Ladies and gentlemen, dear shareholders. On behalf of the board of directors, I would like to bid you a warm welcome for the shareholders meeting of Worldline for 2022. After two years marked by virtual meetings held behind closed doors, we're very happy to be able to hold this meeting in person once again. For me, it's an opportunity to meet you for the first time in person since I was appointed to the chairmanship of the board, but also since the purchase of Ingenico took place at the end of 2020. Like last year, this meeting will be streamed directly live on the Internet in French and English, and following the presentations by the corporate management and the statutory auditors, we'll have a Q&A session, a question and answer session.
If you're attending remotely, you'll also have an opportunity to ask your questions via the Internet through the online broadcasting interface, and we will answer these questions during the session. Alongside me here, I've got Gilles Grapinet, our CEO. Marc-Henri Desportes, Chief Operating Officer. Grégory Lambertié , CFO. Charles-Henri de Taffin, who is the Chief Legal Officer and also Secretary of the Board of Directors. Olivier Burger, who is attending remotely. He's our Human Resources Manager. And Sébastien Mandron, who is the Director in charge of Corporate Social Responsibility. I'd like to open the shareholders meeting at this point. First thing is we've got to set up the committee of the AGM. We have the scrutineers who will be Bpifrance, shareholder of the company, represented by Mr. Thierry Sommelet, and then SIX Group AG, shareholder of the company, also represented by Mr. Daniel Schmucki.
Thank you to both of you, gentlemen, for being with us today. Charles-Henri de Taffin will be the Secretary of the meeting today. So we now can act validly. We have a committee for the AGM. The Deloitte and Grant Thornton firms have been duly convened also. They indeed are our statutory auditors. I'd like to welcome Madame Virginie Palethorpe, who represents the joint auditors. I'll give the floor straight away to the Secretary so as to recap the documentation, the agenda and the quorum.
Thank you, [ Charles-Henri de Taffin] . Ladies and gentlemen, dear shareholders, I'd like to recall that you've been convened here at a combined general meeting at the invitation of the board of directors decided upon on the April 26th , 2022.
The agenda and the text of the resolutions were published in the notice of meeting that was published in the BALO publication gazette on the May 2nd, 2022. The convening notice was published on the of May 23rd, 2022 in the BALO and also in the Journal Spécial des Sociétés. In line with legal requirements that are enforceable, the documents that must be communicated to the shareholders' meeting were published on the website of the company during the 21 days preceding the meeting and for others that were made available to shareholders in the 15 days preceding the meeting. I'd like to suggest, therefore, that we will dispense their authors from reading out these reports. Regarding the universal registration document, I'd like to recall it's accessible on the website of the company in the Investors heading.
You can obtain a copy of it on request from the company. The total number of shares to be taken into account to calculate the quorum is 226,309,719 shares, representing 259,010,764 votes. Given taking account also of dual voting rights availed of by certain shareholders who've been holding the registered shares continuously for more than two years. This general meeting is being convened here on the first invitation. It requires a minimum 20% quorum of shares with voting rights and for the extraordinary part, a minimum quorum of one quarter of the shares.
After taking count of the attendance sheet and the votes and the proxies passed on before the general meeting, the quorum is at 80.66% for the ordinary part of the session and the same percentage for the extraordinary part of our combined meeting. I'd also like to point out that this quorum was finalized on the day before rather, the meeting at 3:00 P.M. Consequently, we are duly convened and can act validly as a combined general meeting today. Before moving on to vote upon the resolutions, I will communicate to you the definitive quorum figures. Concerning the agenda of the meeting, 39 resolutions will be put to you for approval this year. You've taken cognizance of the resolutions in the convening notice and the notice of meeting published on the second of May 23rd , 2022.
