Our presentation is being recorded and all participants will be in listen-only mode, and they'll be able to see and follow our presentation. All participants can access simultaneous translation into English if you prefer that. On the lower portion, there is the Interpretation. Click there and select the language of your preference. I'm going now to speak English so that we can help those who cannot speak Portuguese. After the presentation of our officers, we're going to start the Q&A session for analysts and investors only. Further instructions for questions will be provided later when we start the Q&A session. Before proceeding, we normally do, I'm going to read a text. I would like to point out that forward-looking statements made during this call related to business perspective of Bemobi and the different assumptions and beliefs are based on our management knowledge and currently available information.
They involve risks and uncertainties because they relate to future events, and therefore depend on circumstances that may or may not occur. Investors should understand that general economic conditions, industry, and other operating factors may affect the performance of Bemobi and lead to results that differ materially from those expressed in such forward-looking statements. That said, let me hand it over to Pedro Ripper, who is going to start the presentation. Pedro, please.
Thank you, Bruno. Good morning, everyone. Let's start with the presentation of the results of the fourth quarter 2025 with the closure of the fiscal year 2025. It's always good to have a general introduction. Bemobi has been transforming into a company 100% focused on what we call vertical payments. This is something that we've been focusing on for many years because we've identified market opportunities.
There was no specialization in the market yet of understanding problems, challenges, and opportunities of payment by industry. In our case, we focused on essential recurring service companies. Telecom to start. Gradually, we learned more about the area of utilities, energy, water, sanitation, and recently we have migrated into the area of education, higher education, and healthcare, especially healthcare insurance. Our thesis of verticalization results from all our understanding and the idea that we should have an end-to-end integration where we considered the end-to-end payment journey from the moment the clients interact with our partners through digital channels, payment per se, and all the other systemic integrations that are part of the full vertical integration. By doing that, we can reduce churn and release more value. This is what we have focused our strategy as a company.
Based on that, I think there are some indicators that we like to share with you. Here we have a segmentation by industry. First, TPV, which is a very good metric. It does not capture it all, but it's a very good indicator of volume that we've been dealing as transactions. We had a robust growth of 36% year-over-year, crossing BRL 3 billion per quarter, BRL 3 billion, Brazilian reals. We have had an improvement in our take rate, which has captured the value of all transactions. In the midterm, we believe the take rate will go back to our previous numbers as we have a broader perspective of payment terms. As we work in specialized areas, we do not believe this number will change much.
In terms of evolution by segment, this is the first time we have this breakdown for you to understand that Bemobi started with telecom-based payment. It was 100% of our business two or three years ago. As we've learned more and started investing in new verticals, they got more relevant. In the last chart here on the right, we can see that utilities now is much more relevant, and it also shows significant growth in the area of education. Even though telecom will keep on growing and we see potential in it's going to lose some of its share compared to other industries which are going to get more and more relevance. In terms of clients, even though Bemobi works with mid-sized companies as well, our main target are large Brazilian companies in the area of service.
We are very proud to say, two of the 15 largest are our clients, but we focused on the top 100, top 150 companies. 12 out of 15 largest companies really. 2025 was a very important year. We expanded our presence in telecom, even though we had a mature market. Telcel, which has become a payment partner in Mexico, were our first large customer in Mexico. Vero has joined our portfolio. These among the main carriers and telecom. Utilities, Enel in Chile, our first international contract before Telcel. Sabesp, which we closed business with for the past quarters. In education, we've got SOU Educação, which had been in place for a while. Inspira, second largest group of K-12 education, YDUQS, Colégio Farias Brito, and a number of other 377 specifically other groups.
In health, we've been working with Hapvida, which is going to go in place in the next quarter, and a number of the Unimed branches. As we focus into new industries, we learn more about that, go get specialized, and bring a number of new customers in. In terms of product, as we talked about customers and TPV, we've been innovating as part of solution. We believe we are like payment or an orchestration. It brings intelligence with new solutions of payment to our customers, but also a combination of payment modes. We are highly enthusiastic about the work with Nubank in a model called Closed- Loop. Nubank has 110 million account holders in Brazil, so it has very great penetration, and it has a number of interesting characteristics. The checkout now is frictionless. It can direct automatically to the bank.
