Paysign Q2 2026 Earnings Call - Revenue surges 48% as Patient Affordability scales and Plasma normalizes, driving raised full-year outlook
Summary
Paysign’s second quarter was less about beating guidance and more about proving a dual-engine model is actually working. Revenue jumped 48% to $28.3 million, with patient affordability acting as the primary accelerator. That segment alone delivered $14.6 million in revenue, up 89%, while claim volume climbed 54%. The dynamic business rules platform is doing exactly what it promises, shielding pharmaceutical partners from over $300 million in accumulator-driven costs in just six months. Meanwhile, the plasma division shed its inventory overhang. Monthly revenue per center hit $7,699, the cleanest reading since late 2024, and strategic center closures are already paying off in utilization.
Management is not resting on the quarter’s outperformance. Full-year revenue guidance has been lifted to $114 million–$117 million, with adjusted EBITDA now tracking toward $35 million–$38 million. Margins expanded 170 basis points to 63.3%, and operating leverage is becoming structural rather than cyclical. The pipeline runs into 2027, the Apherion software suite is advancing through FDA review, and a new European hub is already anchored in Ireland. The playbook is simple: scale the high-margin pharma platform, let plasma stabilize as a cash engine, and let the software suite open a multi-billion-dollar software TAM. Execution remains the only variable left to watch.
Key Takeaways
- Total revenue surged 48% year-over-year to $28.3 million, marking the second consecutive quarter of exceeding internal guidance.
- Patient affordability revenue jumped 89% to $14.6 million, driven by a 54% increase in claim volume and 13 new program launches in the quarter.
- Gross margin expanded 170 basis points to 63.3%, reflecting a favorable mix shift toward higher-margin pharma services and strong operating leverage.
- Adjusted operating margin reached 21.3% from 7.5% a year ago, converting roughly half of every incremental dollar of revenue into operating income.
- Dynamic business rules technology shielded pharmaceutical clients from over $300 million in accumulator and maximizer costs in just six months.
- Plasma revenue grew 21.4% to $13 million, with monthly revenue per center hitting $7,699, the strongest level since Q3 2024.
- Full-year 2026 revenue guidance was raised to $114 million–$117 million, with adjusted EBITDA now projected at $35 million–$38 million.
- The balance sheet remains fortress-like, exiting the quarter with $27.4 million in unrestricted cash, zero bank debt, and $149 million in restricted cash.
- RFP and RFI win rates remain north of 80%, with a healthy pipeline supporting expectations to match or exceed 55 net program additions in 2025.
- Apherion, the company’s life sciences software platform, advanced its BECS donor management system through FDA regulatory review and established an Irish subsidiary to capture international demand in a $3.5 billion global market.
Full Transcript
Kevin, Conference Operator, Paysign: Good afternoon. My name is Kevin. I’ll be your conference operator today. At this time, I’d like to welcome everyone to Paysign’s second quarter 2026 earnings conference call. After the speaker’s remarks, there’ll be a question and answer session. If you’d like to be placed into question queue, please press star one on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. The comments on today’s call regarding Paysign’s financial results will be on a GAAP basis unless otherwise noted. Paysign’s earnings release was disseminated to the SEC earlier today and can be found in the investor relations section of our website, paysign.com, which includes reconciliations of non-GAAP measures to GAAP reported amounts. Additionally, as set forth in more detail in our earnings release, I’d like to remind everyone that today’s call will include forward-looking statements regarding Paysign’s future performance.
Actual performance could differ materially from these forward-looking statements. Information about the factors that could affect future performance is summarized at the end of Paysign’s earnings release and in our recent SEC filings. Lastly, a replay of the call will be available until November fourth, 2026. Please see Paysign’s second quarter 2026 earnings call announcement for details on how to access the replay. It is now my pleasure to turn the call over to Mr. Mark Newcomer, President and CEO. Please go ahead.
Mark Newcomer, President and Chief Executive Officer, Paysign: Thank you, Kevin. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us for Paysign’s second quarter 2026 earnings call. I’m Mark Newcomer, President and Chief Executive Officer. I’m joined today by Jeff Baker, our Chief Financial Officer. Also with us are Matt Turner, our President of Patient Affordability, and Matt Lanford, our Chief Payments Officer, both of whom will be available for Q&A following our prepared remarks. Earlier today, we reported second quarter results setting new records for revenue, net income, and adjusted EBITDA. In fact, it was our second consecutive quarter of exceeding our quarterly guidance. As a result, we’re raising our outlook for the full year today. The momentum we’re seeing reflects the strategic decision we made a few years ago to invest in patient affordability as a business that could complement plasma and augment our overall growth trajectory.
