Good afternoon all. Welcome to the Capital Markets Day of CM.com here in the head offices of Breda. It's great to see you all have come in such great numbers. Also, on the live stream, welcome to the Capital Markets Day of CM.com. I understand you are with hundreds, so we're very honored by your attention. Before we go into today's agenda, let me first talk you through the technicalities. We will be presenting a lot of things to you today, and to make sure we do that in a correct way, we point out to you the safe harbor statements here, pictured on the screen. The agenda that we have put together for you today will consist of two blocks.
The first block is the strategic block, where we will dive into the markets, the strategy, our financial results, and the customer engagement, which contains our product and our product strategy. That will be presented by our management board. After the break, we will dive into a deep dive on product, price, and people, and how we have secured your data safely within our firm from a legal perspective. After that, we will turn to the Q&A, and you can ask any questions that you have in mind or generated during this presentation. We will now start with the first block, as said, that will be presented by the management board, and we will start with our CEO, Jeroen van Glabbeek.
Thank you very much, Serge. Great that you're all here. We looked forward to this day for a couple of weeks or months. It's great to share with you our latest insights and visions going forward. We have a great company, we have a great platform, we have great clients, and we have great investors, and it's nice to work together also, yeah, with Serge Enneman, Investor Relations, and all the other colleagues to this day where we can share everything. Before I would like to start, I would like to take you back to this.
A phone. And an internet communicator. An iPod. A phone. Are you getting it? These are not three separate devices. This is one device. And we are calling it iPhone.
Yes. This was a very defining moment for our market in 2007 already. CM.com was eight years on its way. We founded the company in 1999, and we were busy with group messages, text messages. Then for the first time, yeah, we saw, wow, this communication device, this mobile phone is not only for making calls or text messages, but it will literally change the world in how people engage with each other, with friends, with family, but also with brands and businesses. A few years later, a lot of big brands started to say, we are a mobile-first company, like Booking.com in the Netherlands, Facebook.
They said, no, all our viewers will be on mobile phone, and we have to optimize for mobile phone, also Google said at the time. This inspired us with CM.com. We became also mobile-first, of course, to build a platform that is really capable of engaging with consumers in all the way they engage with each other on the mobile phone. We call it now customer experience as a service. It combines messaging, voice, insights with software, AI, payments, tickets for entrance management. We have a lot of things we can accommodate in our platform. It is like a toolbox for everybody who wants to engage with consumers on the mobile phone. That is where we were, I think, a few years ago when we listed the company and we saw a very good accelerated growth just after that.
A few years ago, there was another moment like the iPhone moment, and that is the ChatGPT moment. AI was not new at that time. We already invested in AI. We acquired CX Company a few years before for conversational AI. We just acquired building blocks for consumer AI. ChatGPT, the launch of ChatGPT really showed the world what the power was for AI, and hundreds of millions and maybe by now billions of people every day use AI, at least the generative AI part of it. This is also a very important moment in the history of the economy, in the history of the world, but also in the history of CM. It inspired us to take the next step. Like back then, it was becoming mobile-first. Now it's everything about becoming AI-first.
A few years after the ChatGPT moment, we hear that term monology a bit more than ever before. Also during this presentation today, you will hear more about what it takes to become an AI-first company. At least it also inspired us to take the next step with our platform. Where we are today, it is much broader and richer than we were a few years ago. Where we are today, we call it the engagement platform. It is a globally available platform, AI-powered, which actually manages all the engagements any business might possibly have with their consumers, not only on the mobile phone, but everywhere. It can be internet, it can be email, it can be also in a physical location. We show you many examples, real-life examples today, but we also show you the platform just after the break during the demo.
Now, what does it entail, this engagement platform? Basically, there are three main building blocks. Of course, in the core, you see AI is AI-driven. AI can only function if you have all the data organized and in place. That is what we have with our data platform. We call it consumer data platform because it contains a lot of consumer data, but actually it has much more data than that in it. Also, you will see a demo later on with Bart, where we show also the product data, if you have it in a platform, what it can do. We have data, we have the AI on top of that, and then we have all the engagements with the consumers. It can be communication with SMS or WhatsApp, it can be payments, and it can be many more things.
Our business model is we work for the businesses, and we help them to be successful in their market to engage with their consumers. Our business model is we work for the businesses. How do businesses work with us? Basically in three ways. They can log in on our platform with a web portal. They do it on a daily basis. You go to CM.com, you make an account, you log in, you can do all the work. We'll show it later on. Also APIs. A lot of software developers connected to our platform and use capabilities of our platform directly in their platform as part of their service. More and more, we also show that today, our clients are chatting with our platform. They just log in and they start talking to our platform.
They explain in natural language what they want to achieve with their engagement, and our platform will perform that for them. Our platform can make plans and can execute those plans. That is where AI comes into play. We see four types of AI we have on our platform. I think it's important to explain that a little bit better because today you hear AI everywhere. Even my toolbars at home is AI-powered. It is maybe sometimes a term which is used too much. What we do specifically with AI is conversational AI. We understand the conversation based on the technology we acquired five years ago with CX. Then we understand the consumer based on consumer data. My colleague Saskia will show you a case with Basic-Fit, how we understand their millions of consumers and we predict their behavior in the future.
We influence that behavior based on our platform. We have two other types of AI. One is the generative AI. We generate now whole campaigns or we generate answers. Last but not least, certainly not, we have agentic AI, the Halo platform we launched a few months ago. Now, what do we do with the communication? Basically, our clients use us for three reasons. One is service, where it is a customer contact as a service. Many businesses around the world, and we literally show you businesses around the world. We have my colleague Wael from the Middle East here, my colleague David from U.S., and they will show you cases from the other side of the world, how businesses there are successful with service cases, but also with marketing cases on our platform. We have the commerce part.
Commerce is maybe the most important part of a business, the magical moment where you really sell something, when a customer signs a contract on our platform with a signed solution, where we identify people with our validation software, where we make a payment with a payments platform, or we sell a ticket with a ticketing platform. This unique moment in time when people buy things, what we call commerce, our platform is really valuable in that part of the business. That is a bit our engagement platform. It is a mouthful, but it is one platform. I think that is the most important thing. It is not that we are doing a lot of different things. We do one thing and we do it really well, and that one is our engagement. In order to be successful, we need a few things to happen. One is that our clients trust us.
Now, we are 25 years in the business. We have many clients who trust us, but we have to be trustworthy. We have to protect their data. We can only do our work if they really trust us with our consumer data, with our product data, and all the insights. That's really important. Later on, also my colleague Aard Kegger, the Legal Counsel, will explain to you a bit why we are trustworthy from a legal perspective, but there's also a lot of technology behind that, of course. We have the AI part, and then we have something else. The communication and payment platform is something you cannot replicate overnight. We all have seen millions of startups maybe all around the world. We say, okay, I start my business, I'm an AI company. That's great. You can do a lot overnight with AI.
What you can't build overnight is a global telco platform with 600 connections worldwide, connected to all the operators, directly connected to WhatsApp as a premium partner. The same as with the payments platform. We have an in-house developed processing platform directly connected to Visa and MasterCard, the number one and number two payment providers in the world. You cannot replicate it overnight. This is a very defensible platform. Yes, there will be competition, but we build upon the things we've built up over the last decade, so to say. That's our engagement platform. Now, because I said already so much, if you have to remember three things about our platform, you can trust it. It's based on AI, and we have a lot of licenses to operate in it.
We're not only that we say this, we will see cases from clients, but also industry analysts really recognize the value of our platform. We have Juniper naming us an established leader in the communication platform as a service. We had Emerce, a magazine that did a survey, and they called us the five-star PSP, payment service provider, and five-star was the highest score together with Mollie and Adyen in the Netherlands. Yeah, we see a lot of tractions based upon our latest launch of Halo only a few months ago, and already more than 100 clients signed up and are now literally more successful than they used to be because of our agentic platform. There's a lot of traction, and Rutger, my colleague, will show it later on how that really works. It's a great demo. That's a bit where we are today.
What is the market we play in? It's a huge market. It's growing up to $125 billion in a few years from now, and it has a nice growth. It consists of different parts. CPaaS, the communication platform as a business, our classic business, so to say, still is a little bit less than half of our gross profits. That grows like 8% a year. On top of that, we have the communication, the customer contact center as a service business is growing a bit faster. We have the CDP business, the customer data platform. We have the AI market. The AI market is even growing faster. Altogether, we think that we believe that our market will grow around 22% on an annual base for the upcoming four years.
We are in that market, and we hope to grow with it, of course. If we dive a little bit deeper into AI, AI is set to grow at a certain pace, 36%. Specifically within the AI market, you have agentic AI market, and that is even growing faster than 36%. We are well aligned with our platform in the right market, and we are ready for a lot of growth in the near future. How will we get this growth? We will get this growth by selling, of course, to more customers, more to our existing customers, and more to new customers. Already we sold a lot. With this experience, we learned about what is successful for us and what not. What we learned, we are most successful in sales in a mid-market.
You have large clients, really large global clients, nice clients, but longer sales cycles. There are small clients. There are a lot of small clients, potential clients, of course. It's also nice, but lower deal size. In the mid-market, we see high deal velocity. We can sell it every day, and we have decent order sizes. Really, if we have to choose, we pick the mid-market as our ideal customer profile. There is something else. The market for our type of solutions is divided in two parts. We have two types of customers, so to say. One is best of breed. The other one is best of suite. Now, what is the difference? Best of breed means for every possible problem you can have as a business, there's a solution. There's the best solution.
You want to buy payments, you go to the best payments provider. You want to buy messaging, you go to the best messaging provider. You want to buy software, you go to a software provider. If you keep on doing this for a long time, and a lot of enterprises have learned that the hard way, you end up with a lot of vendors and a lot of complexity. You need consultants to help you with the complexity, and you need developers to integrate all the different vendors. More and more, we see that our clients and potential clients, they choose us, or they choose at least one of our competitors in the best of suite part of the business. Less complexity, integrated already from scratch, broad opportunities, broad possibilities. That is where we play. This is not a new strategy.
This is the strategy we always followed, but it really is playing into our hand now at this moment. Mid-market, best of suite, that's where we are positioned in this fast-growing and big market. Of course, we have competitors. Some are better in payments or bigger. Some are better or bigger in messaging. Some have other types of software. Some are smaller. In different angles of this big market, we have different competitors. In our sweet spot, the mid-market, best of suite, we are very strong and we win a lot of deals. That is also important. We will see later with Jörg, our CFO, that he will explain that our cost of acquisition is coming down over the last years. We are more efficient. We are winning more deals because we know where to sell.
It's not only the size of the type of customers we go after, it's also the vertical they are in. We have clients in multiple verticals, but we focus on eight verticals. These eight verticals, we have proven business cases, which we can easily sell, easily replicate, and we know how to make those clients successful, and they also know that we can help them in it. We have really great brands in these verticals. The biggest one is technology and media. 30% of our gross profit is generated in that market. We have also leisure and travel. This is a nice market where we have a lot of good products and a lot of growth. Technology utility, financial services, telco utility. These are the markets with a lot of consumers and thus a lot of data and interactions over our platform.
We have retail and e-commerce and omnichannel, also very important for us. We can combine, for example, with payments, online payments with in-store payments. We combine that as omnichannel. It works really well with retail e-commerce, and so on. We have seen where to sell in terms of verticals and type of clients, but it is also literally where to sell, in which country, which region. Over time, we also learned that. We learned where to sell. Literally, we know where we can win. At this moment, we are live in 15 countries. At least there, we have actual offices with salespeople, people in service and support. In those countries, we understand the markets. We understand the clients. We speak the language. We understand the culture. It is divided a bit in the US, Europe, Middle East, Africa, India, and APAC.
These are the regions where we can win, where we are successful. We have a strong story. We're very happy with this global footprint we have. We are based in different countries, 15 countries, but we manage regions. Like I'll also explain, from our office in Dubai, but we sell in, let's say, 10 countries around Dubai, and that is quite successful. Of course, here in Breda, this is our head office. A lot of people work here. I think half of our employees more or less work in Breda. From here, we develop the products. We do a lot of central things like IT, technology, finance, legal. We have a very smooth and efficient operation running here in headquarters where we support our global colleagues. All right. That's a bit where we play.
I have two last remarks before I hand over to our CFO. One is about success in terms of how this business model works. We have more clients. The clients upload more knowledge to our platform, more profiles. We see that in the middle. More clients means our AI can do a better job, learn more, come with better insights, start more interactivity, getting better results. That you see on the right-hand side. In the end, we have also more transactions, more payments, more tickets, more messages, more volume in the Service Cloud, more volume in the Marketing Cloud. All these transaction type of models where we earn money for users-based are growing fast because of the users of our platform, because of the data it has and the insights it has based on AI. This will drive upsell and growth of our existing base.
The last thing, what is also very important, Gilbert will explain more about that in a while. A lot of clients came to us and they started with one product. After a while, they started using more and more of our platform. We have learned that, for example, if you use three products of CM.com, we earn eight times more margin from this client than if they only use one product. That is another reason why we have this multi-product, this suite type of approach. It is better for the client, but it is also better for us and for our business model. Now, looking back and looking forward, to summarize, fast growth after the API with conversational commerce, value over volume in the last three years where we are more profitable, better margins, positive cash flow, all those things are really important for the last three years.
We are now ready for the next phase, and that is further growth, profitable growth, more revenue, but not with more costs this time because based with AI, we can be much more efficient. I'll explain in a minute. First, we go to our CFO, Jörg Graff.
Thank you, Jeroen. Good afternoon, everyone. Nice to have you all here. My name is Jörg Graff, and I will tell you a little bit more about our financial journey, but also the opportunity ahead with obviously some financial targets as well. Let me start one step back. We became a listed company in the beginning of 2020 to raise capital to accelerate growth. That's what we did. We built out the company. We're now three, four times as large, depending on the metric you look at.