I confirm that the company received no valid request to feature points or items regarding resolutions on the agenda of the general meeting according to the framework provided for by law, be it on the side of shareholders or on the side of the Social and Economic Committee. I'd like to recall also that this meeting was convened in order to make decisions on the agenda that you see on the screen before you today. In particular, the approval of the annual accounts and a related party agreement, the renewal of the terms of office of board members and statutory auditors. Amendments to the bylaws, including ones relating to the transfer of the head office, items to do with the compensation packages, and also the usual financial delegations. I'll give the floor now to Mr. Bernard Bourigeaud.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'd like to tell you who will take the floor. Firstly, we'll have our CEO, Gilles Grapinet, who will present the update on the last year's activities. Marc-Henri Desportes, our Chief Operating Officer, will present the operating activities. Grégory Lambertié , the CFO, will pursue the presentations and will present the financial results for 2021, the highlights of the Q1 of 2022 also, and also the objectives, the guidance for this year. Gilles Grapinet will come back again and will present a point on the stock market performance in 2021, and also the ambitions we have, under our Ambition 2024 plan, in particular in terms of our corporate social responsibility. We have a presentation of the report on the corporate governance.
The chairman of the Remuneration Committee, Luc Rémont, is unfortunately away on business abroad at the moment and can't attend, and he's asked Danièle Lagarde, who is a member of his Remuneration Committee, he's asked her to represent him today. She's also an independent member of that committee, and she'll present the report from the Remuneration Committee. Now, Virginie Palethorpe from Grant Thornton will then present the reports of the statutory auditors on behalf of the joint auditors before our Q&A session. Then you'll be able to ask all the questions you like, of course. We'll field all your questions after the presentations. We'll answer, of course, also the questions that will have come in in writing. We will conclude our meeting by voting here at the session upon the resolutions put to you.
Also, we will announce the outcome of the polls on the resolutions. Gilles Grapinet will now make his presentation.
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, Mr. Bernard. Thank you. Good afternoon, dear shareholders. I am so happy to be able to come back to an in-person AGM again this year because we missed meeting you at our last two sessions. I'd like to start off, as Bernard said, by presenting the summary of what happened in the last year, in 2021. Lots of things going on in the company. Then I'll give the floor to Marc-Henri and Grégory, who will talk about the more operational financial performance items. Then I'll come back to you to bring up other items, especially the medium- and longer-term perspectives of the company, sorry.
Let me start off by underscoring the fact that we have indeed fulfilled on our strategic roadmap that we set up for ourselves, perfectly in line with the priorities that we set ourselves in February of 2021. We have four priorities, the first one being to execute the budget of the year, and we have come up with very sound financial results. That was our intention. That's what we've done. I'll come back to that in a minute. With, in particular, the speeding up of the growth throughout the year with the prospects of coming out of the pandemic in the second half of the year and growth accelerating up to 10.2%, and I'll go back to that in a minute, in the second half.
The second priority, as you know, was to embark on the strategic review of the TSS division after the acquisition of Ingenico. As of February of 2020, as soon as we completed the acquisition, we said we were going to focus on the strategic review on this particular global business line. Was it going to be retained in Worldline or would it fly with its own wings? Now, we made a lot of progress on that in 2021, and at the start of 2022, we received a binding offer that was accepted by your board from the Apollo company. This activity will become independent from now on. The third priority was pursuing the integration of Ingenico and implementing our synergy program, fruit of previous acquisitions.
We pursued the consolidation in the industry going on, in the payments service industry that is in Europe. Since we were IPO'd in 2014, we were part of that process the whole time. We've progressed a lot in the last year. We made four additional acquisitions. I'll go back to them in a second. That represents for your group a lot of developments, especially in the south of Europe, where we were underrepresented. Our footprint was really too small in the past. Finally, we also wish to be capable, after the acquisition of Ingenico and after going through all of our strategic points with Ingenico in 2021, we wanted to present to the market our medium-term strategy, and we held.
We had an Investor Day held at the end of October last year, and we reached some conclusions about the future prospects of the company that I'll present to you in a short while. Let's have a look at the financial results that Grégory will go into the detail of later on. The first point is that 2021 was a good year for us in spite of all of the imponderables around because of COVID. In many geographies, we had lockouts, we had administrative closures of certain entities and so on. Travel restrictions, tourist restrictions, business travel restrictions. You know, a rather chaotic year for many merchants, but we said we'd achieve at least 6% growth, and we did 6.8%.
In actuality, with a lot of growth in the second half, as I said earlier, which was 10.2% in the second half of 2021, even though we had to contend with new lockdowns at the end of the year, totally unexpected in certain of our geographies, like the Netherlands, for example, or Austria. We tend to forget it maybe, but between the end of November and the Christmas holiday period, the Austrians were, like in China a few weeks ago, totally locked down again. The retail outlets couldn't operate and so on. In the context of the pandemic, we think it was a pretty sound performance. We also had to manage the consequences of the semiconductor crisis because of the manufacturing of payment terminals that needed certain items.