There is biometric authentication and some other features. For example, check the account balance, availability of the balance depending on the purchase, and even an offer of credit to complement, let's say, payment of a bill. We are very enthusiastic with this first case, and this is going to enrich our ecosystem of payments. Along the same lines, one novelty also in Brazil is the so-called PIX Biometrics, one of the first cases of use of the Open Finance, which is the non-redirect journey. The payment transfer, PIX, has a redirection. You have to paste in code, copy and paste a code. Then you open the bank, copy it, pay it, and then go back to the payment environment to validate it has been done.
This Biometric PIX solution tries to remove further friction, and once there is one first acceptance to pay through the app of a utility company or a large company, you can have the payment transfer with one single click with biometric validation, facial recognition or fingerprint, and now you can have higher conversion. It's a new standard. It's just the beginning. Bemobi, within our value proposition of having the most modern solutions for consumers, see it as a very important landmark. In the midterm, certainly, it's going to get much more importance in Brazil. The last point, qualitatively speaking, in the end of the quarter, the end of the year, we made a very relevant acquisition which puts us into a new segment, but still maintaining our idea of vertical payment.
We have closed the control of acquisition of Paytime, 51% with an option of purchasing of the 49% additional shares with some model that we've put in place, which is bringing a strong entrepreneur with alignment, equity, but opening the way for 100% acquisition previously negotiated. Paytime, in my opinion, is the best company to create payment-as-a-service solution. It creates end-to-end solution, including Bank-as-a-Service as well, focused on digitizing and bringing ecosystems that can provide payment solutions to their productive chains. Micro entrepreneurs or a franchisee or a manufacturer or a software provider, there are a number of potential sub-segments. Paytime has quite good attraction in this modality of what we call B2B2B, bringing hubs to create payment solutions for their own specific chains.
They are focused on SMB, and they've shown that the solutions that Paytime have can automate this kind of business, creating an additional layer that are really focused. It has very good complementarity, and Bemobi has a payment solution online which is highly complementary to what Paytime already holds. They have a DNA of small and mid-sized company, whereas we tend to sell more to large companies. In the end of the day, we can bring our solutions into an end-to-end solution to unlock some markets which are quite promising. Maybe you can understand better by seeing here. We have two segments on the left, size of companies. Bemobi focuses on large companies. Minimum would be BRL 500 million in sales, even though we have some more fragmented. I mean BRL 500 thousand rather.
We have the vertical specialization, and the idea is to create new verticals that we are calling the ecosystem and marketplaces. In general lines, franchise companies. Another ecosystem would be manufacturers, distributors or sometimes software companies that have financial processes which are orchestrated for ERP and offering them the payment solutions. Here on the up portion, we had combination of solutions of Paytime and Bemobi, which would create a new pocket, a new addressable market, and together we are going to focus on that. Whereas the size of medium-sized business, we would operate more independently, but with technology solutions of Bemobi. This is the kind of practice that we are going to put in place now as of 2026. Two slides about revenues. We had 20% revenue increase, but it's always interesting to see it from a neutral perspective.
Considering the foreign exchange variation, we have grown somewhat more. It was 23% actually because of the currency, which reduced our international revenues when converted into Brazilian reals. One last comment before handing over to the CFO. Net revenues, we had 20% growth year-over-year. More accelerated in the last quarter, so 23% considering the foreign exchange rate. If we go deeper into payment had a very strong quarter. We had nearly 50% growth quarter-over-quarter, and annually, we had a 35% growth. The main driver of growth of the company comes from payment. Payment has to be understood together with SaaS, even though we provide data separately, but they are two elements provided in a combined fashion. This can be seen here in the pie chart on the lower right side.
When we look at the fourth quarter 2025, SaaS plus payment takes us to nearly 64%. Two-thirds of the company are concentrated in what we call payment vertical payment solutions. It shows very relevant progression compared to the previous year, which was just nearly 50%. In terms of geography, as payment is our main driver, payment's still very concentrated in Brazil. We have gained some relative share because of the business direction or because of the size and seasonality of the foreign exchange rate. Brazilian real has got more value compared to other exchange and other currencies, which has meant growth compared to our international operations. That said, let me hand it back to André Veloso, our CFO, and he's going to make some comments about additional financial metrics.
