Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to our strategy day. We're delighted you're joining us online. I just want to introduce myself. I'm Alex Nicoll, Investor Relations at Unifiedpost. Today, we have an exciting agenda planned for you. We'll discuss Unifiedpost strategy, recent developments, and future prospects. We aim to provide you a comprehensive understanding of where we stand and where we're headed. The presentation will last approximately 1.5 hours, and then we'll open the floor to Q&A for 30 minutes. If we overrun slightly on the presentation, we might go over in time to ensure there's enough time to answer all the questions. During the presentation, please use the chat to submit your questions, which we will answer at the end. Before we begin the presentation, I would like to draw your attention to the disclaimer on slide 2.
I will, which sets out the legal framework under which this presentation must be considered, and which I will assume you have read. I will now hand you over to our CEO and founder, Hans Leybaert.
Thank you, Alex. Welcome everybody on this strategy update session. Today we want to give you an overview of where we stand and what will the future bring. So first of all, we want to give you a clear message about our core business and the core business where we grow to, and how it can bring us to a very profitable company, and how we can build that company as a sustainable business with a long-term and independent focus. So secondly, we understand that our business model is quite regulation-dependent. However, underlying, there are quite some business drivers which are within a modular approach, also, important business drivers without being dependent on this regulation.
So we want to crystallize this untapped potential, give more insight in this, and make and show you that this model can work in a modular approach, and on the other hand, an integrated approach based on e-invoicing. Of course, the operational execution of all this is crucial to make that we can realize all these opportunities and all the onboardings that come to us. On the governance level, our reality is constantly changing.
The mix of shareholders is changing, so our governance is always open for introspection and open to get aligned to the exact reflection of our shareholdership, including the, or complemented with independent board members. The past four years, I have to stress that we have worked together in a very prosperous way, and a very cooperative way, and I thank actually the team to get here, because it was not always an easy period, quite complex because of different circumstances, but we achieved what we needed to achieve to get here.
To get here, to grab that big opportunity of digitization in the future. So, always open to reflect on it, always open to reflect on the team, always with the goal to realize the plan that we have. Point four, important here, a proactive stakeholder engagement. I must say that, or I must admit here that this could be better? So in the past, clarifying our model, explaining where we work on and what we are trying to achieve, it was not always, that's not always the best way how to present it to the outside world. There is certainly room for improvement. Also, on the model and the accountability and the transparency level, we can improve the model.
So we hope that we can bring you that to a level that you... We give you more insight in our business, the business drivers, and how our mid-model will evolve, what it is today, and well, how it will evolve in the future. So, taking a few steps back, we of course are on a long track since 2000, but of course, the IPO was a crucial point in time and changed our reality. So let's reflect from there and see where we stand, huh?
On the first place, we had an IPO, and if I look to the initial ambitions in the prospectus and the corresponding stock price, it's fair to say that we underperform, huh? That's. The results are what they are. We can always find reasons for this, but of course, there was a macroeconomic circumstances. But the impact of the delay in France impacted our short-term figures. But on the other hand, we executed our plan to become a Pan-European player, building a state-of-the-art technology that can bring us that will guarantees a future for the coming 10, 20 years.
So that makes that parallel to that on first glance underperforming figures, we have really built a company that's ready for taking the opportunity of the digital age, huh? ViDA, VAT in the digital age will be approved in the coming days by the European Commission, which makes that's really kicking off the digitization of our business. crossinx was the necessary step to have the right technology in-house for digital communication. We come from a hybrid world where PDFs and email were the standards, and we go to full data communication. There were only a few players in this market. Pagero was one of them, recently bought by Thomson Reuters.
crossinx was another one, and market leader in Germany at the same time. I see this more as a strategic partnership with the shareholders of crossinx, because they were paid more than half in shares. Which makes that they joined our long-term vision and our long-term approach to make a Pan-European platform for digitization. To get there, to get this all integrated, to make that one company, also from an organizational level and on a technology level, we had to attract a bridge financing. A bridge financing from Francisco Partners, initially seen as quite expensive, but it is a bridge financing.
On that moment, it wasn't. We were not ready to have traditional bank financing, because it's a bridge to a business model that can bring this to a level that is, it becomes bankable. So this bridge financing is a facility over 5 years, still 3 years to go, with yeah and the step. Also a bit the reason of the underperformance, the delay in France, which was a key item in our prospectus.
But again, the opportunity of France is not away; it's only postponed, and it's even more anchored because the partnership that we had in time with the Accounting Association in France has turned out now in a joint venture that we have with the Accounting Association, which is called Facturel, and which is actually the hoster of JeFacture, where we go in detail afterwards. So today our following colleagues will join me in explaining our business. On the first place, our new CFO, Koen De Brabander. He will explain you the financial framework and how we can translate our business model in a simple model to extrapolate what our business will reflect in the future.
Jan, responsible for international business, will give you an insight in the different models on e-invoices to corporates, to SMEs, and also on the corporate, the government models, where because some countries choose for a centralized government-driven model. Very important, still small, but huge opportunity, the ultimate leverage on our on our e-invoicing layer is payments. So Arthur, CEO of Unifiedpost, Unifiedpost Payments, the regulated payment institution, will give you some details and insights in our payments business. Finally, David will give you, as Director of Strategy, a detailed overview of our implementation of our strategy and how we turn our vision into into practice. So, the topics of today then, of course, the business model.
What's our core business? What's our core business, and what is not core, and how we want to handle this in the future? The value chain that we have in a, like I said, in the beginning, a modular approach or an integrated approach, or a step-up model from modular to integrated. And of course, digitization as the catalyst for growth, e-invoicing, yeah, it's only the start for a full digital working, full digital interaction between buyer and supplier. So e-invoicing as the catalyst for growth in a lot of directions and dimensions. Scalability, readiness, the +25 million companies, 25 million independents in the EU, must go over in the coming 5-7 years to towards full digitization.
It's an absolute must to have a platform which can absorb these massive amounts of connectivities, members of the network, so scalability, self-service is crucial in this approach. We have to do this with a cost discipline approach, getting that breakeven position, because like I said, regulation can delay. We have a modular approach, but cost discipline is crucial to further elaborate the company if you have a long-term independent strategy. Financial commitment with where we explain the financial framework to ensure the cash generation and meet the medium term targets. So let's zoom in on the digital service, our core services.
They are built around five pillars: the e-invoicing as such, e-invoicing as a service. The payments, complementary to this and relatively new, the reporting, because tax compliance becomes a very important topic, and it's immediately related to real-time invoicing. Nothing without a strong identity. Business identities are a core element in digitization. Without a secure identity, secure services, digital services are not an option. Finally, we will zoom in on the government platforms, which is actually complementary to e-invoicing as a service. Countries, some countries choose for buying a license and install it, and give it for free to their businesses. That's, and there we also have a proposition.
So actually, we fade away from hybrid digital services, PDF, email, and of course, paper, towards these core digital services. So first of all, we had a divestment. We are now in some divestment cases. Why? Actually, we did an acquisition track where we wanted to step in the market by, let's say, step in the hybrid hybrid communication. Why? That secures the volumes. A paper invoice will become an electronic invoice somewhere over time. So stepping in this business, locking in the customers, and getting footprint in a country from where we can build the network, that was the rationality to do the investments in and the acquisitions in 2021, 2021, 2022. So now we are...
But the rationale that we bought that company if we push it away. The goal was always to make the step up towards full digital. I think the recent announcement now of 21grams, where we are in discussions with PostNord, shows what we want to achieve there. The print and post and the postal and parcel service goes to the company, which is best placed to manage this. But at the same time, we make a partnership to serve these customers for our full B2B proposition.
So it's on one hand, putting the hybrid business on the right place, and on the other hand, it's making a unlocking, a very important Nordic market with the with the right party who has the customers, and where we can do upselling from their the from their existing customer relationship and their existing services. So there are some divestments with a different nature. It can go from postal and parcel, it can go from with Fitek in, we have the robotic accounting, right? Which is is not our core business, but the network for e-invoicing, it's core. So it goes hand in hand, partnership on the network, robotic accounting as a divestment, and we continue the business together.