Then in about halfway 2022, when we had our latest investor deep dive, we said, "Okay, as of now, we're going to focus on efficiency. We're going to focus on profitability." That is also what we did. That means we shifted away from revenue focus to value focus with, as a result, less emphasis on top line, with also for a short period of time, even a decline in top line as we shed parts of the business where we're not making enough return. We did focus on gross profit and gross margin. As you see, over the last year, we have consistently delivered gross profit growth year after year after year because that was our focus. At the same time, we've also seen the margin on our overall portfolio go up.
We went from about 25% in 2021 to over 30% in 2024, focus on value. The other thing we did was focus on efficiency. We redesigned our processes, improved the way we work and operate, focus on return on investment. We made a lot of growth investments. When we got the data on where it actually generates sufficient return and where not, we also acted upon that. What you see is that the OpEx that we had, our operating expenses from 2022 to 2024, as a result, went down with more than 30%. That is a big turnaround. If you combine those two, consistently growing gross profit with higher margin, and the big step down in operating costs due to increased efficiency, you actually see a big turnaround in our EBITDA performance.
Where 2022 still had minus EUR 22 million in EBITDA, 2024 was already at plus EUR 18 million. That is a big turnaround that is composed of those two elements. Now, subsequently, if we go below EBITDA, then we have seen that we have also held a very tight grip on our investments. Therefore, our free cash flow went from about minus EUR 34 million in 2022 to plus EUR 3 million last year. That is a big milestone where the cash flow really turned positive. In that sense, we really turned our operating model around, focused on value, on efficiency, on return on investment, and it paid off in our financial results. If I compare that to the targets that we set ourselves in our investor deep dive of 2022, gross margin, we said, "We think we will be in the high 20s." We delivered 30%.
We said our OpEx as a percentage of revenue will be somewhere between low to mid 20%. It came in at 24%. Also there, we delivered. Lastly, we said our EBITDA margin will go up to mid single digit. We said it at a time when it was heavily negative, 6% by the end of 2024 and growing. I think we delivered on all of those targets that we set. Our operating model is in a much better place, but there was one more thing that we also wanted to address before we enter our new phase of focus on accelerating growth again. That is our balance sheet because you do not only need an efficient and profitable operating model, you also need a healthy balance sheet. What you may remember is that we had EUR 100 million convertible bond outstanding that matured in September 2026.
We have decided to refinance that one and a half year ahead of maturity in February this year, where we actually bought the bond back at a EUR 13 million discount. We got EUR 100 million. We only paid EUR 87 million back. It's a massive improvement in that sense of value. Also, we've been able, in collaboration with our partner banks, HSBC, ABN Amro, ING, to put together a EUR 80 million credit facility. That gives a lot of confidence. Also, the support of these very reputable banks is very important and powerful for us. To strengthen our balance sheet, making ourselves set up for success for future growth, we also raised EUR 20 million in capital through equity. The result of that, as you can see in this slide, is that our net debt position went down significantly, minus EUR 27 million.
Also our leverage, so net debt over EBITDA, came down significantly as a result of this transaction. If you look at December 2024 versus the end of Q1 this year, 2025, our leverage went down from 4.4 times EBITDA to 2.8 times EBITDA. Now, also from a balance sheet point of view, we're in a healthy position where we are ready to focus on our next phase of our business. That is where I also want to take you through from my perspective, starting with our business model. How do we look at our business and at our business model? I think, as Jeroen also already explained, the essence is we facilitate customer interactions, customer engagement. That is what we do. We want to add value to those interactions.
Whether that's a message that's being sent, whether that's software that powers a conversation, whether it's a payment that a consumer is making or a ticket he or she is buying for the next event, for us, that's where we want to enter the conversation and add value. That means also we look at our business a lot more agnostically than in business units because our main point is where do we enter the conversation with the consumer, and that's where we start adding value. What we see here is if you want to grow this number of interactions, then what do you need? You need more customers. We've been growing our customer base significantly, 44% increase in our customer base. Those customers, so businesses, they also need something very important.
They need customer profiles stored in our CDP because once we have those customer profiles, that's where we can actually add value to it, add magic to it. You see an exponential growth in number of CDP profiles that we have in our system on behalf of our customers. That translates, as you see on the right-hand side of the screen, that translates into growing interactions, growing conversations. That's the essence of our business and of what we do. Now, if we look at our business in sort of the traditional way, we see our different units, product units, are comprised of a bit of a different margin setup. Our Connect business traditionally has a bit of a lower margin than what we call a high margin business, being Payments, Live, and our Engagement Platform.
That means we really look at it on gross profit because if we would compare revenues, it's not apples with apples. We run our business on gross profit and gross profit development to equalize for this. Interestingly enough, we do see a large improvement in this gross margin. If we just single into Connect, as I just mentioned, it's lowest margin of the totality of our business, which is true from a business model. If we also look there over the last couple of years, our focus on value also there has been paying off because you see in a very competitive market that we have been able to increase our gross margin in our Connect business. With the rise of OTT richer channels, it gives us also going forward the opportunity to put more features into those conversations and drive more value.
Talking about higher margin products, what we have seen over the years is that where originally we were more of a CPaaS or Connect company, now moving much more to a higher margin product company, as Jeroen already explained and my subsequent colleagues will also explain. That also shows in our results because right now, less than half of our gross profit originates from Connect and more than half originates from the higher margin products. That has been a big driver after our continued gross margin improvement. If we look at new business, new sales around the world in all these regions where we have people where we operate our business, then as you can see, in a very large part of the business, our landing product is already an Engage product. It's a software product because that's often where we start driving the conversation.
The new business intake that we score last year, 73% of that new business was on high margin products. Again, we're agnostic in terms of how we start the conversation with our consumer, but this is really what is driving our business and our margin upwards. Now, as I mentioned, the way that we run our business and look at our business is long-term value creation, focusing on year after year after year gross profit increase. That's what you see here. This is how we look at it. Where we are very successful as well is enabling the very, very large global platforms to interact with their consumers. The nature of these very big platforms is that they have campaigns, events, they may shift traffic, we may bid on traffic or not, so that makes sure that there's volatility.
That's a part of our business which delivers good value, but from a revenue point of view, it brings volatility to our business because of the nature of how these platforms operate. That is what I wanted to show you because if you look quarter after quarter at our financial results, you will observe the same thing. You probably won't see a steady revenue line. The reason is that may be impacted in the very short term with these volatilities, fluctuations in sort of wholesale traffic, if you like, that we see. This is a picture showing you last year, just each quarter. You see Q1 over Q3, about stable, then Q2 up, Q3 down, Q4 up again. That is part of our business. The most important thing is look at the gross profit bars.
That's what we manage our business on, and that's how we create value. Now, let's look at the opportunity. Having discussed our business model and how we look at it, let's look at the opportunity that's ahead of us and how we address it. As Jeroen already mentioned, we operate in a large market that is also growing rapidly. It's growing rapidly basically for two reasons. One is adoption of new technology, so new customers entering this space, becoming a customer in this space. That's one. The other one, which is also very important, is existing customers using more. Usage is going up. That's the two main things that are driving our business, but are also a very powerful force for us to tap into to grow our business going forward. Now, another element that Jeroen alluded to already is where do we grow?
Because originally, we're a Dutch company. I think we're quite successful here in the Netherlands. We like this country, but it's small. We expanded globally. We invested in that years back to build successful units in all those regions. We'll hear some of our colleagues explain a little bit more about that later. It's paying off because what we're seeing is that where a few years ago, about half of our business was still Dutch, by now, 71% of our business originates from outside our traditional home country. We also see, of course, as a consequence, that we're growing a lot faster in other parts in the world. The beauty of that is that those markets are huge markets, they're very large. We are just scratching the surface of what is possible there.
Our market share is relatively small, so there's ample room for growth. Starting to get traction and building a team that actually knows how to sell it and become well-known, that's the difficult part. We successfully did that in the countries where we operate right now. One of those consequences where you can see that is our payback time is getting better. In 2022, I told you our average payback time on our invested EUR in growth is about 20 months. Right now, that has come down to 16 months. That's a sizable improvement in sales effectiveness. That's driven by two things. One is indeed in all these regions, we're now well established. We have the right people. We know the markets. The markets know us, so we have more traction. On the other hand, also, we have invested a lot in our portfolio.
Also in that sense, our portfolio enables us to be more successful commercially because we have simply more customer traction. Now, if I then look at cross-sell, because that's another element that is best of suite, you've heard. Best of suite means that we actually like our customers to buy more than one of our products, to buy two, three, four, five, six more. Also there we see gradual progress. Year after year after year, we see that our customers are taking more of our products. The average customer right now uses 2.1 products of CM.com. That's obviously a trend that is going up and that we like to continue because, as I will show you in a second, it delivers value. You also see the graphs over the years.
Every year, the new cohort of customers ends at a higher point, so enters with more average products. As they remain customers with us, we are able to sell them more products, a testament to our best of suite commercial strategy. Jeroen also already showed this slide, but just quickly go over it again because I think this is important. This is where a very big opportunity for us lies because a customer that is taking two products instead of one is already generating three times as much gross profit. A customer that is taking three products is generating eight times as much gross profit, going up to 21 times as much gross profit for the ones who are taking four products. Also, the much loyal customers because the retention rate is a lot higher.
The attrition of two or three products is only half of one product customer. They stay with us twice as long. It is only a third if they take four or more products. There is a lot of value there. I think we have a massive opportunity there, both in our existing customer base, to sell them more, make them more valuable, make them stay longer with us, but certainly also as we attract new customers to enter in a higher and higher starting point in terms of average numbers of product taken. Now, all these elements that I just mentioned add to our ambition. As I mentioned, we are now at a new phase where our operational model works, the return to profitable growth, positive EBITDA, positive free cash flow is there. We cleaned up our balance sheet. Now the focus is on growth.
We have the ambition to accelerate growth. Obviously, we define that as gross profit growth to at least 15% by 2028. The levers to get there, the building blocks to get there, are the ones that we actually just went over. Just to summarize, the first thing is adoption of the new technology driving higher usage. It's happening in the market. We're there. We're going to benefit from it for sure. The other element is cross-sell, as we've just seen. Massive opportunity to increase value. Our international markets, where we're just scratching the surface, capitalize on the investments that we make and keep building that out. As you will hear from our colleagues, we have some very nice track records there and use cases there.
Also, we want to increase our sales efforts and sales investments again because now we know where it pays off. We have a very efficient machine. We want to start increasing our sales effectiveness even more, but also adding investments in sales. Those investments in sales not necessarily come from just upfront increasing our operating cost, but they come from further efficiency improvements internally, as will be explained later, amongst others, by Gilbert, where we are basically employing our own AI capabilities to become a more efficient organization. Some of that efficiency will be reallocated to increased investment in growth. As I will show you in a second, the moment that we grow, because we have a platform model, we can allocate some of that incremental gross profit to additional investments in growth.
We get a flying wheel going that will accelerate our growth to more than 15% by the end of in the course of 2028. I mentioned operating model and leverage. We run a platform business. What does a platform business mean from a financial point of view? It means that we can scale very efficiently from a financial point of view. If I just try to do the math a little bit for you here, we see that every additional EUR 1 of gross profit that we expect to come in will only lead to EUR 0.25 of incremental OpEx. 75% will trickle down to EBITDA immediately. Also our CapEx investments, again, because our platforms are very scalable, will not need a lot of incremental investments as well. Only EUR 0.05 will add to CapEx.
That means every EUR of additional gross profit will translate to 70 cents incremental cash. That's huge operational leverage that we have in our model. That's something that we're going to use and capitalize on, but also for you as a shareholder can generate a lot of value. Getting to our targets, 2028, already mentioned, we want to accelerate our gross profit growth. In 2028, we want to reach a gross profit growth level of at least 15%. We expect our gross margin to continue to go up to about 35%. EBITDA margin will also, now that it turned positive, we want to continue on that trajectory. By 2028, we target for an EBITDA margin between 12%-15%. I think those are natural building blocks from where we are now, but it shows a massive improvement in financial performance.
We do that while we retain our financial discipline. We became very, very disciplined in how we run our business, and we will continue to do so. The first thing we want to achieve is we want to reduce our leverage even further. We want to bring it down by 2028 to less than two times EBITDA, with maybe a temporary headroom to two and a half if needed, but below 2.0, that is what we aim for. Also, our cash conversion, from EBITDA to free cash flow, is going to be at least 50%. At least 50% of our EBITDA is going to turn into cash, into free cash flow. If we have more money to spend, excess cash, then the allocation of our capital is going to be in incremental growth investments.
If we think the return is good enough, it's going to be in product development to make more and better products. Selective M&A, if we see something that's worth it, but also there, you know, we're quite reluctant and disciplined in that and reducing that even further. With this, I think we have a very strong financial position and outlook, and we're very much looking forward to continue our trajectory and making this happen. One of the ways we are going to make that happen, the most important way, is obviously on the customer side. Therefore, we have our COO, Gilbert, tell you more about how we enable customer engagement, but also what we do with AI agents. Gilbert, to you.
Thank you very much, Jörg, for all these insights.
Yeah, I like to explain a little bit more about our customer engagement and how our product portfolio developed over time and how it's going to develop in the future. Let's start a little bit way back in 2000, when we started. We got the question of our customers, "Hey, can you send this text message to this database?" A very simple question. It was the first club, the first discotheque that asked us this question. We said, "Yes, we can do it. We can help you collect the data. We can help you with the planning. We will build some software for it, and we can open the SMS channel for you." That's how we started.