We had to try and equip merchant clients. Our guidance was 6%, the figure we achieved, we think is quite a feat, given what was happening throughout the year. Apart from growth, we also improved the profitability in terms of the OMDA. 220 basis points better actually. That corresponds of course to the operational leverage, especially in the second half, but also because of the rigorous execution of all of our synergy plans, especially on costs. In particular, thanks to the first year of operations with Ingenico. We did essentially better than the objective we set ourselves to convert between 44% this OMDA into free cash flow, and we achieved 44%.
That reflected the rigorous management of the cash of the company, its ability to encash monies from its clients and keep control over its expense flow. The second priority, apart from the operational and financial results that were robust, is the fact that we made progress, too, on the possible divestment of TSS, the payment terminals. This was a considerable activity. Here you have the main steps, the main milestones. Don't forget that we concluded the acquisition of Ingenico only in November 2020. We spent the first few months together looking around at what was going on in this business activity. Along with Ingenico, we put together a business plan for the combined entities and so on. We also, in parallel, pursued a strategic review of the prospects for this business area.
We had no preconceived ideas, but we wondered, should we keep it? Should we IPO it partially, in whole or what? Are there trade players, you know, interested in this? There might be a strategic trade partnership to be done. It's an asset that would be of interest to investment funds, too, perhaps. We looked through all of that and under the supervision of the board, of course. In the first half, the process went on, and then that led us up to when we published the earnings for Q3. It led us to make an announcement that we decided to divest this business activity, and we indeed concluded a deal with an investment fund.
This will be deconsolidated from our accounts henceforth, and we want to finalize the discussions underway with the fund, ASAP, as we said at the time. We hadn't named it, upfront, but it is of course the Apollo fund. We therefore received the binding offer that was accepted by your board concerning the divestment of terminals valuation of EUR 2.3 billion worth. We immediately engaged in operations to crystallize this promise of purchase with, you know, the regulatory consultations of our staff representative bodies, and all of the regulatory authorization that must be obtained around the world. We hope to conclude the deal in the second half of this year. It's a fundamental transformational operation really, this one. It has three major benefits for us.
Now, the first one is for the TSS business activity itself, as it'll be independent, as Worldline did with Atos some years ago. It'll be able to deploy its full potential. It'll, you know, if there's a possible trade war that takes place, most of the clients in the terminals activities are direct competitors of Worldline, and it's not easy to, you know, act in that arena. It's also for the Worldline group, the possibility as mentioned here of refocusing on our core business. It's not the hardware side of things, but the service, payment service dimension. Also, our growth profile is perhaps a bit different. These are all the mature market, the terminals market, very distributed, and the long-term growth prospects are perhaps slightly positive, but it's not double-digit growth, in other words.
Finally, in a context where the interest rates are going up quite a lot, we'll go back to that later on, it was an opportunity to deleverage the company massively in a big way, following the acquisition of Ingenico, to enable us to be more agile, nimble, strategically speaking, going forward for future acquisitions. It was a decisive step along the way, and I have a lot of gratitude for the TSS teams and the Worldline teams. I really must extend my thanks to them. They helped us to stick to our timeline on this. The third priority to pursue consolidation in Europe. A lot of banks are opting out of payments activities these days.
They recognize, you know, that when leaders like Worldline emerge, with the rise of new players too, it's harder for the banks these days to be competitive. That enabled us last year to conclude four new acquisitions. two in Greece-
Giving us now a market share of about 25% in the Greek market, which is quite a promising market. There's a lot of liquidity out, down in Greece, and a lot of transactions in cash, but also it's the second-largest tourist country in Europe with more than 32 million annual visitors. Tourism in the payments business area is one of the big levers to bring in revenues and growth. Sweden. Sweden with the acquisition from Handelsbanken, which is the second-largest Swedish bank, of its commercial acquiring activity, and a distribution partnership with this big Swedish bank bolstering our position, making us number two in Scandinavia at this point. The third big acquisition, third big country that we made a move in is Italy, which is where Nexi, of course, is largely present.