Thank you, Pedro. Good morning, everyone.
Great to be here with you for one more opportunity to share our release, our earnings. We closed the year of 2025 with a company three times larger than the company that had its IPO in February 2021, and consistency has been the key word here. Eight consecutive quarters of increase of EBITDA and revenues. Looking at the results of the fourth quarter, we can see the best results of our previous history in terms of revenues, EBITDA, net profit and generation of cash. Gross margin to start. There was an expansion of gross margin quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year. This is the result of payment and SaaS share, as Pedro pointed out. This is going to be maintained for the upcoming quarters as well.
Now considering OpEx, growth amounted to 23% quarter-over-quarter, 22% year-over-year. Growth resulted from investments in strengthening our team of products, technology and the commercial team, something that we talked in the beginning of the second half of last year. We've seen many commercial opportunities, so we decided to strengthen our team to be properly structured and capture all possibilities. In addition, we've been investing in technology resources. Despite the challenging macroeconomic situation we've all been facing, but we've decided to have a more conservative position in terms of bad debt provision. The amount is entered in 2025, giving you a prospective understanding, and it's probably going to be much lower in 2026. It has impacted our results in 2025, and in the fourth quarter, it was no different.
Consequently, when we look into Adjusted EBITDA, there was growth of 20% quarter-over-quarter, 22% year-over-year. With some compression of margin in the quarters, but a 6 BPS expansion in the year-over-year understanding because of the investments that I have just alluded to. Now, moving on to the next slide. We can see here net income, so adjusted net income ex swap. Considering the financial metrics, it was our main highlight at 30% growth. In addition to better operating performance in the end of the year, we also had significant increase of volume of some specific tax initiatives such as Lei do Bem and also interest on equity that contributed to this adjusted net income.
We had a negative impact of tax, whereas in the year, it was about 22% margin, highly influenced by the negative variation of the foreign exchange. Now, operating cash flow, there was 27% increase quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year, which shows the robustness of our company, how solid we are to convert our EBITDA into cash flow. Nearly 80% of EBITDA being converted into cash. As you can see, we are a company that generates cash consistently. Finally, our last slide, where we show you our cash balance between the third and fourth quarter. There was a reduction of BRL 112 million in our cash position, which resulted from dividends and interest on equity that we shared in December. BRL 130 million that we had a payment of dividends.
We have also had some expenses in paying Paytime and acquisition of Celer, so that amounted to BRL 28 million. These acquired companies are not here reflected in terms of earnings, but they have added BRL 12 million in our cash position as you can see in the chart. Operationally, we had generated BRL 26 million of cash from operations in the quarter. This volume of tax paid of BRL 14 million in the quarter do not reflect the tax benefits I mentioned in the previous slide. That's going to be portrayed in the first quarter of the year and the third quarter of 2026, so the two different tax exemptions or tax incentive programs. Finally, before handing back to Pedro, we have already approved our sharing of dividends considering 100% payout, and we are working on improving our capital structure.
Thank you all very much for joining us, and now I'm going to hand it back to Pedro.
Great, André. Let me make some of my closing remarks, and then we're going to open for your questions. Once again, we have been showing consistency in the different expansions. 23% is a good growth. 21% in payments is excellent. Two-thirds of the company are in synchrony with the vertical payment strategy with an integrated offer to clients. TPV has gained more and more drive. TPV growth is very well-balanced coming from new clients, which bring the greenfield TPV. All our I'll say all clients in our portfolio have had an increase of TPV within their own baseline. Telco clients showing that the value proposition is consistent.
There is a renewal of payment mix, but we've been capturing the positive benefits of that. You are bringing new customers in, yes, but at the same time, we are developing maturity and working with our existing partners, transforming and digitalizing their process and renewing payment methods. The combination of them both generate this increase of payments and SaaS 50% and 23% respectively. In terms of EBITDA, we've maintained stable margins. We've made important investments in recent quarters, especially developing our team and processes to keep on growing sustainably. This is something important because we don't want to have any bottlenecks there. It's an investment with good return on investment. We could be expanding further the EBITDA margin, but we believed we should strike a balance and keep on increasing the infrastructure of the company as well.