Five years further in time, 2005, we got the question, "Wow, okay, that works, but can you help me to interact with the audience?" We were talking with TV stations, pop stars, idols, for example, and they wanted to have more interactivity. We said, "Yes, we can do it. We can build more interactivity into the platform." We created premium SMS and voice as new channels in our system. Five years further in time, we got a new question from our customers. "Okay, I reach out to people. I have interactivity, but can you help me monetize all these interactions?" Again, we said, "Yes, we can. We can bring some monetization there." We created our own PSP and created various payment methods, such as iDEAL QR, to create monetization.
Five years further in time, we got the question, "Wow, now I earn money with my interactions, but can we broaden the way how we reach people so we can communicate with consumers in the channel they like?" We said, "Yes, we can." We created more multiple channels. We created WhatsApp, WeChat, RCS. We opened up these channels in our platform to reach out to more people in the way they like. Five years further in time, in 2020, we got the question, "Okay, nice, but can we now really add more capabilities in this communication so we can help customers in their customer journey from discovery to delivery?" Of course, we said, "Yes, we can." We created soft pulse payment methods, CDP, signatures, different kinds of SaaS software products, such as the Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud.
We added that in one suite to help the whole customer journey to be improved for our customers. Five years further in time, we got the question just a few months ago, actually, "Can you give me an agent to do all the optimization for me in the whole customer journey?" Yes, we can. We built Halo to bring agentic AI to our customers and help them to be more effective and more efficient. What would the world look like in five years' time? That's my biggest hobby, to try to predict that. I can try to make some kind of a prediction. In my eyes, in 2030, it will be true living services that we have around us. With that, I mean that interaction with companies will be there always. I mean, your agents will interact with the agents of the company.
Your smart glass will be there always for you, being able to do things for you. Maybe you still use your cell phone to do stuff, but it's always there in a very low-friction way. If it's buying something, if it's getting information on something, notifications for something, it's there. That's a true living service. Agentic AI will be very important to that. The buildup of this product portfolio also brought a very nice flywheel, this triangle for us. If we look at it, we see this first product. Actually, customers nowadays, they start not with one product, but even with two products with us. Examples of these starting products are the Marketing Cloud. "Hey, help me to send out a campaign." Very simple question. "Give me an agent." Very simple question that we can help with. "Give me an event app." Yes, we can.
These are very simple products to start with. Once you start, of course, we want to bring you to buy more products. For these suites, we try to be best of suite. I brought a few verticals that we are active in to show you what kind of elements are in these suites to make us successful. We have the e-commerce companies, the leisure, the financial services. If we zoom in, for example, in e-commerce, what do we bring? We bring the SMS Gateway, WhatsApp, online payments, email campaigns, Halo, the Service Cloud. It is all clustered together to bring a very swift experience for people that buy stuff online for web shops. Another set of verticals that we are active in, if we zoom in on the government, we help them with SMS communication to inform everybody in the Netherlands, for example.
Also, they now use our payment solutions. If you are abroad and you need a new passport, you lost it, for example, and you go to an embassy, there you will buy a new passport via our payment solutions and our cash registers. The people here in Breda, if you drive home and you drive a little bit too fast and you get a fine, then you pay via our payment services and we earn a few cents on that fine. Do not speed. That is not good, of course. If we look to another set of verticals that we are active in, where we have a lot of suites, let's zoom in on the leisure and travel market. Of course, we have ticketing there. We have the CDP. We have WhatsApp for Business. We have our point of sale solutions.
Here we see that ticketing is really embedded now in our engagement platform. We hardly sell just a ticket solution to a festival. No, we sell the CDP and we sell the cash registers to bring information about who's the biggest spender on the festival. We sell the event app. We sell scan services. It is all together becoming this one platform of engagement where ticketing is a part of. We start with a few products. We sell the whole suite. At the top of the triangle, we have all these billable items. Those are really the fun stuff, if you like to send invoices. Here we have different items that just run up the bill. We have voice calls. We have the payments. We have chatbot conversations. We have text messages. These are the usage products. That fulfills the whole triangle.
Now, with the arrival of agentic AI, with the arrival of Halo, we have some kind of a supercharger for this triangle. If you start to conversate with an agent to build up a campaign, of course, the agent says, "You want to send me out a text message, but of course, we need a CDP to store all this data." The customer says, "Yes, of course. I need that." The agent will advise, "You can send a text message, but maybe you can send a richer message now via WhatsApp. Let's do that." Halo is maybe our best salesperson in the room that can help us speed up and also bring more usage to the platform. Halo is not only speeding up this triangle, but Halo is also speeding up the way how we operate.
Of course, as a CEO, that makes my heart bounce a bit quicker because I always am looking for more operational efficiency. We found this with Halo. It is quite fun to use our own product because it gives us very quick improvement cycles, of course, for the software. We want to become an AI-first company. We have to. Our competitor will be AI-first. The competitor of our competitor will be AI-only. We have to be in front of line to get this done. I like to explain to you a little bit about how we are becoming an AI-first company. Three points I like to explain. The first point is, we really encourage our employees to use agents in their daily work.
In fact, the next round of annual reviews, I'm not so much interested in reviewing you and talking about your life at CM.com. I'm more interested in how your agents are doing. Let's have a look at the seven agents you're using. How effective are they? How many times are they used? Are your agents happy? Are they friendly? That's the conversation I want to have. I'm promoting all these agents now within the company by celebrating good agents. We have the agent of the week where we have a look at every week which agent was most successful, which new agents were born, and how happy are we with them. The second point, how to become an AI-first company is the super agents that are very helpful. Let's bring them into the organizational structure. Let's have them as a real colleague, a real virtual colleague.
We have this organigram. Maybe you've seen it before. It's a team tree that we have. In the team tree, we have now already the first virtual employees that are always awake and always friendly, never grumpy. They don't need food. They are very helpful. This is an example of Norma, the AI assistant that knows everything about our policies. A few other examples. We have the SMS wholesale specialist, a virtual colleague. She is trained with all the information about every operator in the world. She knows everything about SMS prices, about determination systems. It's quite a complex business, as you can understand, but all the data is there. All our colleagues worldwide can access this colleague via Teams chat, and she always has good answers for us. It saves a lot of work. Another example is our virtual recruitment agent.
You can try it out. It's on our website. If you're looking for a new job at CM.com, you can try it. It will have a very interesting conversation with you and try to find out what your hobbies are, what you like to do, which job maybe would be the best fit for you of our open vacancies. It will generate a very interesting form that can be used by our real recruiters to pick it up the day after this conversation and already have a head start in the whole process. Yeah, and this is Norma, the agent that I mentioned that knows everything about the policies. For most of the people, policies can be sometimes a little bit boring, but it is very interesting and important for us as a listed company to have.
It's very helpful, but we can make it a little bit more sexy to be able to have a conversation with all the policies. You do not have to go through every policy. You just ask what you want to know and bum, it's there. Norma will be there for you. These are examples of our virtual colleagues. The third point that we have to really get ourselves front of line for being an AI-first company is the AI team. We constructed a team of data scientists, of developers, of project leads. That is a fixed team that can help wherever it's needed in the company to speed up the process to become AI-first. I'm very happy with that to make these steps.
All right, so that concludes my story talking about how our portfolio grows, how it helps us to speed up the usage, and how we use Halo into our workforce. That also concludes the first part of this presentation. We are going to a break right now. In the second part, we will do the deep dive, but first a break. We have 20 minutes time, so we will be back 3:20 P.M., if I'm correct. And we have drinks for you, but also we have two places. Left hand near the bar, we have our Halo booth where a few colleagues of mine can show you how Halo works and you can interact with some virtual colleagues maybe. See you back in 20 minutes, 3:20 P.M. Thank you.
Maybe I don't want to know the way home. Taking on a journey, I got places to go.
Want to chase a miracle. It's possible. You just got to open the door. Darling, it's cold out there. Don't fear the road, just come along with me. You're not alone out there. Let's write a song, wake up the melody. If you're looking for me, baby, you know you can find me following the sun somewhere, running up my heartbeat. I don't look behind me, following the sun, following the sun. Come and give your love away. Don't play it safe. I'm going to let you fall, but I won't let you break. Want to chase the sunset. Are you ready yet? We won't get this chance every day. Darling, it's cold out there. Don't fear the road, just come along with me. You're not alone out there. Let's write a song, wake up the melody.
If you're looking for me, baby, you know you can find me following the sun somewhere, running up my heartbeat. I don't look behind me, following the sun, following the sun, following the sun. You can lean on. You can lean on me. You can lean on. You can lean on me. If you're looking for me, baby, you know you can find me following the sun somewhere, running up my heartbeat. I don't look behind me, following the sun, following the sun, following the sun. You can lean on. You can lean on me. You can lean on. You can lean on me. Cold keeps me shy for the night. Keeping myself. And I did what I could be happy with. Somebody else. Cold keeps me shy for the night. Keeping myself.
I did what I could be happy with. Somebody else. You could you help me wash the pain away? The thought of you is keeping me awake. Oh, darling, I need you to stay. I'm like, who? Where did you, where did you go? Where did you, where did you go? Stuck here without you, the walls that we're run through. Something about your love. Where did we, where did we go? Where did we, where did we go? I try not to run down, but somehow I miss you. Where did you, where did you go? Oh, I'd do anything to wait for you. Oh, I pray that we could see the blue because the rain, it only pours for you. I'm like, who? Where did you, where did you go?
Where did you, where did you go? Stuck here without you, the walls that we run through. Something about your love. Where did we, where did we go? Where did we, where did we go? I try not to run you, but somehow I miss you. Where did you, where did you go? Ask me what I did with my life. I spent it with you. If I lose my fame and fortune, really don't matter. As long as I got you, baby. Let the hands drop, so right. Let the hands drop, so right. Let the hands drop, so right. As long as I got you, baby. Let the hands drop, so right. Let the hands drop, so right. Let the hands drop, so right. As long as I got you. Ask me what I did with my life. I spent it with you.
If I lose my fame and fortune, really don't matter. As long as I got you, baby. Let the hands drop, so right. Let the hands drop, so right. Let the hands drop, so right. As long as I got you, baby. Let the hands drop, so right. Let the hands drop, so right. Let the hands drop, so right. As long as I got you. As the years they pass us by, we stay young through each other's eyes. No matter how old we get, it's okay. As long as I got you, baby. Let the hands drop, so right. As long as I got you, baby. Let the hands drop, so right. As long as I got you, baby. Let the hands drop, so right. As long as I got you, baby. Let the hands drop, so right. As long as I got you, baby.
As long as I got you. Staring at a wall, it looks darker than it did before. Mirroring my mind, you left me behind. You are the sun, I am still the moon. Gone are the days I can look to you. I am what remains. Oh, where did you go? I will follow. My heart is full of holes. I'm the hollow of the time. Oh, where do I look for your shadow? Oh, where did you go? I will follow you. Where did you go? Where did you go? Darling, I'll follow. I'm the hollow of the time. Where did you go? Where did you go? Darling, I'll follow. I'm the hollow of the time.
I come unglued in the chaos made for me and you. Borrowing your bed, crying on your sheets. You are the sun, I am still the moon. Gone are the days I can look to you. I am what remains. Oh, where did you go? I will follow. My heart is full of holes. I'm the hollow of the time. Oh, where do I look for your shadow? Oh, where did you go? I will follow you. Where did you go? Where did you go? Where did you go? Where did you go? Darling, I'll follow. Darling, I'll follow. I'm the hollow. Where did you go? Where did you go? Where did you go? Darling, I'll follow. Darling, I'll follow. I'm the hollow of the time. I'm the hollow of the time. Losing control. I'm losing control. I'm lost. Yeah, I don't feel the pain you do.
I know I'm trouble, but someone knows who says we need to know for sure. Who says we need to close the door? Losing control. I'm losing control. Been losing my mind. Been losing my mind. Been losing my mind.
If you all would be so kind to return to your seats, please. Okay, welcome back all. I hope you enjoyed your break. We're now going to present to you the second part of our Capital Markets Day presentation. We're going to dive into the three P's: product, price, and people. We're going to inform you a little bit better about how we safeguard the use of your data. After that, Jeroen will take the stage again with some concluding remarks, and then there will be ample time to answer any questions you may have in the Q&A.
For the product part, we have selected for you today three speakers. They will address all the three items that were previously discussed by Jeroen in his presentation as part of our engagement platform. I am very proud to present to you the first speaker. That's Bart De Peuter.
Thank you very much, Serge. Yeah, that's me. Last February, we released Halo. Talked a lot about it already, our agentic AI platform. The release of Halo doesn't stand in itself. Also, as already explained by Jeroen, we released Halo as an integral part of our engagement platform. This means, first of all, that you can deploy these agents on all the different channels that we have on offer within CM.com, such as your agents are always there where your consumers are.
Next to that, Halo is also integrated with our Marketing Cloud, such that it enables businesses to orchestrate all the outbound communication with their customers all from a single platform. With our Service Cloud, we also have all the ingredients in-house to turn a traditional contact center into an agentic AI contact center. As you can see, we have all the ingredients in-house within that platform to enable businesses to break down the silos between their different departments, between the marketing department, between the service department, to consolidate their vendor landscape. Most importantly, maybe to provide a consistent experience to their customer. Doesn't matter whether it's marketing, doesn't matter whether it's service. The experience that companies provide is consistent across all these touch points. At the heart of that platform is our Customer Data Platform.
That is the case because we believe that for businesses, in order to build strong engagement with their consumers, it is important for them to know who their customers are, who their consumers are. What are their interests? What are their problems? What do they care about? Because if a business knows that, then they can really become a trusted advisor for the company and create really valuable customer interactions. In this world where everything is digital, everything is conversational, and everything is AI-driven, knowing your customer is synonymous with having the right data. In order to provide our customers with the capabilities to build these data profiles and to start collecting that data, we provide them with a customer data platform. The customer data platform has two main responsibilities.
