On Wednesday, 05 March 2025, Triumph Financial (NASDAQ: TFIN) participated in Raymond James & Associates’ 46th Annual Institutional Investors Conference. CEO Aaron Graf outlined the company’s ambitious strategy to grow its transportation revenue from $210 million to $1 billion. While the plan focuses on leveraging data and expanding services, challenges remain in scaling new initiatives.

Key Takeaways

• Triumph Financial aims to increase transportation revenue to $1 billion, focusing on factoring, payments, and intelligence.
• The recent acquisition of GreenScreens.ai is central to enhancing data monetization.
• LoadPay, a virtual wallet product, is expanding faster than anticipated, while Factoring as a Service requires more time for customer onboarding.
• The company remains committed to the transportation sector, with no plans to diversify into other areas.

Financial Results

Triumph Financial’s current transportation revenue stands at $210 million, with a strategic goal to reach $1 billion. The company’s financial health is supported by:

• Factoring revenue of $150 million, which is expected to double through organic growth and Factoring as a Service
• Payments revenue of $60 million, with plans for significant growth via LoadPay
• Bank revenue of $110 million, maintaining a 50% efficiency ratio

Operational Updates

Triumph Financial is the second-largest factoring company in the U.S., focusing on:

• Factoring as a Service: A platform for freight brokers to grow their factoring business, expected to double factoring revenue
• Payments Business: Generates $60 million with a core focus on data transmission and auditing for payments
• LoadPay: Targeting 15,000 accounts by year-end, with each account potentially generating $750 in revenue
• Intelligence Segment: GreenScreens.ai acquisition aims for a $300 million revenue opportunity, leveraging Triumph’s extensive data

Future Outlook

The strategic goals for Triumph Financial include:

• Achieving $1 billion in transportation revenue
• Improving EBITDA margins in the payments sector
• Driving EPS growth without shareholder dilution
• Focusing on factoring, payments, and intelligence segments

The GreenScreens.ai integration is expected to accelerate growth by providing brokers with valuable pricing insights, while LoadPay is on track to exceed initial account targets.

Q&A Highlights

During the Q&A session, key points included:

• GreenScreens.ai’s scalability differs from payments, with data being reusable multiple times
• LoadPay is progressing ahead of schedule, while Factoring as a Service faces challenges in onboarding
• Existing factoring companies are expected to adapt, emphasizing the need for technological upgrades

Triumph Financial’s focus remains on the transportation sector, with CEO Aaron Graf stating, “We are just focused on transportation. There will be no more segments.”

In conclusion, Triumph Financial’s detailed growth strategy and focus on data-driven solutions aim to solidify its position in the transportation industry. For a deeper insight, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript – Raymond James & Associates’ 46th Annual Institutional Investors Conference 2025:

Joe Yancunas, Research Analyst, Raymond James: Good morning. My name is Joe Yancunas, a Research Analyst at Raymond James, and I’m pleased to be joined with Triumph Financial. With us today is CEO, Aaron Graf CFO, Brad Voss COO, Ed Schrier and Head of Investor Relations, Luke like to have this be as interactive as possible, so if you’d like to ask a question, let me know. And with that, let’s dive into some Q and A. So Aaron, you’ve had rather busy start to the year where you launched a new business segment surrounding your data.

You have several new initiatives that went live, including load pay and your factoring as a service offering. Then last week, you announced the acquisition of greenscreens dot ai. Can you tie all these moving pieces together and explain how they work?

Aaron Graf, CEO, Triumph Financial: Yeah, yeah. No that’s a perfect place to probably start. So we’re Triumph, we are a bank. We don’t talk a whole lot about that piece of our business, but I’ll try to help you see how we see the world. Our North Star, and you’re going to hear us talk about this in the letters going forward, our North Star, and we previewed this some time ago, is $1,000,000,000 of revenue in transportation.

Today, we generate $210,000,000 of revenue in our transportation business. We have three ways in which we go to market. Number one is our factoring business. If you followed us, been around a long time, we acquired that business in 2013. We are the second largest factoring company in The United States.

We generate $150,000,000 of revenue. In good times, which this is not good times, but in good times 40% operating margin very, very profitable business. And in our billion dollar journey, we think that business is going to double. And how are we going to double it? Well number one, we have not organically grown our own factoring business in years because of the payments.