We've been trying to strengthen our footprint in Italy for quite a while, and there are a lot of cash transactions there, too. The signature of the strategic partnership and the acquisition of the activities of the subsidiary of BNP Paribas, initially called BNL in commercial acquiring, that is, this was a major move. All of these operations taken together represent the acquisition of 400,000 relationships with merchants, a lot of potential revenue development, and that will grow merchant services quite a lot for us in the future. We have high hopes that we'll replicate this kind of operation with European banks more and more in the coming number of years.
For the last few years, we've known that a time would come when the banks would opt out of payment services in Europe, and this is how we were IPO'd ourselves a while back. We're in the right place these days to be part of the consolidation of the industry. Last point, where I have to recognize and also I'd like to congratulate them all. I'd like them to thank them for the rigorous execution of the 2021 plan despite all the constraints of the pandemic in your companies. Just like many others around the world, almost 80% of our headcount were able to carry out teleworking during the whole of 2021. They couldn't move around, they couldn't visit their teams in other countries.
They couldn't have physical meetings. All this has meant and allowed all our employees due to the motivation and commitment to ensure all our service activities for merchants, governments, and banks throughout Europe and the whole of the world. We've had no operational incident to speak of in 2021, despite the difficult conditions. We were also able to anticipate a rebound that everybody was expecting after the pandemic. We stopped recruitment for almost twelve months, but we were able to relaunch recruitment in order to deal with the strong growth that we felt was come in. We launched a recruitment campaign during the second half of 2021. All this meant an awful lot of activity.
Of course, we delivered the two synergy plans that we had ongoing in parallel. We had the end of SIX Payment Services acquired end of 2018, so third year in 2021. We also had the synergies with Ingenico for the first year, and those were extremely well executed by the team. Finally, we wanted to use the acquisition of Ingenico. This is what we said at the beginning of exchanges to Ingenico. We knew that if we put these two companies together, we have the opportunity to create a huge machine in terms of Merchant Services. This was one of the first synergies that we wanted to carry out in terms of the integration plan.
So this is one of our great satisfactions, the penetration of the market, gains in market share in 2021. This just strengthened and consolidated the impact of the joining of these two companies. We were also able to renew all the large contracts that we were able to gain from Equens and Dutch banks and others that were able to cede their activities to us, and other contracts were renewed at the end of 2021. Those are the highlights, and those make me very satisfied to see the commitment of our teams. Also the teams of Ingenico as well, who are working hand in hand with Worldline.
This 2021 was a very intense year, with some important achievements in line with what the management team presented to the board. I will come back to you in a moment to talk about the midterm perspectives. Now I'll hand over to the finance director, and he will explain the excellent results to you. Thank you, Gilles. Thank you and good afternoon, everybody. I'm going to start my presentation by commenting the performance of the services, Merchant Services. 2021 was the first full year where the effects of the merger with Ingenico were able to be observed. The commercial development was quite remarkable from many aspects.
The first market share showed the competitive edge that we were able to acquire. Merchant Services represents two-thirds of our activities, especially on the three-year plan. Since the beginning of this year, we started publishing information, financial information, and commercial information, which is more detailed, and we comment on those very regularly. This is what I'll do in the next couple of slides.
The first point, strong growth of the number of payment points operated by Worldline, whether this is on the web, in terminals or whatever, gains in new contracts for national or international players, partnerships to enrich our offering and also to start monetizing our very central position in terms of the payment ecosystem. Finally, this is a result of everything said before, the MSV results, the turnover for merchants for electronic payments through the connected payments and through our acquisition platforms. You see that 2021, this increased much more quickly than the growth on the market. That is a very clear sign of the good development of the company.
I'm going to start with the commercial dynamic for Merchant Services, which is the first driving force of Worldline, the first source of growth in 2021, where 120,000 merchants on our platform. 1.1 million merchants, as you will have seen in the film at the beginning of the general assembly. At the end of 2021, an increase in 12% on this growth was seen for physical merchants increased by 10%, and also for the online merchants, where growth there was 21%. In fact, our main challenge for 2021 was supplying the payment terminals due to the crisis that we're seeing in terms of electronic components.
It's dynamic and it's the results of our portfolio, among other things, which cover all the needs of the merchants, and which has simplified payments for them. For small merchants, we provide a package plug and play offers, and we have online subscriptions, simple digital enrollment. In terms of retailers, we supply very personalized offers, and we include services which allow us to stimulate sales and also omni-channel solutions. Solutions on online and large international coverage as well.