The first one is unifying data from all different sources, all different touch points into a single customer data profile, such that businesses have a unified and central view of everything that happens around the customers. That means that the left-hand side, say, service within a company also knows what the right-hand side in the company, maybe the marketing department, is doing. That data mainly tells you something about what happened in the past. The question is, based on all the data that we collect, what is the next best action that companies can take for all the customers individually?
That is why our CDP also contains consumer AI capabilities to enrich the profiles with all kinds of actionable insights, such as we know what the customer lifetime value is, such as we know what the churn risk is, such as how companies can take the next best action for every consumer individually. This is really the fundament for good customer engagement across all the different touch points because we really understand who the customer is. In order to illustrate a bit on the value of that, I brought an example that I recorded with my phone. Let's say we have the data in our customer data platform and we use that to identify customers which have a high propensity to buy. In this case, this is my profile.
Based on all the purchase data, based on all the behavioral data, our CDP, our customer data platform, has predicted that I am very prone to make a purchase in the next moment. Now, using our software, we could send out an automated campaign. Let's use a conversational channel for that. Let's use WhatsApp. What happens if you send marketing campaigns through WhatsApp? Of course, customers can start talking back. That's what I'm doing here. I received this personalized campaign and I start talking back. I ask the agent, "Hey, what kind of products do you have on offer for me?" Now the agent starts talking back. Because we are using WhatsApp as a channel, this agent knows my phone number.
It now asks me, "Hey, can I use your phone number to pull up your preferences based on your previous data?" I confirm that. What it does now is it sends me this message where it tells me, "Hey, that's fantastic news, Bart. Welcome back. I see based on your previous data that you are interested in men's fashion, in interior products, and specifically in the colorful collection that this company offers." If we go back to my CDP profile, we see indeed that based on my behavioral data, this is what the CDP derived. The AI agent now has access to my personal preferences based on all the data that we collected in that customer data platform. It can use that information to give me good advice. Here in the Netherlands, the weather is getting better. It's really springtime.
I ask the agent, "I'm looking for something nice that I can wear during springtime, maybe a nice T-shirt that I can wear." Let's see what it does. It knows my preferences. It knows what I'm interested in. I just ask it, "Hey, can you recommend me a nice T-shirt?" You see what it does here is that indeed it is able to recommend me a T-shirt which fits my preferences. Indeed it's a T-shirt. Indeed it's men's fashion. Indeed it's a fit with the colorful collection. It did that because within the CM.com platform, we also have access to all the product data of our customers. The AI agent is able to search through that to give me this personal recommendation. We can even go one step further.
The models that we use under the hood in our agentic AI platform, they are multimodal by default, which means that they can not only process text, but they can also process images. Let's say I bought these jeans last week and I want to ask the AI agent, "Hey, these jeans that I bought yesterday, do you think that that will fit nicely with the T-shirt you just recommended me?" The model is able to also interpret that image and even give me personalized advice based on that image and based on the T-shirt that it recommended me earlier. Now, to finish it off, I was not just ready to purchase this product. I needed to think about it for a bit longer. That's what I tell the agent. I need some more time to decide. What the agent now says, "Don't worry, Bart.
I've set a reminder for you for this product." What we do now is that also the information about this conversation and the fact that I indeed showed interest in purchasing this product is also sent back to the CDP, such that we save that, "Hey, there's been a discussion with Bart about this kind of product." We have that information back in our customer data platform and we can follow up at a later moment in time to keep the conversation going and keep that information about the conversation to make the following-up conversations even more relevant than we already have. That is an example of how customer data and agentic AI can come together. To tell you a bit more about how our agentic AI platform, Halo, works under the hood, I would like to invite my colleague Rutger to the stage.
Yeah, thanks, Bart.
Yeah, so it probably hasn't escaped your notice by now. We've talked about it a lot. February 6th this year, we launched our agentic AI platform called Halo. Bart has shown you a bit of how it looks, how it feels from a consumer perspective, but we haven't really shown yet how it works on the backside, if you will. I'm going to do a little show and tell from that perspective. Before we do, it's important to understand that we didn't launch this product reactively, sort of trying to jump on the AI agent hype train. It was part of a strategy that we revised early 2023 to reinvigorate our product portfolio in the age of AI. We started out with this phase, the short-term phase.
We launched our first GenAI product in 2023, infusing the customer experience as a service product that Jeroen alluded to earlier with informational capabilities, offering the right context, the right information at the right moment inside these products, whether that is context-centered software or marketing orchestration software or our conversational AI platform. We also predicted back then that for the medium-term phase, that is right about now, clients would ask us to apply this for internal use cases as well. Think about IT, HR, legal, finance, disciplines like that, and that these systems would become action-capable and that we needed to devise a platform that would meet those needs. For the long term, this may sound far out to you, but if you actually follow closely and squint and look closely at how fast this AI development is going, it is not unrealistic at all.
We're focusing on enabling highly autonomous organizations to run their complete business with our platform. We've done so from the beginning with a focus not just on the sexy stuff. Don't get me wrong, it is super sexy and we're going to look at it in a bit, but also the mission-critical aspects for serious companies and organizations around the globe. Think about proper stewardship of your data, safe storage, automated redactions of personally identifiable information, so you are sure that no consumer data leaks into any model, whether that's a closed-source model or an open-weight fine-tune that we customize and that we run ourselves. Of course, compliance regionally in every geography in which we're operational is super important to assure. We safeguard our clients against common AI pitfalls such as hallucinations and prompt injections.
They can rest assured that their data and their processes are safe with us. Talking about processes, this is sort of the bread and butter of the Halo product, is agents, so actually automating a process, simple or complex. Let's take a look at how we set this up. This is super simple. In this example, we have a pre-documented process in a company, which is oftentimes the case. You have a process, you documented it, so everyone can look at it and know what to do.
I summon up the assistant within Halo Studio and I share this document with the assistant with a simple instruction, "Create an agent for me based on these pieces of information because it's too much of a sweat for me to do it myself." Just like that, with the uploading of a document and a simple instruction on chat, we've got full process automation up and running and we're done with the first part of bringing an agent to production. The second part comes with interacting with not just our software and the components that we offer out of the box in our platform, but also potentially third-party software with which you need to integrate. Now we're going to try sort of a different flow. Here I'm setting up an example for a utility company.
We're going to import a standard tool from our own offering, so that's identity verification. We're going to check based on the mobile phone number with the carrier if this person is who they say they are. We're going to ask our assistant to use this verified consumer, call an external service to determine what their current monthly fee is with this utility, let them change that utility fee up to a maximum of 30%. Again, we saw a simple instruction on chat where I just said, "Here's some parameters for this tool, create it for me," and it provisions API calls, running code, functioning code that we can use in an actual live example. We're now two minutes down the line since we started and we've got our process and we've got our tools set up.
The third thing we need is actually general information about the organization or the company itself. What's it all about? What does it do? All of that type of context. One thing we can do is crawl your website and index all of that information. Another option would be a manual file upload for something that you have on record. Then we've got options for a custom API connection or a standard integration from our marketplace. In this point, in this example, we're going to share information from SharePoint by selecting that directory. We're almost done now.
The final part, final ingredient that we need to bring this agent to production is sort of a character description, a tone of voice, a description of who your company is, what your brand is all about, and how you want to interact either with your customers or employees if you're applying this for an internal use case. Also, very simple description, assisted by AI again, simple selection, and you're good to go. Now, once you're actually live, the magic doesn't stop. You can still optimize your sort of greenfield scenario with simple written feedback. This is a real interaction from Gilbert where I just give a small note, "Be more elaborate," because I thought the message was too terse, and it gives a more elaborate response based on those instructions.
It will actually recognize the next time an interaction comes in that looks like this one, that it needs to apply that feedback. It will learn from your instructions as you go along. We also talked about sort of the mission-critical non-functionals. A big part of that is the governance application that we shipped with Halo Studio, where you can set up your entire organization with role-based access controls to define who gets to run which agent, use which tool, who do I contact within a certain approval flow if a high-risk use case is being applied and someone has to approve a tool execution in the process. That is what you all organize in the governance application, including you're guided by real-time audit logs. You are completely sure of what the system is doing on your behalf.
2025 was and still is obviously a very big year for AI agents that we've already did big launches in and we're going to continue to do so rapidly in the future. It was also still a big year for consolidation. Bart explained our total platform, Jeroen did so in the beginning. This is not just because we want to cross-sell more products towards clients. This is because the market actually wants this type of stuff. Since 2023, you can see a clear trend of consolidation. People going from a multi-vendor landscape to fewer vendors. They're not decreasing their total software spend, but they're allocating it towards fewer vendors because it lowers their total cost of ownership, it increases customer experience and customer satisfaction, and it just makes them faster and more nimble.
We solve at the intersection of these two major trends of what AI is doing and this need and this yearning in the market for consolidated platforms and running all these interactions on all channels. Speaking of all channels, for that part, I would like to hand over to my great colleague over here, Stein, to explain a bit more.
Thanks, Rutger. Yeah, I would like to talk to you about our communication channels. Of course, a big part of CM. Rutger already showed something about our agentic AI. We saw our customer data platform. Of course, to communicate with your clients and to have a bot or EF contact center software, you need a channel to communicate. That is what we are in, of course, for the last 25 years. We started building that platform already 25 years ago.
Jeroen and Gilbert did, of course, our two founders. Today, we have our connections with all the channels in place, our Google RCS, our WhatsApp for Business. We have our strategic partnerships with Meta and Google, but also our 600 telecom operators, which we are connected with. It's of course very important. To recap a little bit about what Jeroen said, it's not only us, it's also of course the analysts who recognize that, like Juniper, for instance. We're really an established leader in the world of the CPaaS area. What we see today as trends in the market are actually good trends. CPaaS is the enabling technology behind many domains. We already saw in the slides of Jeroen and in the slides of Jörg that certain domains are growing, like contact center software, customer data, agentic AI.
Of course, where I started with, you need a channel to communicate with. Based on the growth and the tailwind we get there, the messages and the channels will grow as well. That is good news for us. Another point where we see clearly in the market and what is good news is that we see a shift from basic messaging to rich messaging. What does it mean? Basic messaging is typically like SMS. The rich messaging is like, again, WhatsApp for Business, Google RCS, where you can serve your consumers with images, with videos, with product carousels, etc. Those certain rich and advanced messaging need software. We as CM can provide you with that software. We have our Mobile Marketing Cloud, we have our CDP, our Mobile Service Cloud, our Conversational AI Cloud.
That kind of software is needed when you want to send advanced messaging. There is also another part about the rich and advanced messaging. Those channels are conversational by nature. What does that mean? SMS typically is a no-reply channel, where the WhatsApp for Business and Google RCS is conversational. You can send inbound messages. We see more than 16 times more messages sent from a consumer to a company on those channels, of course. The total market and the total messages go up. Gilbert already explained that we're in a transactional world, so that's good news for us. Where we expect those to grow rapidly are in the sectors of the interact and convert sector. I will explain to you a little bit about the use cases we have over there because these are our actual trends.
On the slide I showed previously, this is the market. This is what the analysts think where the message market will grow to. This is what we actually see in our own data. The green bar on top are the rich messaging. Quarter over quarter, we see a growth in that area and in that domain. Those are the domains where we play. We play in the basic messaging sector. In the past, we were very big in that. Now we grow rapidly in the advanced sector. To give you some examples about those use cases, we've shown four cases on this slide. You can see, of course, the notification part where, for instance, you have something delivered to your home and you get a notification.
Also, the validation, you know, probably a one-time password you received to validate and secure that you are the person you are, maybe to log in. The rapid growth we expect at the interaction part. In this case, we have an interaction with a travel agent. You see over there it is going back and forth. There is a conversation starting. Conversation, of course, more messages being sent. The last, the conversion part where we sell a product, you see a product carousel, etc. Again, a lot of conversations and a lot of growth. Why we feel we are completely ready for the future? Still in the future, messages are not going to change. Everyone wants to send messages. You want to connect to your consumer, towards your customer. It is not going to change. We do see a shift. We are there.
We have all the channels in place. Also for the future, that's good news. For the validation part, we see a slight shift from the one-time passwords you receive and we send a lot towards mobile identity services. We as CM.com are completely equipped and we can help our customers today to have a mobile identity service which works more on the water. You're being validated, you're being recognized as the person you are without receiving that one-time password. That's really good news for the future. The last two parts is the advanced messaging where we see the market and we see in our own data to grow. This is where our specialized software comes in. We saw that over the years, we sell more and more products to one consumer, to one customer.
That is because of the growth of the last two sectors. We see for the interaction part, especially a growth for our products like Halo, like Mobile Service Cloud, like the AI cloud solutions. For the sell and convert part, of course, our Customer Data Platform, our Mobile Marketing Cloud. Our aim today is to sell more and more products, of course, to our consumer base and to our prospects. How we do that is something that Jeroen is going to explain to you in the next few minutes. Thank you all.
Thank you. Thank you, Stein. Yeah, let's talk about our go-to-market strategy. At CM.com, we have embraced the Bowtie SaaS Model as a land and expand strategy, basically focusing on growing our customer relationships and really making impact.
We tend to, our customers tend to start with just one or a few products typically. Like Stein already said, that can as well be just one communication channel. Over time, they will expand their usage and will make use of more products during their customer lifetime with CM. Also, because of the breadth and depth of our platform, together with our continuous innovation, our customers tend to stay very long with us. They grow and evolve with us. Let's talk about this bowtie model a little bit more. The bowtie model basically extends the traditional sales funnel by four additional stages, capturing really growth by acquisition, retention, and expansion. After closing a deal, that's not actually the end. It marks the beginning of a long-term customer relationship. That's what we see as well with the contracts that we have with our customers.
