Quick reminder that after the presentation, we'll have a Q&A session for analysts and investors. We'll provide you with further instructions when applicable. As usual, before we move ahead, I would like to remind you that any forward-looking statements that may be made during this call regarding our business outlook, operational, and financial targets are based on the company's management expectations and beliefs, as well as on information that is currently available to us. This involves risks and uncertainties as they are related to future events which may or may not happen. Investors have to understand that the overall macroeconomic conditions in this industry and other operational factors may affect future results and lead to outcomes that differ materially from those expressed in such forward-looking statements. Let me now hand it over to Pedro. Pedro, good morning.
Good morning, Nicholas. Good morning, everyone.
Welcome to the Earnings Release Presentation for the Second Quarter of 2025. We usually have a very brief introduction. For the past couple of years, we've been using a different approach when it comes to payments. We combine software and payments in one integrated offering. We work with what we call vertical payments. This means two things. It is vertical because it is different from traditional payment players. We have an end-to-end journey. We integrate software and CX. It is client-facing with apps, our web channel, WhatsApp, and others. We deal with payments where clients are. Finally, we usually offer integrated solutions that integrate with the back office of the companies we're dealing with, like their CRMs. Our hypothesis is that this integration translates into better conversion, better results, less friction.
Our second concept when it comes to being vertical is our hypothesis that we should become specialized in industries with similar pain points. We are using recurring essential services here, like telecommunications, utilities, education, and insurance. We've made good progress when it comes to new clients. We have another 75 clients for this quarter. We have one big enterprise client. It is above half a billion in revenue. We have 74 clients who are medium-sized clients. We are close to 1,600 active clients. We are in 60 countries, and we want to have leadership in the biggest utilities companies in Brazil. We are working with 12 out of the 15 that work with recurring payments, measured by revenue. We would like to highlight some qualitative elements as well. In this quarter, we had a very important launch. This carries lots of synergy with what we're doing in payments.
This is a new agent, PRACE. It focuses on AI, WhatsApp, and integrated payments. When we think about the relationship between our clients and their end clients, they need to do collection. They need to receive payments. WhatsApp has become something ubiquitous in Brazil. However, the payment experience is still a bit fragmented. It's not seamless. PRACE was created to offer outstanding experience for that. We already have some clients who are using us. This is a highlight. We don't have a slide for this, but we have other highlights as well. We had innovation in payment methods at the end of June and beginning of July. We launched the automatic PIX. Bemobi is an expert in recurring payments, so we integrated the automatic PIX with the MOTIREO offering, where the automatic PIX goes together with other recurring payments.
Our hypothesis is that we're going to have better conversion at lower costs. This is an innovation, and we've been preparing for this for over six months. What's also interesting in the evolution of the Pix transfer is that we may have been the first in Brazil to launch a Pix offering integrated with Google Pay. If you have a digital wallet without necessarily using a credit card, you can integrate Pix with Google, and we support that in our checkout. These are highlights for products. We also have one highlight for clients, which is very iconic in two senses. For utilities, in our vertical approach, we were exclusively focused on power distribution. However, in utilities, we have other subsets of activities, like sanitation. We started focusing on that, and we got the biggest sanitation company in Brazil to work with us. They've been privatized for a year.
This case is also a highlight because of another reason. We've been putting together a group of solutions that maybe look like one-off solutions from the outside. We bought a company called NOM a year ago, focused on digital transformation and customer experience. We also bought an ISP business, which ended up spearheading PRACE. We had lots of evolution with our checkout and our payment methods. I think the SABESP case is the very first one where we have all of these components in a unified view. This business had a very aggressive view on how to universalize services and digitalize customer experience. We were able to integrate all of their main digital channels: the web, the new app, WhatsApp, and in the future, we'll have more channels. We took a 180.
They were very focused on the boleto pay slip, and now they are very focused on the PIX transfer. They took a leap. This is a sanitation business with the most modern payment methods out there within under three months. In under two full months, their WhatsApp channel became a highlight. With the support of AI, they were able to collect over $100 million, 3 million conversations. This is very abstract, so let's make it tangible. We have a short video under a minute, and you'll be able to see how all of these movements have been playing out. This is the solution that we've been putting together, and this is how it translates into very good results for our end clients like SABESP. This is something that we've been trying to replicate to other clients too. I think this video helps us understand it.
When we talk about vertical payments, we're talking about a seamless offering, payments that are integrated to different features and different channels. We have a very vertical perspective in this case of utilities and sanitation. This is something we're trying to replicate in every industry. We're doing something similar in education with Agenda Edu. We do the same in telecommunications. This is the difference between a vertical player in comparison to other traditional players with APIs and POSs. As usual, let's go through some KPIs. We keep growing. For most of new clients, we're completely focused on our two target areas. These are mainly clients with payments and SaaS, and usually, these things go hand in hand. We're taking a step to the side with microfinance when it comes to the number of clients, but this was a good highlight for this quarter.