What we were doing with our payments network that is changing. I called that out in the last letter. Number two, we launched factoring as a service, which means large freight brokers, C. H. Robinson being the one that’s already been announced, but others are coming are going to use our platform, use our balance sheet to grow their own factoring business.

This has been something they’ve wanted to do for a long time. It allows them to monetize payments to their carriers. It allows them to have a better carrier relationship. And so our factoring business is a is going to grow. You’re going to see that happen even in the face of a weak market.

The second thing we do and I’m getting to tie it all together for you is payments. And if you followed us for any period of time, you know about our payments business. Our payments business generates 60,000,000 of revenue in a single digit EBITDA margin. We started that at the the absolute worst time, in the height of the market and we have grown it in despite the worst freight cycle we’ve seen since 1980. And that business is going to continue to grow.

The legacy part of that business and this is the core and you need to understand this. We talk about our network network transactions platform, whatever word you want to use. Here is the core of what our payments business does. It is the transmission and auditing of data for purposes of making a payment. I’ll say it again transmission and auditing of data for purposes of making a payment.

That is our core transaction. That is what we do more of than anyone in the world. And everything we do has some bearing back to that. For example, when you are factoring someone, you are just making the payment before the transmission and auditing of data is complete under its standard contractual terms. But it still goes back to that data set.

So we’ve been doing that for a long time. Right now our average payor, which is generally going to be a large broker, is going to pay us roughly 75¢ an invoice to do audit for them, and pay us a dollar 25 an invoice to do payments for them. $2 in other words for a fully integrated payor. That is 33% above what I told you three years ago I thought the market would bear. I thought it was a dollar 50.

We’re actually having more success there with our scale. On the payee side, who is being paid in our payments business? It’s either the carrier or the factor. In the 60% of instances that invoice was sold to a factoring company. We’re a factoring company that gets paid.

There’s about 400 other factoring companies that get paid. Oh, and by the way, there’s some new factoring entrants coming into the market who are using our factoring as a service who I think are going to take a lot of market share. Because they they just have a better mousetrap, because they can they can layer things in with their capacity. The payees are paying us right now between 50¢ and a dollar per invoice, and that makes the network transaction. Now at one point I thought we would generate $5 of revenue on network transactions, a dollar 50 on the pay your side, $3.50 on the payee side.

It seems to me where the market is and we again you read our shareholder letters we go into excruciating detail because we believe transparency is the key to trust. We’re going to be between $2.50 to $3 per network transaction. And the network, just so you understand, means we’re connecting system of record to system of record. The system of record for the payor, that would be the transportation management software that tells the broker who to pay, how much to pay. And then the system of record for the payee.

Either the carriers TMS their own architect their own tech stack, or if it’s been sold to a factoring company the factor management system. And the problem some factors have and the reason we have not generated quite the revenue on the payee side is the factor management systems that we are paying do not have the technical capability to absorb data about the load before the load is hauled. Because we happen to have the data a day or two before the load ever moves. But I cannot push that data to the legacy factoring industry because their technology will not support it. I can push it to my own, and for the people who are joining us with factoring as a service I can push it to them and that’s a really powerful thing.

So our payments business 60,000,000 of EBITDA. I still believe it will be one third of our billion dollar journey going forward. I think that you’re going to see EBITDA margin continue to improve over long periods of time. The brokerage industry, I would say we’ve monetized half of it. We’ve announced a bunch of names.

We have 55% of all freight touches our network in brokered freight, but we have not monetized all of it. We haven’t made a cent from CH Robinson as I told you that comes in the back half of the year, and there’s a lot of infill selling to go do. The other parts of payments that we will eventually monetize number the second thing would be the shipper part where shippers are paying brokers. We are not doing much there right now. We do a couple billion dollars in payments.

It is not a high priority area of growth because frankly we’re just really busy with the other things we’re doing. But that part of the market stays there. And then the final part, and this Joe is what we announced, is load pay. And load pay, I go back to what I said, the core transaction is the transmission and auditing of data in furtherance of making a payment. That is the core of our network.