We have many multi-year agreements with our customers. They stay for a long time with us. The left-hand side of the bowtie is covered by our sales team. They are focusing on primarily generating new business. The right-hand side of the bowtie model is covered by our customer success team. They are focused on customer satisfaction, retention, and growth. About Halo. Halo really positively impacts this whole bowtie model as well. It helps to have our customers adopt and expand their usage faster. Basically, with the Halo platform, it acts like a facilitator or a lubricant, if you will, in between our different products. It helps them grow faster, like I said. Our Halo platform is really extending the possibilities of what was possible before in service, marketing, customer interaction.
Like Bart and Rutger already demonstrated, the possibilities of agentic AI are really endless when it comes to customer engagement or even business or internal processes, ultimately resulting in faster and higher ROI for our clients, which in turn make them promoters for CM.com again. Let's talk about how we actually make sure that our solution, our agentic AI solution, is being implemented and adopted by our customers. We have two different approaches. First, there is more of a lightweight approach, and then there is a more heavy-lifting approach for this adoption and implementation. It really depends on the complexity of the implementation. For the more simple use cases, we provide standard agents that can go live within 24 hours. That can be for simple use cases like where is my order.
We also have more complex implementations with phased integrations when it comes to more complex business cases, like if there are a lot of integrations required with internal business processes. One of our customers actually had this one, AS Watson, a relatively complex implementation it was. Yeah, you've seen this before. International expansion comes for us with landing products. In the past, our foot in the door was really our SMS business. Nowadays, more and more, it's our SaaS business around the world. Our SaaS business really consists of our customer contact center software, AI personalization engine, marketing automation software, AI recommenders, and of course, last but not least, our agentic AI platform. Our go-to-market strategy is really focusing on empowering our clients while fueling our own growth. We have our commercial teams focused on three different areas. First, grow together with our clients.
We have, so basically, our clients grow over time. They make use of our products more and more. Then we let them increase our share of their wallet, basically by having them expand to multiple products over time. Last but not least, if we team up continuous innovation with customer advocacy, we have a winning combination there. How do we do this? We have a best-of-suite platform. We have a complete and full product portfolio. You do not need to have a costly integration or implementation consultancy to have our solution implemented. It is all in one. We are global with a local touch. We have teams and offices around the world that help you basically facing your challenging regional needs. More on that later by my coworker Wael. Our variable compensation for our teams is really aligned with our long-term business goals.
That means that our commercial teams are rewarded for the hard work they put in that contributes the most to our business success. Think of KPIs around new business generation or customer happiness and retention, CSAT and net revenue retention. Of course, there's some Dutch common sense in there as well. We're of Dutch origin. We deliver on what we promise to our customers. We do not get ahead of ourselves. Yeah, we're a Dutch company after all. Now it's time to basically have a look at that, how we really expand within our customer. I think we have a great example of Basic-Fit. I'd like to hand it over to Saskia.
Thank you all. Of course, we heard a lot already today about what CM.com offers, what the Engagement Platform offers.
I'm very happy to tell you something about Basic-Fit and what they have achieved with our Engagement Platform. For the ones of you who don't know Basic-Fit, Basic-Fit is one of the European leading fitness chains with locations in the Benelux, Germany, France, and Spain. Enhancing the customer experience, reducing churn, and building a loyal community of members is very much of the core strategy for Basic-Fit. For that to happen, every interaction needs to be seamless and meaningful. That's where the CM.com platform came in. The first step Basic-Fit took with the CM.com platform was Chatbot Ruby. Here you see her. She is built on the Conversational AI cloud of CM.com. Here, you build conversational flows, which understand what the customer wants to know. For instance, I'm not sure. Am I allowed to bring a friend to the gym or not?
Ruby knows because Ruby is trained on the Basic-Fit knowledge. But Ruby does not know everything. Sometimes she needs to hand over to a human agent. The platform is also making some great impact there. Here, we are making AI suggestions for a conversation. If you are a human agent of Basic-Fit, you get AI suggestions tailored to your conversation. At first, we used to do this with question blocks. We understand what a question block was around, and then we also make sure that there was an answer block that was not really tailored to the conversation. Now, with the use of Halo, the suggestions are really tailored to the conversation and ready to be used by the Basic-Fit human agents. This was really a game changer because now nearly half of the responses are already good to go.
Just one press on the button and the member is being helped. Already some great impact made there. Basic-Fit likes to think ambitious, and so do we. We thought, how can we together improve customer commitment even more? They identified four member faces with the data that they had a look at. Of course, loyal members. What are loyal members? Loyal members are active members. Therefore, the members at risk and the already out-of-the-door members, they need to become active members again. How did they do that? With the consumer AI Jeroen already told you about, we can predict what the next best action is. They have several AI-driven loyalty campaigns. I would like to tell you something about a few of them. For instance, workout behavior. That is quite predictable with our consumer AI.
If we see a member is missing maybe one, maybe two workouts, then a red flag goes off. Because if you're not in the gym, you are maybe not so loyal to Basic-Fit anymore. Eventually, you will be likely to churn. Therefore, we have a personalized marketing campaign that Basic-Fit is sharing with our consumer AI that's making sure members can come back to the gym. Maybe you're not that active anymore. You're already churned. You're still an active member, but you already canceled your contract with Basic-Fit. Our consumer AI is able to identify members that are likely to come back. Their personalized communication is shared to win them back. All these campaigns together touch upon 900,000 members a year, making great impact in the Benelux, Germany, and France. Of course, we will not stop there.
Together with Basic-Fit and Halo, we will continue making great impact using our engagement platform. Saying that, I would love to hand over to David.
Thank you, Saskia. I am here to tell you all the way from America to tell you about a case study with a beloved American brand, literally the company that moves America. If you have ever had to move your home or rent a trailer to move a heavy object, or you need a storage unit or a pod for a home renovation, U-Haul is probably the company that you are going to call on. Now, U-Haul is in almost every town and every city in the United States. At least it feels that way. In fact, I had a colleague that was visiting Washington, DC, last week and sent me a text message with a U-Haul truck that was on the road.
If you think about their footprint, 2,000 corporately owned stores, 21,000 franchise stores. Very similar to the McDonald's model. If you break that down even further, every brick-and-mortar business has technological points of failure. You think about a point of sale system, the Wi-Fi connection, the physical door security, perhaps, the cameras that are needed, all of the multiple software platforms that it takes to run the business, inventory, all of those things. What happens when they break? U-Haul had quite a few challenges in this area from a support standpoint. If you do the math, that's over 250,000 points of failure that could go wrong at any given time. Supporting that potential back at the U-Haul headquarters is an IT help desk support team. If you break down that IT support desk help team even further, they all have specialties.
You have individuals of expertise that understand physical security or have been trained on a certain software platform that can help. The challenge that the store manager or the franchisee had, they had to stop the physical interaction in front of the customer, pick up a phone, wait in a queue. Hey, this is David. I'm calling from store 1122. Yes, this is my information. Very, very poor customer experience. When you think about the seasonality of the business, you think about the need if you're operating and trying to coach your help desk team back at the headquarters, you need some real-time reporting, right? You need to understand the data, the metrics, so that you can improve the business and help run it more efficiently. I could have called on the executive management board of U-Haul for probably 10 years and never got a meeting.
That's just the reality of sales. If you're in sales, you know that the hardest part of gaining a new prospect is getting in the door. A couple of years ago, we decided to pivot our go-to-market strategy and take more of an indirect partnership-style approach. Through trusted advisors who already have existing relationships with brands, they simply need to be introduced to successful brands like CM.com. If they believe in your product, if they trust what you're doing, and they genuinely believe that you can help their client, they're going to bring you in. They're going to introduce you.
Now, you couple that with a very thorough discovery process and trust built and established along the way, weekly cadences and check-ins, and really understanding what their business objectives are and all of their critical business issues, coupled with some just good best practices from a sales standpoint, like the six P's. Perhaps you've heard it before, but perfect prior planning prevents poor performance. It's a mantra that I coach and we believe in thoroughly back home. That can make for some very positive outcomes. U-Haul kicked the tires with us for a couple of months, and they were really blown away with what we were able to bring to the table and how we were able to help them drive optimal efficiency. The result, the end result, was essentially a single web widget that had the intelligence built in, had the intelligence already engineered.
The web-based bot already knew that David is reaching out from store 1122. All of that critical information was already brought into the appropriate sub-department within the help desk. If there was a door security issue, the bot would automatically route it to a live agent behind a keyboard. Now, you're probably wondering, you've heard all of this talk about AI today and about Halo and agentic AI. You're probably asking yourself, doesn't Halo, doesn't agentic AI, can it do some of this work? The answer is absolutely. Absolutely, it can. We believe that it will. What's important to understand is that companies have culture. One company's culture could be very, very different from another company's culture.
When you look at the spectrum of AI adoption, particularly in the enterprise space, which is where we would classify U-Haul, you've got a plethora of early adopters of AI jumping right in, right, and really embracing. Sometimes you do it a little too quickly, right? You end up doing business with a supplier that doesn't have the compliance, doesn't have the security parameters built into their platform, hasn't been in business for 25 years. When you're a larger brand in the enterprise side, you tend to be a little bit more conservative. All of those characteristics that we bring to the table at CM.com with Halo specifically are going to help us align and not only upsell these types of products into U-Haul, but also win additional market share with new logos. Last month, the team had a face-to-face visit in the U-Haul offices.
It was a very positive visit. Our account management team and our support team. It is a good health check to understand where we're going. Also, those critical business issues within any company can change, right, from day to day, month to month. Certainly, with the adoption of AI, that was certainly the case with U-Haul. The good news is, as my colleague Rutger pointed out, and you've heard today, we have a land and expand strategy here at CM.com from a sales standpoint. There is additional opportunity to be had, some additional ways that we feel like we're going to be able to help U-Haul. We certainly plan on doing that.
In closing, we have an expression in the U.S., "Go big or go home." Ladies and gentlemen, we're at a place right now where additional investment and additional expansion, as we continue to double down and triple down on our partner distribution strategy, we simply need to get in front of more customers and additional investment in marketing, getting the word out, hiring more impassioned employees like myself and those colleagues that are waking up back home. That's what's going to move the needle for us. If you think about if we're able to do that in the biggest economy in the world, what this could do to the revenue line of this company, it's exciting. Frankly, I'm privileged to be part of it. I hope you will too. With that being said, I'm going to turn it over to my esteemed colleague from the Middle East, Mr. Wael Ali.
Hi everyone. It's a great pleasure to be here in the Netherlands with this great weather that you have. In Dubai, it's 42 degrees right now. All right. Today, I'm going to tell you a little bit about CM and the Middle East. First, CM started operating in the Middle East in late 2018. The Middle East is a big region with 17 countries. However, for many reasons, we decided to invest, put our efforts in only one part of that region. It's called GCC or Gulf Cooperation Council. It's one of the hottest regions in the world in terms of weather, but also in terms of opportunities. Why?
Because this GCC actually is an alliance, a strong alliance of six countries: Saudi Arabia, the biggest reserve of oil and gas; Qatar, the biggest reserve of oil; United Arab Emirates, the biggest hub in the region; and Kuwait, Oman, and Bahrain. All these countries, 60 million of population, but also the highest or the biggest GDP per capita in the world, or maybe the third one, Qatar, with USD 83,000. This population is a young population looking for new technologies, but also the government of these countries, they have visions, they have strong visions. UAE started with their Vision 2020, Saudi Arabia with their Vision 2030, and now Oman with their Vision 2035. In their visions, they have two goals. One of them is strong development, and the second one is digitization.
That makes that region actually a perfect region for CM because they need technology providers like CM to invest in there. Now, if we look a little bit about our success in that region, our footprint is 49% in the UAE, 21% in Saudi Arabia, 8% is in Kuwait, and the remaining is spread across the region. If we look a little bit about our metrics, product versus clients, we see that 25% of our customers, they have one product, and more than 30% have two products, three products, 15%, and four plus products, 30%. All these actually are high-margin products, as explained earlier by Jörg and also by Jeroen. The next slide, I am going to show you a few of our success stories in the Middle East. I picked a few ones from different countries, but also from different industries. The first one is in Oman.
Awasir is one of the biggest ISPs in the region, Internet Service Provider. Now they are a telecom operator. They are a customer to CM.com since 2020. They are using four or five products from CM.com. They are relying on this product for their daily operation, like account management, bundle subscription, bills payment, and technical support. Another example is Cleanlife, Saudi Arabia, the biggest cleaning company in Saudi Arabia for corporate, but also for individuals. They are using our product since 2019. They are using almost all our products. Very soon, we will place for them Halo, which is our agentic AI. They are using our service for the daily operation, for marketing, but also for booking appointments and for support. The third customer is in medical, Andalusia Group in Saudi Arabia, but also they have hospitals in the whole region.
They are using many products from CM.com to handle the relationship with the patients and for booking appointment, sharing results, lab results, and stuff like that. To finish is with an example from the finance sector, Gulf Insurance Group, previously AXA Insurance. They are using our products in four different countries. They are using most of CM.com's portfolio in that region, mainly for booking insurance, for motor insurance, healthcare, life, travel, and provide claim information, policy issuance, and support. All these customers, they trust CM.com because we are providing great products, making their life easy, but also because they trust CM.com technology, but CM.com people. Talking about CM.com people, I will give the floor to Mr. Marine, who will present CM.com. Thank you.
Thank you, Wael. Today it's all about agentic AI, but what about real human beings?
We are also strongly convinced that real human beings also play a very vital role for our future. So, I'd also like a moment of your time to draw the attention to the people behind our company, CM.com. First, let's have a look at the development of our workforce in the last years. Five years ago, we did our IPO, and that was also the starting point of our growth journey. In the years after, we did several acquisitions. We opened up offices in several new countries. Yeah, as a result of that, in the next three years, we also more than tripled our FTE towards 930 FTE. Now, we adopted a new strategy, value over volume. Yeah, as a result of that, we also had the need to let go of about 30% of our FTE.