This quarter is a good example of that work continuing to pay off. To put the quarter in perspective, revenue grew 48% year-over-year to $28.3 million. Net income came in at $6.8 million, or $0.11 per fully diluted share, a near five-fold increase year-over-year. Gross margin expanded 170 basis points to 63.3%. Jeff will walk you through all the financial results from the quarter. These numbers clearly demonstrate the progress we are making in the business. Patient affordability delivered another exceptional quarter and remains the company’s principal growth engine. Revenue rose 89% year-over-year to $14.6 million. Claim volume was approximately 54% higher than the second quarter of last year. Those results reflect the compounding effect of new program wins, deeper utilization across the existing clients, and the continued expansion of our largest pharmaceutical partnerships.
We are scaling the business methodically, and the combination of strong growth, margin expansion, and positive contribution margin demonstrates that strategy is working. What’s also encouraging is that plasma is now contributing to that same story. Both lines of business expanded margin this quarter. Patient Affordability compounding as it matures and plasma moving past the headwinds that weighed on it for the better part of the last year and a half. That’s the balance we’ve been working toward, a steady cash generative core supporting a faster growing high margin platform. Through the first half of 2026, the platform has channeled more than $900 million in financial assistance to patients. For context, we provided close to $1 billion over the whole of 2025, and we have already come within reach of that full year figure in just six months.
The pace reflects both widening program base and increased utilization within programs that have now been live for a year or more, and it shows how central Paysign has become to keeping high cost therapies within patients’ reach. Our dynamic business rules technology is a meaningful part of why pharmaceutical partners are consolidating more of their business with us. Over the first half of the year, it shielded clients from more than $300 million in costs that co-pay maximizers and accumulator programs would otherwise have diverted. To frame that, the full year 2025 total was roughly $325 million. We have nearly matched an entire year of savings in six months. That reflects both the scale of the platform and the continued sharpening of our detection logic. We launched 13 new programs in the second quarter and exited the quarter with 148 active programs, up from 97 a year ago.
In line with our expectations in demonstrating consistent and rapid growth. Launch activity tends to build as the year progresses, and the second quarter was a clear step up from the insurance plan year transitions and resets that make the first quarter our most constrained. The pipeline remains healthy through the balance of 2026 and well into 2027, and we expect to match or surpass the 55 net additions we recorded in 2025. Between the rising program count, growing utilization, and assistance dollars deployed, the read is consistent. The platform scales cleanly and market demand for our Patient Affordability solutions continues to strengthen. Turning to our plasma donor compensation business, plasma contributed $13 million in revenue for the quarter, up 21.4% from $10.7 million a year ago. More telling was monthly revenue per center, which reached $7,699, the strongest reading since the third quarter of 2024.
That measure reinforces our view that the recent center closures were strategic, with donors moving to nearby centers inside the same network rather than leaving the system altogether. We finished the quarter providing services to 561 centers, reflecting the 19 center closures that we flagged on last quarter’s call, partially offset by seven new additions. The trend leaves us increasingly confident that the headwinds we faced are now largely behind us. Plasma also remains a dependable source of cash generation, and it gives us a natural entry point to broaden adoption of our donor management and engagement software among the collectors we serve. Our life sciences technology suite, which we bring to market under the Apherion brand, continues to advance through the regulatory review process for our blood establishment computer software or BECS donor management system, and we look forward to sharing additional milestones as that work progresses.
Interest in the Apherion platform remains strong both domestically and internationally. To support that international demand, we’ve established Apheryon Technologies Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary domiciled in Ireland, which will anchor our sales, development, and client support as our European hub. With roughly a third of source plasma collected outside of the United States, much of it by companies that also run U.S. operations, we see substantial international runway for this business and this step positions us to pursue it. In summary, the second quarter validated the strategy we have been building towards the past several years. Patient affordability is scaling, plasma is steady and cash generative, and our life science technology efforts are opening another meaningful avenue for growth. We head into the back half of the year with business accelerating, margins expanding and a pipeline that reaches into 2027.