So different techs are running, and it's a, yeah, a high priority in 2024 to conclude them all, so that we can have filtered out our real core business. Of course, there are proceeds coming in, which makes that we reduce our net debt, and we can strengthen our cash position, complementary to the business model that develops himself, which makes that it our balance sheet becomes lighter, and we can reflect on how we finance our business in the future. So on the core business, I talked about e-invoicing, payments, identity reporting, but like I said, the four topics are only a catalyst for four broader services. We are stepping in a world where everything will be digital, everything will be data, huh?
That is very, very simple. From quote to cash, it must be all integrated, all real time, and it will be all data. Data that can be analyzed, that can have artificial intelligence on top of it, but fully integrated full data. Order to cash, procure to pay, it will be all data exchange instead of PDF paper exchange. Additional services, or in this order to cash flow, additional services like cash optimization, like, yeah, complementary to payments, of course, working capital financing, are extra services that can be plugged in on top of it. So once digital, there is a whole world opening, that for additional services to streamline the full chain of process of doing business.
So our goal is to build that network with these four triangles in hand, and actually, work out a network. E-reporting with the complexity of product data management, the tax regimes, different taxes, VAT, plastic tax, all these things must be incorporated in that central model. We want to do this, and that's quite ambitious. We want to do this for any type of business, and that, that's a bit different from our competition, who only focus on small businesses or on larger businesses. We focus on every type of business. Why? Because we believe that a small business communicates with a large business and reverse. So we have to serve any type of needs for whatever business.
So that's that makes that we incorporate a few different models because if you go from a massive subscription-based model for hundreds of thousands of businesses, that's different from a corporate that buys a solution for being compliant on a global scale. Yeah, that's another sales process. All these types of sales processes require typical partnerships. Partnerships, accountants for SMEs, consultancy companies for larger businesses. So we try to build out a network of partners that can leverage on our platform to give the right solutions to our customer base. Last but not least, always behind an identity, no secure services without a strong identity.
eIDAS 2.0, which is a European regulation on identity, will become an obligation for every member state of the EU by 2026, maybe within 18-20 months. And then, we can rely on strong identities for any person, individual, and we upgrade it to the level of businesses. We will zoom in on this also in our further explanation. So, like I said, and that's a bit, yeah, that's important for today to understand and to explain, is that this integrated approach is not an all or nothing approach. No one steps in with taking the 4, the 4 triangles at the same time.
So that's why we, we have incorporated in our model, actually a gradual upgrade. We will give you an example of pure the identity case, what we have rolled out in the Netherlands, and then the upstep to e-invoicing, or the upstep to payments, and further on towards the full integrated solution. No one steps in with the more e-digitization evolves, of course, the more we move to the complete integrated approach. But until today, it's a mixture. That makes also that our business model looks like something, yeah, yeah, a bit of everything? And we need to split that, that's what we want to give, give you insights in, on the, on the different, yeah, let's say, triangles.
Where they fit in, what's the business model behind, and how is the RPU evolution based on this rollout towards the fully full four triangles. So that's also the guideline for this presentation, where we explain what's the modularity, which is not regulation dependent, but the full triangle is what we need when regulation kicks off, which is, of course, which will become an important booster in for our further elaboration of our business model. So let's go now to David, who will give you more insights in what we exactly do and how our digital processing is configured.
Thank you, Hans. Also, a warm welcome from my side. Before I dive into the details of our business, I will briefly outline the market we operate in. Next, I will talk about which position we take in that market, how we are going to make a difference, how our growth model works, and what the impact is of the regulatory changes expected in the years ahead. Let's start. In today's markets, businesses are outsourcing non-differentiating activities while managing costs and ensuring data integrity. There's a rising demand for integrated business solutions to meet regulatory requirements, but also to streamline operations. Companies face challenges with data volume, while advances in cloud, data, and artificial intelligence accelerate innovation. Regulatory complexity and digital security concerns require careful attention. Businesses must adapt their operational models to remain agile and resilient, avoiding operational delays and reputational damage.
Let's delve deeper into which role we play in this market. First of all, with Banqup, we provide businesses with services across four domains, as outlined by Hans using the four triangles concept. We digitize and streamline purchase and sales processes with e-invoicing as a central component. With e-payments, we enable companies to pay and get paid. With e-identity, we authenticate and authorize private persons to act on behalf of verified businesses, fully aligned with their mandates. And with e-reporting, we make businesses compliant with statutory reporting requirements. For all these services, our business model primarily consists of subscription and transaction revenue. In the payments domain, we also generate additional revenue streams through financial and financing fees. We have reported about our license business for governments in the past. Those licenses are commercialized under the eFaktura brand and are complementary to our business offering.
As eFaktura focuses on e-invoicing and VAT reporting for governments, there is a pathway for us to offer value-added services via Banqup to the businesses that are linked to the governmental platform. Later in this presentation, Jan will present the case study regarding eFaktura. So now you have an idea of our key drivers of our business, let me guide you through our competitive advantages. We operate in a fragmented market with a diverse mix of global and local companies. While many competitors fall into one of the four triangles, the extent and design of their offerings within a specific product area can vary. We build our platform from the ground for a multi-country market and with multi-functions, all related to the administrative side of sales and purchase processes, with e-invoicing being the central component.
We stand out by providing a comprehensive model and an integrated solution that goes beyond geographical boundaries. This unique approach allows us to address a broader customer segment compared to most peers. We connect those customers, which are buyers and sellers, to the Banqup network, no matter the size and wherever they are, on our network or on a third-party network, with the goal to exchange business documents such as quotes, orders, and invoices, and perform payments. A crucial advantage is our own payment infrastructure. Others have integrated third-party payment providers, but with our own payment infrastructure, we have the advantage that we can go further in the integration than any other platform, as we deeply understand the invoicing and the payment business needs.
As we believe that all interactions between businesses should happen in a trustworthy manner, and not only payments, we require every customer to go through a thorough KYC and KYB process. To cope with the scale, we made the onboarding process completely self-service, and we are automating the processing of onboarding requests. Later in this presentation, Arthur will go in more depth in our identity and payment solutions. This wraps up the quick overview of the competitive advantages we achieve with our technology platform. About our technology platform, in 2020, we have clearly expressed our ambition to become a leading cloud-based platform for SME business services. We did acquisitions to expand in both regions and capabilities. After a period of integrating all the different solutions, we started consolidating the different solutions into one single platform under the brand Banqup.
Today, one centralized product division builds and expands our capabilities in the four triangles, driven by the insights of our leading experts in those domains. Those capabilities are offered in one global, scalable platform that offers a high degree of flexibility, which allows us to adapt to the specific needs of countries, industries, and individual customers. To have maximum control over compliance, functionality, costs, pricing, and usability, we want to have full ownership of the core offering, which boils down to the four triangles. On the other hand, we are very open, as we have made the platform ready for third parties to build upon. We facilitate integration into existing software products and IT landscapes. We don't have the ambition to replace existing ERP or CRM systems. We merely want to enrich them with the capabilities of the four triangles.
While doing so, we gather a lot of valuable business data about the purchase and sales process of a business, including payment transactions. This allows us to build data-driven services that use a network of connected data, that includes data from individual companies, their suppliers, and their customers. This opens the door for new opportunities and solutions that leverage those business insights. For our commercial approach, we have segmented our target customers into multiple categories. For our large enterprise clients, we have a direct approach. We have a dedicated sales team that engages with these organizations to understand their specific requirements. Our solutions for large enterprises are designed to be highly configurable, which allows us to create tailored solutions that seamlessly integrate with existing systems of those large enterprises.
That also gives us the opportunity to collaborate with top consulting firms that do the implementation, with the additional benefit that they bring us leads and projects. In contrast, for SMEs, we adopt an indirect approach to our partner network. We recognize that SMEs often have similar operational needs, so we provide a standardized solution that addresses these common requirements efficiently. Through our partner ecosystem, we collaborate with organizations that have a deep understanding of the local markets that can effectively reach SMEs. A good example of our partnership approach is our collaboration with ECMA in France. Together with ECMA, we introduced JeFacture to the French market. Jan will give an update about that partnership later in this presentation. With eFaktura, we provide a trusted platform to enable governments to introduce all tax compliance and reporting models.