We right-sized our organization to 666 FTE, structured in four business units. Now we believe we have the right organization in place for our new chapter of growth. This chapter of growth will be differently. We also worked hard to leverage different opportunities for efficiency. We did AI adoption, and we also did further platform integration. We can also believe we can achieve that growth by keeping the FTE stable or only slightly growing. Some demographics, the average age of our employees is about 35 to 36 years old. Yeah, we also are happy that the average tenure is 4.7 years. Our gender split over the last years is about 70% male, 30% female. We're also very happy that we also achieved that recently in our managerial functions. If you continue, let's also take a look at how we are organized.
You've seen our team tree before, and the team tree is structured in four different business units: engage, connect, pay, and live. Why do you think this is important? Because these are groups of people that work closely together, commercial teams and also product teams. While commercial people are continuously in touch with the market, with our customers, they work on a day-to-day basis very closely with the product teams. They meet each other at the coffee machine, at the lunch table, and also make sure that feedback from the market is directly fed into the product teams. That is ensuring that we grow fast and they can also innovate very quickly. We also have a global presence, 15 different countries in the world.
That also makes sure 70% of our earnings are coming from different countries across the world, that we also have this global and international culture represented in our workforce. As Gilbert already explained, yeah, we also have a new introduction in our organization chart of agents, AI agents. Yeah, we also strongly believe they will be a perfect fit. Agents can work hand in hand together with real human beings. They both have their unique talents, and they can also be very complementary to each other. That is a very interesting development. Something where we also are very proud at is our culture, our DNA, and something that really makes us special and also will help us to be successful also in the future. Let me also introduce that shortly by our four shared values. The first one is drive and lead.
Drive and lead stands for our entrepreneurial spirits. We like to give people freedom. We like also to empower teams, yeah, also to be entrepreneurial. I think if you look back in the last 12 months, we saw many very nice use cases, how our people helped different brands with, yeah, also using our products. The second one is about grow and learn, and that is also creating an environment of innovation. We like to let people experiment and, yeah, let's see what they can do with our products and make sure that our product developments go very quickly. It is also sometimes very fun to see how creative our people are and what they all can do themselves. The third one is about together and care. Being part of CM is not just having a job. It is also, yeah, creating some belongingness to the organization.
For example, next week, we have a Vitality Week. Yeah, everyone is also doing different sports, exercises, tournaments with each other. You could make friends with your colleagues and also meet people that you have not met before. The last one is about speed and change. You might not always be the biggest company in the different industries, but we try to be the quickest and also be the company who takes opportunities first. Yeah, we like to be a very flexible company with a lot of internal communication and also, yeah, create an environment that people adapt quickly also towards the marketplace. Now, we like to go fast. We like to experiment. We like to innovate. We are not making any compromises on our safety and security of our customers. Yeah, my colleague Aard will now also tell a bit about that.
Okay, thank you, Marine. Yes. Okay, so we're nearing the end of this afternoon. You've heard our story. You've seen our products. You've seen how our clients can benefit from the engagement platform. As a potential customer ready now to buy our products, there's an important question that you will still have, a question that we get every day. That question is, as you've seen, is my data safe with CM.com? As you've seen, the platform requires a huge amount of data from our customers. Data security and data protection have become an important topic. I can answer this question very confidently and positively every day. It seems like a straightforward question, but there's a lot behind it, a lot of work to make sure that CM.com is secure and we're compliant. There's a lot of documentation, validation, audits, assessments that go into that.
For that, we need an internal multidisciplinary team, legal, security, risk, and compliance to work on that every single day. In the end, what we want to achieve is trust, the trust from our customers, trust in our products. That is why we are so dedicated and committed to security, to data protection. Because in the end, it is about building trust and trusted partnerships. How did we get here? From the very start, as you have seen in the presentation, 25 years ago, we have been a telecom company. We moved into payments and other regulated industries. From the very inception, we have been a regulated company. This is something that we have been doing from the start. Ten years ago, the EU introduced an agenda for the digital single market, introducing in the past decade over 120 regulations for tech companies alone.
We have been there all that time, adopting, adapting, getting used to that, and building our compliance framework on those regulations. Some refer to that as the gold standard of EU data privacy to build your framework. Compliance is something that is embedded in our culture. That is how we build our products. That is how we build our infrastructure. That is our commitment to security. How do we provide that validation? How do we provide that proof? We do so with international standards. We are certified for privacy and security with all the relevant ISO standards that are available. We will be one of the first to have a certification also for our AI governance and to show that our AI product that we've built over the past year is up to par with all relevant regulations, legislation.
Now, customers connect to our infrastructure. We have built a global infrastructure. We have private cloud locations, as you can see on the slide, all over the world in important geographies and public cloud environments in Europe. Now, why is this also important compliance for us? By being on top of compliance, by being secure, we enable that we can provide our innovations quickly. We reduce the risk, not only for CM.com, but also for our customers. It is not just about CM.com being compliant. If we are compliant, our customers are compliant. That is what they require from us every single day. It enforces trust in our product, in our brand, and eventually with our customers. It positions us as a safe and future-ready partner for AI and customer engagement. For the latest developments, I will hand it over to our CEO, Jeroen van Glabbeek.
Thanks. All right. Now, it's quite an afternoon already. To think that we have had to exclude so many topics out of this presentation because we have so much more to share. I think, yeah, we're now working towards the Q&A and coming almost to an end. There was one thing missing. Last night, when we walked through this presentation for you, I was still a bit in doubt. Would the audience understand that things are happening here at a fast pace? Every day, a lot of things happening, and not by accident or from the outside, but from the inside. We're doing so much, and we're learning so much. Literally, this afternoon, I also learned something from David. It's so nice to work together with this broad cultures all over the world. Prior preparation prevents poor performance. That I've learned today. That's great.
Prior preparation prevents poor performance. I hope you liked our prior preparations for today. I also have already seen that the performance on stock marketing was great today. If it was like a job review, we did great. How can I explain that so many things are happening? I thought, let's make a list, like literally last night, of what happened this week, what we delivered just this week, not last five years, next five years, just this week. Literally this week, we launched a resale platform within our live division. It's a big new step there for our live division because we are in primary ticketing and we sell tickets for events and all those times, museums. This week, we also are now in secondary ticketing.
Once we sold a ticket first and somebody wants to resell the tickets because they're ill or they don't want to go anymore, they go back to our platform, we can sell it again with much more higher margin than we used to have. Also, literally this week, what happened? We had a large festival this weekend. We did all the cash registers and all the point of sale. There was an internet outage. Normally, this will mean a big problem because you cannot sell beer or cashless with your PIN terminal because it just doesn't work without internet. Now, we prepared for that over a year. We have offline PINning now available on the platform. It literally saved the festival.
Actually, nobody even experienced the outage of internet because the terminals adapted for storing the PIN transactions and then forwarded later on when the internet was available. If you would see that in practice, we have a demo behind that maybe later on. About payments, we have our own in-house developed processing platform. It's pretty rare. Almost nobody has that in the Netherlands. Only literally a few payment service providers have their own in-house developed payment processing platform. We have it now for years. It works perfectly fine. Literally this week, we got it also approved for in-person payments. That's great news because in-person payments and a PIN terminal part is like a five times bigger market than the online payment market. Still, today in Europe, most transactions are being done in retail chains, not online still. We are certified for that this week.
Also, literally this week, we went live with shopper recognition. That is the technology behind our data platform for payments. We have our clients, in this case, Zeeman. Renewing their payment infrastructure, 2,000 stores with our new technology. What we can do for them, we store the payments. We process the payments. What we also do is we make a token of every shopper. Normally, these shoppers are anonymous. They just do not know who is in that shop. Now, they are still anonymous, but we recognize them when they come back. We see if they repeat sales, if people come back, and how often they will be in the shops. We have many more insights now for them. All this data goes into the CDP and the data platform, and it helps them with their marketing. Also, this happened just this week.
Also this week, we started with our research and development for something called intelligent commerce. Intelligent commerce, you might have never heard of it because it's quite a new term. It's introduced by Visa. It means that we are preparing now for the next phase of AI agents, where also humans, consumers, will have their own agents talking to the agents of our clients. They have to pay each other. How can you, as a human being, authorize your own personal agent to make payments on your behalf and then make it safe? That's a really nice new thing to think about for us. Up to now, we are very good in blocking bots from going to our site and making fake payments. Now, we have to accept bots and accept their payments.
Yeah, there's a whole future for that in the upcoming years. Like an hour ago, we had these drinks. One of you asked me, "Oh, I heard you won the biggest ticket deal ever." I said, "Oh, yeah, I forgot about it." Indeed, we signed yesterday, last Tuesday, for the biggest event ever organized in the Netherlands. It will be bigger than the Formula 1. We signed that we will do the ticketing for that. A lot of things happen every day. This is not by accident. This is because of the six-piece, the proper prior preparations. I hope with this, I can also share a bit about this feeling we have of this fast pace and how we progress every day and go faster every day. We learn every day. There's always one more thing, one last thing.
For this, I will hand over back over to Rutger.
Oh, you do not need that. No, yeah, I do it for you. No, I do not need the clicker this time because we are not going to watch something. We are going to listen to something. Talking about fast pace, we did our launch February 6th. It is now two months further down the line. Now, we have our next biggest unveil, agents on the phone, so voice agents. We teased it this morning in the press release. We want to follow up on that teaser a tiny bit with an actual live phone call with one of these agents. The important thing to understand here is you have probably seen agents on the phone before. This is a different approach.
Alongside being fully multilingual, it's also going to be extremely cost competitive, what we're going to offer, undercutting the price of what you mostly see in the market, whilst it's being far more advanced from what you know of traditional IVRs or conversational voice bots. Let's just plug it into my phone and place a call.
Hey, I'm Eve, the AI assistant of Air Conditioning International.
Hey, what can you do for me?
Hello. I'm here to help you with various service-related inquiries. I can solve up to 50% of issues without needing a technician, which speeds up the resolution of your issues.
Yeah, you can just skip the intro. My air conditioning broke down.
I'm sorry to hear that your air conditioning has broken down. Let's see if we can resolve the issue together. Could you please describe the problem you're experiencing with your air conditioning unit?
It doesn't work, and it's showing
some fake error, but I don't know what the problem is.
Thank you for sharing that information. Let's try to identify the issue. Could you please tell me what the error message says or describes?
Anyways, we could go on and on with this for hours and have a full conversation with this thing. The most important takeaway is this is just as easy to set up as what I showed you earlier during this presentation. This is just deploying an agent that you can create in minutes on the phone. You have got something way, way better than what you used to be used to working on for years to getting that finalized and getting proper call deflection on the phone.
Another big release for us, and I think this is important to get into your heads, if you will, is that we're not just a steady incumbent with stable gross profit growth, but we also move faster with all of these releases than most of the upstarts that you see out there. This is just one moment in the busy weeks that we continuously have. You can expect this pace of development, this rapid pace from us in the future. The early reception of Halo has been phenomenal. I'm getting great feedback by clients. I'm confident it will be the same thing for agents on voice and for whatever is to come next. For that, I invite you to stay tuned. I think we're going to go over to a summary of the day with Jeroen now.
After this, one more thing, then we're going to dive into Q&A, and we'll wrap up.
All right. Thank you very much. Yeah, I liked it a lot, this demo, because we were in telephony for such a long time already. It was like a second product after messages. Now, this combination with AI is really powerful. What you've just witnessed was the demo in English. Literally two nights ago, I was able to witness it in Dutch. That was, for me, more mind-blowing that I called a phone number, ring the number, and a Dutch lady, the name was Lotte on the line. This was an AI lady. This was two days before this demo, so the guardrails were not on. I could literally talk about everything with her.
Normally, with these demos, we do, yeah, it has to be in the line of the client, of course. The security was not on. I had a few hours of conversation the other night. It was great. I hope we get demoed that as well once, because if it's in your own language, you really feel the power of how personal these new AI agents, voice agents are becoming now. All right, let's go to the summary of today before we go to the Q&A. What we've seen today, we made quite a shift from customer experience as a service towards a truly AI-powered, globally available engagement platform. That's one important, maybe the most important thing we want to share. We dive into that very deeply. We know where we are. We know where we want to be.
We know where to sell: mid-market, best of suite. We explain that. Why? Not only because clients want it, but also because we want it. For us, it's very powerful to sell more products to the same client because we earn more money, and clients stay longer with us. They are just happier clients and more successful clients by our platform. Another very important message for today to convene was that we delivered on our outlook of three years ago. Three years ago, we were here with a deep dive. Not literally here because it was online because of the COVID and the lockdowns. Three years ago, we shared our outlook. Three years later, we're here now to share that we delivered on that. Today, we are sharing a new outlook for the next three years: outlook with more growth, more margin, and more profitability.
I think that's great. We are excited to do that, but we also really feel that we're ready for it. We have a great product. We have a great team. We have a great market. We have great investors. Together, I think we will be wildly successful. To really conclude, we are on our way for our next journey of profitable growth. Thank you very much. Now I would like to invite my fellow members of the board, and then we are open for questions. Serge, our Head of Investor Relations, has the microphone. For everyone to ask a question, we are here available.
I will be assisted by my colleague, Patricia Verhaer. She will hand out the mic to anyone who wants to ask a question on that side of the room.
I will be standing on this side of the room. If anyone has a question, the only request I would like to ask is to stand up so that we all can see you and also the live audience on the live stream. If you would rather not, then that's no problem, but that's just a free request. That's all. Is there anyone who would like to open the floor with the first question? Timer, you start.
