Even in the midst of a sharp drop in his company’s stock price and a freight market that is not supporting the bottom line at Triumph Financial, CEO Aaron Graft touted milestones reached and signaled a new aggressiveness in pricing the company’s products.

In his quarterly letter to investors released in conjunction with the company’s earnings on Wednesday, Graft said Triumph’s “network engagement” – the percentage of brokered freight that one or more of its payments systems touch – crossed the 50% mark in the first quarter for the first time. The road to that number has been steady; the four prior quarters from the first quarter of last year through the end of 2024 went 42.7%, 46.6%, 47.8% and 48.7%.

But after two quarters of positive earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, the Payments group at Triumph slipped to a slight negative margin of 0.1%. In the letter, Graft said the group had several noncore charges that led to the EBITDA red ink.

That isn’t stopping Triumph from more aggressively pricing its payment products, Graft said.

Monetizing the network

“The time has come to shift more emphasis to monetization of the Network” – the “Network” being the full invoice audit and payment system that has been the core of Triumph’s growth plans.

“Our efforts to monetize payments will be aimed at fairly and consistently pricing our services based on the value created for our clients as we continue to build income,” Graft said. Many current customers date back to when Triumph purchased HubTran in 2021 , kicking off the growth of the audit network, and their fees have not kept up. “The value we are creating for many of our clients has grown faster than our pricing,” he said.

Triumph’s stock price has taken a beating in recent months. It is down 34.4% for the year and far more for the past three months: 45.6%. Graft acknowledged that slide without citing specific numbers, but did say that “seasonality and cyclicality have converged with uncertainty around trade policy and recession fears, [and] our enterprise valuation has been affected.”

But in this quarter’s version of what he has been saying repeatedly , Graft also said that earlier declarations that “the plan is to stick to the plan … [have] not changed.”

“We will not blame the freight market and trade policy for our results, nor will we let them dissuade us from our strategic vision,” he said. “We could have deviated from the plan and ceased additional investments, delayed immediate realignment expenses, or cut our way to modest profitability this quarter. Each of those has a cost – whether you execute it or avoid it. It is not in our nature to avoid pain today at the risk of jeopardizing long-term value.”