We use a direct approach, but are often supported by global implementation partners. To ensure our strategy is implemented effectively throughout the organization, we have set up a strong product division that works very closely with sales through bridge to business teams, that focus on specific areas like compliance, pre-sales, marketing, and partner management. The success story of MAN, which will be explained in more detail by Jan later in this presentation, illustrates how this approach pays off. Initially, MAN, a client of crossinx, faced challenges in onboarding small suppliers to e-invoicing. Our sales team identified this need and recognized that Banqup for SMEs could provide a solution. A customized demonstration by our pre-sales team convinced MAN that Banqup was indeed the right choice. By using our expertise in compliance and the forthcoming regulations to our advantage, we convinced MAN to promote the adoption of Banqup among its smaller suppliers.
This collaboration led to joint marketing efforts with MAN, and any necessary platform adjustments were prioritized by our development teams. This kind of collaborations will help us to grow our business. But let's talk about growth. To foster business growth, it's crucial to retain existing customers. That's why we actively listen and address common customer needs, resulting in low churn rate, which we aim to maintain. Additionally, there exists potential for upselling and upgrading within our customer base, including increased transaction volume, additional subscriptions, expanded services, or even adoption of additional domains. Historically, many of our customers have utilized services from only one or two of the triangles, presenting opportunities for upselling. Also, our network holds the opportunity to attract businesses that we reach, but are not using a paid subscription of Banqup yet.
To attract new corporate customers, our primary approach is direct engagement with the market, supported by consultancy firms. For SMEs, our strategy aims to acquire new customers through an indirect approach, leveraging our partner network. As our platform continues to grow, the power of network effects comes into play. With each new company and partner joining our ecosystem, the value of our platform increases. Moreover, as the network expands, it attracts even more companies and partners, creating a virtuous cycle of growth and value creation. Our growth strategy will benefit from the regulatory momentum expected in the years ahead. While the timelines for mandates may vary, their eventual activation is inevitable. As these regulatory changes are beyond our control, our focus remains on diligent preparation to effectively navigate and capitalize on the forthcoming mandates.
I'll indicate how we do that in a minute, but first, let's run over some key figures providing evidence that our SaaS business is gaining momentum. I won't delve into the numbers extensively at this point. Koen will provide a detailed analysis later in this presentation. Instead, I'll highlight some key areas that deserve attention. First to notice is that a substantial part of our revenue is recurring revenue that consists of subscription and transaction revenue streams. Importantly, both subscription and transaction revenue have demonstrated consistent growth. You'll also observe a disparity between served customers and direct paying customers. This is where the network effect becomes evident. For example, large corporations, often buyers, invite their business partners, such as suppliers, and cover for their subscription costs. Our network also holds the opportunity to attract businesses that we reach, but are not using a paid subscription.
Within our network of under 2 million customers, there is a potential of another under 2 million businesses not using Banqup. We also notice that the revenue per customer is increasing. Koen will show how our modular business model offers an opportunity to accelerate ARPU growth with clear ARPU targets per triangle. As I indicated before, our growth strategy will benefit from the regulatory momentum expected in the years ahead. ViDA, VAT in the digital age, is a new proposal to tackle the challenges presented to traditional VAT systems due to the emergence of the digital economy. Now, ViDA sparks the rush towards e-invoicing and e-reporting regulations and mandates in the member states. We outlined some upcoming milestone, but most importantly, for each of those member states, we have defined a comprehensive strategy to increase our market share. Let's take France as an example.
For France, the e-invoicing mandate is expected to become active by September 2026. We have been preparing for this since 2020. We have a joint venture with ECMA to bring Banqup into the market under the branch of Facturel. Together with ECMA, we can access about 20,000 accounting firms, which all have, on average, more than 50 clients. This is already a significant share of the addressable market in France. As we understand that ecosystem integration is the key to success of the platform, we are continuously adding partnerships with accounting solutions, CRM solutions, and ERP packages to improve our position. So we will be ready for the French e-invoicing mandate that is expected in September 2026. This mandate will push a lot of SMEs towards solutions like Banqup, especially in the segment of micro and small companies.
To wrap this section up, we have a long-lasting, in-depth understanding of the market dynamics with leading experts in each triangle that contribute its strategic direction. But how is that going to make us win deals? Well, the combination of our modular proposition, the integrated solution on top of it, and the way we network those, allows us to offer solutions for entire ecosystems of companies of different sizes. We can make the difference in level of integration, customization, and business model, as all triangles of our platform, including payments, are our own proprietary technology. We have meticulously crafted a commercial engine that takes into account how each customer segment operates. For corporations, we have chosen a direct approach with implementation partners. In context for SMEs, we adopt an indirect approach through our partner network. The growth drivers in each of those segments are similar: automation, control, and compliance.
Businesses want to increase cost efficiency to more control and automation of processes. Governments want to decrease the VAT gap by optimizing tax reporting, leading to regulations that result in compliance challenges for businesses that need to be addressed. For both businesses and governments, tax administrations, we have a solution, and that is how we will scale. This concludes the overview of our digital processing activities. I will now pass it over to first Jan, and then Arthur, to demonstrate how we use our platform in practice.
Thank you, David. Thank you and good afternoon, everybody. My name is Jan Druppel. I'm in charge of the international business development at Unifiedpost Group, and I will be talking to you about three case studies on e-invoicing. I'll be talking to you about a governmental initiative that with eFaktura. I will be talking to you about JeFacture, that has been mentioned before, the SME platform in France. I will be talking about MAN, MAN, a corporate, of course, that was a customer by of crossinx, and for which we have done a recent project. Let's just dive into these three business cases, these three case studies. The first one is eFaktura. eFaktura is a solution, a governmental solution.
It's a centralized e-invoicing exchange system, which basically means that all of the invoices in Serbia will have to go through this system. That is basically what we mean with centralized e-invoice exchange, and it's for all kind of activities. So I mean, it's for business to government, business to business, government to business, government to government. So all of the invoices in these domains have to go through this centralized government system. Now, of course, our contracting party is the Ministry of Finance. And what they wanted to do actually, with this platform, with this initiative, as we know, Serbia has the ambition to join the European Union.
What they wanted to do and what it wanted to show was to show to other countries and the European Union, that they are in control of their VAT Gap. So this is the case. A couple of interesting facts about this platform. Well, the first one is, the use of the platform for the user, so for the companies who have to, you know, send their invoices, upload their invoices, receive their invoices, is free of charge. Our contracting party is the government, and what we provide is a user interface and an API system, and both of them are free. What basically happens is that all of the invoices are delivered to the platform.
As a company, you have to pick up your purchase invoices from the platform, and all commercial e-invoicing platforms must be integrated with eFaktura. Okay? Of course, what we see is that in the mid-market companies, the slightly more evolved companies, a lot of them are using the APIs. They don't want to change their way of working, their ERP, their CRM. They simply want to connect to this platform, and therefore they're using the APIs. The small companies, and traditionally, what we see is the companies using Word, Excel as an engine to generate their invoices. Well, that is no longer possible because you have to send your invoices basically as data. So you cannot use these tools anymore.
You really have to have a platform to generate electronic invoices, and there we have the solution on eFaktura to generate e-invoices through the user interface. Couple of interesting facts is that it took us 22 months from the commercial agreement to the go live. Another interesting fact is the fact that, of course, through this platform, we are connected to the entirety of the European network, so we are compatible with all of the different e-invoice formats in all the different countries. Again, what I said before, the usage is free, but of course, we have a commercial contract with the Serbian government for the implementation, for the maintenance, and for the upgrades. Now, what I really want to show you with this case study is... and you can see the graph on the right-hand side.
The Serbian government implemented the first mandate for electronic invoicing on a G2B and a G2G level, so government to business and government to government. What we saw is, you know, we had low activity. We were at about 700,000-800,000 invoices per month. The formal mandate for electronic invoicing came in the B2B environment, so business to business. It came in January 2023, and if you look at the graph, you will immediately see what the impact of regulation will be on e-invoicing. You could see that even in the first month, the volume of invoices really went through the roof, and in three months' time, 220,000 SMEs.
So basically, SMEs and other companies, by the way, basically in three months' time, all of these companies onboarded on the platform and started using it. So you can see the impact of regulation. As soon as regulation kicks in, and we see it in all of the countries, automatically, all of these companies will start using e-invoicing platform. Maybe a couple of interesting facts, just to give you an idea on the volumes, et cetera. 6%, maybe first, 50% of our users of eFaktura are using the user interface. So like I explained, it's mostly small companies. 50% are using the APIs. And if you look at the linked volumes of it, you can see that only 6% of the volume is generated through the user interface.