This is a business that’s ramping, not just beating a number, we believe Paysign is well-positioned to continue delivering sustainable growth and long-term value for our shareholders, the clients who trust us, and the patients who ultimately benefit from what we build. With that, I’ll turn it over to Jeff for additional details on our second quarter results.
Jeff Baker, Chief Financial Officer, Paysign: Thank you, Mark. Good afternoon, everyone. We delivered another strong quarter. Results in both plasma and patient affordability show the momentum we have been building. We also drove year-over-year margin improvement across the entire income statement, even excluding a one-time non-cash benefit of $990,000 related to the carrying value of the Gamma acquisition earn-out liability. Our first two quarters of 2026 make two things clear. Our patient affordability solutions are resonating with pharmaceutical companies, and our plasma business has recovered from the high inventory levels that weighed on results throughout 2025. For the second quarter, total revenues increased 48.1% year-over-year to $28.3 million. Pharma revenue led the way, increasing 88.9% year-over-year to $14.6 million. That growth was driven by continued program expansion, including 51 net pharma patient affordability programs launched over the last 12 months.
We exited the quarter with 148 active programs and processed claims increased approximately 54% compared to the second quarter of 2025. The revenue increase reflected higher monthly management fees, setup fees, claim processing fees, customer service contact center support, and other billable services such as dynamic business rules. Pharma revenue again surpassed plasma revenue this year, even with the normal seasonal pattern in which claims begin to decline and plasma donations tend to increase as we move through the year. Plasma revenue increased 21.4% year-over-year to $13 million. Average monthly revenue per center increased more than 5% to $7,699, up from $7,098 in the second quarter of 2025, and the average number of loads per center again increased year-over-year. The improvement was driven primarily by stronger utilization at existing centers rather than footprint expansion, which is an encouraging indicator of underlying donor activity.
As Mark noted, we exited the quarter with 561 centers, in line with the expectations we communicated on our first quarter earnings call. These trends support our view that the 2025 inventory overhang has largely normalized. Gross profit margin expanded to 63.3% from 61.6% a year ago, reflecting a greater mix of pharma revenue, which carries higher gross margins than our plasma business. Call center support, implementation, processing, and commission costs in the aggregate grew well below our 48.1% revenue growth, which is what produced the margin expansion and demonstrates the operating leverage inherent in our model. Total operating expenses were $10.9 million, an increase of 5.5% from $10.3 million in the second quarter of 2025. During the quarter, we recorded a non-recurring non-cash benefit of $990,000 related to the carrying value of the Gamma acquisition earn-out liability.
Excluding this benefit, total operating expenses would have been $11.9 million, an increase of 15.1% over the prior year. Well below our 48.1% revenue growth, selling, general, and administrative expenses increased 4.3% to $8.5 million, including stock-based compensation of $1.3 million. Excluding the one-time benefit, selling, general, and administrative expenses would have increased 16.3% to $9.5 million. Operating leverage was one of the highlights of the quarter. Excluding the one-time Gamma earn-out benefit, adjusted operating margin, calculated as adjusted operating income divided by revenue, expanded to 21.3% from 7.5% in the second quarter of 2025, an improvement of more than 1,300 basis points. Put another way, we converted roughly half of our incremental revenue into adjusted operating income, demonstrating the scalability of the platform as pharma mix increases and plasma normalizes.
Depreciation and amortization increased $200,000 due primarily to the amortization of intangible assets from our Gamma acquisition and the capitalization of new software development costs. Here are a few other important details for the second quarter. Income before taxes increased to $7.9 million from $2 million in the second quarter of 2025. The company reported an income tax provision of $1.1 million, resulting in an effective tax rate of 14.5% compared to 32.1% in the second quarter of 2025. The lower rate reflects discrete item adjustments primarily related to the increase in our stock price at June 30, 2026, compared to the same period last year, which increased the tax benefit from stock-based compensation relative to the prior year period.
