Pathward Financial Fourth Quarter 2026 Conference Call - PATHWARD FINANCIAL INC

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to Pathward Financial's 4th Quarter 2026 Investor Conference Call. During the presentation, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. Following the prepared remarks, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star 2 again. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference call over to Darby Schoenfeld, Senior Vice President, Chief of Staff and Investor Relations. Please go ahead. Thank you, Operator, and welcome. With me today are Pathway Financial CEO Brett Farr and CFO Greg Sigrist, who will discuss our operating and financial results for the fourth quarter and full fiscal year of 2026, after which we will take your questions. Additional Additional information, including the earnings release, the investor presentation that accompanies our prepared remarks, and supplemental slides, may be found on our website at PathWordFinancial.com. As a reminder, our comments may include forward-looking statements. Those statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual and anticipated results to differ. These statements speak only as of this date, and the company undertakes no obligation to update any forward- looking statement except as may be required by applicable law. These refer to the cautionary language in the earnings release, investor presentation, and in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our most recent filings for additional information covering factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements. Additionally, today we will be discussing certain non-GAAP financial measures on this conference call. References to non-GAP measures are only provided to you to assist in understanding the company results and performance. Additional information regarding these non-GAAP measures, as well as reconciliations, are included in the earnings release and the appendix of the investor presentation. Finally, all time periods referenced are fiscal quarters and fiscal years, and all comparisons are to the prior year period unless otherwise noted. Now let me turn the call over to Brett Farr, our CEO. Thanks, Darby, and good evening, everyone. Thank you for joining our earnings call. We're looking forward to sharing our updates today, but I'd like to start by taking a moment to reflect on an important milestone. This quarter marks five years since my first earnings call as CEO of Pathword. Looking back, it's remarkable to reflect on everything the Pathword team has accomplished together. We have navigated the challenges of COVID, rebranded the company as Pathword, expanded our executive team, and strategically reshaped our balance sheet all while evolving our business and strengthening our position as a trusted platform that enables our partners to thrive through each chapter one thing has remained constant and that's the dedication and commitment of our employees our success has always been rooted in our people every day talented employees across pathwork work with customers and businesses to enable financial availability choice and opportunity their unwavering commitment to true partnership is what has enabled us to adapt execute and continue delivering for all of our stakeholders i'm very proud that we've continued to sustainably grow while staying true to our purpose of powering financial inclusion that is not a coincidence our purpose continues to guide our strategy and we believe that this diligent focus helps drive long-term value for our shareholders and while i find tremendous value in times of reflection i'm even more excited about what lies ahead we have a strong foundation a team that embodies our values and is committed to success as well as a clear strategy to guide us forward with that let me spend a few minutes on our strategy then i'll provide a quick update on credit before turning the call over to Greg. Fiscal 2026 was another important year of execution for Pathwork. We successfully advanced the strategic priorities we set out to accomplish last year, and this was by no means a small feat. We had some major wins across each area, starting with maintaining an optimized balance sheet. Commercial finance growth combined with reductions in our lower yielding securities portfolio reflects our disciplined approach while remaining cognizant of our balance sheet capacity. We deployed capital, where we believed it provided us with optionality or generated strong risk-adjusted returns. We made significant inroads in the small business administration loan market, moving up within the top 20 SBA 7A program lenders in the country. Next, we continue to make investments in technology, risk, and compliance. We believe these continued investments will allow our partners, both present and future, to deliver with confidence as they leverage our expertise, infrastructure, and collaborative support. The world is only moving faster, and we are proud to enable our partners by offering a broad suite of capabilities. Furthermore, we are very proud to have been recognized by a few different organizations throughout the year for our standout workforce and culture. We believe part of our success can be attributed to our Talent Anywhere approach. Through this talent