This regular growth of our base of merchants, of course, shows an increase in retail activities in Europe, and this allows us to be ahead in terms of our objectives, so to integrate more merchants for in 2022 to 2024. This is a plan which is currently ongoing. Now, to go back to the signature with major merchants in the Q4 . I'm gonna focus on the Q4 . In terms of the relevance of our offering, I wanted to talk about two categories. First of all, I want to give you a concrete example of the way in which we increase our portfolio with existing merchants.
I wanted to talk about some new merchants that we have gained from competitors. These are the merchants that we've developed activity with. L'Oréal, for example, we've increased the number of brands which are covered. We've include Valentino, La Roche-Posay, which we are accompanying along their digital transition. With Shein, we've increased their geographic coverage. Aldi, we have provided a special offer in terms of new merchants for the omni-channel solution. We have Costard and The Kooples . We have the Toast with a cross-border solution, Motorola and Care.Health. This is the quality of our international corridors.
Online payments towards specific geographies, and this made a difference in terms of the different countries that they deal with. As we presented during our Investor Day in 2021, we have had a special strategy in terms of orchestration of the ecosystem of payments, and this has created extra value. Our single entry point, so this gives us a key advantage, strong activity in terms of the payment ecosystem. This position allowed us to sign numerous partnerships during the year with FinTechs and also digital companies. You can see lots of names on this particular slide. This partnership approach is one of the growth accelerators of Worldline.
On the one hand, you have supplementary services proposed by partners for our merchants, and also the possibility to attract new merchants due to a service offering which has been enhanced. It's a virtuous circle. From that point of view, we are playing our role as an orchestrator, and we use the position of our company, which has been constructed and built over several years. Now let's go to the factual data. All our actions contribute to the growth of MSV. This is Merchant Services value. It's the turnover from merchants that we capture them in terms of electronic payments. The volume of Worldline there increased 11% for 2021, EUR 262 million.
This EUR 264.6 billion. Also we gained market share in terms of research 7% and 10%. With the Q1 , which was marked with a lot of restrictions in many countries, the main countries, as Gilles pointed out, the MSV has accelerated quarter after quarter and supported the growth of our turnover. We were therefore able to deliver double-digit growth during the second half of 2021, not just compared to 2020, but also compared to the MSV of 2019. You can see the different years on the slide.
In terms of 2021, this recovery, this was without the pickup in the travel industry, which was quite limited. This is a real opportunity for the future for us and especially for this year. We've seen that traveling is really taking off again. What you can see on the blue line of this slide, we continue to have a very positive trend at the beginning of 2022. This makes us confident so that we can realize our growth ambitions for this year. We're determined to continue with this and to accelerate developing key solutions. This will allow us to improve commercial performance for our customers.
Now, all these success and these commercial developments are the fruit of the work of the group. This is backed by robust expertise, which has been proved through our acquisitions and the implementation of our synergy plans. In terms of the two main achievements, SIX Payment Services in 2018, Ingenico in 2020, we were able to achieve synergies that were identified as planned. Just to remind you have the figures on this slide, EUR 110 million for SPS, and the total of that will be made by the end of the year. EUR 230 million for Ingenico. 30% has already been delivered in 2021 as announced through this operation.
The integration that has given major advantages, and this allows us to deliver increasing more synergies, and we can also always rely on a single platform, and I will talk about that in the next slide. We have also been through technological transformation, and this is based on two pillars, conversions of applications and solutions. We're moving towards a single solution, migration to the cloud, so the improvement of cloud technology so that we can have the best scalability and speed for our operations. In terms of our single platform, this is operational. All these different components are delivered and are currently working with a certain volume and customers. But they don't allow...
They will allow us to move our transactions towards this platform to increase our efficiency by 40%. The objective by 2024 is want to have 24% of volume and 80% of transactions on this platform by 2024. The cloud solutions, intense use of the cloud technology. This has provided structural advantages, such as maintenance, simplified production, and major savings in terms of IT costs, and also has increased agility so that we can provide new functionalities and new products. This new technological architecture was designed to increase our efficiency and also to provide a single experience for our customers.