GAAP net income for the quarter totaled $6.8 million, or $0.11 per fully diluted share, an increase from $1.4 million, or $0.02 per fully diluted share in the second quarter of 2025. Adjusted EBITDA increased 113% to $9.6 million, or $0.16 per fully diluted share, compared to $4.5 million, or $0.08 per fully diluted share in the second quarter of 2025. Adjusted EBITDA margin expanded to 34% from 23.7% a year ago. We use adjusted EBITDA, which excludes stock-based compensation and one-time non-cash adjustments to evaluate core operating performance. The fully diluted share count used in calculating per share amounts was 62 million shares versus 57.9 million shares in the prior year period. We exited the quarter with $27.4 million in unrestricted cash and zero bank debt. Restricted cash increased $5.2 million from the year-end December 31, 2025, to $149 million.
The increase was driven primarily by customer program deposits for plasma and pharma programs, as well as higher funds on card, which represents balances loaded to cards but not yet spent by cardholders. Before turning to our outlook, I want to note that our second quarter results once again exceeded our guidance across every line of the income statement, primarily driven by strength in our Patient Affordability business. Revenue of $28.3 million exceeded the high end of our $26.2 million-$26.7 million guidance range. Gross margin of 63.3% finished above our guided range of 60%-62%. Adjusted EBITDA of $9.6 million exceeded the high end of our $7.7 million-$8.5 million range, and adjusted net margin of 20.4% exceeded the top of our 13.4%-15% range.
The outperformance in the first two quarters of the year, combined with the visibility we have in the program launches and seasonal trends, supports our increased full-year outlook. For full-year 2026, we now expect full-year revenue of $114 million-$117 million, representing 39%-43% year-over-year growth. This is an increase of approximately $7 million at the midpoint compared to our prior guidance, primarily driven by stronger than expected Patient Affordability business and a recovery in our plasma business. With the increase in Patient Affordability revenues driving continued margin expansion and operating leverage, we expect gross profit margins between 62% and 63%, an increase compared to our prior guidance of 60%-62%.
GAAP net income is expected to be in the range of $21.5 million-$23 million, or $0.35-$0.37 per diluted share. Adjusted EBITDA is expected to be in the range of $35 million-$38 million, or $0.57-$0.61 per diluted share. These full-year net income expectations include the non-recurring non-cash Gamma earn-out benefit recorded at the second quarter. Consistent with our adjusted presentation, adjusted EBITDA excludes that benefit. For the third quarter, we expect revenue of $28.5 million-$30 million, a year-over-year increase of 32%-38.9%, with approximately $300,000 coming from other revenue and the remaining balance being split between the Patient Affordability and plasma businesses. Gross margins are expected to be in the range of 61%-63%, reflecting a greater mix of plasma revenues.
Our tax rate for the quarter is expected to be 17%. Our GAAP net income is expected to be $5.7 million-$6.0 million, or $0.09-$0.10 per fully diluted share. Adjusted EBITDA is expected to be $9.5 million-$10 million, or $0.15-$0.16 per fully diluted share. As of today’s announcement, we have 157 active Patient Affordability programs and expect to exit the third quarter with 165-170 active programs. We also expect our active plasma center count to slightly increase from the second quarter. As a reminder, pharma revenue is typically highest in the first half as claims peak with annual insurance deductible resets and then moderate throughout the balance of the year. Plasma revenue, by contrast, is typically softest in the first quarter and builds as donor activity normalizes following tax refund season.
Both dynamics are fully reflected in our full-year guidance. In short, we are entering the second half of 2026 with stronger program momentum, improved plasma utilization, higher margins, and a clean balance sheet. Those factors support both our revised guidance and our confidence in the long-term earnings power of the platform. That concludes my prepared remarks. With that, I would like to turn the call back over to the operator to begin the question and answer session.
Kevin, Conference Operator, Paysign: Thank you. We’ll now be conducting a question and answer session. If you’d like to be placed into question queue, 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’d like to remove your question from the queue. One moment please, while we poll for questions. Our first question today is coming from Gary Prestopino from Barrington Research. Your line is now live.
Gary Prestopino, Analyst, Barrington Research: Good afternoon, all. At this point, Mark, have you contemplated or even really measure, on a same store basis, what the revenue growth per program is, for programs that you’ve had in hand for 12 months or so?
Matt Lanford, Chief Payments Officer, Paysign: Yeah. Hey, this is Matt. Can you repeat that? Are you talking plasma or are you talking patient affordability?