So what this means is 50% of the companies are using the interface, but they're only generating about 6% of the 10-11 million invoices we are actually treating on a monthly basis. So maybe a couple of, you know, a couple of results we can take away from this case is that the Serbian government implemented the system, and it's really a huge success story for a couple of reasons. First of all, what we see is that we had a very short implementation time. Second thing is that we are compatible with all other European and even worldwide formats, and compatible with all the government initiatives that we have in the European Union.
A third one, and I think it's a really important one, this platform and this initiative that was implemented by our Serbian team proves that we can actually, on our technology, we can handle large volumes. We can onboard a lot of companies in a very short time. So I think that eFaktura is really a success story that we can share with other countries, which basically we are doing today. So we are discussing this implementation. We are talking to different countries on different continents because the Serbian case has been such a success story. Second case I want to talk to you about is JeFacture. So JeFacture, like both Hans and David have mentioned before, JeFacture is actually a decentralized, continuous transaction control and exchange system. What does it mean? It's a private initiative.
So contrary to eFaktura in Serbia, JeFacture is a private initiative and is the result of a joint venture between ECMA and Unifiedpost Group. And ECMA is actually the technological daughter, if you want, of the French National Institution of Accountants in France. Now, how does it work? So ECMA, the technological division of the institute, will invite their members, who are the accounting firms, and these accounting firms will invite their customers to onboard on the platform. And like David said, we have about 4 million SMEs. Again, same as in JeFacture, we offer them a solution with a user interface and with API technology, and we are fully and automatically integrated with the governmental platform in France, that is called Chorus Pro.
Of course, very important for the SME community, very important for the accounting industry, is that we are, of course, connected to all major accounting software. I think, and I can say today, that we are integrated with basically all of the major players, and we're still adding. And another element that I want to stress, as in France, the VAT declaration is closely linked to the payments. So you can only deduct VAT if your invoice is paid. We added the layer of payments so that the users of our system can upgrade to Banqup with a fully integrated payment module and of course, other added value proposals. Now, just to give you an idea, again, on the timeline. So, in January 2022, we launched the beta platform. We started in 2020.
We launched the beta platform, and in 2022, January 2022, and we saw the first accounting first coming on board. We had the official launch in January 2023, and what you can see, if you look at the graph, so the graph on the right-hand side, the upper one, what you can see is that in January 2022, a lot of accounting firms started to onboard. We practically doubled in one month time. We doubled because the original plan for the French government was to make it was to have the mandate for electronic invoicing in 2024. So the accountants were getting prepared. Sadly, as we've, as we know, the French government basically delayed the obligation for electronic invoicing. So then the curve kind of flattened.
But still today, and I'm looking at the situation of March 2024, so last month, we have today 18% of all accounting firms, about 3,550 accounting firms, have today onboarded on the platform. And just to give you an idea, these 3,550 accounting firms represent 710,000 customers, 710,000 SMEs, which is a substantial number. Now, as we know, and we see it on the graph of the onboarded SMEs, I mean, we're seeing it in all the countries, as long as there is no obligated mandate for... As long as the e-invoicing hasn't been, you know, made an obligation by the government, you can see that the companies don't really adapt easily.
They want to keep their way of working. There's not really a push from the accounting industry because it's not an obligation yet. But what we see is that as soon as the mandate will kick in, you will automatically have a growth, as I should say, of the SME. So I think this is an important thing to, you know, to consider, is that we have today a potential of 710,000 customers, and we're still two years away from the deadline. So there's potential for growth with JeFacture as well. Maybe the final case I will talk to you about is MAN. So, this is an e-invoicing delivery system for small and medium suppliers of MAN. Now, just to give you some background on what happened at MAN.
MAN is, of course, an automotive player that everybody knows, and we had the situation where more or less 175,000 invoices, purchase invoices at MAN, they were not digital. Of course, this is a company that is fully EDI-based, so their procurement is EDI-based. And what we saw is that the top 20% of the suppliers, they generated more or less 80% of the incoming volume at MAN. And these 20% of the supplier database, of course, were fully integrated in the EDI procurement. The other 80% of suppliers were basically SMEs. SMEs distributed over 17 countries in Europe.
What MAN asked us is, they said: "Listen, we need an internationally available platform, integrating with OpenPeppol, but also other systems, other initiatives." We had 28,000 SMEs, like I said, generating 175,000 invoices in 17 countries. Of course, a condition for this platform is that it's easy to use. Easy to use, not expensive to implement. It has to be a standard solution that companies are able to use very quickly. So easy onboarding, easy to use. And it had to be connected to the SAP ERP at MAN for automatic entry. Now, what we did is we started in 2023, and we set up a proof of concept with 25 companies in 7 countries. So Poland, Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Sweden, Austria, and Italy. So this is what we did.
We started, the company started to send their sales invoices to MAN, who, of course, at MAN became purchase invoices, and we started automatically in injecting them into the SAP. What we're doing now, this project went very well, by the way. So it was, it was a success. What we are currently doing at MAN is that we are kind of building a proof of concept marketing initiative with 1,800 suppliers in Poland. So we are both communicating, so MAN is communicating and kind of guiding their suppliers in Poland towards the Banqup solution, and we are, of course, on our Banqup website also talking about MAN. And we are guiding, we are kind of doing the same thing, but from our side.
The idea is that in Q3 and Q4 of 2024, all of the suppliers, so the 28,000 suppliers, will become customers of Banqup and can use our platform. They will be invited, by the way, by MAN in a one-to-one email, to start using Banqup to generate their sales invoices so that they are automatically picked up at the MAN. So this is again a huge opportunity. It means 28,000 additional users. Remember that I talked in the JeFacture case about today already 710,000 users. And of course, as you know, we have the 220,000 users in the government initiative in Serbia. So this concludes a little bit the e-invoicing initiatives.
Of course, these are just examples and I'm open to any kind of Q&A afterwards. But I would now like to hand over to Arthur, and Arthur will give you some more information on some case studies that we have in the identity and payment industry. So Arthur, over to you.
Thank you, Jan, for showing these interesting cases. My name is Arthur Paijens, and I'm responsible for payments and identity with the Unifiedpost. Today, I will start with a short introduction on identity, followed by an identity case, then I will go over payment solution, and finally, I will discuss a payment case. Let's first have a look at our identity solution. As explained by Hans and David, identity is a core component of our solution. When a business is authorizing a payment, approving an invoice, communicating with the government, it is important to maintain a high level of integrity, security, and validity when executing these transactions. Therefore, businesses need a strong identity solution. We have built a Pan-European solution by which businesses can identify and authorize their business transactions online. Our current solution is fully aligned with the existing identity regulation, the eIDAS regulation.
The EU recently approved the second eIDAS regulation. This includes the rollout of a European Digital Identity Wallet. This is something which Hans also explained in his introduction. Each EU citizen will get this wallet and will hold your most important credential, such as your ID card, passport, but it will, could also hold the IBAN bank account you own. The wallet can also contain a business identity. For example, I am a legal representative of Company X, Y, Z. This credential will be provided by an eIDAS-certified company. We will be an important player in this market by creating these business credentials and certificates for this wallet. Let me just discuss the eHerkenning case in the Netherlands. eHerkenning is one of the largest business identity schemes in Europe. Actually, there are two countries today who have a business identity, which is the Netherlands and Italy.
It started in 2009 as a public-private partnership. During the last years, we've become the largest provider of eHerkenning in the Netherlands via two of our brands. There are today more than 1 million businesses using eHerkenning, 75,000 logins per day, with over 6,000 server providers reachable. This case represents that we are well positioned to capture part of the upcoming European market as well. Let's have a look at our payment capabilities. As already mentioned by Hans, Unifiedpost Payments has an EU payment license from the National Bank of Belgium. In addition, over the last couple of years, we have obtained local regulatory approval from local central banks to issue local IBAN payment accounts in 19 countries, from which today 12 countries are fully live and operational.