strategy, we have been very successful in expanding our reach beyond local candidates as a remote-enabled employer and strengthening our ability to meet the evolving needs of our business. The last strategic priority is the client experience. We believe our partners see the value in Pathway's platform and our ability to grow alongside them. Last quarter, we announced that we had renewed our relationship with Clare, a company that has empowered workforce management and payroll platforms to offer early access to earned wages to employees at no cost to employers. This quarter, were pleased to announce that we've renewed our contract with longstanding partner H&R Block, extending our relationship through mid-2030. H&Р Block has been a leader in the tax preparation industry for more than 70 years with a deep commitment to their clients, associates, and community. We are excited to continue to support them. We still see significant opportunity in our pipeline with both new and existing partners to build on this momentum by expanding the products and capabilities we deliver. As we look ahead to fiscal 2027, our strategy will remain consistent. We believe the continuity in our strategy reflects the confidence that we have, both in the direction of the business and the progress we have made throughout fiscal 2026. Our focus is now on continuing to execute against these areas and building momentum across the organization. Importantly, we believe our diversified mix of partners, products, and capabilities remains a key differentiator of Pathwork. We are not dependent on a single partner, industry, or market, which we believe delivers a resilient business model while providing multiple avenues for growth. Our broad suite of solutions allows us to create opportunities, deepen relationships, and deliver value. As a result, we believe we are well positioned to capitalize on the opportunities in front of us. We continue to work through the renewable energy projects that we mentioned last quarter and still believe we have line of sight to bringing them to completion. While we made significant progress during the quarter, these things take time. We will continue to provide transparency and connection with these credit items. additionally we continue to believe that these events are not indicative of a broader systemic issue within the portfolio aside from credit we are very pleased with the results of the year now i'd like to turn it over to greg who will take you through the details of our financials and fiscal year 2027 guidance thank you brett we were pleased with the performance during the quarter as our core businesses delivered solid results Starting with the balance sheet, our Treasury-led model continues to deliver with growth of nearly $6 million in net interest income from our commercial finance business. We also delivered double-digit percentage growth in non-interest income, primarily due to an increase of almost $8 million in card and deposit fee income, the majority of which was driven by growth in the core payments business. Non-interest expense improved in the quarter as a result of disciplined expense management with lower legal and consulting expense. This is partially offset by building and software expense. Additionally, we will continue to make targeted investments in our people, processes, and technology to facilitate evolution and scalability. Aside from the credit items Brett discussed, we are pleased with our full year results, and equally important, how our teams deliver them. Their focus, collaboration, and consistent execution throughout the year drove strong performance across the business. Interest income growth in commercial finance was nearly $30 million, driven primarily by an increase in structured finance. Solid partner growth combined with disciplined expense management led to full-year net income of $175.7 million, or $8.14 of diluted earnings per share. With that, our return metrics remain strong, with a 230 basis point return on average assets and a 32.9 percent return on averaged tangible equity. We believe that these results reflect the quality of our business model, the discipline of our teams, and consistent execution, not to mention our capacity to generate earnings and to create capital to cover events as they arise. We believe this continues to differentiate Pathword and provide a strong foundation as we enter fiscal 2027. While deposits held on the company's balance sheet at September 30th experienced a modest decrease versus a year ago, we held more than $400 million more in average custodial deposits. As a reminder, we do earn fee income on custodian deposits that is tied to the effective Fed funds rate. Average partner deposits were strong in the quarter, giving us the ability to generate additional servicing fee income. Loans and leases at September 20th grew 9%. We continue to be successful in growing structured finance, term lending, and SBA and USDA loans, as well as working capital asset-based lending. Adjusted net interest margin improved to 551 basis points in the fourth quarter as we continue to improve our earning asset mix and see the benefit of repricing. Year-over-year loan originations increased from $1.3 billion to $2.2 billion, driven primarily by significant growth in our credit sponsorship