Gary Prestopino, Analyst, Barrington Research: Patient affordability, please.
Matt Lanford, Chief Payments Officer, Paysign: You’re asking like month-over-month what it looks like when it normalizes?
Gary Prestopino, Analyst, Barrington Research: No. Just to get an idea of the programs that you have in hand 12 months, if you look at it like on a same-store basis, what’s been the, for lack of a better word, organic growth within a program or within your program?
Jeff Baker, Chief Financial Officer, Paysign: Yeah. Gary, for the most part, all things being equal, on a year-over-year basis, once it becomes a mature program, you would expect flattish revenue growth. However, we’ve been adding in more feature functionality into a program. A program may get an additional indication. There are a number of factors that we’ll go into. We have some programs that we’re turning on other services for, that we’re now billing for. It’s kind of hard to tell you. If we did nothing, if we did absolutely nothing, you would expect if there were X number of claims one year, there would be the same number of claims next year. We’re actually seeing growth in some of our existing programs because we’re adding more products and services for those programs.
Gary Prestopino, Analyst, Barrington Research: Right.
Jeff Baker, Chief Financial Officer, Paysign: We’ve got a couple of programs that are getting more indications, meaning there’s other uses for the drug, and so that expands their opportunity. That’s what we’re seeing right now.
Gary Prestopino, Analyst, Barrington Research: Okay. Just the bulk of the growth is going to continue to come from adding new programs, that’s what I was trying to get at.
Jeff Baker, Chief Financial Officer, Paysign: Absolutely.
Gary Prestopino, Analyst, Barrington Research: I think at one time or another, Jeff, we talked and you said there’s between 850 and 900 potential pharmaceutical programs. Is that still a good number?
Matt Lanford, Chief Payments Officer, Paysign: Yeah. This is Matt. It’s way higher. I think there’s 850 drugs that currently have maximizer and accumulator impact. If you look at the total number of drugs in market with a copay program, you’re in the tens of thousands. Pretty much every branded product as well as most biosimilars. You get into some medical devices as well, and you get into physician administered or infused products. There’s still a tremendous TAM here for us to tap into. We’re going back to analogies from a couple of quarters ago. We’re still in the first inning here.
Gary Prestopino, Analyst, Barrington Research: Okay. That’s great. Then just lastly, I know you mentioned something about the Apherion program needing approval, but could you just go into that a little bit more, what you’re waiting for here before you can launch it into the market?
Matt Lanford, Chief Payments Officer, Paysign: Yeah. Really, the regulatory process is something we’re in the process of going through. I don’t have a crystal ball, so anytime you’re in that review process, it kind of is what it is, and you just kind of roll with it.
Gary Prestopino, Analyst, Barrington Research: Right.
Matt Lanford, Chief Payments Officer, Paysign: I can’t really give a date for that at this point in time. You got to figure that we’re going to continue. We’re getting lots of interest internationally and domestically. I expect that to continue.
We’ll definitely give you additional feedback as it comes down the pipe on milestones met on that.
Gary Prestopino, Analyst, Barrington Research: Okay. It’s the FDA that you’re waiting for the regulatory approval from, right?
Matt Lanford, Chief Payments Officer, Paysign: Correct.
Gary Prestopino, Analyst, Barrington Research: Okay. Just lastly, the TAM there is pretty big, probably over $1 billion worldwide?
Jeff Baker, Chief Financial Officer, Paysign: The TAM, for software, for blood and plasma software alone, globally today, it’s $3.5 billion. The estimates from a third-party research that we looked at thinks that that’s going to $7 billion over the next 10 years.
Gary Prestopino, Analyst, Barrington Research: Okay. Thank you.
Jeff Baker, Chief Financial Officer, Paysign: That’s a large TAM.
Gary Prestopino, Analyst, Barrington Research: Yeah. That’s great. Thanks.
Kevin, Conference Operator, Paysign: Thank you. Our next question is coming from Jacob Stephan from Lake Street Capital Markets. Your line is now live.
Jacob Stephan, Analyst, Lake Street Capital Markets: Hey, guys. Appreciate you taking the questions. Congrats on a really nice quarter here. Maybe just on the Q3 program guide. Q3 implies roughly 20 new additions in the quarter. That’s pretty strong seasonally, just given Q3’s usually a lower quarter. When you kind of factor in that Q4 is typically stronger, and correlating that with your over 55 guidance, I guess, what are you seeing differently in Q3 that gives you the strong sequential number of additions there?