This gives us a unique position to give our customers a local IBAN account to pay and get paid on, and hold credit balances on these accounts. Next to that, we also issue Mastercard debit cards. Our customers can use this card to pay online and in store from their own Banqup payment account. Customers can also give debit cards to their employees and control their spending by setting limits on their cards. Our debit card can also be used with Google and Apple Pay. We offer our customers also a full range of international and local payment methods. We have open banking connections with 350 banks in Europe and the U.K., reaching more than 1,500 sub banks. We are fully licensed Mastercard and Visa acquirer, and have a full range of local and international payment methods for our customers to use.
With these payment methods, we enable our client customers to pay online via payment link or QR code, and pay their invoices or orders using their preferred payment method. As mentioned before, all this will only work if we know our clients, if we know our businesses, and we can identify our clients. For these, we've built a complete online onboarding interface by which customers can simply, simply and quickly onboard and start working with us. In addition, we have several payment solutions for specific customer segments, such as our mobile payment terminal, providing retail customers in-store payment functionality on their own device by just simply downloading the software from the Apple and Google Store. We provide a complete payment interface for large corporate customers who want to initiate bill payment files in a very simple and easy way.
That could be from their existing bank accounts, but that could be also from our own payment accounts, which we can deliver to these corporates. We also have an integrated foreign currency payment solution for customers to pay their foreign currency supplier invoices. Finally, as Hans already mentioned, and also David, we offer our customers the possibility to get instant finance, like invoice financing. This solution is funded via capital from external funders such as Munich Re, one of the largest insurance company in the world. Now, let's go over to this slide, where you can see we have embedded all these identity and payment solutions in Banqup, our SME cloud solution. You can pay and get paid via your own local Banqup payment account.
And again, that local payment account is crucial because SMEs in a particular country want to use, of course, a local payment account in the country, and not some account of another country. So this is crucial that we have this local Banqup payment accounts now in 12 countries. But you will also, as a user of Banqup, get insight in your transactions and cash position today and in the near future. You will be able to do smart reconciliation, because we are actually giving you insight, not only in our payment account, which you get from us, but also in your existing bank accounts you already have with your existing banks. You can use the instant finance options if you are short in cash.
If you see that in the near future you have a short cash position, you can ask your customers to pay faster, you can pay your supplier later, but you can also use our instant finance options. You can use your mobile terminal to let your customers pay in store, so not any hardware needed, you just download it on your own device, and you can use it to get your customers pay in store. You can integrate our payment functionality in your web shop, and you can get paid faster by integrating payment links automatically in your sales invoices, pay your foreign currency suppliers directly, and pay your bills easy and simply using the payment account you will get from us. And you and your staff can pay with the Mastercard debit card and control all of the expenses online.
You've seen that our complete range of identity and payment solutions are embedded in Banqup, our SME client application. But more importantly, what Hans also said in the beginning, you know, this is fully then embedded in our Banqup solution, but we also embed our solution in third-party applications, such as other e-invoicing providers, accountancy application, and B2C and B2B e-commerce providers. One of the leading accountancy software companies in Europe has started embedding our open banking capabilities for their clients, that they get the account information, but also able to pay invoices using their existing bank accounts. We have several e-commerce providers using open banking as an alternative for expensive card payments, and multiple e-invoicing and biller providers have integrated our payment capabilities in their customer application.
We see that digitization has massively expanded opportunities to embed our payment capability further in third-party applications. Let me go into a payment case, a very interesting one. One of the examples of how we embedded payment solutions is the guardianship case in the Netherlands. In the Netherlands, there are over 340,000 people under care. These are people unable to manage their finances themselves. This could be because they are in debt, but it also can be that the person is not able to manage his finances because of illnesses like dementia. There are more than 2,000 caretakers in the Netherlands, of which 20% of the 2,000 take care of 80% of the clients under care.
One of the largest caretaker trade organizations, Horus, and the solution provider, Fyncard, came to us with the question to help them provide a better and more innovative way to provide payment services to the caretaker industry. Today, it takes over 30 days to open an account with a traditional bank, and more than 45 days extra to get all set up on this bank account by the caretaker. Time lost, and a lot of frustration with both client and caretaker. We have provided an innovative solution to the caretaker and his client to be able to quickly open a care account for the caretaker to manage the client finances, and an expense account with an app and a debit card for the client to do this, to do his day-to-day expenses.
As a result, our solution improved the opening time of accounts and management of the account substantially, providing a much more better service than the traditional banks in the Netherlands did. This is really a token that we are replacing traditional banks in the Netherlands, the main three banks, prominently, in the Netherlands, by providing the same but better service and more innovative service to the guardian industry in the Netherlands. This concludes the overview of our identity and payment activities, and I will now pass it over to Hans.
Thank you, Arthur. Thank you for also, Jan, for giving some insight in our payments, identity, and e-invoice business. So let's now wrap up on what are the strategic initiatives that we currently deploy and what we will deploy in the future. So simplifying the financial value chain between businesses is clearly our mission. Digitize it and simplify it, and optimize it. That's what we, that's now our goal, to do all the necessary steps to realize this. For us, it's absolutely crucial that the DNA of this model stays intact, that this plan can be executed. Okay, we are in the middle of a process. The market is popping up in the near future, but execution of the plan and continuation of the plan is crucial.
We have the ambition to realize this vision, as I repeat it again, with a long-term strategy as an independent company that's able to work with every type of partner. Because if we want to build that network, we need a lot of partners, a lot of stakeholders to establish that network and connect everyone with everyone. That's why our independency is an absolute must to become our model successful. So if I overlook the strategic actions that we will take in a coming period is, of course, expansion within the digital processing ecosystem, more businesses, more upselling, more capabilities for our businesses so that they can interact in a more integrated way and actually work together in a more efficient way.
We need to execute the divestment plans to be able to focus clearly on our core business and have a investment-only approach on this core business. Sustainable, profitable growth, very important, our business model passes through a phase where it is cash generation, that's the drivers, which Koen will explain, is the volumes and the number of customers that we have and the upselling that we can bring on a high growth margin business. We have the customer centricity, the technology must be there. We have a commercial engine which is based on partnerships.
Operational excellence, right from the beginning, the first touch point of our customer onboarding on our company, first suspect phase towards the full customer service afterwards, it must be an end-to-end experience, which is, which, which is perfect from A to Z. So the solutions need to be to build the sustainable solutions, it's of course, it's a real-time business. It's a 24/7 business with large volumes, fully self-service. That are the absolute requirements to become successful in this fast-growing business ecosystem. Disciplined performance. Yes, growth is important, the profitability is important, and so that means that we have a financial discipline, which is crucial to respect.
Of course, this is, we explained to you the modular approach, the integrated approach. It all comes together when regulation kicks off, so being able to onboard millions of businesses is, is, yeah, you need to be ready for this, huh? You need to be ready, on different levels. Partners need to be able to onboard their customers. Massive amounts of customers need to be, need to have a correct service. So the dimensions are different when you have hundreds or thousands of customers, and when you go to millions of customers. So that's why we also prepared ourselves to be able to do this massive onboarding. I always say that our market is far big enough for distributing it between all, us and our colleagues. It's the capability to onboard that will make the difference, huh?
So that's the challenge that we have to conquer the coming months, years. So that comes together, of course, with cash generation, together with the divestments, so that we can strengthen and clean up our balance sheet. So finally, on the sustainability front, I want to highlight it's important for us on two fronts. Firstly, as we focus on building a sustainable business for the future, we have committed to several KPIs to track progress, emphasizing employee welfare and talent retention. We are encouraged by the progress we have made to date and will continue to drive this agenda forward, given its importance and relevance in today's world.
Secondly, and more broadly, speaking to the ecosystem that we operate in, we enable companies to share information for indirect emissions, Scope 3 from the emission regulation. So emissions between businesses, particularly in a buyer-supplier relationship, with invoicing serving as the ideal conduit for this purpose. We see this as an area of increasing importance in the future, and expect to positively influence the drive towards carbon neutrality in a wider setting. Sometimes, we summarize it as Unifiedpost must become the first customer of his own network to solve these topics and to implement it for itself, like we will sell it to our customers. So these are our strategic actions to take in the coming months, years.
So how this is financially managed now, will be explained by Koen. Koen, the floor is yours.