business from both a new contract signed last year and expansion with current partners. Regarding credit, the non-performing loans and lease ratio did increase modestly to 5.61% sequentially. While there are always normal flows in and out, the increase was largely attributable to additional work being done to bring certain credits to completion. Net charge-offs were $52 million in the quarter, of which $20.3 million was associated with commercial finance portfolio. We continue to expect credit to normalize in 2027 as we work down our non-performing loans. The strength of our balance sheet, along with our earnings and capital accretion power, allows for return of capital to shareholders. As of September 30th, our liquidity was $3.1 billion, and during the quarter we were able to repurchase approximately 282,000 shares and an average share price of $88.75 for a total of over 2 million shares for the year. This leaves 2.8 million shares still available for repurchase under the current stock repurchASE program. We are reiterating our fiscal year 2027 guidance range of $9.50 to $10 per share, which includes the following assumptions. No additional rate changes during the year, an effective tax rate of 18 to 22 percent, expected secondary market revenues between $5 to $7 million per quarter, and includes expected share repurchases. Lastly, a comment on expenses. As we have said, we will continue to invest in people, processes, and technology. In prior years, that has largely shown up as an investment ramping throughout the year. For fiscal 2027, we expect those investments to begin in the December quarter. This will manifest as additional hirings in the first quarter that will increase the compensation and benefits run rate earlier in the year, but will still hold the normal seasonal pattern. Similarly, we will continue to use consultants with modestly elevated spend in the first half of the year. This concludes our prepared remarks. Operator, please open the line for questions. We will now begin the question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star 1 again. We ask that you pick up your handset when asking a question to allow for optimum sound quality. If you are muted locally, please remember to unmute your device. Please stand by while we compile our roster of Q&A. Your first question comes from Tim Switzer with KBW. Tim, your line is now open. Please go ahead. Hey, good afternoon. Thanks for taking my question. Hey Tim. It sounds like good, you know, good progress on the partnership side announced on H&R Block and clearing some other ones recently. I'm curious on, you know, where do you think, you know, the new partners will be coming from, you specific industries and is it more in the credit sponsorship side embedded finance you know the card and debit business we'd love to get an update there yeah so i i think there's a variety of ways it's pretty broad one of the things we kind of emphasized is our diversified business model and product set um and so it's all of the above we're seeing um and you know we've said it before a lot come from potential new partners and also an awful lot of our increase in revenue comes from existing partners but there's not one that i would single out and say that it is a higher percentage of it this is all about the breadth and depth of our offerings and our partners really want to understand that and be a part of it okay um and do you guys feel like there's any areas right now we need to invest a little bit more in to keep up with the competition in the basket embedded finance space where are you directing most of your investment dollars right now well greg i'll get you talking about a little bit but i mean we've said for a while that we've been in you know in our run rate investing in technology and enhancing the infrastructure and the backbone. Anything you want to add to that? No, I think that's right. I mean, it's more just staying contemporary with our clients to really help them support their own, you know, endeavors. And as I said in my prepared remarks, we also invest on the risk and compliance side because with the onboarding we've done and just the increase in the volumes today and in the future, we just want to make sure that stays, you know, state of the art and stays at the strength that we've had historically. So that's just scenario to make sure we stay ahead of. Okay. That's helpful. And I want to ask a few on the credit side here. With the charge-offs this quarter, and I guess even the last few, which were – some of them were in the renewable energy space, were there any specific verticals or industries that these were concentrated in this quarter? No, none specific that we would call out. you know a lot of this is related to transactions that we've already talked about before as we work through the process um so there's not anything new or any new kind of asset classes that we would bring to the table and say we're seeing things here yeah and tim i think the key point there with predator yeah i think i think key point which you really touched on though is that the elevated charge offs and frankly still the npl and the mpl ratio it's it's concentrated in the credits we've really talked about and i think importantly we're making resolutions you know you saw the past dues have