Matt Lanford, Chief Payments Officer, Paysign: I want to push back on something, that Q3 is normally not a slow quarter for us. Typically, Q1 is our weakest quarter for new program launches because of insurance resetting. I think if you look at this quarter, or the first quarter of this year, we only launched a couple of programs, and that’s really what we expect. As you get into the end of Q1 and move into Q2, we have the Asembia conference that we talk about every year, and that starts to set the stage for the back half of this year and the first half of next year.
What we’re seeing come into Q3 now is representative of sales work that was begun in Q1 when we were in that launch lull, as well as things that are popping out, that we kind of closed up at Asembia and were able to get through. On the non-portfolio accounts, take the giant top 10 pharmas off the table for a second. For the smaller pharmas, our sales cycle is still holding around 90 days. As we were planning this stuff in Q2, that obviously, you kind of take the 90-day framework and it starts to look towards Q3. Jeff already said, we’re sitting here talking fifth, and we’ve already done plenty of launches in the last 30 days.
I don’t think there’s necessarily a driver other than this is just the normal timing that we expect to see these types of deals come through. Q4 always tends to be on par with Q3 because we’ve got a lot of people that will rush to get programs up and live before Q1 when insurance deductibles and everything else reset, and we enter what we call the blizzard, just to where every patient’s calling about everything, every pharmacy’s calling about everything because they’re dealing with insurance deductibles resetting everything else. That’s really the push of Q3 and Q4, is to get everything done before Q1, because nobody wants to transition a program in Q1.
Typically, what you’ll see, launch-wise in Q1 and sometimes as much Q2, is new programs that are a new-to-market drug as opposed to you won’t really see us transitioning very many programs in January, February, just due to resource constraints across the broader industry.
Jeff Baker, Chief Financial Officer, Paysign: Jacob, like I said, we sit here today, we exited July with 157 programs, so added another nine since the end of the quarter. Look, last year, we added 28 programs in the fourth quarter. The pipeline is extremely strong. We feel good about where we’re headed and the number of programs. Added 13 programs in the second quarter, was very solid as well. If you look at our guidance, the pipeline is strong and the implementations keep coming. There’s no slowdown.
Jacob Stephan, Analyst, Lake Street Capital Markets: Got it. Appreciate all the detail there. Maybe just one more, kind of a building off of the last analyst question, but how does, I guess, first year revenue per program kind of compare with your more seasoned base? Do you guys typically land with DBR or is that kind of an add-on product that gets upsold later?
Matt Lanford, Chief Payments Officer, Paysign: We try to launch with DBR. That’s our normal go-to. But that’s obviously for specialty products that are impacted by maximizers. It’s not to say that every product that we have is impacted by maximizers. It’s a little bit of a mix. I think it’s very difficult to answer your other question around what does a program look like. I pulled up some quick metrics, looking at a program that we transitioned back in July of 2024. If you were to look at January of 2025 versus January of 2026, there was about a 15% increase in claims. That has nothing to do with Paysign. That has to do with the fact that that drug received a pediatric indication in Q4 of 2025. Going into Q1 of 2026, their claim volume is naturally higher.
On the reverse side of that is I have another drug that’s maybe doing, say 7% less in that program year-to-year, but I’m not going to feel it because I actually have the drug that’s cannibalizing that product. A lot of times, as pharma companies will have a drug start to enter a loss of exclusivity period, they will launch another drug timed, and it’s for similar indications. The treatment profile is similar, adverse events and pharmacovigilance, efficacy, all that stuff is very similar, but it’s a new molecule. They’ll launch that product in a way that is designed to cannibalize from the product that’s losing exclusivity. You can’t generalize that and say, this is just how programs work. It’s like saying, "Hey, tell me how much it is for a drug," and you have to account for aspirin as well as gene therapy.
Gene therapy is $30 million. Aspirin is sub-pennies per pill. When we get into our programs, there is that level of disparity. We have programs that might do a couple claims a month. I’ve got programs that might do 30,000 claims a month. There’s no way to just give you an average and say, "This is what you should look at for a program, and this is what they look like year-to-year." You have to really be dialed into the efficacy of the drug, the pipeline of the manufacturer, everything else. Unfortunately, with our contracts, we’re just not allowed to disclose our book of business.