Thanks for getting the floor. I hope you all have a bit of energy left for this financial capture. My name is Koen De Brabander, appointed new CFO of Unifiedpost Group. I will guide you max 20 minutes through our vision on financial reporting. First, a word of thanks to Laurent Marcelis, my predecessor in the role of CFO. What have we learned so far? Revenue growth in our digital business can be realized through, one, product upselling, two, teasing our network with the product suite, three, onboarding and activating partner networks such as ECMA, ETAF, UniCredit, Fyncard, but fourth, the tailwind of regulation. Next to revenue growth, we have potential to upscale our gross margin by the simple usage of economies of scale and cost efficiencies, by eliminating all platforms and decreasing onboarding costs.
These growth factors should become visible in our financial, and therefore we have reflected on how to present the future figures in the future. All this to better answer on your market expectation. Let's guide you through this slide, as it is crucial in the understanding of our financial mechanics.... In the most left bar, we recall the current presentation of our revenue as it was used in the past, and as you can read in our annual report. We realized digital processing revenue of EUR 136.6 million, with a gross margin of 43.2%. And we had a second block, postage parcel revenue, EUR 54.8 million, with a gross margin of 12.6%. In the second bar, we present the 2024 approach.
We have shifted all hybrid digital revenue from digital processing revenue towards a basket called Traditional Communication Services. So the latter is the new name and groups the postage and parcel activities in the Nordics, the hybrid digital activities, such as paper delivery activities and printing activities, and the pure digital activities are, by doing this, presented in one separate block. As you can see, our 2023 business is nearly 50% pure digital, core digital, with a margin of 51.8%, and the other 50% is traditional communication services with a margin of 17.5%. Let's now zoom into pure digital business. As it is the engine for growth, it is what it was all about in the preceding presentations. We will look at the digital business from three different interesting angles.
The first one, we look at it by product line, so-called eIdentity, eInvoice, ePayment, and eReporting. Identity, the start of everything, represents 14% of our revenues, of our digital revenues. eInvoice represents 80% of our digital revenues, and ePayments and eReporting represent each 3%. The second interesting angle of looking at our figures is by type. What does it mean? Nearly 50% of digital revenue are volume-based, 30% is based on subscriptions, 16% is coming from license sales, and the final balance, 6%, is coming from project revenue. The third interesting angle is periodicity, and of course, interesting to read and to see that 88% of digital revenue is recurring, and only 12% is non-recurring. As already outlined by David, the bullets next to the product line show which product type generates this revenue.
For example, in Identity, is purely generated by subscriptions. eInvoice is generated based on volume, subscriptions, and projects. This format of presenting our figures will be applicable from 2024 onwards, and of course, we will, as be required by IFRS guidelines, adapt the figures reported in 2023 in the same format. Let's present a breakdown of the growth figures so that it--this is clear and understandable for everyone with the right, within the right context. The reporting model 2023. Our digital processing revenue amounted EUR 136.6 million, compared to EUR 126.9 million in 2022, which is a growth on the face of this, these figures of 7.6%. But digging a bit deeper into this growth, we have split that up between the recurring revenue and the non-recurring revenue.
You can see that in recurring revenue, which is the engine of our growth, is 10.7%, and the non-recurring revenue, and we come back on that one, is even decreasing. Digging a bit deeper into that, we have also excluded the impact of foreign exchange, mainly from the Swedish kroner and the Norwegian kroner, and then excluding that foreign exchange impact, we can show that the 10.7% growth in recurring digital revenue represents, in volume, at the basis, organic 13.2%. At the right side of this slide, I made exactly the same analysis, but now applying the new reporting model of 2024. You will see that the digital services, exclusive hybrid, represent EUR 94.8 million in 2023, compared to EUR 86.4 million in 2022.
So at the face of our income statement, this would represent a growth of 8.5%. Splitting it up in recurring and non-recurring, you can see that the recurring digital service revenue show the growth of 13.6%. And going a bit deeper, looking at the organic, so excluding the foreign exchange impact on the Swedish and the Norwegian kroner mainly, we show a organic growth in our digital recurring, business of 17.3%. On this slide, I will zoom with you into the growth drivers per product type. As mentioned on the first slide, the drivers we are looking at are revenue growth and gross margin evolution. We do expect important growth in transactions and subscriptions. This seen the business drivers exploring the network and the partnerships.
Based on the clear plan explained earlier, these two blocks are the real engines of future growth model. I will further explore on the evolution of the subscription revenue on the next slide. Gross margin for these will mainly grow based on further cost saving due to synergy effects and efficiency effects. License revenue has still growth potential, but is dependent on timely realization of projects. In this area, we already have attractive margins, which we will maintain. The project revenue is not our first focus, as it concerns implementation, projects, and change request issues. Margin will be under pressure, seeing the biggest portion of the cost of sales is coming from direct staff cost. I promise to zoom in the heart of our future model. That is the growth coming from subscription revenue.
I recall the slide with the triangles already shown by Hans and David, which represents the current product offering. I give some insights on subscription rates for each of the products. This is by example, as these indicative rates can differ by region or differ seeing the partnership agreement, existing partnership agreements. But anyhow, it explains the mechanics. The current ARPU for the pure subscription revenue is at the level of 6.10 EUR a month. A big portion of our subscription revenue is generated by eIdentity products and eInvoice products, and still a minority is coming from the full palette presented in the triangle. It is clear that we have potential to raise the ARPU figure by increasing the cross-sell of full palette offerings, or at least selling more combined triangles of the palette.
Identity will always be part of the offering, as usage of the platform needs always authentication feature to know who you are. This slide zooms in on the impact of increasing ARPU, but do not forget, next to increase in the ARPU, we explore, at the same time, the market, and we will raise the number of subscriptions by, and I repeat, activating the network and usage of the partnerships. Great! So far, I spoke about the potential, but let's also look at the evolution of our cost structure. What have we done so far and where are we in the process, is the question. R&D is a combination of two components: R&D capitalized and R&D expensed through income statement. I prefer to present a parameter which only relates to our digital service business, as the current R&D spend is purely focused on the development of these tools and products.
The R&D spend in relative percentage compared to digital revenue slightly decreases, partially by cutting in the cost structure and partially by growth in our digital revenue. The spend today is still 25%-27% of digital revenue. Ambition, based on mainly revenue growth, is to further decrease this gradually over time to 6%-7%, to be reached in the midterm. G&A, sales and marketing. The relative impact of this envelope compared to total revenue, and I underline, total revenue, decreased from above 40% to a level which is actually below 35%.
big portion of these costs are coming from our staff costs, and this is well presented in the graph on top right, where you can see that over a period of 18 months, we decreased the number of staff in R&D, G&A, and sales and marketing in the digital service activities with 150 full-time equivalents, and in traditional communication services with 10 full-time equivalents. Within the corporate staff, which is a separate block in our presentation, with about 30 full-time equivalents. So in total, 190 in total. The full impact of this staff cut is not yet in the figures of 2023, as these figures are still impacted with the cost structure for some active months and are also impacted with non-recurring severance pay.
Please note that our 2023 figures are still impacted by at least EUR 2.3 million non-recurring costs, mainly severance pay and due diligence costs. All this is summarized in our EBITDA evolution, where you should mainly compare the same quarters with each other. I mean, compare Q1 2022 with Q1 2023, and Q2 2022 with Q2 2023, and so further. We notice a clear improve, and this trend line will be continued in 2024. The word free cash flow is crucial in our financial management. To remove any doubt or misunderstanding beforehand, I clearly state that free cash flow means EBITDA minus all financial cash out. I mean, interest and reimbursement obligations of loans, minus cash out on corporate income tax, and minus cash out on CapEx.
In the top graph, we repeat the CapEx spent over the past 8 quarters, which is decreasing, but are said to be read and interpreted together with the OpEx. In the bottom graph, we show that we kept our cash position over the past 3 quarters quite stable, but of course, we manage currently working capital elements. We acknowledge that step by step, the company should improve its solidity of its financial position. Our current net financial debt position is EUR 95.2 million, end of December 2023, and our current cash position, exclusive restricted cash, is still maintained at a level of EUR 21 million. We have potential of additional cash ins from divestments, from subscription rights, and potentially also increase of our factoring line. Cash from divestment opportunities may or will strengthen our current available cash position, and/or decrease our net financial debt position.
