Shift4 Payments, Inc. FOUR

The business

Shift4 sells the full payment stack to what management calls the experience economy: restaurants, hotels, stadiums, resorts, and increasingly international retail. A merchant takes the SkyTab point-of-sale system or one of Shift4's venue platforms, and Shift4 processes every card tap that flows through it, keeping a slice of the volume. The engine is end-to-end payment volume with software attached: gross profit reached 34.2% of gross revenue in FY25, up from 23.6% in FY22, as software-attached merchants replaced lower-margin legacy gateway ones, and payment volume grew 24% year over year in Q1 2026 per management's call. The moat, in one sentence, is the switching cost of ripping out an installed point-of-sale system that runs the whole restaurant or venue; whether that holds for twenty years is a separate audit.

What the financials understate is how much the company changed in twelve months. The Global Blue acquisition closed in July 2025 at roughly a $2.5B enterprise price, funded with new debt plus $1B of 6% mandatory convertible preferred, and brought the dominant tax-free-shopping and dynamic-currency-conversion network across 70,000-plus European and Asian merchants. Founder Jared Isaacman, who built the company from 1999, handed the CEO seat to longtime deputy Taylor Lauber in mid-2025 amid his NASA administrator nomination, while retaining super-voting control. And on the disruption narrative that has crushed every acquirer multiple: Shift4 launched its own stablecoin settlement platform in December 2025, letting merchants opt into USDC or USDT settlement across seven chains, and on July 14 shipped Shift4 One, a single handheld combining payments, currency conversion, and tax-free shopping. Q1 2026 gross revenue grew 32.1% despite travel disruption from the Middle East conflict; international revenue grew 51% per the call.