Our EBITDA minus CapEx, especially P&D, research and development, so training the team, expanding our infrastructure. It is below our revenue. In other words, it impacts our operating margin, and we have had nearly 27% increase of the operating cash generation year-over-year. In other words, we are investing more, but gaining scale and providing a better return on investments made. André has talked about the adjusted net income. We are being more and more efficient, I would say. Finally, we are going to keep on launching new products. The global market, specifically the Brazilian market, is under transformation. We want to maintain our mid- and long-term competitiveness. To do that, we are going to come up with new alternatives and how we can propose that to really be together in the forefront of innovation.
Finally, we are focusing on new payment verticals. There are the ecosystems and the marketplaces, productive chains that still haven't leveraged the potential of having a full control of financial flow. Similarly to recurring services which could be improved and capture value, and these old or previous ecosystems also offer this kind of opportunities. Of course, they have specificities, but the combination of Paytime tools and the know-how that we have developed at Bemobi will provide a niche specialization towards those new payment verticals. This is going to be gradual throughout the years of 2026 and 2027. 2026, we are going to integrate Paytime solutions and bring the first new clients. We are talking about major productive chains in Brazil, so long sales cycles constructed very similar to the ones that we have in our corporate customers.
With that, I close the presentation. Bruno, can you please tell us about the Q&A? I am going to stop sharing so that everyone can see us better.
Thank you, Pedro. Now we are going to go into our Q&A. The first question is Bernardo Guttmann with XP. Bernardo, please. Bernardo, we cannot hear you. Well, okay. Now, yes. Bernardo, please. Still on mute. Cannot hear you, Bernardo.
So first, Zoom's mistake. Second, my own mistake. I apologize. Good morning, Pedro, André, Stricker, Bruno, everyone. Thank you very much. Kudos to you. Amazing results. This growth of level of growth now with a more difficult comparative platform. I'd like to talk about future drivers considering payment with the speed up of revenues and TPV.
Is it ramp up of recent initiatives, and to what extent does it reflect something structural coming from the maturation of your bases? Looking towards 2026, does it seem to be sustainable growth, or do you think that in the second half of the year you would reach some plateaued levels?
Well, Bernardo, qualitatively speaking, in a nutshell, the growth resulting from the business lines has been well-balanced between the base of current customers and new customers. Our current bases is somewhat greater than new clients.
When we talk about delta growth or delta revenue, the current customers they already had in the bases contributed further for the growth, not in percent, in terms of percentage, but in absolute cash, which I think it's positive because it shows that as we bring new players into the ecosystem, they have a very long life with us where we can optimize them and ramp up their importance and scale. Looking ahead, we believe that this is going to be sustained because as we have more clients, our current basis of clients will expand. They'll start as a sub-penetrated nature. Our sales are expanding, but we have an install base, a current base of customers which will lead to more growth. The mix will be balanced because of the current base of customers.
Now, in terms of speed of growth, as I told you, we are not talking about hundreds of thousands. We are talking about dozens of customers, which are big. Sometimes, one month there will be one, the other months there will be two or three. I don't think that's going to be 50% always. I think this is kind of an outlier. I think we're going to maintain an accelerated pace of elements considering our current offers. What can change our pace? If we unlock new verticals and Paytime as a bet we are making, they have very good business, small to mid-sized company that's going to join our figures, but then we can work with large ecosystems. Nobody has done that well in Brazil yet.
We have the ambition that we can do it quite well, but this is not going to change for the next three or four quarters. Paytime will contribute based on the business as is that it already has. The combination of that with new customers will provide similar pace of growth for upcoming years, not only sprint in 2026, but we expect to keep on growing in upcoming years. It's always that. Look ahead two or three years, creating the right path, bringing new customers and additional payment verticals or maybe a new business model, such as the one of Paytime, so that we can keep on growing as is or even faster. Have I answered your question?
Absolutely. Thank you, Pedro. If I may, I think there is an interesting topic.