Jacob Stephan, Analyst, Lake Street Capital Markets: Yeah. No, makes sense. I appreciate all the detail. Nice quarter, guys.
Mark Newcomer, President and Chief Executive Officer, Paysign: Thank you.
Thanks, Jared.
Thanks.
Kevin, Conference Operator, Paysign: Thank you. Next question today is coming from Peter Heckmann from D.A. Davidson. Your line is now live.
Peter Heckmann, Analyst, D.A. Davidson: Good afternoon. Great to see the good results. Back to pharma. Could you talk about how do the manufacturers or the middlemen that work with manufacturers, how do they procure these? Are there typically requests for proposal or-
is it just kind of on a one-off basis? I guess when you look at that, is there a way to think about your win rates, and kind of the Paysign obviously has great momentum in the business, but this makes me wonder if your win rates really have moved quite a bit higher. Then just thinking about seasonality of wins, just looking at the last couple of years, it doesn’t seem that there’s any real particular pattern. I guess generally, would you expect to win relatively more new programs in the first half or the second half?
Matt Lanford, Chief Payments Officer, Paysign: As far as win ratios, let me go back to kind of the sales cycle first, as that was the first question you asked. There is a pretty good mix of RFPs, RFIs versus direct award. I would say right now we’re probably in the 75% of our wins are coming out of RFPs, RFIs, and the remaining 25% is word of mouth, kind of direct award. Our RFP win rate is pretty high. I don’t have the exact numbers in front of me. I’d have to go back and kind of dig that out. I would say our RFI, RFP win rate is north of 80%. All right, that was the first question. Now I lost your second one because I didn’t write it down. Sorry, what was the next one?
Peter Heckmann, Analyst, D.A. Davidson: Just thinking about any seasonality to the wins. I’m just looking historically and just trying to, I think last fourth quarter was a great net win quarter. Last year you also had a very strong first quarter. Just trying to, if there’s certain conferences or certain timing launch that generally we would expect you to add more net new in the first half or the second half, or it just depends on the year.
Matt Lanford, Chief Payments Officer, Paysign: Yeah. I think that there is seasonality in the transition wins, but I don’t think that’s necessarily related to selling. That’s more related to what makes sense as to when to actually transition the program. There’s quite a few programs that we may have known we’ve won and have been sitting on it for four or five months because the launch date is the middle of the year, because that’s what worked for the manufacturer. I kind of equate it to building a house in Alaska. You don’t build it in the wintertime. We don’t transition programs in the middle of the blizzard. It kind of knocks out this whole three or four-month period of the year to where you’re just not going to see a lot of transitions.
If you look at our business wins this year, we’re about 50/50 on transition programs versus new to market, which is why you see some of these programs launching in the first quarter and the second quarter. They’re brand new to market drugs. We’ve won those products through RFP or through word of mouth. Those trickle in just throughout the year, and that’s based on the PDUFA dates that they receive from the FDA as well as their internal launch readiness around those products. There’s certainly a seasonality to the selling. We do talk about Asembia a lot. That conference is critically important to us every year. We throw a lot of time, energy, and resources at that conference. We consider it our single largest marketing event for patient affordability throughout the year.
We attend five to seven other conferences as well, at various levels to where we may have one or two people, or some of them we have 10 or 12 folks show up. It just really depends on the conference and who we think is there that’s on our target list. Asembia is in the April to May timeframe, we get into the October-November timeframe with a couple of other conferences that are typically in the Philadelphia area, or New Jersey area every year. I would say that’s the seasonality into our sell. One other thing I’ll talk about around win rates, because I just thought about this, is if you look at last year and all of the new programs that came to market, there’s a certain percentage of those that we were never going to be in a position to win, right?
They have exclusivity contracts with their current vendor or something like that, this is going to be a small drug rolling into a manufacturer that already has exclusivity with somebody else. We went back and looked at that last year. Out of all the new drugs that came to market
We won over 80% of those RFIs, RFPs that came out. We know our win rate and our conversion rate is very high overall. If you look at comparing us to the rest of the market, I don’t think you see anybody else in the market doing 50-60 program launches a year. I worked at another service provider prior to coming here, I can tell you we quite certainly did not set up on average more than one program a month. I think our growth is certainly leading the industry.