Load pay just is the bucket that hangs off the end of our network. Because we knew that we’re paying out billions of dollars every month to these carriers, and we knew those carriers were spending that money at fuel stops and to buy fuel. And so we created a product, and we didn’t just create the product in isolation. C. H.

Robinson said, hey, we think we should jointly like, we see this opportunity to create a virtual wallet. They will not be the only one. There will be other people who join us in this virtual wallet experience, and there is no true incumbent who can compete with us. Because we have direct connection to the payment rails because we are the bank, so we can move money 24 by seven by three sixty five. And we have the marketing prowess of having the largest payers in the industry in addition to us saying, this is how you’re going to get paid.

And so then it ultimately just comes to how do you monetize it. And I think we’ve been real specific with investors. We said that by the end of this year we should have between 15,000 accounts and that we think at scale those accounts generate $750 of revenue and that the bulk of that revenue is interchange fees. That does not hit our balance sheet very high margin, high value revenue. There’s probably 200,000 to 300,000 accounts to go get in the world if you think about all the small truckers.

And we won’t get all of them. But we touch hundreds of thousands of carriers every month and no one else does that. And so you put that in payments and that’s well over a hundred million dollar revenue opportunity and that is what makes our payments business. The legacy payments where we’re generating 60,000,000 of revenue, The shipper market, which we’re not really doing much in, and load pay. And load pay is built.

There are feature sets being added. We push code every week just to make it more reinforced that it’s different than anything else out there. And the, you know, it’s a bank account is what it is with an attached debit card where we’re both the issuing bank and the program sponsor. So the interchange fee belongs to us. We can use that to incentivize and work with our customers, but we own it all.

We don’t have to share it with someone. That’s our payment segment. So you take factoring plus payments you get to $650,000,000 of what we want to go do. Today we’re at $210,000,000. In other words, we’re a third of the way there to what we want to go generate.

And the last thing, which you just asked about is intelligence. This has been in the works for a couple of years. I’ve tried to breadcrumb it for investors. I knew we would take criticism announcing a segment with not much revenue, but I put myself in your shoes. If I were in your shoes and I thought intelligence or the monetization of our data was something I was going to go do, then I felt like you deserve to know that.

So I couldn’t tell you everything at once because I knew what was coming, but we could only reveal certain things. But here’s what it means. Green screens is the fastest growing intelligence provider for pricing in the marketplace. There are only three, and they are taking market share really quickly, doubling revenue year over year, and they’re doing it on about $15,000,000,000 of volume. In other words, it’s a consortium.

Brokers give data, they get data back, anonymized, curated tells them how you should price a lane. And if you’re a broker you care a lot about that because 85% of my expense as a broker is hiring trucks. Right? That’s a big, that’s my by far my largest expense base. The reason we bought green screens is we have more clean data than anyone in the world about the freight brokerage industry.

Roughly 55% of all freight. We know where it went, what was paid, what accessorials were charged, what lane, nobody, no entity has clean data at that scale. So we had two options. We could have built the technology to sit on top of this to offer intelligence to the market ourselves, which would have taken us probably $20,000,000 in two years, Or we had saved up $260,000,000 of excess capital over the last few years, and we decided to buy the fastest growing company that was a culture fit with us and empower them to take our data. And lastly, the reason we did it is we had a lot of large customers, large brokers ask us.

They’re like, Aaron, I know you all have this data. I know you have it. It would be valuable for my business to get that data either in an API or in a single pane of glass, you know, to be able to log in and to see that. And so we preempted a process, paid a big premium. We knew we were doing it.

We can see the pathway because the raw material that green screens needs to grow is what we already have. So our gross margin in our SaaS business will be well over 90% because we don’t need to go acquire that material anywhere else because we get it in our payments segment. And then we also they needed the relationships and the good housekeeping seal of approval with the large brokers to not just focus on the long tail of small brokers, well those are all my clients. Those are every one of those people we do business with. And so we knew we could have that conversation.

And so that business over time, I think there’s a $300,000,000 revenue opportunity. And so if you push those things together that’s what we think about. Our bank generates 110,000,000 of revenue, not even talking about that, at a 50% efficiency ratio. Steady state. Do the right thing, keep cost of funds low.