Timur Yildirim, ING. Firstly, thanks for the presentation. Very interesting. My first question is around the financial targets that you set. The 15% growth, we've also seen in the beginning of the presentation, the market growth expectations of around 22% of all the markets that you play in. We've also heard a lot of the positives around, let's say, international market expansion, new products like Halo.
My question was, the 15% is below market. Why is that? Do you think you can outgrow the market at one point as well? That's my first question.
Yes. Thank you, Timer. Yeah, great question. Let me start with explaining it and then also the upside that's there. If you look at the buildup of the market with different components in it that were not growing at equal pace, we've seen that the connect, the CPaaS market, was growing at a lower pace than, for instance, the AI market. If we look at the mix of our portfolio, then from a gross profit point of view, we're still relatively heavy right now in connect. It's about a little less than 50% of our gross profit.
That means that on 50% of our business, if we grow according to market, you have to apply sort of that market rate. We will grow a little faster with the other products, but in the mix, that will end up at a lower percentage than what you have seen on the total market. On top of that, there is also a matter of phasing and scaling. As we put more effort and more resources against our commercial efforts, we want to accelerate. We are not going to do that the way we have done immediately after our listing, when we just put a lot of money in growth and then waited for the acceleration. We are now going to build it up stepwise.
You've seen where we're going to get more efficient in how we run our organization and use that gained efficiency to apply it against resources for growth. At the same time, we are also going to apply some of the gains from the, let's say, the operational leverage that we get from more gross profit also to apply against more commercial resources. That's sort of why we have phased it this way, because we want to do it disciplined and we start with a different mix than what you've seen in the market on average. Now, having said that, we believe there's a tremendous opportunity out there. That means that we certainly see opportunity to do more. Here, just like we did last time, we want to give you an outlook that we think is realistic, that's feasible. We always aim to do more, go faster.
This is what we want to share with you right now.
Great. Thanks. Maybe one follow-up, if I may. You shared one slide with the building blocks building up to that 15%. Could you maybe put some more insight into, let's say, how much is coming from existing customers versus new customers, and maybe how much is coming from existing products versus Halo? What's built into your expectations?
Yeah. As we grow, the majority, a larger part of growth will always come from our existing customers. Existing customers will become more important as we grow and as we grow bigger. You've already seen that land and expand, build a relationship with our customer. That's really core to what we want to be and what we are. The larger our, let's say, installed base, the more powerful that is on the total of our performance.
Right now, we also see a lot of interest and appetite for our products and portfolio from new customers. Right now, that's still also a very important metric for us. We have the Halo proposition in itself. The beauty of Halo is that it's a catalyst for our total portfolio. In that sense, we believe Halo as a function itself is going to be successful in growing. Probably more importantly is how it ties our different products together. It will also accelerate growth in our messaging business. It will also accelerate growth in our ticketing business, etc. We think there's a direct effect, and we think there's a spin-off effect.
Thanks a lot.
Robert Fink, Kepler Cheuvreux. First, a question also on the financial targets. Currently, of course, you've set a midterm target from 2028.
Why have you not given more visibility on the years of 2026, 2027? Is there maybe a reason for that, that you're still driving a transformation in your business before you have more of that clarity or that visibility? Yeah, what is that decision-making there? Maybe you can provide a little bit more clarity on that. Of course, you have the outlook for 2025. Maybe a second question on the capital allocation. In the past, of course, a lot of focus on M&A to kind of buy companies that were innovative, that had already innovative products. Now, maybe it sounds a little bit more like you're focused on organic product development. M&A is kind of more in the backseat. Those are my two questions.
Yes. I will give the M&A part to you, Jeroen. Let me answer your question first.
Indeed, we give a midterm outlook, deliberately not year by year, of course. In the beginning of, or by the end of 2025, beginning 2026, we'll probably say something about that year. However, also, truth be told, it probably in real life is not going to be a straight line. You never know how it develops. I think we have all the elements in place to accelerate growth. Preferably, we would see it front-loaded, go a lot faster, and then maybe even exceed it, but at least go to 15%. It's a little bit too early to tell. The reason is also that if you look at the first three years, we were a listed company. Then we grew very fast, more than 15%. Then we shifted our focus to efficiency, effectiveness, profitability, value. We reorganized ourselves.
That is also when you saw a bit of a slowdown in the gross profit growth. We have to sort of turn that around. This is sort of the kickoff of that, where it is going to be on growth again, but also very strictly within the financial framework that we have with a lot of financial discipline. Therefore, we hope to accelerate as fast as possible. Right now, it is too early to already say for 2026, it is going to be this number, 2027, that number. You should see, as years progress, a meaningful step towards the 15% or more. Yes. On the M&A, for M&A, there are basically two reasons to do an acquisition. One is technology. The other one is clients. Our default mode has always been, let's build the technology ourselves in-house and find our clients ourselves.
We have great technology. We have great products. It's not too complicated to sell for us because it's such an advanced player. Sometimes economics are just a bit different. We've seen five years ago that in a few instances, we were looking for a specific technology, and we made a buy decision and then build a buy decision. We chose to buy a few parts of our technology back then because it was just a faster time to market and a more efficient way to do. Same with clients. I think for the last 10 years, in every year, it was more efficient to find our clients ourselves with sales and marketing. It's more efficient to do that than to buy whole companies. Fifty years ago, it was all the way around. We did a few acquisitions also for customers.
Basic mode is build it ourselves, but sometimes you can make an exception. There are a few disadvantages of acquisitions, of course. You have to integrate it, and it takes also time and cost energy. When we build ourselves, like we've seen with Halo and with Generative AI, all these new products, we build it in-house with our own people on our own platform. It was much faster to scale up after that. This is also about whether or not we will do M&A. Now, maybe we are selective. We do not need to, but we might do it. When can you expect that then? I do not believe this year. We did a really small acquisition earlier this year, good technology, but it was a small one.
If you look at the figures as you show them, this leverage versus very important figure, important KPI, it's 2.8, or it was 2.8 a few months ago. End of the first quarter, we want to bring it down to 2. If you look further in the model, you will see we're not that far away from going to 2 in the near future. I think that in the course of next year, there will become a window that we have room for extra investments. We might look into M&A at that moment. We're not going after something really specific at this moment, as we still are building and developing our own platform. We're really enthusiastic to sell our products we already have.
It feels, I do not know how you feel about it, but I feel about it that we have seen today, it feels complete already. It is not like there is an obvious missing thing in this whole platform strategy. We have a great engagement platform. For me, all the components we really need are in it. I will not expect any M&A very soon, but maybe in the years to come.
Thank you very much. That was a gentleman there. Did you still have a question?
Yes. Thank you. My name is Bert-Jan Lohman. I am a private investor with an interest in innovative, disruptive Dutch companies.
You are at the right spot.
That is why I am here. First of all, I want to give you a compliment.
You as a board and your team, I think you have impressed, at least I speak for myself now, you've impressed this group with a fantastic presentation. Also with some courage, I must say, to go from a top-line fast growth track to a more profitable prioritized growth track. That also requires some guts, I would say, because the whole market, when you began, I think, was looking for this new either Salesforce or whatever crazy fast growth. You had the guts to turn it around. I have a question to you, and I have a question to you, Jeroen. In your projections and in your earning model, you showed, in my view, a very low CapEx requirement for good reasons explained now. What is your view on shareholder return in the future, looking forward, linked to a certain scale of the company?
That brings me to the question to Jeroen, combined to the CapEx. Is there a level of the platform where your CapEx becomes higher demanding in terms of financing because you reach the limits of what your platform can absorb in technology? Two questions.
Okay. Yes. Thank you. First, great to hear that you enjoyed the presentation. Thank you for that. What we are looking at right now is turning this company in a company that generates net profit first. EBITDA is already a big step. Next step is going to be net profit if you really look at shareholder value and shareholder return. That is really going to be our next step. I think we issued a guidance on CapEx versus revenue in the past. We are now also pretty close to that.
It wasn't in our 2022 investor day, so I didn't repeat it, but we're there. I think for us, the most important thing, so we've done a lot of investments in our platforms, in the infrastructure. For us, the most important thing of CapEx consumption is development. It's just feature development. It's product development. I think we're very big on that. We also really want to scale that going forward. Also there, we see that using AI technology for a developer group is generating enormous efficiency and productivity gains. We believe that we're going to invest more probably in EUR terms, but the output increase is probably going to be 30-40% more on the same amount of money. That's how we see that progress.
If you listen to Rutger, the most important thing there is our ability to keep the pace of innovation high. That is not necessarily related to the number of people you have working on it, but what are they working on, how are they working, and how relevant is it. I think, yeah, we are on the right track there and able to sustain it. Yeah. A few other words about CapEx. I was thinking back like 25 years ago, we founded the company in that time. Operators, telco operators, they were investing billions in infrastructure, antennas, cables, licenses. It was multi-billion investments everywhere. We were just started with this company. We did not have billions. We had a laptop. Yeah. That was it. We thought, no, there is not a problem because we are not building a telco operator back then.
We are building an application provider. The same is happening a bit now. If you watch the news, you read the Financial Times, you read a lot about multi-billion investment in AI infrastructure, in chip machines, in chips, in data centers. These are very important investments in this time of the market, in the early days, because we need the infrastructure later on. We are not in the infrastructure investment, so we do not need these multi-billion investments. We are in the application business. If you think back about these mobile operators, you never hear that much anymore about the big companies back then, like Ericsson, Cisco, and all these infrastructure players back then. It is now about what do you do with your mobile phone. It is maybe on Facebook or Instagram or maybe on Skype or Spotify. The same will happen, I believe, with AI.
Now you hear a lot about infrastructure investments with hyperscalers, and they are the big numbers. In a few years, you will not hear that much about it. It is as is that we have the infrastructure and more about businesses like CM.com delivering applications to businesses to really embrace and monetize the value of what you can do on top of this infrastructure. That is how we look at CapEx. We are not as CapEx intensive compared to the infrastructure builds. We are in the application. I think that is a very important distinction to make. Yeah, we are cloud agnostic. We have public clouds. We use all the public clouds. We have private clouds. Based on technicalities, what we want to achieve, but also on legal premises, we make decisions on how to scale and to host our software.
I personally believe that also with private cloud investments, we can be much more efficient sometimes than cloud infrastructure, public clouds. Public cloud is efficient in itself, but yeah, the scale it has, it makes it efficient, but the money goes to the investors, mostly of the very profitable AWS, Microsoft, Azure, and things like that. Having capability in-house to have our own infrastructure, I think is valuable. It will give us better outcomes financially. That is our balancing act a bit there. Yeah, we have ample opportunities to keep our CapEx under control going forward. Also because, yeah, as Jeroen explained, the majority of our CapEx is actually our software development. Going forward, software development is not that complicated or not that it is still complicated, but it's not that you don't need that many people anymore.
If you look at what we are doing in the background in R&D, we did not show it today, but we have built our own AI tools, building our own AI tools. Yeah, maybe another day we organize a demo about that where you can see, okay, you just ask what you need, and the software is being developed for you. We believe that we can keep going forward in this rapid phase we are in without the need of hiring even more software developers. With the same team, we can do more because we have our better tools at hand. That is why we are indeed quite confident that CapEx will not raise that much anymore.
Maybe to add to that, our selection process of new colleagues also changed.
I'm in every conversation with every new person that's coming in because I want to welcome everybody just before they are hired or maybe not hired if the conversation was not that good. I always tell two horror stories to new people coming in. The first horror story is we don't work from home. We don't like it. Work in the office. We do complex stuff. We need each other. We need to talk to each other physically. I mean, we are human beings with legs. We need to walk around. It's not healthy to have Teams meetings all day long. If they survive that horror story, it's a good employee. My second horror story is, if you start working here, you will have to make yourself redundant within a year with AI. Do you grasp that? Do you like that?
Are you already fiddling around at night creating all kinds of AI stuff? Are you testing new AI technologies? Because we're looking for that kind of employee, the employee of the future that really wants to make himself or herself redundant in a year. It does not mean that we need to fire you in a year. It just means that you will be way more effective and maybe you can do other things within the company. It is pretty cool to have these two horror stories because the last 100 people that came in are really a different breed of people than maybe the people we hired when we scaled up after we got listed. Yeah.
Thank you very much. Any further questions? Yes. Please go ahead.
Thank you. My name is Arjen Gideonse, private investor as well. Thank you for the presentation.
You've listed a number of competitors, also application companies who are all much larger. You have four business units, so you need to divide your resources over four business units. In general, when you're operating at a smaller scale or with less resources, it tends to be most successful if you don't focus on old customers, but on the select number of customers, have a vertical or industry approach. Your business units have three out of four are a predominantly horizontal approach. You started as a very vertical company with the discotheques. Are you planning to add industry focus in your products or in your go-to-market for the other three business units?
Yeah. Actually, you know, when we created the business units, the first step we took is industry focus because what we wanted to achieve is to build more customer intimacy.
When we were one big company after being listed, I heard competition say, "Wow, you should not work with CM.com because they're so big and they're so busy with all these things and they don't have time for you as a festival or as a retail company." That really made me mad because we do have time for you, but it was not that visible for potential new customers. We created the business units, being more closer to the customer. Every business unit has its one, two, three sweet spot verticals that they focus on. That really helps. Now, again, we are perceived by our customers as really easy to call, easy to go to, close by. They always see the same people on the same trade show. Building this customer intimacy, that's a good result of these business units.
I do think we have a good industry focus per business unit. Yeah.
Thank you very much. Martin.
Martin Verbeeke, the AD, two questions from my side, please. Firstly, you presented a cascade whereby EUR 1 would lead to EUR 0.70 of cash. What I actually missed in there was the working capital requirements. Could you give some insight in the working capital intensity or something like that to support your growth going forward? And then secondly, we had two interesting presentations or more, sorry, but we had two very interesting presentations from GCC and from the US. Very big markets with characteristics of which I believe CM.com's profile would fit well. How much of your revenues do you think these two regions will represent in 2028? Thanks.