declined that's important to see too and we've not seen any evidence that there's any other you know issues spreading across the portfolios okay um i mean i guess with the charge up this quarter we still see npa you know staying around the same level should we expect further charge offs um starting next year um what you know what kind of assumptions should we have keep in mind and we talked last time about a number of um the projects that we were going to take over and have to lead to completion uh that means you fund the projects um and then eventually complete them get them producing and then you sell them well for the existing portfolio when you fund some of that construction those dollars go into non-accrual until you sell the product yeah but specifically on charge off the temp you have to separate and differentiate the charge offs from when you take the specific reserves and how that kind of dovetails with the life cycle brett just mentioned right the charge offs you're seeing a result of you know specific reserves we've taken in prior quarters and you have to differentiate that against our ongoing credit cost of you credit right which is what we provision for um you know we talked about last quarter we see credit normalizing into 2027 what that really means is the cost of credit which is our credit provisioning is getting i feel it's going to migrate back to our historic levels um the charge-offs are a bit more episodic and they're tied to the idiosyncratic you know loans that we've talked about over the last year frankly but it's a byproduct of just the natural progress of working through some of those okay all right my last one here and gregory just touched on this but what kind of provision expense expectations are embedded within your guidance for 27? Yeah, I touched on it last quarter too, and where I said we would normalize back to kind of the historic run rate. And I think I said this last quarter, too, what that really means is, you know, if you focus solely on the commercial finance portfolio, the historic ACL ratio has been, you can see it in the deck, it's in there, but it could be down, you Know, roughly 120 to 130 basis points is probably a normalized level. I think that's the starting point. And then anything up or below that's really just going to be more of a function of the mix of new production. What you saw this quarter, frankly, the provisioning in the quarter is really just provisioning for new, you know, for new for loan growth, depending upon what that mix was. And that's why I kind of see next year playing out is more akin to that 120 to 130 basis point range. OK, since you're already near those levels, it seems like, you Know, the revision going forward to be morphed in loan growth rather than credit deterioration. based upon the facts we have right now that's exactly the way we're feeling about it all right good to hear um thanks for taking all my questions your next question from the line of joe yanchunas with raymond james your line is now open please go ahead good afternoon guys thanks for questions hey how you doing yep i'm doing well um NEW ORIGINATIONS INCREASED MEANINGFULLY THIS QUARTER, LARGELY DROVEN BY CREDIT SPONSORSHIP AND YOU REFERENCED GROWTH WITH EXISTING PARTNERS. HOW MUCH OF THAT GROWth REPRESENTS A NEW NORMALIZED RUN RATE VERSUS SOME ACCELERATION-SPECIFIC PROGRAMS? I'M CURIOUS WHAT YOU'RE SEEING IN THE PIPELINE TODAY THAT GIVES YOU CONFIDENCE IN THAT CONTINUED GROWT. I BELIEVE THAT REALLY REPRESSESTS THE NEW RUN rate based upon um you know the programs and the partners we've announced and onboarded it i think you know we tend to ramp into those programs more rapidly than an issuing you know partner or acquiring is pretty rapid too but i think that's the new normal and from here it's really just growth in partner programs and then growth in the partner base that's great to hear um and then brett you know having completed five years of earnings calls for password and congratulations for that. I was hoping you could talk a little bit about the next five years. And what do you think the themes will be in the BAS space? And, you know, how do you expect consolidation and the regulatory environment will play out? Well, so I think there's a broad set of things there. Obviously, there's lots and continual change in all kinds of payments products. I mean, if you think about where we were five years ago and the products that we offered and provided, and then what we offer today is vastly different. And I think five years from now, there will be a lot more of things that are, let's say, not just issuing and interchange related, and that's going to continue to advance, some of which are the products we're already doing, some which are products that we don't even know about or that are coming, and we've got to let all that play out. We've got all that AI play out that's gonna have a material impact on our industry. I think it's going to be more on the customer front end, ultimately, and how that shows up. So that's going be a big part, I think, of five years out. And I think we're in a period of time where some are looking at vertical integration. We're going to see if that's right or wrong, and I'm not sure. I Think there are pros and cons to that, and so I think we'll watch that play out. That won't