We had a video that we recorded addressing artificial intelligence, and much has been said about AI and how companies are interacting with consumers, especially in interactive channels. I think it would be an interesting topic to address. How do you see the role of AI in the development of Bemobi solutions?
This is a question that has a number of perspectives. I'm just going to choose two of them. Three, rather. I think there are three opportunities. Two opportunities and one defense. First opportunity, especially for those who work in technology and products. The cycle between prototyping, ideation, and execution has reduced dramatically with AI. Productivity is increasing materially, because we can deliver more with less, and we've been very aggressive and proactive in changing dramatically the way we develop new products, really to impact the technology.
It has changed a lot in the last quarter, and it's a fact what we used to do before November last year is completely different from what we can do today. New tools, new models. We are very actively trying to lead the wave, do more with less, in other words. You may argue that it's also a threat because new incumbents with less investment would be able to come up with solutions and softwares from scratch and start challenging Bemobi. But that's an important differentiation to make. Isolated software which are not part of an ecosystem, not operating in a regulated area integrated with payment, are more subject to be disrupted as we were doing. The other way, the CFO said, he killed three SaaS solutions that we were using internally with solution developed in one afternoon. It's true.
If you don't have a level of integration, ecosystem, the effect of network, if you're not operating with financial elements, you are more subject to disruption. Bemobi, we've created a moat. It's a barrier because our software is non-isolated. It's highly integrated in a value chain, integrated at clients' level with regulated services. I think that to some extent it creates a barrier, like a protective wall, compared to isolated software creators. The other side of the coin, and something that I could quite enjoy, is the new opportunities brought by it. How can we create a more effective offer to improve conversion, reducing fraud, or even trying to access the new world? Very plausible setting because those that have been working with us will help us deal with the elements.
A company which is a payment specialist has to be open to alternative scenarios and be investing on it. We cannot say that the revenues are associated with AI solutions. It's too early to say that, but we are paying close attention, and we see it much more as an opportunity to go into new markets. We are a very small company considering the size of the market where we operate. We still have got much more to learn and to operate. Once again, we could be here on and on for two hours talking about it, but just a little bit of what we've been thinking.
Good. Let's schedule for a two-hour talk, right, later. Thank you very much. Great results.
Maybe two hours wouldn't be enough.
Next question, Maria Clara with Itaú. Let's see, Maria Clara. Hello.
Good morning, everyone. Good morning, Pedro, André. Kudos to you. Great results. I have two questions, the first one related to growth in new geographies. You've announced your first customer in Mexico, Telcel, and I would like to ask you to explore further what we can expect in terms of your expansion into new markets. Where do you see opportunities, and whether this is an opportunity to you even though we know that there is still a lot of marginal growth to derive in Brazil. Second question concerning profitability. You've said that you are not going to waste any opportunity of growth. You've been investing in all of the opportunities you see. In the report, you said something about operational leverage.
Could you please tell us a bit more about how to think the effect of operational leverage as payments get more and more traction, towards 2026? How does payment differs from the rest of the business? Thank you very much.
Great questions. I would be very careful in terms of projections for the international market. Not because we don't like it, but it's something that is our differentiation and also a challenge. We see there are different industries, different countries, and by getting specialized, you unlock so much value. Different countries also have specificities. Understanding the industry, for example, telco in Brazil and in Mexico are similar. That's a fact. Utility in Brazil and in Chile are quite different. The ecosystems are very different.
Yes, we can use what we've learned, but we need time, attention to be able to replicate equivalent value propositions similarly to what we do in Brazil. It'll be. We are very careful. We are making very precise proposals. We are just working in two countries only. In Chile, very much focused on utilities, and in Mexico, very much focused on telecommunication companies. As we learn more, maybe we can revisit and start emphasizing more. As an analyst, I would consider an optionality. I would analyze it to understand to what extent our capability can be replicated in other countries, but be very careful to expect major growth in these countries. I think it's too early.