We didn't start any new carrier for digital subscriptions in this quarter, even though in previous quarters, we had lots of progress with this indicator. When it comes to utilization KPIs or volume KPI, physical KPIs, we have one for each one of our four business lines. TPV had very robust growth, like clockwork. We're growing around $100 million quarter on quarter. This is 30% of growth year on year. For SaaS, we had a small reduction quarter over quarter, but this has to do with a change in concept. We had a 5% growth. The change in concept here happened because we have different SaaS licenses, and we have carrier platforms. For one of them, we have now an unlimited model. To not distort this number upwards, we eliminated the number of unlimited licenses.
Even though we only had 5% of growth here in revenue, we had more accelerated growth, which shows that the revenue per license is up. According to the same logic for microfinance and microtransactions, we have two different types of very diverse transactions here. In one business, we work with top-ups and voice data packages. Usually, we have a much smaller ticket for this. We have a new business which is growing in an accelerated way, which is credit scoring transactions. In this case, we sell to banks and fintechs the scoring of clients in countries where usually you have less information about players. Players like Nubank, American Express, BBVA, among others, use this information. This has been growing a lot, and the unitary ticket is much higher than the other business line. Here we're growing. We reduce the absolute number of transactions, but you have a higher ticket.
This completely offsets revenue and ARPU. For user paid subscriptions, we had a small increase in licenses. It's good quarter over quarter. Year over year, it is a 4% growth. In this quarter, we want to give you more visibility. We're breaking it down here, like an ARPU or a take-hit rate. It is easier to see it here with the take-hit rate. Our take-hit rate for payments has remained adjusted. Our TPV for payments is close to our revenue. For SaaS, we have exactly what I was talking about. Our revenue per license increased significantly from 3.8 to 4.1 in a year. We grew more in revenue. I think the biggest positive distortion is that in microfinance, since we have two different kinds of transactions, credit score really brings our ARPU up. We have a blended change here. We go from 0.3 last year to 0.4 now.
Even though we have - 14% in volume, because we're changing the type of business we're doing, our revenue is up. For paid subscriptions, we have a reasonably stable result. We now have 1.9, which means that our revenue grew above our user subscription base. We had 19% of growth for our normalized revenue. With neutral foreign exchange, we would have grown 15%. The impact was basically marginal. The EBITDA growth numbers that Andre is going to show are slower because of the foreign exchange rate. Before I hand it over to Andre, let's zoom into the revenue. As we were saying, in this quarter, we grew 19%. Up until the first half of the year, we're growing at basically the same pace. We're accelerating a bit in Q2 year on year compared to Q1. It's a bit above. With payments, we've been very strong.
We grew almost 26% for digital payments this quarter year on year. If we look at the year-to-date numbers, we see something similar to the trends that we saw with revenue. We accelerated growth in this quarter. Now, for our international mix and our domestic mix, our international operations are running really well. We had a small gain here. We're able to be a bit better in our international operations. Some of it comes from the foreign exchange rate, but everyone was performing well anyway. Finally, we see a breakdown per business line. Here we have a payment mix, and SaaS is already the biggest part of our business with payments. Payments and SaaS. With payments, we went from 34.5% to 36.5%. With SaaS, we have stability, but by combining payments and SaaS, we have basically 60%. Other businesses are also stable, but they are growing at a slower speed.
Let me now hand it over to our CFO, Mr. Andre Veloso, who is going to be commenting on financial indicators.
Thank you, Pedro. Thank you for being here, everyone. I'm happy to be here for another earnings release presentation. Let me start my share of other P&L lines. We have our gross profit here. It grew a little bit more than revenue, 21% in this quarter, with a slight increase in our gross margin, a little bit above 73%. This is the fruit of a better revenue mix for this period. Year to date, we had very robust growth around 19% because of the very same reasons.
To support the number of opportunities that we've seen in the last quarters, in this quarter, we were doubling down on our expenditure, not only with personnel because of the new business units that Pedro was mentioning at the beginning of his speech, but also expenditures with IT. We also had reinforced doubtful accounts, which increased our OPEX for this quarter. Year to date, we're not growing as much. It's not 18%. It's 16%. When we look at our EBITDA and we take into account our operational leverage, we're able to expand our margin to a bit over 34%, both for the quarter and year to date. Our respective growth was 24% and 19%. This is very robust growth for our EBITDA. Now, when we talk about net income, we have a small low light here for this quarter.