be five years. That'll be two years, and we'll watch as that plays out. But, you know, very optimistic about this because this whole thing has always been about third-party delivery and about people being creative, innovative, entrepreneurial, upfront with the customer, and then us providing the infrastructure, the backbone behind it, obviously wrapped in risk and compliance. And I just think that's a fabulous business model for whatever's coming. So excited about the future. And, you know, we lead based on what our partners lead into. And so we watch them and what they're doing, then we help support them to do that and often co-create. And I think we'll keep doing that. You know, you mentioned the vertical integration, your answer there, and I believe this question has come up on the past probably five or six earnings calls with you guys. You know with more fintechs considering their own charters and more banks building, you know, vast capabilities, what's the hardest aspect for a competitor to replicate you know do you think it's the regulatory infrastructure product breadth technology or just the relationships it's culture culture matters and there is a distinct reason that banks do banking um and our program managers do what they do and and by the way you can't hire culture You have to spend a lot of time creating it. And I think the BAS business model has worked because the banks had the bank culture and the program managers had the program manager culture. I think we've already had in the past household names that you know that tried vertical integration and failed. Now, some of them, as we go forward, we'll figure it out. Some of them have narrow-based charters that can let them do some things, and so it won't be quite as hard. But the fully vertical integrated model, I think it's hard to get up every day and have a culture that meets the needs of a banking infrastructure in the background and all the things you need on the front end as a program manager. And as I said, you can't hire that. That's a good point. Ben, one more for me here to bring Greg kind of back in the fold. You know, the securities portfolio continues to wind down. Now it's still under $1.2 billion. I think you have about another $150 million cash flowing in fiscal 27. Where would you like to see the portfolio settle out? You know we still keep it there largely as a reservoir of liquidity just in case we need it. You know it's pledged. We borrow against it. that's part of how we fund tax season. But the reality is, I think we can let that run down to the $800 million to perhaps a billion dollar range, and it'll settle out there. We're in that environment, though, where rates are. I've said historically, we'll take that $140 or $150 million of principal off the portfolio and reinvest it back into the loan book. The reality is though, there's probably a benefit for us to buy a few securities along the way, just to give us, in the event there is a down rate scenario, a bit of coverage on the OCI front. I wouldn't say it's going to be a lot, but I would say there might be a little bit there. But that's still, in my view, we're going to normalize around that 800 to a billion range. All right, great. Well, thank you for taking my questions. Thanks. Thanks, Joe. Your next question from the line of Manuel Navas with Piper Sandler. Your line is now open. Please go ahead. Hey, good evening. Hi, Manuel. With this higher rate environment, can you kind of talk through – and also you had a NIM rebound this quarter – can you just kind of talk through what are some of the expectations from the September hike, how a potential December hike could impact your EPS trajectory, And also, maybe touch on is this – how this could show up potentially down the road in credit? Let me tackle the first one first, then I may hand off to Brett so we can do a little tag team here. But I'll break it down maybe just broadly on the adjusted net interest margin, how I think about headwinds, tailwinds there. And you touched on the September hike, the possibility of a December hike. more broadly, we have been fairly neutral from an asset liability perspective. So each 25 basis point rate cut or increase has been pretty close to pretty negligible. We, during the balance of 26, did shift a little bit of new production toward floating rate loans, particularly tied to prime. So that's put us at a moment in time at a slightly asset-sensitive position. So from this point, if we have a 25 basis point raise in December or the next meeting, it's perhaps $2 million pre-tax, maybe a little bit more for the full year. But I point out it's a point in time because a lot of that new production came from the renewable space, from the infrastructure space, and it's in the construction loans. And I think we're probably at a high water market where those are going to be. So over time, as that portfolio comes down, and also the Treasury teams looking over the next, you know, notifying timeline, but I think we'll get the assets back to neutral, you Know, certainly over the Next couple of years, I don't think there's a long term trend, I think it's a short term trend. But it's the trend that's helpful at this point in time, just given where the rate environments going. I think the other tailwind, though, we've talked about