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Paysafe Ltd. early Thursday reported a net loss in its third-quarter results that widened to $87.7 million from $13 million last year as the company’s top executives expressed some frustration with its recent performance, particularly in its merchant-processing unit. Much of the loss, though, is attributable to a non-cash charge related to U.S. deferred tax assets. Still, the stock market noticed, as Paysafe’s shares had plunged about 17% an hour or so after the market opened.
In a morning call with equity analysts, chief executive Bruce Lowthers and chief financial officer John Crawford also pinpointed Paysafe’s digital-wallet business for a closer look. The unit, which caters to casinos and other businesses, accounts for 47% of the company’s revenue, but fell short of growth expectations. Reported revenue growth for the digital-wallet business in the quarter came to 8%, reaching $205.7 million.
At the same time, the count of three-month active wallet users was flat with a year ago, at 7.1 million. “We continue to sell the deals, now we’ve got to figure out how to keep the deals once they start ramping up,” Lowthers said. Transaction volume, though, was up 13%, to $6.7 billion. Overall, Paysafe in its presentation noted the business is “still under construction.”
In the company’s bread-and-butter merchant-processing business, revenue fell 4%, to $231.9 million, despite 9% growth in volume, to $34.9 billion. Lowthers indicated the company is working to get its growth rate “back up” in merchant-processing, but this will be a long journey, as the company works to sell to a mix of small and mid-size merchants. “The SMB side is just going to take time, it just will take time to build. It’s a big book,” he noted. Fiserv Inc.’s Clover point-of-sale technology, which FIS resells, is producing “nice growth,” he added.
Lowthers also expressed some regret in not acting sooner to move at least some small-business recruitment to internal direct sales, which would have produced a better margin than sales through ISOs. “We were too optimistic in shifting our mix dynamic in 2025,” he noted. “Our overall revenue growth has shifted to the lower-margin ISO channel.” Still, the full impact of that move was apparently unexpected. Crawford added: “This is not where we planned to be from a margin perspective.”
For the company as a whole, revenue reached $433.8 million, up 2% year-over-year, on $41.2 billion in volume, up 10%.
