Usio Q4 2025 Earnings Call - ACH and Pinless Debit Surge, Usio One and PostCredit to Drive 10%-12% Growth in 2026

Paul, Investor Relations / Call Host, Usio: On this call with me today are Louis Hoch, our Chairman and CEO, and Greg Carter, Executive Vice President of Payment Acceptance and our Chief Revenue Officer. Michael White, Senior Vice President and Chief Accounting Officer, and Jerry Uffner, Head of Card Issuing, will also be available during the question and answer session. Let me remind our listeners that certain statements made today during the call constitute forward-looking statements made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, as amended, and as more fully discussed in our press release and in our filings with the SEC. Let me start off today’s call with some highlights from this afternoon’s release. It was a solid quarter in line with our commitment to shareholders to deliver a stronger second half of the year.

Revenues were up both sequentially and on a year-over-year basis, with record growth accelerating to 8% in the fourth quarter. This led to a 3% increase in revenue for the year, but excluding revenue associated with interest, revenues from products and services were up 4%. We set a record for total dollars processed in the year, which were up 19%, and transactions processed were up 30%. As has been the case over the course of the year, revenue growth for the quarter was led by our ACH and card businesses. ACH was once again our fastest-growing segment. Revenue increased more than 30% for both the quarter and the full year, driven by new client implementations and strong growth in pinless debit.

For the year, ACH set a record for dollars processed, up 22%, transactions up 29% and returns which were up 31%. Pinless debit dollars processed was up 81%. Card revenue increased 7% in the fourth quarter and finished the year up 3%, with continued PayFac growth driving performance. Card also reported record processing volume and transactions. Our Output Solutions finished the year with strong momentum, with pieces mailed up 11% and electronic documents processed up 18% in the fourth quarter. This led to a 6% increase in revenues for the quarter, so that revenues ended up flat for the year. Although Card Issuing revenues were down in the quarter, they improved relative to the third quarter. Card Issuing also continues to improve its profitability.

Weakness in Card Issuing in 2025 was almost exclusively attributable to the indirect acquisition of a reseller’s amusement park card program. Since this transaction occurred early in 2025, this should provide relatively easy 2026 comps, which we anticipate will help Card Issuing 2026 results reflect the recovery staged over the balance of the year. The majority of the revenue in the quarter was generated from ongoing programs, with the primary exception being certain Card Issuing programs with governmental entities. No single client accounted for more than 10% of total revenue, reflecting the diversified nature of our customer base. From an account perspective, attrition remained very minimal. Operating cash flow for the year was $1.5 million.

These proceeds were used over the past year to invest in expanding both our tangible and intangible fixed assets, as well as for over $1.1 million in share repurchases. Though down from a year ago, we still have nearly $7.5 million in cash on hand, positioning us to invest both organic, inorganic and non-organic expansion opportunities. In the fourth quarter, we used stock for the $500,000 purchase of PostCredit. Bottom line, we still have plenty of dry powder for strategic development. In addition to positive cash flow, we also delivered another year of positive adjusted EBITDA and have now reported positive adjusted EBITDA for three consecutive years. Our guidance contemplates positive adjusted EBITDA in fiscal 2026 as well. All in all, a solid growth year with record revenues and record operating performance.

We believe 2026 is the year to take another big step forward with new initiatives to increase our share of our customers’ wallets, build a portfolio of recurring revenues, and to introduce new products and services that only improve on the infinity that we already enjoy with all of our clients. This is a strategy that builds value. Now, with that, at this time, I’d like to turn the call over to Greg Carter.

Greg Carter, Executive Vice President of Payment Acceptance and Chief Revenue Officer, Usio: Thank you, Paul, and good afternoon, everyone. It was another record quarter and year for Card as we reported all-time record quarterly and annual transactions and dollar volume processed led by our continued focus on PayFac. As a result, revenue growth net of our legacy portfolio was 13% for the quarter and 7% for the year. That’s been Card’s mantra strong processing volume and solid PayFac revenue growth. It’s resulted in steady, predictable, recurring revenue growth built on a foundation of primarily ISVs who are loyal to Usio and most frequently are growing their own client base and consequently processing volume with us year after year. Since joining Usio, I’ve seen our market reputation and awareness steadily increase. This success can be attributed to our multi-pronged sales and marketing strategy that incorporates both traditional as well as creative and new age digital marketing tactics.