this consistently is just the middle part of the curve. You know, roughly 35% of the of the book and new production is fixed rate loans, which price off of the three to five you're part of the curve. And with the curve, you know, five-year had, you know, touched 5% and then backed off a little bit. You think about the loan portfolio, which is currently book yielding around 3%, and you assume that we're taking $100 or $150 million and recycling that. That's a pretty large tailwind for us as we continue to do that, not to mention the fixed-rate loans in the book that are continuing to reprice, because some of those still came on pre-22, which has been really great. You're obviously over time going to have some offsets. Cost of deposits will go up a little bit, but it's going to be more than offset with the rate environment. Did that make sense? I'll assume yes, because you might be on mute. I'll hand it over to Brett. Yeah. I think the other part of your question is really is what does higher rates for longer mean from a credit perspective or an economic standpoint? You got to remember our asset-based lending and working capital portfolio actually benefits during that time because the commercial traditional CNI borrower that was at a bank now is even being either pushed out of the bank or cannot get credit. And so then they start looking for alternatives and that's where we step in. And actually it's during higher rate and economic stressed environments where we get the better quality credit in the asset- based lending and working capital portfolio. So I only see that kind of, it's kind of a dark view, but I only see that as a positive. When the economy slows down, we'll pick up more opportunities in that space. Higher interest rates do have an impact in the energy infrastructure portfolio because you have to use a higher capital cost. It impacts the value of the tax equity throughout the life cycle of the project, so more equity will have to come in. But these projects have such high rate of return that the incremental impact of the interest rate is not going to stop the projects. It'll just reframe the capitalization that goes in up front. So I don't expect there to be much there. And the consumer loan originations, our partners are operating in a space that's not prime credit. And as I often say, these people are always in a recession. And so the interest rate costs are not going to be very material in that space, and they may be repaying it with benefits payments rather than income payments, but they'll repay it anyway because of where they live and, you know, the part of the economy that you're in. So I'm not worried about an economic downturn. I actually think our credit verticals are built for those kinds of things. They assume an economic downturn. Is there a certain level of rate increases that you think would start impacting the demand for your product, your partner's origination levels, and where it would impact some credit? Is it like 100 basis points from here? Just trying to ballpark that. Yeah. I mean, you know, let's suppose that Prime goes up 200 basis points, that is going to slow down commercial business. And that is exactly where we would excel in the working capital and the asset-based lending. And as I said, the 200 basis point increase in rates in the alternative energy and electricity infrastructure arena, it will change the economics. But because they're so rich, they will still be valid projects. You to structure them differently so I don't expect that we will be impacted by a slowdown in that regard and in fact in some ways we might be positively impacted by it okay that's helpful I appreciate that just about thoughts on your partner population do you have a sense of any that are actively pursuing national charters? We have had conversations where a small subset of them have talked about it and may be pursuing it. But it's one of the things you've got to remember. If you're a private equity firm, it is very difficult to become a bank holding company. And so there's an awful lot of them that are in that category. and it may be an exception here or there, but there's not any circumstance where we're having any kind of material threat from a partner because of it. And part of that is just the lack of concentrations in that partner base in the first place. That's right. That was going to be another question. I appreciate that, your commentary that you're not dependent on any one customer. Do you have a sense for some sort of metric that you can track that what's like your top three top five top ten uh partners yeah so let me uh let me let me give you this number no partner represents more than five percent of pathward revenue okay i appreciate that appreciate that is um one thing one area that's been uh quite strong is that is the card It kind of bounces around quarter-to-quarter, but there's very solid year-over-year growth. How should I think about that fee line over the next year? If I heard the question on the card fee income line, I mean, Carrie, I'm going to ask you, is the CD off balance sheet? Yep. Definitely. Yeah. I think really what you're looking at right now is really sets the mark for going forward and I think any variations from there are really just going to be volume based from here with the partners