But we need to take $210,000,000 of our revenue in transportation and grow that. And if you can do that without diluting shareholders, EPS because the margins are high. We have built so much, to invest in the infrastructure to get here. And so all of our focus is on growing in those three segments. And so hopefully that helps people understand how it all fits together.

Joe Yancunas, Research Analyst, Raymond James: That was a very thorough answer.

Aaron Graf, CEO, Triumph Financial: Well, last meeting of the day, I feel like people deserve to hear a thorough answer.

Joe Yancunas, Research Analyst, Raymond James: So can you dive into green screens a little more in, you know, how much faster can they grow, you know, as being part of a triumphers independently?

Aaron Graf, CEO, Triumph Financial: Yeah. So that’s hard for me to answer, and let me caveat this with, we haven’t closed yet. We don’t have regulatory approval to close yet. That should happen in the second quarter. But their ability so they are venture capital backed firm.

They’ve grown very quickly and they work on the consortium model, right. You give all of your data into a pool and you get all of the pool data back on an anonymized basis. They get about 15,000,000,000 of data for 200 brokers, Right? Small brokers, if you’re going to have that kind of gross number with that many brokers. Their average contract signing to go live is forty five days.

If you followed our payments business, it’s like six or nine months because our integration, and this is one of the hardest things about our business, this is the problem on the factor side and on the broker side. Our payments integration is so invasive that we need to be able to write back to the system of record. And so we have to get the technology provider to allow us a very different level of integration than you would need if you were just taking an output. Right? Like it that’s a different level of integration.

So you’re gonna close green screens. In the meantime, right now, you’re obviously we’re working on building our intelligence product that doesn’t just do pricing, but it also does performance, which is the ISO acquisition. So it’s going to tell the broker what should I pay this carrier and is this the right carrier for this load? Like if it’s a if it’s a load of water bottles nobody cares. But if it’s consumer electronics on a lane I’m not familiar with with a carrier not familiar with, I would like to know what percentage of the time do they show up on time in full.

That’s a that’s a I really care about that. Well, we have that data and that and we can layer that in. So their scalability is different than what we do in payments because in payments there’s one truck. It’s a linear platform, right? Like a load gets tendered only one truck can haul that load.

Versus a nonlinear platform like a YouTube platform where one video can be viewed tens of thousands of times. Our data can be viewed thousands and thousands of times. It’s not a one to one ratio. And so when I said in that last shareholder letter that network fees are in the end not going to be the most scalable and profitable thing we do, I was alluding to the monetization of our data is in my opinion. It’s got to go get proved out.

You all are going to go channel check it be my guest. You’re going to find glowing reviews. I think about green screens across the board people you can verify what our data is. I mean that that’s been reported to you. That should grow much quicker than anything else.

The price point is lower. The integration already exists. The relationship already exists because we know these brokers and we already have the data.

Joe Yancunas, Research Analyst, Raymond James: And is there a capacity issue with how quickly that there are how many brokers you can onboard at the same time?

Aaron Graf, CEO, Triumph Financial: There always, sure. There always is, but What

Joe Yancunas, Research Analyst, Raymond James: does that funnel look like?

Aaron Graf, CEO, Triumph Financial: Well, I mean it’s much tougher in payments, especially because not every broker has a standardized TMS integration. They’ve written their own code or they you know they have a certain way they want to see things and so we have to map to all their fields. I think green screens their ability to use our data set if we think about the third and fourth quarter of this year once they’re onboarded, once the product is rolled out because we’re not going to put a Frankenstein product out there. Like it’s going to feel like triumph. We’ve I’ve got too many years invested with building credibility with the the marketplace.

Once that full product’s out there, I mean, you could be signing contracts, new contracts every week. Right? Because the data exists you’re just turning on an integration. And a lot of these people, I don’t even have to ingest their data. We already have their data.

And that’s the key. I don’t know that investors were able to understand this. I will drive it home in our next shareholder letter. The only reason you do this is because the core of the core transaction for us, the transmission and auditing of data for purposes of making a payment is the exact thing that feeds the green screens model. And we have more of it than anyone on earth.

Clean payment data is very hard to get. It’s taken us years to get there. So we already have that data. It’ll just be creating a login for a lot of these people.