Yes, thank you. Let me first try to answer your question on the working capital part.
I did indeed not include that in the overview. The reason is at this point in time, we are running a negative working capital. Our high-margin business, and especially our software business, is more prepayment. We invoice you for the next period so that it's beneficial to our working capital. In that sense, I think that as that grows, that is supporting it and helping it. However, the most important metric for us to look at in this domain to free cash flow is EBITDA minus CapEx. Working capital is actually probably going to support it, maybe make it a bit better, but I didn't want to be over-enthusiastic in our leverage model. Yeah, scaling negative working capital is typically generating cash. Should I answer someone else on the should I answer the question on the market?
The U.S. and the Middle East, how did it look in 2028? I was wondering. Yeah. If I watched the news with Trump, he came back with like billions of dollars and an airplane. Yeah. From the Middle East to America. We're trying to be in between. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think as we mentioned, the same applies to the Asia-Pacific region. Those are very large markets. If you look at our position there, the revenues we're doing for our company, it's sizable. It starts to become sizable, but for the totality of the market, obviously, it's really small. Just to give an example on the American market, and I think David also kind of alluded to it, the United States is a huge country with a lot of states, a lot of different cities.
In order to reach that, that's impossible for a company of our size. The approach we took there is to build trust with partners, large partner distribution networks that tap into all these regions with specialized people, with their own marketing and sales efforts, etc. Building that, being part of their portfolio, being on their shelf, that takes a lot of time and a lot of investment and a lot of effort. That's something that David and team have been working on for a lot of quarters, years to get that done. We've made those investments, and we're seeing now that it actually starts to get traction. It's paying off. We do expect those markets to become significantly larger, and we also expect them to outgrow, let's say, our domestic market in terms of absolute value. Obviously, that's very difficult to say right now.
Yeah.
I think we try to scale smart. I mean, we have a bit less countries to focus on. We closed a few countries in the past, so we have more focus on the countries that are there. We try not to overspend by just hiring tens of people and just see what's happening. We have a very good focus, and yeah, we have the finger on the button to, okay, let's see how it evolves this week. How does the funnel grow? What's happening there? How are the partners evolving? New customers in the region, for example. If we see more growth, we can immediately act. We are very agile in growing, but we try to grow, yeah, along with the growth that customers bring in.
Yeah, maybe that's not the fastest way, but at least it's a very cost-efficient and a smart way to do it, I think.
Okay. Thank you very much. Robert, I hand back the mic to you.
Robert Fink from Kepler Cheuvreux again. My first question is on the headcount and also the operational cost, which are of course kind of linked. If you look, of course, outside of mainly the Netherlands, there's still less scale for you. What makes you confident that kind of the headcount is going to remain kind of stable, slightly growing, considering the investment that is still required to grow the international markets? That is kind of in Europe, but also Middle East, U.S., I think also, sometimes alluded to in some of the presentations.
Maybe the second question is on the Middle East, where the cross-selling metrics were very strong. Yeah, what are maybe the learnings from that? What is driving that, and why are we maybe not seeing that as strong across the whole group?
Yeah. Let me answer the first question. Indeed, we expect to grow the commercial teams in the different countries going forward. As I mentioned, the pace of that is going to be decided by two metrics. One is the efficiency gains throughout the rest of the organization that frees up resources to do that, and the incremental gross profit that we generate, of which we part will reinvest in accelerated growth.
In doing so, we think that at a point in time, we probably see maybe a slight step up again in headcount, but for the totality of the company over all functions, we think it's going to be modest, and that's also what we count with. The absolute number of people and EUR going into new business is going to be a very important driver of accelerating our growth. Yeah. About why the metrics are so good in the Middle East in terms of cross-sell. Scaling up in different regions, we always started the same with the playbook. We did the investigations, what are interesting markets, what are the best dynamics in a growing market, high GDP, a lot of people on the mobile phone, things like that.
Once we were there in the new geography, we always learned something, and we had to adapt a bit. In APAC, we were very successful because we wanted the largest players there, and they really valued our telco network. They sent masses of messages. Chinese companies, for example, wanted to expand globally. They need a platform which can communicate globally. That is how we win in APAC. That is only one product, just sending messages. It is a huge scale and very successful. In the Middle East, yeah, we started there as well from scratch. From the early days, we could really say, "Okay, we have an advanced platform with software and messaging combined." We never explained that we have two business units engaged and connected, just one product and integrated engagement platform, as we say now.
From the start, you can only buy a bundle of products. You buy messages, most time WhatsApp, I believe, and then combined with Engage suite for service marketing. You saw it in a presentation of Wael. Most clients, they buy the whole suite from the start. That worked in that region very well. Maybe there was less incumbents there or things were growing so fast there in the economy that everybody just wanted to buy the latest, and they really understood that already. Yeah. Indeed, in the US, we've learned that we could scale much faster with the distribution channels, with the Spark networks. We adapted the strategy everywhere a little bit until it was successful. Therefore, the outcome can also be a little bit different in the profile of different regions.
Yeah, Middle East indeed is a good region for us in terms of the broadness of our platform.
Yeah. To add to your story about the people needed for growth, if you remember the team tree, we have the general people in the roots of the tree, like finance, legal, support, policymakers, risk department is there. In the top of the tree, we have the business units and the global hubs. I am very convinced that this fifth business unit that's in the roots of the tree, the general group of people, about 150 people right now. Less?
Yeah, about 100.
Yeah, about less. I think we can double with the same group of people. That's pretty cool.
With the help of AI and with all the professionalism that we have achieved after 25 years, and especially the past five years of growing into a bigger listed company, we do not need to scale there. That is quite nice. We can grow a bigger tree with the same roots. That will help us become more profitable. Yeah.
Yeah. I was thinking about a client I spoke to last week. It was specifically about Salesforce. They came from Salesforce to us. I asked them, "Why did you switch?" They said, "Because," your question, "Salesforce has more people, so why not a client there?" I said, "Now, they can have all the people of the world. I like your product better, and you evolve faster." It is not a number game in terms of how many employees you have. Not anymore.
How happy your clients will be. That is not that much correlated, not at all, maybe.
Thank you.
Thank you very much. Simon, you had an additional question?
Perfect. Last thing, sorry. We like this topic. My sweet spot. Now, the employee, the virtual employee that Rutger showed that you can call, and it can give you an explanation about your air conditioner. You can do 1,000 concurrent calls with the same Lotte that tells 1,000 people about the air conditioner. It gives a little bit of time, and we have our automatic SDRs calling out 1,000 at a time automatically, like, "Hey, do you want to buy stuff?" Yeah, indeed, we have to accept that we are in a different paradigm here and that the number of people is not, again, our next competitor will be AI only. Here we are with 600 people.
Then we are legacy. That's dangerous. People is not something in a formula anymore. The number. Yeah, the number of people. Yeah. Quality is. Yeah. No, no, the quality is. And that's why the hiring process adapted to really have more quality instead of quantity. Very interesting.
Simon Grenberg, ING again. Yeah, one question about the competitor environment, just a high-level question. You showed one slide, I think, with the best of breed, mid-market where CM sits, and then you see competitors all around, but no competitors around CM. I was just wondering, who do you look at that does similar stuff within the market, also the markets that you play in, and what do you do differently and why you will win?
Yeah, maybe we share the secret. In our corner of the market, it's not that crowded at the moment.
I can name you like 10 clients who came from Salesforce, which is in the upper part of the market, to us last year because they said, "I don't want this complexity anymore. I don't want these huge bills anymore. I just want an integrated platform which suits me as a mid-market player, like Prey, Nattel, and many others." We compete against neighbors and other angles of the market. The same is in the bottom of the market where you have smaller players. Our potential clients might be there now, and once they think, "Okay, I want to have a more advanced product. I like mobile marketing, or I like Service Cloud. I like all these products, but I want a bit more. I want to take the next step." They come to CM as well.
We have clients at the best of breed part, and they say, "Yeah, this just is now too complex for me." We signed an exchange the other day in Gold Republic, that group, and they said, "We have so many tools. During COVID, everybody's working at home, and all my employees, they start buying different SaaS tools. And now I'm here as a CEO of a company, of a CFO of a company, and we have like 300 different SaaS tools." The scary thing is, "I don't dare to cancel those contracts because I don't know what they're doing." They made a big step towards us in order to automate their processes, but also to phase out all the SaaS that bought. This is mid-market player. We do the same for Red Bull globally.
They are like in 190 countries, and they have, in the past, all these countries had the freedom to buy their own marketing software stack. They had so many software. In Austria, head officers said, "This has to stop. We make one infrastructure, and it is CM.com for our marketing. All the data of our fans, consumers have to be in there. We have to communicate with the platform through campaigns. We design centrally, and we can localize them locally." Now, country by country, I think the countries now, 33, they migrate to our software. Defender consolidation, as Rutger explained, is really happening. About competition, we do not compete that much in maybe can people do the same, but we are successful in what we do also towards clients who want what we sell.
Yeah, we could have elaborated a bit more in our presentation because it's a very interesting fact about agentic AI. Agentic AI eats traditional SaaS. That brings a whole new stream of potential customers towards agentic AI and hopefully towards us.
Thanks a lot.
Thank you very much. I'll take a quick look around the room. Are there any more questions? Robert.
I'll go again.
You go again. There you go.
Yeah, maybe a quick follow-up on the question from Timur. In a competitive environment, do you often see system integrators in kind of the best of suite, I think, how it's called, in the mid-market? Is that kind of competitors that you sometimes see? Yeah, and maybe quickly on payments, can you elaborate a little bit more kind of how payments fits in the whole scope of the strategy of the company?
Yeah, the first question I can answer very briefly. Yes, we see a lot of system integrators, but that's all in the large enterprise markets where really, let's say, work in a large enterprise is just fun to hire a lot of consultants to do a lot of work with, spend a lot of money. In the mid-market, yeah, people are more efficient, and they don't hire that much system integrators for these broad projects, and they're more looking for one-stop shop, at least the clients we speak. About payments, yeah, I think it's an exciting time for payments. We made a couple of pivots. We started a long time ago with payments with the premium SMS already voting. The other day, we had the European Song Contest this week, I think yesterday, and you could also vote. Still going on our platform.
We are in payments like for two decades. We're then connected to mobile phones. I think for more than 10 years, we have our license now in the Netherlands to be a payment service provider. We always believed in the beginning that it was this combination of messaging and payments that would be really strong, conversational commerce, like Tikki, as a combination of Apple and a combination of iDEAL and WhatsApp. We saw Apple Pay and Apple Messages, Google Messages, and we saw what's happening in China. Conversational commerce, combination of messages and payments. We really believed in that five years ago. I think it's still a strong story, but the market didn't evolve, at least in Europe, not into that direction as fast as we predicted back then. We made a pivot more to our engaged type of clients, the online and the retail chains.
We integrated our payments product into engaged because we have, if you look at the Netherlands, I think almost every online retailer in the top 100 is for one or more product client of CM.com. I think it's a no-brainer that they all will buy payments from CM.com. The reality is they're not all shifted. We have a few nice online retailers as a client, but we are much stronger in the fiscal environment, in the retail environment. We have many opportunities there. Why? Because we have a more unique product there and less competition. Things like I explained already, like offline PIN store and forward that you can use your payment terminal without internet and that it still works. It's quite unique. There's only one or two competitors there, and I think every retail chain needs that.
Also, there is a big trend going on with unattended payment terminals, for example, with EV charging. Mobility is one of our key verticals. EV charging, there will be a European regulation that if you have an electric car in Europe, that as a European citizen, you have to be able to pay with your bank card on this EV charge. That's not possible now. There will be a lot of unattended payment terminals on this fast net type of EV chargers. We made strategic deals with the top three of the vendors of these terminals that our software is on that terminal and they are connected to our payment processing. We expect a lot from that as well, but there's like a specific market. We're also seeing, for example, in payments, the cash money is coming back a bit.
There are like 1,000 points in the Netherlands now where you can withdraw cash money, but we play a role in that with our technology. This will go to 5,000 terminals in the upcoming 5,000 case where you have Geldmaat is the name of the brand where you can withdraw money. Also, technology will be there. The second shift we made, the first shift was from connect to engage, so from messaging to online. Now the second shift we made is from online towards the in-person payments. We learned also in the live industry with all the festivals we were, with all the cash strategies. We were the first to do that for the Formula 1. It is the biggest event ever organized in the Netherlands. It was cashless to our technology. We learned a lot of things there with offline.
How this is part of our CM, it's also data feeds. If you go into a retail shop there, you don't know who is who. You don't have all the data. If you want to be successful with CDP and marketing there, you need to meet more loyalty systems and more data there. That's what we can do with our own technology there. It's quite unique with shopper recognition, like we're rolling out now for Zeeman. It's feeding the customer data platform all the time, and it becomes better and better in marketing, and it makes our clients more and more successful. This is a bigger market than the online payment market.
Yeah, I think we expect a lot, but it took us a while if you see how long we are investing already in payments to get the online processor, the acquisition we do, the integration with it. I think going forward, we have a lot of room to grow in payments.
Very clear. Thank you.
Thank you very much for that.
I think I can state that if there are no further questions, then this concludes the Q&A.
Yep. Thank you very much. Thanks very much. Thank you. We enjoyed it. Thank you all in the audience.
Let me finish by inviting you all to the bistro for networking drinks. The people online, thank you very much for attending. If there was any question in there, and also people in the audience, if you want to address additional questions, I think tonight, I was wondering how that works.
Always feel free to send an email to investor.relations@cm.com. We will publish the deck and the recording afterwards on our investor relations website so you can look up the event again afterwards. Thank you very much all for your attention, and we'll speak to you in the bar and to the audience online. See you. Thank you.