we're unloading, onboarding the pace and the like. So I think what you are seeing now, but keep in mind too, there's always seasonality in that line as we bring on deposits in the fourth quarter, spin them out in the March quarter, the December quarter, you know, in the second quarter. So you're going to see the normal seasonality in that, but there's always kind of a, you know, the evident flow, there's always a low watermark as the tide comes in and out. And then just one kind of wrap-up question on credit for me. How do you view, you have the rest of the tax services kind of, you ended that for the year, kind of the net charge-offs there. how do you kind of view that next year? Do you feel like you've talked in the past about how that business performed better on credit? Do have any other kind of look back on that that you can apply for next year in terms of the tax services business itself? So I think we've said that for the last several years, we have continued to improve our underwriting. And that has shown up and the numbers. We'll maintain the gains that we have gotten, but I doubt we'll continue to improve at the same degree every year. So I would hope it is some better, but not as much better as it has been in past years. Okay. I appreciate it. I'll step back into the queue. Thank you. Your next question from the line of Tim Switzer with KBW. Your line is now open. Please go ahead. Hey, thanks for letting me back through the queue. Greg, you actually just kind of answered one of the questions I had in terms of the seasonality. Obviously, we're going to get the bump in FQ1 next quarter. But has the seasonability for the rest of the quarters changed at all? Like, for example, a really strong Q4 would typically be, you know, down, you know, mid to high single digits, at least historically, you know, as, you know, growth from any individual partner or, like, the onboarding of new partners change that at all? I think it's really the onboardding of, you know, new products and then new partners, new products, and just that continued march of, you know multi-threaded opportunities. That flattens out the seasonality a bit. I think with the prepaid card business, though, you still see, you know, deposits grow in the December quarter, and then you see the fee income, core fee income in the March quarter. I think you'll always see that, but I think the continued march toward diversification of both products and partners helps to take away some of that seasonality, particularly in the fourth quarter. I think that's what you've seen when you kind of track back. There is one nuance, though. I mean, we talked about this last quarter a little bit. we do receive some contractual volume-based incentive payments, which can hit one quarter versus the next. And that was kind of the explanation last quarter for why when you did the year-over-year, fiscal 24 was a little above, or 25 was a bit above fiscal 26. For a full year basis, we feel like we're going to get those incentive payments. But that could skew one quarter to the next? That'd be the only caveat to what I just said. gotcha okay that that makes sense um and then just qualitatively are you able to kind of parse apart the acceleration we've seen here every year in uh fiscal 26 on the card fees like how much of that is driven by new programs new products new partners versus um older ones that already in place in 25. I think you're always going to see for the foreseeable future growth year over year is still going to be driven more by existing partners. And I think when you think back over the last four to six or eight quarters, it's a combination of just, you know, they're putting on new programs, but also adding new multi-threaded products to the mix. And I think that's still, historically, that's probably been 75 to 80% of the uplift year over year. And part of that is, you know, the new partners typically take a bit more time to onboard, plus part of which is going through the third party onboarding process, which takes some time. And we talked about how once we've gone through that process, it's a lot easier than to do multi-threaded with new partners. But when I think out the next 12 months, I think it's still revenue growth is still largely going to come from existing partners, perhaps a bit more uplift from new products with those partners. But brand new partners, typically, unless it's, you know, credit sponsorship, which we can get uploaded a little faster. Acquiring, you can get those ramping a little fast. But if it's issuing business, that typically takes longer. It's usually enough. Plus, as part of the issuing, they would have to ramp into those new programs, which really means you're talking the subsequent fiscal year before you really start to see uplift from that. But, you know, the partners and the pipelines we've been talking about for new partner growth, that is just tailwind for us, you now, exiting 27 and going into 28 and 29. Gotcha. Okay. Thank you so much. You're welcome, Tim. Thanks for coming back. We have reached the end of the Q&A session. I will now turn the call back to Brett Farr, CEO, for closing remarks. Thank you for joining the call this evening. We hope you have a good night. This concludes today's call. Thank you, for attending. You may now disconnect.