At the same time, each quarter, we get more excited about seeing compliance with what we are doing in Brazil and how we can expand that to other industries. We can see some markets that could get more and more penetration into that payment markets, about 1% of everything of the possibility we could have in Brazil. Yes, enthusiasm in the medium term, there's nothing that would prevent us from capturing the advantages of this market. We have been very careful to really be able to capture the opportunities we can see in Brazil. Now, going to the second part of your question about margins, we have a number of vectors just to shed some light on operational leverage. I'm going to give you some examples.
We are going to bring Paytime for the first time consolidated in the results in the next quarter. Paytime, it's much smaller than Bemobi, so it's going to start with an EBITDA margin which is lower than Bemobi, which will bring down our margins. At the same time, as Paytime grows and we have understood the market levers. There is nothing structural in it that wouldn't allow it to have a better margins close to ours, especially because we are going to find synergies. In the short term, it's going to be in growth, but it will apply some pressure because it's much smaller, some negative pressure considering our current numbers. In the midterm, it will be reabsorbed because it's going to get scale and keep on growing.
As we are working with new payment methods that have the same value such as PIX, the exchange payment, we are going to have a further acceleration, but the contribution margin may go down very few percentage points actually. Another factor is the following. For some time, increasing OpEx not away from revenues and contribution margin can make sense for future perspective. We see CapEx, even though we've been investing in innovation growing as much as expected. EBITDA minus CapEx, you can have better margins. I'm not giving you single numbers, but these are the main drivers to be considered to understand where we are heading to. The margin continues to be stable. There is room for improvement, but it's always a trade-off of not putting too much pressure to prevent growth. That would be a negative trade-off.
I haven't shared numbers, but I think that it gives you some elements to help you understand how the drivers would work. Does it make sense?
Absolutely. Thank you very much, Pedro. Thank you.
Bruno, do we have time for one more question?
Yes. The next question by Gabriel Vaz de Lima with Morgan Stanley. Gabriel, please. Maybe Gabriel is no longer with us. I don't know.
Let me ask two questions that were submitted through the chat, and maybe Gabriel, if showing up, can ask later. First, about the international situation M&A of Paytime, I think we've answered that already. We've also talked about AI. Hapvida and TPV and some comments about Unimed, if you could make it. Healthcare. Especially healthcare insurance benefits. This is the latest initiative that we have had. Hapvida is a very ambitious project.
It has an idea of digitizing all its processes of billing, and we are their partners to do it. We've been working for something like eight months. The first phase is going to be in place in the second quarter of this year. Results will be perceived slowly, and by the end of the year, it's going to become more and more relevant. It's going into effect, and then it gets more importance and really traction in upcoming quarters. Unimed, for those that follow healthcare sectors, they are a confederation. There are different Unimeds. They are healthcare medical cooperatives that distribute healthcare insurance.
We have like 15 branches. Some of them are small and mid-size, very much in the beginning. But they bring us some interesting elements that the compliance with the payment method that we have developed, it h as a very good fit. Failing to pay means no coverage to healthcare insurance holders, and you won't have the same contract terms, and there is also the grace period, and that can be a problem. Therefore, this kind of behavior in a sector which is not highly digitalized indicates that there is a possibility of unlocking more value.
Even though the Unimed branches we're working with are small, we have an added value by TPV, which is even higher than other industries. It's very much beginning. Hapvida is the first large size customer we're working with, but the initial experience we have had with Unimed is quite encouraging for Hapvida and for other potential players in the industry, and we've been trying to develop additional possibilities. It seems to be a very promising sector. Have I answered all questions?
That's it, Pedro. Yeah. You've answered them all. Well, that said, it closes our Q&A session.
Thank you all very much for joining us, and thank you for following us at Bemobi. Pedro.
We are still talking about the fourth quarter of 2025, which seems to be in the past. We are thinking about 2026, and we've been thinking about it for the past six months probably. We are now considering the beginning of the new year. All our hypotheses seem to be much more concrete, very good momentum, and closeness with new potential customers. It's great. We are very optimistic with the perspectives for the next eight, nine months. Bear in mind, as Bruno has pointed out, that this is a process of going step by step, not doing anything overnight, really working closely with customers and maintaining the stability that we have achieved in previous quarters. Thank you very much. I wish you all great weekend. Thank you.
Thank you. Bye-bye.