For instance, our SEO results continue to improve. We are leveraging this success and recently we are added to the G2 platform, which is one of the largest online influencer reference sites. We’re already starting to get quality leads from software companies that are searching on these sites, specifically for payment processing. It’s not more effort, it’s smarter effort with more surgical precision, something we’ve preached from day one. Another growth lever is Usio One. Usio now is essentially fully integrated. The idea is to mine our existing relationships to uncover opportunities where other Usio services may be needed. This is a mandate to increase our share of our customer’s wallet. We’ve made changes within the sales structure that’s going to improve our throughput and accountability.

In addition to our efforts, Houston Frost is now focused almost exclusively on new product development that will also increase our share of the customer’s wallet. Louis will provide some insight on how the PostCredit acquisition fits into the strategy and is the ideal platform to supplement and accelerate our existing efforts. The proof is in the pudding, so let me offer you some examples of our new agreements that have arisen from this strategy. I’ve talked about our growing backlog of new customers that are in various stages of implementation, and I’m pleased to report that many of these implementations are complete and are processing volume with us. For instance, we completed the implementation of a national online specialty sports goods retailer. This is a straight merchant processing account that we expect to add meaningful volume this year.

In addition, we completed the rollout with the multi-state building supplies company. All their stores have been boarded and processing volume is correspondingly on a very attractive growth trajectory. Finally, a quick note on the outstanding progress of our new Filtered Spend program, which was a massive implementation. It’s up and running with thousands of bodegas and smaller grocery stores now able to accept healthcare assistance cards. It allows users to buy over-the-counter pharmaceuticals using a specific healthcare spending account. The takeaway is that we successfully boarded well over 2,000 of those merchants during 2025 that are now live. There are over 8,000 more target merchants that are involved in this program, and now that all the complex initial interfaces have been completed, we are hoping to board the remaining locations through mid-summer 2026. I used to say that Usio was the best-kept secret in payments.

I’m not so sure that’s true anymore. It’s also reassuring to see us more widely appear and more quickly climb among various surveys that rate payment processors. As the number of successful implementations increases, so does the interest. Now we need to capitalize on this interest to continue to deliver value to our clients and profitably grow Usio. Now, I’d like to turn the call over to Louis.

Louis Hoch, Chairman and CEO, Usio: Good afternoon and welcome everyone. I’m proud of our accomplishments and progress in what was a record 2025. It was a year in which we achieved the highest revenue in the company’s history. Operationally, we set numerous full-year transaction and processing volume records across many of the company’s operating metrics. Of equal importance, we met our commitment to shareholders by posting a second half that was improvement over the first half. These records bear out the message in my shareholder’s letter that throughout 2025, we executed on the mission of delivering secure, scalable and integrated electronic payment and embedded financial solutions. Time and again, our technology has been chosen by leaders such as Mastercard, Apple, the City of New York, State of California for the ability to meet this mission. I’m very proud of our market reputation we have built on this foundation of trust and reliability.

This is the value in our mission, and as Greg alluded to, it’s becoming increasingly recognized. We continue to work to unlock the value by building on this legacy with innovative new technologies that meet and sometimes even exceed customer requirements. Our strategy is to pursue opportunities to increase the proportion of customers that need these services on a recurring basis, an area where there is significant opportunity to achieve this objective through increased penetration of our existing customer base. Greg is leading our Usio One initiative with the objective to increase cross-selling. At the same time, Houston is developing new products and services that similarly cater to untapped customer needs. One of the most exciting new opportunities to capitalize on our strategy was the acquisition of PostCredit, Co.

It supports our strategy to offer our customers a comprehensive business banking solution while enhancing our visibility into managing customer risks. Today, we move over $100 million every day by virtue of our clients’ processing agreements. With Usio’s business banking solution, we can effectively become our clients’ depository institution. When they log on to our business banking solution, clients will be greeted with a dashboard clearly illustrating their account. It will also enable them to utilize their funds for any of our services, such as the issuance of corporate cards, an ACH disbursement, or even settling accounts payable. When this goes live later this year, all new clients will be encouraged to use our business banking solution to pre-fund their Usio accounts and to receive their daily settlement funds. When they log in, they’re seeing a full suite of banking tools representing another cross-selling opportunity.