Furthermore, the growing revenues, growing margin, continued cost savings will strengthen our cash flow. I confirm that so far, the group met all governance, all governance checks foreseen in the senior facility loan with Francisco Partners. But it is our objective within finance to support this goal with high discipline in finance management. And finally, what are now the building blocks of our future outlook? I know that is all what you are expecting from my-- from me or from us to see. Our current digital revenue, as shown, is at a level of EUR 95 million. Based on expected CAGR, we may grow in the midterm our business to a level exceeding EUR 160 million. This is the add of the green block. The activation of partnerships such as Munich Re, ECMA, software houses, will add additional potential.
This is the light blue colored block, and supports the ambition to double our current digital revenue level in the midterm. On top, we are forward-looking and believing that the mandatory character of e-invoicing to be implemented in the different European countries, reference the ViDA, as already mentioned by Hans, is seen as a real booster and means that the company should have the potential to grow to a EUR 500 million company by exploring an acceptable market share in the different European markets, representing plus 25+ million SMEs. Short-term is what really counts today. We foresee low teens growth in digital business and to be cash flow or free cash flow break-even, considering the current group structure. I cannot and will not anticipate on the impact on one or another divestment, as timing and financial consequences are related to these are difficult to forecast.
Let's conclude with four takeaways. One, organic development is based on continued growth in digital markets, with internal focus on realizing synergy and efficiency cost savings. Two, CapEx is maintained at same level, but pure focus on adoption of key products for the core markets. Three, UP investigates each opportunity to divest components of traditional communication services. And four, free cash flow positive is primary focus for 2024, subject to impact of divestments. Finally, all this should be realized with a high discipline in financial management. Thanks for your attention, and I hand over back to Hans.
For your explanation. I suppose that you will get quite some questions if I look to the question list popping in. Yes, we always have to do an explanation, but figures at the end are the most important part. So before we go to the Q&A, let's wrap up on the takeaways and what we will do. So we have a robust foundation to execute an organic growth agenda, an organic focus. We have all the fundamentals now to step in this digital world. A modular approach, which makes us more independent from regulation only. And the modular approach is also the driver for increasing our ARPU, the upsell from services, starting with identity and so on.
So ARPU increases by extending the number of services to our businesses. Partnerships, all right from the beginning, crucial in building out our network. Different type of industries are partners. Independence is a crucial element to enable us to work with every type of partner. Optimal positioning, we can't neglect the regulation coming to us. Every week, there is an announcement somewhere that the country has decided to officially launch e-invoicing. So it will come, we must be ready on the moment that it happens. Can there be some delays? Yes, some countries will postpone it, that's for sure. But we have to act where it happens. So we must be ready in all circumstances, and being able to deliver on the moment that it happens.
So that's combined with a disciplined approach on capital management, and further strengthen our balance sheet, which is, of course, the best guarantee for a long-term vision on our company. Thank you all for listening to us, and thank you for the speakers to bring this overview. Let's go to Q&A. Alex?
Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Hans and team. Okay, we've got quite a few questions here in the Q&A. So we will start, maybe, Hans, with you, looking at the top here. Why does Unifiedpost not use a common brand across all countries?
Well, that's a good one. We are in a branding exercise, and the Banqup brand becomes a dominant brand in all what we do, that's clear on the agenda. And we come from a landscape where we have a lot of solutions initiated by the acquisitions that we did, but we migrate for small and medium, and larger businesses to the Banqup brand. Of course, there are exceptions which are like JeFacture, the ownership and the partnership stipulates that our partner, in this case, the Accounting Association, stipulates that the brand needs to be JeFacture. And the underlying technology is, of course, the same. On the other hand, Banqup will come back in JeFacture when we talk about payments.
So we really want to put Banqup as a European brand, and actually our common brand everywhere.
Yeah. Thank you.
Yeah.
There's another one here for you, Koen. Could you elaborate more on the EUR 6 ARPU that you talked about earlier in the presentation, and how it compares to what's previously been mentioned around Banqup and the different products?
Yeah. I noticed quite, quite many questions on the ARPU. We should, in fact, go back to the slide with the bars, my second slide. I do not know what's possible to return to that one. But in the past, and also in our annual report, we have presented ARPU as it was calculated in the past, and also definition APM was defined in such a way that we looked at ARPU, combining the transaction revenue and subscription revenue, in the second. Yeah, you see that the slides are going back now. So these were two big blocks of our revenue levels. Subscription revenue is representing 29%, transaction revenue is representing 50%. So in the past, we have computed this total subscription, this total transaction, divided by the number of paying customers.
That is also an APM, that is in our annual report. I think, and I do believe, that an ARPU figure is really linked to subscription revenues, and it has less gray zones. It is a clear KPI, which does not lie. So I had the intention to bring a clear KPI without discussion. And there, we have divided now the subscription revenue from our digital business over the number of paying customers in the digital business. So that is making a big difference in approach. You can see that the 50% of tracks transactions are now excluded. The second KPI, of course, is looking into the annual growth rate of our transaction business.
So we will keep those two KPIs next to each other, but I prefer to have a KPI which is clear, without any gray zones, with a clear number of customers. Is that sufficiently clear? So the level is today EUR 6.1, purely calculated on subscriptions. You could have seen on another slide that the identity indicative rating is about EUR 4. The indicative rating for, for example, e-invoice is about EUR 10, payments is even EUR 27. That's purely indicative. So today we are in a mixture of ARPU from mainly identity and e-invoice subscription contracts. I hope this answers the question.
Sure. Thank you very much, Koen. Next question we have here around scalability, probably for you, Hans. How much digital services sales can you handle with the current technology infrastructure? And the second part of that may be more Koen, but how much CapEx would you need for every EUR 50 million of extra individual service sales?
All right. So what we have done over the past two years is actually my builds technology or bring together all the technology of all acquisition and our existing Unifiedpost platform, and all capabilities like payments together in one central cloud platform. Cloud platform that we- that's hosted on the Google infrastructure, which means that there is actually... We have no infrastructure limits because we can grow endless on the Google infrastructure. So it's now fully cloud, and actually, we migrate all our business towards this fully full cloud infrastructure. I must add one comment to this, and that's a new trend that we see popping up.
Because of data privacy and data security reasons, we are confronted today with what they call second cloud, which is actually clouds, but where the requirement is that the data is hosted in the country where it belongs. So we need to set up a platform in France for French data. Although we look at it as one platform, wherever, from wherever in the world, data needs to be stored in a sort of a distributed way, and it needs to be signed with security keys belonging to a company in that it which has its roots in that country. So Google is partnering with a local French company to make to actually guarantee that the governance of the data is managed through a French company. So.
That's a trend that we will have to follow in the next years, so that the different countries are preparing themselves to establish this.
Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Hans. Koen, one for you. Can you please explain through a use case what is your definition of recurring revenue, and what do you use splits between subscription and transactions?
Okay. Thank you, Alex. Yeah, subscription revenue is, yeah, mainly a revenue that, where we have monthly billings for a well-described or predefined service we are delivering. It is, in most cases, it's a fixed fee. And as Hans already said, our subscription or Banqup model is self-servicing, so you can easily access the website, or by means of, by intervention of our partnerships, you can subscribe a subscription, where we will have a recurring monthly revenue. Volume business, on the contrary, is, where we have a contractual relationship with our customers, and the price, the monthly price paid by the customer is, based on the number of hits passing over our platform.
It can also be a combination that a subscription, as said, it is a well-described or predefined service, but once you pass a certain number of volume, you can have a combination of a subscription revenue and a volume-based revenue. Another nice example is, and do not forget that, I think, Jan explained clearly, how eFaktura is organized in Serbia. We have sold to the Serbian government, of course, a license, so that they can make use of our platform and, and, and the technology.
But on top of that, the Serbian government pays on monthly basis, based on the number of transactions, I can say the number of invoices passing the platform, an additional fee, so that we have not only a project or a one-off income by selling the license, but we have, on top of that, a volume-based income on the Serbian platform.
Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Koen. Okay, so we've got another one here from Marcus Loeb, for you, Hans. Do you expect further delays in case postponed to 2030 or beyond?
What, first of all, delays, it happened, and it's, it will happen again. That's, that's for sure. Look what happened in France. The government themselves were not ready. More and more countries realize that they have to act. There is a sort of a maturity coming in the market, but delays can't be excluded. Look what happened in Poland. Almost... The deadline was almost there, and it was postponed. So the thing is here, that it's crucial to have a business model where we are partly independent of this regulation. And that's why it's so important that we initially build our payment capabilities to act on top of the invoicing services, but we can pro.