For our adjusted net income, excluding the swap, we see a -16% result. This happens basically because of two things. First, in the second half of 2024, we had a positive impact from the tax benefits from our own capital interest or from our interest on equity. We had a negative result here from a financial standpoint. These two things are almost R$13 million, and this is why we saw a slight decrease of -16% in this quarter. Since we're making progress with our dividends policy, and yesterday we announced this distribution of R$30 million in interest on equity to be paid at the end of August, this impact will actually be observed in the third quarter of this year, and we're going to make a correction of this effect from a tax standpoint.
Now, when we look at our operational cash flow with the adjusted EBITDA minus our CapEx, this is the biggest highlight for the quarter. We have 27% of growth both quarter on quarter and year to date. Our cash conversion is above 75%. It's really robust. We're almost at the end, and I think it is important for us to leave you with a comment. In our last Investors Day, we focused a lot on return for our investors and trying to optimize our capital structure. In this sense, in the past quarter, we were able to work with an innovation credit line with the BNDES. It is a 10-year debt with three years for the settlement of the principal. We have interest paid every six months. We are working on optimizing our capital structure.
If we look at our cash balance for this quarter, in spite of good cash generation, we see that overall we had a -28% in our cash position, which is more than explained by the payment of R$59 million in dividends for this period. We also had two effects here. We had profit sharing of 19%, which is offset by the new loan, and we had a bit of devaluation of our cash position abroad at around R$10 million. We have almost R$500 million in cash. We still have a little bit over R$111 million to be distributed in the short term after our statements are approved for this period. With this cash balance, we're very comfortable. We can move ahead with our strategy. This also has to do with lots of M&A opportunities that we have, and we have always been assessing them.
Let me now hand it over to Pedro for his closing remarks.
Thank you, Andre. Let me wrap it up, and we'll start the Q&A. Let me put this into perspective. We've spent basically one and a half years accelerating. In the first quarter of 2024, we had a flat growth, kind of negative growth. We started with 3%, 9%, 11%, and now we're around 20% of growth recently. We're talking about 25% - 26% of growth in our EBITDA. We are gaining traction. Our strategy is creating echoes with our clients. We're performing well in our business lines as well, especially in the ones we focus the most. Payments have had very consistent growth with this vertical payment approach. We won many clients in the past few years, and they are starting to yield results. We have lots of industries. We have power.
We have our first utility outside of Brazil, which we talked about in the last quarter. We have Salta, a big educational business. Now we're going into sanitation. With this mix and with other clients that we are closing a deal with, we are accelerating a lot. I've already talked about our EBITDA. We're very happy with our operational cash generation. We're very diligent. We know that cash generation and accounting indicators go hand in hand. Our cash position, our cash balance is really strong. We can have an aggressive policy for paying dividends without losing our DNA, which is related to M&A activity. We are still actively looking for assets. Of course, we're looking for assets that are going to add value to our strategy. We'll most likely have something to announce very soon. Regarding products, we had a number of important launches.
We had many in payment methods, as we were discussing. We now also have our conversational payment agent. This is growing a lot in Brazil and many of the countries where we operate. We believe not only that this is going to be a growth vector for payments, but also for SaaS and a new line of revenue for businesses. Finally, we used one client as an example here in the last bullet, but other clients could be an example here. SABESP is a good showcase of how we're able to go into new segments and to also put together different elements to offer a very special end-to-end experience compared to what businesses have been doing in Brazil so far. Let me now stop sharing my screen, and we're going to have a Q&A session. Nicholas?
Thank you, Pedro. We're now going to start the Q&A session.
If you want to ask a question, please press the button to raise your hand, and we're going to unmute you. You can also send us a written question in the chat. Finally, if we don't have enough time to answer every question, please reach out by email to our team. Okay, we see some hands that are raised, and I'm going to unmute Luis from XP. Luis, please go ahead.
Hi, good morning. Can you hear me? Yes, loud and clear. Great. Thank you for taking my question. I have two questions. First, capital allocation. When we look at dividends, it feels like the company is very comfortable with the 2025 guidance based on your net income for the first quarter. How do you plan your payout for 2026? Could we have 100% of payout for 2026? Regarding capital allocation, what is your vision regarding M&A activity?
Do you have anything in your pipeline? Another question is related to microfinance. I would love to double-click on credit scoring services. We saw strong results. What kind of factor explains this kind of stronger transaction volume in Mexico? Is it pent-up need from the first quarter? Did you change anything there? If you could give us more detail on your pricing model, that would be great. I'd love to get some outlooks on the changes in microfinance as well. Thank you.