Joe Yancunas, Research Analyst, Raymond James: That was great.

Aaron Graf, CEO, Triumph Financial: Do you

Joe Yancunas, Research Analyst, Raymond James: think we could switch over to some of these other new initiatives like load pay and factorings as a service and if you could just discuss kind of how they’ve been progressing and how you see the acceleration to come in say the intermediate term.

Aaron Graf, CEO, Triumph Financial: Yeah. So factoring as a service is going slower than load pay. I think we’re figuring things out there. In both of these initiatives, like, if you’ve tracked our stock for a while, you need to know five years ago we were standing on a hillside with a horn yelling at the market. If you join the network, you’re going to experience less friction and less fraud.

And that was true. And it’s only because it’s true have we gotten half the market to move all their volume to us. The difference with load pay and factoring as a service is both of those ideas came from our customers. They said, hey, we want to move into this space, right? We do not monetize payments at this time.

If I’m a broker and I’m making a 14% margin on a $2,000 load, I lose the ability to make any money the second that ACH goes out to pay either the factor or the carrier. I’m going to make no more money on that load. If though I’m able to build something where I can participate in the financing, the quick pay of that revenue, which some brokers already do, but nobody does it at a big scale because factoring is so much more pervasive than quick pay. And if I can participate in the interchange fees and the float of how the money actually gets spent in the fuel stop, I might be able to add 10% to my margin. That matters a lot to me.

I mean the average revenue generated when you factor a load is $20. Well the broker is living on a hundred bucks right now, and they’re not going to get all of it. So their option was go build this technology yourself. You know, good luck. Go you can go do it.

And you got to create a balance sheet to hold it. Or the option was come to a trusted partner. We already built the technology. We have instant decision, instant funding, all the stuff you’ve heard me write about, and we have the balance sheet. And someday if you overwhelm our balance sheet that’s great.

We’ll securitize it off because institutional markets should ultimately be the counterparties for thirty day trade payables. Absolutely. All day. And it’s just never gotten there because of a lack of standardization. We will bring standardization.

So load pay is built. Every week we’re pushing code to make it better, make it more trucker centric. It’s a checking account. We have hundreds of thousands of checking accounts already at Triumph. It’s just created with a digital opening that has that has feature sets in it that make it trucker centric.

And then it connects to our payments platform, so we can move money 24 by seven by three sixty five because of the parent child relationship accounting we can do inside the bank. If you’re not a bank you cannot do that. You do not have that option. So load pay is ahead of schedule. We told you we’d end between five and ten thousand accounts at the end of the year.

I believe we will do that. I believe we will do far more than that. And you’re going to see other people come into the market to be selling load pay alongside us, which we welcome them, right. That’s a marketing channel. It’s really powerful.

Factoring as a service, onboarding someone into a factory relationship is more complicated than setting up a virtual wallet. It just is. We are seeing that grow, we are helping our customers. In other words, our customer when I talk about factoring as a service is the broker who wants to provide factoring. We’re teaching them everything we’ve learned in a decade of factoring.

Here’s how you sell this. Here’s what you should do. Ultimately how they need to do this, in my opinion, is very much how American Airlines uses credit cards. American Airlines Visa card, right? They’re not the issuing bank, doesn’t sit on their balance sheet, they don’t do the onboarding.

A bank does all that. But they know they can drive adoption because people want to be executive platinum even if they don’t want to fly 150,000 miles a year. The way forward for a broker is to attach the right lanes, the right routes, to those who factor with them. No factoring company has that option. I don’t move freight.

I can’t give my factoring customers a certain lane. And so the training of how this is working and the onboarding is where we are right now. But if I knew I needed to sell factory, and I needed what would be the competitive advantage. All factoring companies have figured out how to do fuel discounts. All factoring companies are generally figuring out how to fund things quickly.

But the ability to match that with preferred routing for a carrier who wants to get home on Friday night versus stay over in a truck stop, that’s a big deal. And it’s coming. Whether we do it or not we could see it coming and so we positioned ourselves to be part of the solution.

Joe Yancunas, Research Analyst, Raymond James: So factoring as a service has the potential to be extremely disruptive to the industry. I understand it’s early on in the process, but have you seen any of the current factoring companies respond in any way and what could they do?