We can also propose them for different use cases as a separate case. That's what the caretaker case that Arthur showed. Several others are in the pipeline. So the modular approach allows us to create a sort of independency from which to realize growth on one hand, and on the other hand, stay a bit independent from the regulation. Of course, when the regulation comes, we must be pre- we must be ready. That, that's absolutely the case. But we can act in a different way. What I expect from.
If we, if we look to the invoicing evolution now, it is also that by opening up regulation and, and, and legislation in a lot of countries, the larger businesses are preparing themselves, because there is always one country where they, where they have to be compliant. And they choose their partners now. On the moment that they have to be compliant in one country, they choose their partner, and that, and then afterwards, we need to be compliant for any country. So it becomes a sort of an upsell within the country. So we get a quite, so, quite some activity on the larger businesses preparing themselves for the wave of compliancy, although it's not mandatory in all countries yet.
Okay. Thank you, Hans. Another one here, I don't know, for you, Hans, is: Does the negotiation to sell 21grams include the digital business?
What the goal is, what we want to achieve in the discussions we have today with PostNord, is to partner on the digital business and hand over the hybrid and the paper business. What the construction will be, that will be disclosed at the moment we have more clarity about it, but that's exactly the part of the discussions we have now.
Thanks. Hans, another one for you here from Peter Jan in Vienna. How do you see the near future of the Unifiedpost, given the events of yesterday? You know, or possible to-
Well, the events of yesterday, okay, that's... What's important here is that there is an open discussion, okay, we listen to Alychlo. We understand their concerns. We want to grow to a balanced governance, and we are open for partner in this? We don't want to go to an unbalanced governance, and that's what... The door is always open, and it's only respectful to work together in a balanced way.
Thank you. I'm just looking through here. Okay, sorry. Okay, just another one here on, Koen, probably, more for you. What are the main levers for decreasing onboarding costs, especially for large customers? I don't know if that's for you or someone else in the panel.
Can you repeat, what are the drivers for decrease of?
What are the main levers for decreasing onboarding costs?
Well, I think the main drivers for decreasing the onboarding cost is linked to the self-service of onboarding of subscription customers. So the new platform, as already explained by Hans, has this real strong feature on self-onboarding. That replaces, of course, yeah, a lot of energy we have invested in the past, or we have still invest today in onboarding customers, by using a direct sales channel or by investing in other types of attracting customers. So the self-service of the new platform is an important one. I think also that, today, in the cost of onboarding customers, with hybrid digital, we invest quite a lot of money in the OCR, so there is a complex procedure where you receive a PDF.
We apply an OCR procedure in order to convert it into digital. This kind of activities is no longer our base procedure, going or moving more and more to the pure digital world or the core, core digital world.
Okay. Thank you, Koen. Another one for you, Koen, from Pieter-Jan Nerincks again: Can you give guidance for EBITDA in 2024?
EBITDA.
Yeah, EBITDA, I think we have given a clear message that our key drivers today and for 2024 is growth on the top line and is being free cash flow positive in 2024. These are our key drivers, I would like to stick to that one. Of course, you may calculate, going from bottom up or top down, how you can come to that. You can see in our financials our cash out on financial interest. You can see the non-recurring, the current financial debt position. So, but we will stick with a guideline on the free cash flow, being free cash flow positive. That's key for me, and yeah, we will focus on that one.
I made a subject to, because I'm there a bit dependent on how we will, which transactions of divestment we are capable to realize in the course of the year. We are working on that, but the timeline of each of these is always a bit unclear, and I can only make that final calculation at the moment the divestment is closed. And then, of course, we will have an impact because we will get cash in, and in some cases, we will sell part of our EBITDA. In some cases, it will be a no, but it's a bit depending the divestment operation we are facing.
Okay. Thank you very much. One from Kurt. Identity, one for you, Arthur. Identity has been a growth engine for subscription revenue, but focused on the Netherlands. Do you see business opportunities in other European countries for identity business?
Yes. As I explained, thank you, Alex. As I explained in my presentation part, it is especially the business identity, which we have done in the Netherlands, in a public-private partnership. I also mentioned that there will be an EU Digital Identity Wallet for every citizen in Europe. And actually, the business identity part of that, that will be one of the credentials under an individual person's EU digital wallet, will also be actually done in a public-private partnership. And because we have showed in the Netherlands that we are able to do that, we also see a lot of opportunity to do that on a pan-European scale in other countries. As I already said, there aren't many business identities in the countries today.
Also, you need to be actually certified for that, which we are, and you also need to provide certificates towards the business identity. For example, I am responsible, again, as legal representative for Company XYZ, and I can also sign on behalf of the company, and I can mandate others within the company. That's exactly what we're doing, actually, day to day in our business, but what we also have done in the Netherlands. And again, coming back to the previous question, which Koen answered, we've done it also on a very scalable way, because we have onboarded in a relatively short period of time, when really eHerkenning bumped up. We've done that in a relative short time, onboard more than 400-500,000 companies in the Netherlands on eHerkenning.
Okay. Thank you, Arthur. The next one we have from Nicholas. 49, Hans, this will be for you. 49% of your revenue is generated by transactions on the digital processing side. Do you expect this mix to change in favor of subscriptions in the future, or will the transaction part continue to be dominant?
Yes, actually, the subscription evolution will become more prominent on the.
I n our revenue stream. The reason is that, on one hand, you have the rollout of the small businesses who work with a subscription. It's not a volume-based model, but also important is that the upsell that we do on top of e-invoicing, like payments, like other services, are subscription-based. We don't count the volumes on payments. We offer a payment service. But of course, there is always a part of a transactional part, for instance, if you do payment links, then you count the links, even for larger businesses. But in essence, it's the business model evolves more and more to a subscription-based model to two drivers: the rollout in the SME market and the upsell on top of e-invoicing transactions.
Okay. Thank you very much, Hans. The last question here, then we'll wrap it up, is for you, Jan. MAN is a corporate client, so what are the cross-sell opportunities in Germany or more generally with corporate clients?
Well, what you have with these, these corporate clients who will invite their suppliers or, I mean, these, these suppliers go onto a network, so, they will, of course, at a certain moment in time, they will be confronted with, you know, the, the mandate, that will come. In Germany, we're talking about 2027. So these, these customers will not only, use the platform to send their invoices to, to MAN, but they will also use this to receive and to send to other suppliers, other customers. So you automatically create this kind of a, I would call it, I would call LinkedIn procedure, where you're starting to invite your others, other connections. So there's, there's a whole bunch of things that we will start to do.
Of course, once you use a platform, it also offers you the possibility to present additional services. One of the things that we're seeing in some of the countries is that people start to use the platform. All of a sudden, they identify the possibility to have integrated e-signing. They start to send quotes or whatever through the platform to their customer base. They request digital signing of documents. So there's a whole bunch of Arthur Paijens talked, of course, about integrated payments to facilitate reconciliation. I mean, there's a whole bunch of services. It's not only about the invoice, it's additional digital services that we can offer through the platform, which will automatically create new opportunities, but also, you know, raise the RPU for that customer.
Second of all, of course, you will have, MAN is now a very clear case, who've been in the digital process. You will see other corporate clients. What's really important is that we are building this network, and on this network, based on the unique identifiers of a company, which can be VAT, which can be a chamber of commerce, which can be a SIREN SIRET in France and others. Companies are able to identify the other companies who are part of the network. So it only creates opportunities to go more and more digital, and again, all of this is hugely due to the mandate of electronic invoice.
Can I, can I add something, Jan, to it? Because.
Sure.
What also important to mention here is that you can, the flows between buyer and supplier can become more sophisticated, things like dynamic discounting, buy now, pay later. So, pro forma invoices, actually, yeah, once digitally connected, you can optimize whatever flow between parties. And dynamic discounting is a very nice one, because that shows the interaction between buyer and supplier in a real time, in a real-time way, to give them, yeah, discounts on the moment that he can pay immediately. And that's exactly what digitization will bring in the future.
Yeah. Thanks. Thanks, Hans and Jan. Okay, I think we'll wrap it up there. Thank you all for joining today, and this concludes our strategy day. We will speak to you again in May, where we will report on the Q1 results. If you have any questions in the interim or weren't answered here today, please reach out to me. Yeah. Thank you very much, and have a good rest of the week.