Thank you. Excellent questions. We haven't set a policy for dividends in 2026 yet, but I can share a rationale with you. As we make progress, then yes, we'll be sharing an official policy. Here's what we're thinking.
As we feel comfortable with our business growth, with the kind of acceleration that we have right now, and we want to continue in this accelerated path, as we have M&A activity that is compatible to our cash balance and our cash generation, then yes, we expect to have a more aggressive policy of 100%. With the data that we have right now regarding performance and the type of our M&A activity and the mismatch in cash, we could have this ambidextrous strategy of high payouts without compromising on our M&A ambitions. By the way, we're going to announce that when the time comes, and this is always going to be subject to our business perspectives for cash generation and the specific M&A deals that are available to us.
Regarding more specific information on M&A activity, right now we have some better defined areas, which we believe would be natural expansions for us. We see businesses that make a lot of sense to us in the new steps in vertical payments. When and how is, of course, something that we couldn't talk about yet. Also, M&A activity is binary, and they can only be announced when they are 100% confirmed. What I can tell you is that we're extremely active. We have lots of negotiations going on, and we are in line with what we've been doing so far. You see that every acquisition we have is connected to our strategic perspective for the future. Now, microfinance. We have two phenomena in the figures that we shared for this quarter. One is a continuation of what was already happening. The other one is a one-off effect.
I think that it's a kind of one-off effect because we're going to see it again in the upcoming quarters. First, we see the effects of having two different business lines under one umbrella. One of them is more mature with advanced credit and with data and top-ups for carriers. It is more mature, and it grows less. The other one is the credit scoring business. The latter has a higher ticket. As this grows, you see a mismatch because you see a growth in the average ticket. The trend is that we keep on growing a little in our average ticket as the second business lines gain momentum and space. In the second quarter, we were experimenting with a different business model. We had a non-recurring project with a fintech to test out this new model.
Instead of selling the scoring, we would help them do a digital campaign with pre-selected clients who are approved for the scoring model so that we're able to gain clients that have been pre-selected or pre-approved. This offering offers higher added value. This was a pilot. Most of it was executed in Q2. For now, this is not a recurring revenue business line. If it is possible for us to replicate this, and it feels like it is, this could be a recurring engine of revenue generation from now on. This project was heavily focused on Q2, but the good news is that the pilot was really successful, and it feels like this model could be replicated so that we keep on having good growth. Now, regarding Mexico, we have operations in Mexico and Colombia so far.
We do have the option of going to other countries, but the highlights for these countries are that we still have lower levels of digitalization and access to banking services compared to Brazil. They have lots of fintechs and digital banks like Nubank who were making a bet in the growth of these countries. Since their markets are not as mature when it comes to access to banking services, they also are not as mature when it comes to credit. We see fintechs, and they have an appetite to make these countries more mature. It is what happened with Brazil a few years ago. We are interested in being enablers for this growth engine. These are two good bets, and our challenge is to find other similar countries for the future. Was this clear, Luis?
Yes. Thank you very much, Pedro.
Next question.
We now have Leonardo Cintra from Itaú BBA. Leonardo, please go ahead.
Good morning, Andre, Pedro, Nicholas. Congratulations on these results in your presentation. I have a question about the TPV. You had 29% of growth year on year, very strong growth. In the release, you said that this comes from an increase in penetration with current clients, the ramp-up of new clients, and progress in small and medium-sized schools. I'd love to understand how much each one of these three elements contributed, and if you think the TPV is going to decelerate in the second half of the year because of local consumption. Secondly, what about the margins ahead? We see that you have been increasing your share in the mix of revenue for some business lines.
What do you think for the gross margin and for the EBITDA, especially for the EBITDA margin, where AI initiatives are probably going to bring traction for the next quarters? Thank you.
Thank you, Leonardo. I'm going to go back to a presentation that we had in our Investors Day around two months ago. You probably remember that João Stricker had a very educational presentation on our growth, especially for H1 and H2. We talked about increasing our penetration for current clients and current industries, and that for H1, we wanted to get new clients with the same offerings, with the same segments. With H2, we wanted to use obvious adjacencies, like new segments, like sanitation. It is utilities, but it is a new segment for us. We wanted to use our mature model in new countries, in this case, Chile.
When we look at this quarter, we are 100% in line with this plan that we shared. We have a bit of the three horizons. H3 is the new offerings, digital transformation, meaning GRACE. Q2 is almost a picture of the framework that João was talking about. If you look at growth, it is split between growth in the accounts where we were with the same segments, a few clients in segments we were already active in, like schools. They may be bigger or smaller. We have the Salta and the Spiller groups, which are increasing in scale, which is good to show that we have the same level of adherence in telecommunications and utilities in schools. I think we can say comfortably that we have very good adherence in this industry. We already see some revenue from PRACE and our digital transformation. This is very balanced.