Aaron Graf, CEO, Triumph Financial: I mean, I don’t know what you can do. Look, nobody loves when new competitive pressures come into an industry. And what I told them, this was coming. Some of these large brokers were already down the road with fintechs who didn’t really know factoring. This tide was coming.

We just happened to be able to do it in the way that factoring should be done versus how I see some fintechs do it who take undue risk. So look, if I’m one of the 400 factoring companies I got to figure out what do I do, what is my value proposition. Of the top 10 most of them are attached to a broker, not one of the top 10 brokers. So they’ve already got Look, it would be a little hypocritical for them to say I don’t like the fact that a freight broker is doing FAS, when four of the top 10 factoring companies were started by freight brokers. And I do love reminding them of that, like you do remember how you started.

The other ones are attached to fuel providers, right? Because that’s going to be a second largest cost center for a trucker behind salary is the fuel spend. And so these aggregators of fuel providers, so that’s going to be they’re going to play to their strength. The third piece is you’re going to you know some people just have customer service niche and their customers who trust them and they’re going to continue to win. But the days of just throwing out a blanket email offering 2% discount to get paid tomorrow are over.

And it was going to happen whether Triumph was part of it or not. So I don’t know what they can do. You’re going to have to adapt. I mean, if you try to I’m the freaking old dude from Market versus bad. Market versus bad.

You know, like really old. Tell me why I had a dream that We’re a factory company. We’re not going to buy CH Robinson paper. I mean come on, like that would be that would crush your business. So like we’re giving and the other thing we’re telling them if you upgrade your technology we will do for you exactly what we do for others.

I don’t to me we’ve built the factory not factoring the factory. I’ll let anybody run on those rails. It’s just until people start seeing their market share seed I don’t think they will. So it is what it is.

Joe Yancunas, Research Analyst, Raymond James: We just have a couple more minutes to see if there’s any questions in the audience. Yeah.

Aaron Graf, CEO, Triumph Financial: Look, right now there are investors in this room who think I think too much anyway. We are just focused on transportation. There will be no more segments. We have laid out for you finally a plan that’s been in the works for two years. I am a laser focused on getting to a billion dollars of revenue and transportation using the three things that we do all of which relate back to the core transaction.

Because if we do that, that will create a lot of shareholder value. So if somebody takes what we’ve done and applies it elsewhere more power to them, we’re only going to do transportation.

Joe Yancunas, Research Analyst, Raymond James: You know, and as we think about that billion dollars that you’re chasing, you’ve laid out some of the buckets of what each of your businesses are going to provide. What’s the first one do you think that gets their target?

Aaron Graf, CEO, Triumph Financial: I mean factoring is the one we can control. Right? I mean we could wallet whip it to to I’m not gonna do that, but I know how to do factoring. Like, we’ve done that for a long time. We have not we’ve intentionally not grown for a lot of years.

Now we have a big incentive to grow because we have customers who are saying we’ve hired you to grow. So now what we’re seeing is small truckers are still leaving the system. Mid sized truckers are picking up the slack, which probably means an inflection point is coming when I have no idea, but utilization we are buying more invoices from fewer truckers, which is a very rare phenomenon for us. Payments, like the the load pay is the only thing we sell right now where I don’t have a Salesforce and every day new people are signing up. Because I can see we have a Slack channel.

I can see each time someone’s, but you got a lot of names to get to, right, to get through that. And then data I hesitate to say we haven’t even closed on it yet. But I know that what we’re buying already had a very high rate of growth. Otherwise we wouldn’t have paid mid teens revenue multiple. Like you wouldn’t do that unless you knew it was going to grow and unless you knew we had what they needed without any additional cost to us.

That was the critical thing. I mean there’s going to be dev work to make it all fit together. But, you know that’s like So on a the denominator being so small in data it will probably show the highest percentage growth. But if we’re talking about gross dollars to the bottom line, you know, what’s going to prove drive EPS from where it is now to where we wanted to go, I’d say factoring probably. But I’ll take any of them.

Sure. Right.

Joe Yancunas, Research Analyst, Raymond James: All right. Well, I think we’re about out of time. So thank you for joining and we’re

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