Peter Heckmann, Analyst, D.A. Davidson: That’s great. That’s very good color. Jeff, I just had one for you. Forgive me if I missed it, you have earning season, lots going on here. In the last three years, the difference between your EBITDA in the third quarter and the fourth quarter were typically pretty even. This year, just kind of working through your third quarter and full year guidance, it appears that third quarter is going to be very strong from a margin perspective, fourth quarter, not as strong. On an absolute dollar basis, pretty significant step down in the fourth quarter. Forgive me if I missed it, can you talk about the reasons for that? It appears to be more than just your normal revenue mix shift back to plasma.
Jeff Baker, Chief Financial Officer, Paysign: No, it’s a fair question. If you look last year, we had so many patient affordability programs launched in the fourth quarter. It was like drinking out of a fire hose. This year, hopefully, we’re seeing a little bit more in the second quarter, more in the third quarter, some in the fourth quarter. A little bit more evened out throughout the rest of the year. That’s going to be part of it. The thing you’re going to see in the fourth quarter also, one of the things I’ve experienced is, it’s a holiday season and, just like anybody else, we have people that take off. That impacts some of the capitalization rates that we would do on a software development side. I expect it to be lower.
My tax rate, which I know it doesn’t affect adjusted EBITDA, but my tax rate’s going to be higher in the fourth quarter than the third quarter because we have a lot of the vestings, the RSUs that are coming through. We have more vesting in the third quarter than we do the fourth quarter. My deductions go down. Right now, if you look in the fourth quarter, I would expect my income tax rate in the fourth quarter be closer to 27%, versus the guidance of 17% in the third quarter. Just a number of things. This year, like I said, our pipeline’s strong. We are anticipating to hire more account managers to service the patient affordability business, hire more claims people, et cetera. We’ve got to be ready to go in Q1 when the floodgates open.
You’re just seeing a little bit of that as well. I could be wrong, but right now, that’s my expectations.
Peter Heckmann, Analyst, D.A. Davidson: Yep. Okay. That’s fair. I appreciate it.
Kevin, Conference Operator, Paysign: Thank you. Our next question is coming from Jon Hickman from Wedbush Fleming. Your line is now live.
Jon Hickman, Analyst, Wedbush Fleming: Hey, just a kind of a model question for you guys. Kind of going forward, is 15% year-over-year a good growth rate for your OpEx?
Jeff Baker, Chief Financial Officer, Paysign: Jon, honestly, I don’t really look at that. I do a bottoms-up build. I haven’t given guidance for next year. I would expect most of our growth is, from a hiring perspective, is coming from patient affordability. That will continue as we add more programs. I don’t think 15% is unreasonable. It may be a little light, but, probably 15%-20%ish isn’t crazy. I would look back and say, okay, last year we added 51 programs. This year we’re on track to add 55 to 60 programs. You can see what the OpEx is building, adjust out stock comp and some of the D&A, if you want to look at just SG&A by itself, and I think you could probably get some good deduction from those numbers.
Jon Hickman, Analyst, Wedbush Fleming: Okay. Could you talk about, are you going to be at any conferences or anything in the coming months?
Jeff Baker, Chief Financial Officer, Paysign: Yeah.
Jon Hickman, Analyst, Wedbush Fleming: investor relations point of view.
Jeff Baker, Chief Financial Officer, Paysign: We’ve got some non-deal roadshows that we’re doing. We’ve got some conferences. The conferences that we’re attending is, in New York in mid-September. We’ve got the Lake Street conference, and there’s also an Oppenheimer conference, that we’re attending. We have a non-deal roadshow going to Boston. We’ve got the Ideas Conference in Chicago in August, that we’re attending. We will be on the road quite a bit over the next couple of months.
Jon Hickman, Analyst, Wedbush Fleming: Okay. Thank you, and nice quarter. Okay.
Jeff Baker, Chief Financial Officer, Paysign: Thanks, Jon.
Kevin, Conference Operator, Paysign: Thank you. We’ve reached the end of our question and answer session. Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude today’s teleconference and webcast. You may disconnect your lines at this time and have a wonderful day. We thank you for your participation today.