This reflects our ongoing commitment to developing innovative payment solutions, including early initiatives such as virtual cards and our Consumer Choice platform. As we roll out enhanced version of Consumer Choice with significant upgrades, including Venmo, PayPal, push to debit, instant withdrawal, we are seeing increased interest from both new and existing clients. As a result, Card Issuing is now actively engaged with large commercial and governmental entities in need of versatile and dependable disbursement platform, especially one that offers modern payment rails. Consumer Choice is one of the most robust disbursement solutions in the market. In fact, one of our larger prospects was virtually stunned to learn that we are integrated with all the major wallets, something they said was missing from most other comparable payment disbursement platforms.

Mastercard needs to be recognized as they continue to refer business our way, any of which would layer nicely on top of the 44 deals and the 53 new implementations Card Issuing completed in 2025. After a year that was disrupted by the indirect acquisition of a large amusement park client from one of our resellers, it is nice to see Card Issuing recovering. Card Issuing has a solid base that is stable and growing. There are many new clients that require complex integrations that were implemented late in 2025 and have not yet scaled. Even without any contribution from these large opportunities, we expect Card Issuing to make a nice rebound.

All of these growth initiatives should also benefit Output Solutions, which finished fiscal 2025 with strong momentum, including growth in both revenue and pieces distributed and a 10% increase in higher margin electronic document distribution. In 2025, they added 37 new clients, primarily in their core markets, with vast majority representing recurring business. That has created momentum into 2026. In the early in the new year, they are already setting records for number of pieces mailed. Output also expects to put a new printer into operation this year, which will run at a better than twice the rate of our existing printer and at better resolution while reducing the quantity of the supplies consumed. This positions us to expand to new markets, pursue additional opportunities, including the production of marketing materials.

Since many clients pre-fund their postage, this also creates a natural opportunity to introduce our business banking solutions. We believe this will create additional cross-selling opportunities through Usio One initiative, including the upcoming dedicated marketing campaign. The star of the quarter was ACH, another quarter of better than 30% revenue growth, leading to 33% full year revenue growth. We continue to set records on virtually all of our operational metrics as we add new mortgage servicing and other customers and generate explosive pinless debit growth, which saw volume increase by over 80% in 2025. There is no slowdown as it looks like Q1 could be pinless and ACH’s best quarter ever. As you can tell, I’m excited about Q1 and all of 2026.

The pipeline is strong across all of our businesses, and we’re working diligently to increase the share of the wallet. Those incremental revenues offer attractive margins, which is our most direct path to faster growth and improved profitability. We’ve got a lot in motion, so it’ll be critical this year to focus on completing those tasks that offer the most immediate return on our investment. For that reason, we’re being careful on our guidance. The company continues to expect 10%-12% growth in revenue in 2026, while also anticipating continued positive adjusted EBITDA. I thank our shareholders for their trust and our support. We remain committed to building a stronger, more innovative and more valuable Usio. Operator, you can now open the call to questions.

Operator: Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touch tone phone. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. If at any time your question has been addressed and you would like to withdraw your question, please press star then two. At this time, we’ll pause momentarily to assemble our roster. The first question will come from Barry Sine with Litchfield Hills Research. Please go ahead.

Barry Sine, Analyst, Litchfield Hills Research: Hey, good afternoon, gentlemen. You’ve issued guidance for the year, 10%-12%, which is in line with what you’re historically capable of. I don’t know if you have this number, but I know that 2025 was impacted when one of your customers lost one of their customers. It wasn’t yours directly. Do you have a pro forma revenue number for what 2025 would have looked like had that single event not occurred?

Michael White, Senior Vice President and Chief Accounting Officer, Usio: Our Card Issuing division was down 22%. We were estimating, you know, really a similar number to if that one customer would have stayed, we would have around $3 million for that, the lost customer. That’s the kind of revenue that we lost with that.

Louis Hoch, Chairman and CEO, Usio: $3 million-$5 million.

Barry Sine, Analyst, Litchfield Hills Research: add about $4 million back to what you reported and then calculate the that growth, and that would be kind of the normalized growth if that one event had not occurred. Fair enough?