There is no silver bullet. It is the exact framework that Stricker was talking about. We are executing it in compliance with what we were discussing in our Investors Day. You also asked about my margin. We have three vectors here, and they push us into different directions. First, we have a new payment method connected to the PIX transfer. Bemobi is committed to being in the vanguard of the new PIX transfer types: automatic PIX, biometric PIX. At some point, our TPV is going to accelerate more, but it is likely that the take rate is going to be smaller. If you look at current results, this is already kind of applicable. Our TPV is growing at around 29% - 30%, and our revenue is around 4% - 5%, and payment is a little bit below that. We do not expect to see deacceleration here.
Even though we do have a slowdown in our economy, we are sub-penetrated in our target segments. We are under-penetrated. These effects are secondary because of our size, our scale, and our under-penetration. These are headwinds, but they are secondary because of the traction that we have. We think that this growth is sustainable. In our margin, we may have a negative impact when it comes to the take rate of payment, but this will be a marginal effect. This could be offset by a higher TPV. We believe that AI is going to give us productivity gains. One of our priorities is to structure our business for our next chapter.
We believe that Bemobi still has lots of opportunity to grow, and we've been very cautious when it comes to our investments in infrastructure, even when it comes to the type and seniority of our team, when we think about our size and our future outlook for growth. We made important investments. We hired important people in this quarter. Instead of just optimizing our EBITDA and gaining in operational leverage, in the next year, we believe that we need to pave the way for the company, even if our operational leverage is not as good as it could be because we want to keep our accelerated growth. In other words, I would be cautious. I do not expect an EBITDA percentage that is higher than what is here. Maybe we even return some bps because we're preparing to continue our accelerated growth.
Very clear, Pedro. One follow-up question on your TPV, especially utilities. You have a plan with payments installments for sub-acquirers. What do you think regarding our capital allocation here? Should we expect anything bigger here in the future? I'd love to hear about the economics of this operation.
Again, I repeat, I think the name of the game is to have a very more balanced front. Right now, with absolute contribution, telco is the higher contribution, the highest, even though we still have room for growth. Utilities is ranking second, but we still have a lot of opportunity to grow. We have other new sectors like education, and we have healthcare. It is the smallest so far, but we still have lots of opportunity. I see good perspectives for all of them. In absolute values, they are very different, but in their delta for growth, they may not be as different.
Again, I'm going to repeat what Stricker was saying. We have a map of where we believe growth comes from. So far, what we've seen is very similar to the breakdown of opportunities and upsides that we saw a couple of months ago. Of course, we're making progress as time goes by. We change our opportunities for growth. Sometimes we reduce it or we increase it, but that is a good outlook of what we expect for the next quarters.
Very clear. Thank you, Pedro, and congratulations again.
Thank you, Leonardo. Nicholas, I think we have time for one more question.
We do. Let me get a question from the chat. Somebody was asking about the opportunities that we imagine to replicate the SABESP model.
In a way, this is already happening. I believe SABESP was an unusual case. This is a business with lots of urgency.
They had high hopes for going universal with their services. They were skipping steps in their digitalization journey, and this gave us an opportunity to offer them basically every solution that we have at once. If we look at our playbook, for most utilities, our end game is very similar. For telcos, we have a new checkout that we're launching now, especially for top-ups. It's really good. In this case, we don't have the full app, but we're taking a huge chunk of the app regarding payment journeys and WhatsApp. We also have a few clients in other segments like education right now, for which we're offering a more integrated view. This is what we should expect. This is the playbook that we're going to try and replicate. This is a business that took a big step in reinventing themselves. I think this also happened simultaneously.
In other partners, this happens in a more incremental way. They don't change their chassis at the same time everywhere. We expect a similar experience, and we're going to put these elements together for other clients.
Pedro, we have another question here, which you've answered partially. It asks about capital allocation and dividends. What is your expectation for your schedule of the payment of dividends and profit?
Andre?
Thank you, Pedro. We still have to pay a little bit above R$111 million, and we expect two tranches for that. The next one is probably at the end of the year with around 60% of this value. The rest is for when we approve results from 2025, so at the beginning of 2026.
In other words, our business wants to accelerate this schedule according to what our profit allows. Not as much cash, but our cash is related to that. Our goal is to accelerate this as much as possible. Nicholas, we've been here for over 45 minutes. I think we can wrap this up.
Good. Thank you for being here. It's a pleasure to be here with you for.