated. Thank you. Our next question is from Ramsey El-Assal with Barclays. Please proceed with your question. Hi. Thanks for squeezing me in here, and I'll maybe ask both related questions at once in the interest of time. I wanted to know whether the charge point operators, you know, who are they? Is there any overlap between, you know, the fuel brands or fuel station operators who are also trying to expand the kind of distribution or have plans to in this direction? I guess the broader question is, can you leverage your existing fuel card distribution relationships in order to drive this business forward? Yeah. Hey, Ramsey, it's Ron. You got it. I think we tried to say it, but literally, like, you know, we talk regularly, like, to our truck stop partners here in the U.S., right? In our trucking business. They're all now contemplating putting in, you know, chargers, right, to get ready for when the big trucks roll in that have chargers and stuff. We're guesstimating that maybe a quarter or a third of all the CPO capacity will be retrofit, what you and I think of as regular gas stations basically able to take EV because they're gonna live in a mixed world, right? For a long time. A retailer is. To your point, we think that that is super advantageous to us 'cause we're already collecting data from all our proprietary merchants here and in Europe. We have a settlement agreement to pay them and everything. You're on it. That's another asset we think we can leverage in this thing. Got it. There's sort of a built-in pipeline, when the time is right, there's a built-in pipeline for your distribution model here. That's great. Again, we got 80%. I don't want to keep saying this clearly. This company we bought has 80% of all the charging points. Hmm. 80%. Yeah. We're obviously gonna have them all. It's not universal, but it's pretty close, and that's because they've been at it, again, a super-duper long time. I say this all the time, you guys. I buy assets, you know. We make the financial profile happen, but this company has assets to us that far outstrip, you know, the financials that it's creating. We think that that's gonna be super hard for other people to recreate. The other advantage, I think, is if you think about the software that we now have, the operating software for CPO that we can then offer and go to our existing gas station customers and offer. It's agnostic. It's not tethered to the hardware that you're gonna go and buy. That has value because, you know, often the hardware and the software will come bundled, and that kind of restricts the CPO's ability to maybe go in a direction they wanna go in. Our ability to basically provide hardware-agnostic CPO operating system software also I think is a, you know, really advantageous area in this particular space, which is all new to us. Fantastic. Thank you so much. Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I'd like to turn the floor back over to Jim Eglseder for any closing comments. Hey, guys, it's Ron. I I just wanted to give a personal, you know, thanks for joining this on earnings to getting on and hearing the thing. Just wanna leave you with we're pretty excited. I don't know if it's coming across the thing, but we are spending some money and spending some time to try to get out in front of this thing, but we're pretty excited about what we can do with it. Again, appreciate your time. This concludes today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.