Louis Hoch, Chairman and CEO, Usio: Yes. Yes.

Barry Sine, Analyst, Litchfield Hills Research: Okay. Looking forward to 2026, I know that your key strategic initiative is the reorganization of the sales force and under the Usio One initiative, and you’ve also changed their compensation models, you know, to make it more about bringing in new business rather than servicing existing. I think you’re about a year into that process, and I understand you’ve had your second annual all-hands meeting. Could you give us an update on how that process is going? How is the team adjusting to that? How are the customers responding now that you’re a bit into Usio One?

Louis Hoch, Chairman and CEO, Usio: Yeah, Barry, it’s been a good transition. We recently completed our annual meeting here in San Antonio. As I said in my opening remarks or my comments, we’ve made some changes. We’ve actually removed some positions from the sales team. We’re also doing consolidated sales outreach campaigns. For example, the first week in March, it’ll be an all-hands effort, calling states contiguous to Texas for taxing authorities. This has been an effort to drive more output business. The deal that I mentioned earlier about Filtered Spend, which is the large bodega healthcare spending, that actually originated from one of our issuing sales individuals. And that’s a pure acquiring deal. I would say that the Usio One initiative is well underway, and most, if not every individual, has wins under their belt for other areas of the company.

Meaning if they were acquiring, they’ve sold issuing deals, and if they were output, they’ve sold both issuing and acquiring deals. Very happy with the progress.

Barry Sine, Analyst, Litchfield Hills Research: Okay. Then also look, you know, on 2026, in a press release you put out in January, you talked about several new large customers where you’ve already signed them. I’m wondering if I can get a little more detail on that. What kind of verticals are they in? What are the revenue from those new customers look like, you know, once they’re fully onboarded? What is the current onboarding cadence with those customers? You know, what is the timing? Which quarter in 2026 are we likely to see that revenue really start to kick in, and when will it be fully kicked in?

Louis Hoch, Chairman and CEO, Usio: Yeah. I think you’re referring to the 3 large Card Issuing projects that we talked about in the shareholder letter. The largest of the 3 is a school voucher program for a state, and it’ll have a lot of distributions, and that will affect prepaid cards revenue and ACH revenue. That one’s scheduled to start in Q3. The other two, one’s a major bank, and we’re looking at that going live in Q3. The other one’s a top payment company that we’re partnering with that chose us for Consumer Choice to do, can’t get into a lot of detail, but refunds to individuals. That large bank, Forte is doing federal payments. Yes.

Barry Sine, Analyst, Litchfield Hills Research: Two of those you mentioned Q3. It sounds like the growth will be more back-end weighted for 2026 with those kicking in. Is that fair?

Louis Hoch, Chairman and CEO, Usio: You’re gonna see some growth in Q1. You know, you will see those programs go live in the third, fourth quarter and give us a nice jump at the end.

Barry Sine, Analyst, Litchfield Hills Research: My last question, you know, again, going back to the 10%-12% top-line growth guidance. What’s already booked? You know, where do you have customers that are signed, maybe not onboarded? You’ve already talked about some of those. How much of that 10%-12% is already in the bag you’ve got visibility on? How much of that do you know, Greg’s guys need to go out and win? How much of that is variable and dependent upon winning new customers?

Louis Hoch, Chairman and CEO, Usio: Well, I can tell you that we’ve got tons of deals that are in implementation that, you know, if we could flush them all today, we’d be very excited for the year and probably raising guidance. We don’t control when they go live, so we’re always hesitant to answer a question like you’re asking. The quick answer is we have enough deals to meet our numbers. It’s all about when they implement. That hopefully we don’t get another surprise like a large customer going away because they went through an M&A activity.

Barry Sine, Analyst, Litchfield Hills Research: Right. We’ll keep our fingers crossed on that, Louis. Thank you very much. Those are my questions.

Louis Hoch, Chairman and CEO, Usio: Thanks.

Operator: The next question will come from Scott Buck with H.C. Wainwright & Co. Please go ahead.

Scott Buck, Analyst, H.C. Wainwright & Co: Hi. Good afternoon, guys. Thanks for the time. Great year for ACH. I’m curious, have you guys exhausted the low-hanging fruit opportunities here, or should we expect ACH to be an outperformer again in 2026?

Louis Hoch, Chairman and CEO, Usio: I think we’ve been pretty clear in our message that Q1 for ACH is gonna be another record, which will be our third consecutive quarter of setting all-time records for ACH. In real-time payments and pinless debit, that will also set a record. Card processing will also set a record, so that includes PayFac. You know, Q1 is gonna be exciting. We think that ACH does have some momentum. We just recently talked a few minutes ago about, you know, school voucher program that we’re gonna do that’s, you know, probably 50% ACH, 50% card. We’re continuing to be very excited about ACH and real-time payments in general.

Scott Buck, Analyst, H.C. Wainwright & Co: Great. Then you mentioned in the release SG&A expenses were up 10% for the year compared to 2024. I know that reflects some investment in the business. I’m curious whether that investment is over or you’ll have to continue to make some additional investments here in 2026.

Louis Hoch, Chairman and CEO, Usio: Yeah. Well, when it comes to SG&A, our headcount is down compared to last year, and we’ll see some savings, and hopefully we’re gonna keep it flat. We’ll see.

Scott Buck, Analyst, H.C. Wainwright & Co: Great. I appreciate that, Louis. Last one for me, just on Usio One. I’m curious, do you guys have specific cross-selling targets you’re looking to achieve this year? Or maybe phrased another way, how, you know, what would you consider success of this program?

Greg Carter, Executive Vice President of Payment Acceptance and Chief Revenue Officer, Usio: Well, I think we’re already seeing some success as evidenced by the deals that we’re talking about. It’s really just more repetition, and this campaign that we’re going to launch in a couple of weeks will further enforce or reinforce one business unit, this being Output Solutions’ value proposition. The unique thing about Usio is when we talk to any entity, you know, we go at them now with a variety of options, meaning it’s print and mail, it’s issuing, whether it be plastic or virtual, ACH or credit or debit. It’s becoming a natural, almost a pleasure to address these prospects because we’re not a one-trick pony. Success to me is gonna be continued to look through the sales team and see the diverse contracts that are coming in.

As I said earlier, you know, we’ve got traditional or siloed salespeople that are now successfully signing contracts in those other business units. As long as we continue to do that, I would consider that a success.

Scott Buck, Analyst, H.C. Wainwright & Co: All right. Perfect. No, that makes sense. I appreciate the time, guys. Thank you very much.

Louis Hoch, Chairman and CEO, Usio: Thank you.

Operator: The next question will come from Jon Hickman with Ladenburg Thalmann. Please go ahead.

Jon Hickman, Analyst, Ladenburg Thalmann: I wanna follow up on the SG&A question. Lewis, you said you wanna keep it flat. You mean flat 2025 over 2026? Is that what?

Louis Hoch, Chairman and CEO, Usio: Yes.

Jon Hickman, Analyst, Ladenburg Thalmann: Okay.

Louis Hoch, Chairman and CEO, Usio: Yes. Flat with maybe some moderate growth. Again, our head count is down. You know, it. We’ve been not replacing people when they leave or retire, and we’re trying to do more with less.

Jon Hickman, Analyst, Ladenburg Thalmann: Can you elaborate on the $500,000 jump between Q3 and Q4?

Louis Hoch, Chairman and CEO, Usio: What was that, Michael?

Michael White, Senior Vice President and Chief Accounting Officer, Usio: There were some one-time expenses in Q3. You’ll see we made an adjustment to our bad debt expense, which represented a big portion of that. We’re now more in line, and you shouldn’t see that type of jump there, but that was a large piece of it. There was also some year-end expenses that were in there. As Louis said, and just to clarify what he said, our head count is down over last year. Our 2026 head count is down over our 2025 head count. There’s savings in labor that we’re expecting in fiscal year 2026.

Jon Hickman, Analyst, Ladenburg Thalmann: Okay. The depreciation and amortization expense should be relatively flat?

Michael White, Senior Vice President and Chief Accounting Officer, Usio: Correct.

Jon Hickman, Analyst, Ladenburg Thalmann: Year-over-year. Okay. Thank you. Appreciate it.

Louis Hoch, Chairman and CEO, Usio: Thanks, Jon.

Operator: Again, if you have a question, please press star then one.