Now, the last slide, this is backed by plans. We have the management team who wants to make our company a PayTech, a leading PayTech. We are investing massively in our products and also in our solutions. We have a community of developers and experts that is world renowned for innovation and excellence, expertise in terms of technology and also in payments. We have the offers and the teams which allow Worldline to achieve accelerated growth, which will create value. This is the end of my presentation.
I'm now going to hand over to Grégory Lambertié so that he can present the financial performance of 2021. Thank you.
Thank you, Marc-Henri. Good afternoon, everybody. Let me start with the key figures for 2021, which reflect the solid financial performance delivered in 2021 and the reaching of all the objectives. Turnover, EUR 3.7 million. Organic growth, you can see the figures on the board. A strong acceleration in the second half of the year, which compensated for the weak growth in the first half of the year, which was impacted by COVID. The EBO, EUR 933 million. Improvement of 220 basis points under equal scope.
We've been able to deliver on synergies. Acceleration of the growth in the second half of the year. Disposable cash flow EUR 407 million. This was over 120 basis points. Net results group share EUR 440 million. Profit benefit per share EUR 1.53. This slide presents performance per service each year. We've had merchant services 8.2% increase, the growth in the Q1 . Financial services, they are 3.1% over the year and 5.22% over the second half year.
MTS organic growth of 6.8% and 9.3% in the second half of the year. After the first half of the year impacted by COVID, all the activities recovered strongly in the second half of the year. Organic growth of 10.2%. In terms of profitability. Having been impacted by the negative turnover in the first half, profitability increased significantly in the second half of the year due to the acceleration of growth and due to the operational lever and also the synergy plans that were put in place. Profitability of Merchant Services was up 220 basis points due to various factors and including transversal actions and productivity.
Also, an operational lever benefited, and this was due to the acceleration of turnover. The margin of FS was up 15.31 points, but this was affected by tariff concessions and the historic contracts of Equens. Despite, I think, significant improvements in the cost base. The profitability of MTS benefited from an increase of 20 basis points to 14.9%, and also from rigorous management. Finally, in terms of the central costs, we continued with our streamlining efforts, and we reduced by EUR 23 million over the year, so that was an improvement of 75 basis points. Globally speaking, the good performance of 2021 confirms our confidence is in line with our plan, our three-year plan.
Now let's look at the other elements of the profit and loss. This is excluding TSS. Non-recurrent elements, EUR 364 million, and also patents, EUR 189 million. The integration costs and acquisition costs, EUR 86 million. This is integration cost of Ingenico and also SIX Payment Services. All the increase concerning the turnover 2020, of course, needs to be explained within the context of integration of Ingenico. The operating result for the whole of 2021 was EUR 304 million .
Financial net financial costs reached EUR 38 million, an increase by EUR 9 million on 2020, and this was due to the full year effect and the interest from Ingenico bonds and new bonds from OCEANE and the cost of taxation EUR 64 million. Reduction of 180 basis points. The income, the net group income reached EUR 191 million. These were in line with the IFRS five standards, depreciation of EUR 900 million, a tax impact of almost EUR 150 million. A negative net result of EUR 750 million for 2021.
However, the net profit was EUR 440 million, i.e. 12% of the turnover, and the diluted share profit reached 1.53, as against 1.45 for 2020. Now, what about the cash flow statements? The main items in the generation of free cash flow are the following. The amount of EUR 226 million in terms of operational investments is quite in line with the target set of 5%-6% of the revenues. We plan to accelerate our investments as of 2022 in a bracket of 5%-7% in line with our new three-year plan. The variation in the working capital requirement in 2021 provides a positive contribution of EUR 62 million, reflecting the alignment of our contractual conditions between Worldline and Ingenico.
This should be normalized, levelized in 2022. The integration costs are fully in line with the forecast and are mainly connected with the Ingenico and SPS. All told, the free cash flow for fiscal year 2021 stood at EUR 407 million. That is 43.6% of the OMDA, excluding all contributions of TSS and in line with the trajectory of our three-year plan. This good performance reflects our ability to execute our synergy plans, as Marc-Henri Desportes said, while optimizing implementation costs and also by strictly enforcing our cash management policy. Let's have a look now at the development of our net debt in the group, down by EUR 2.923 billion at the end of 2021, as opposed to EUR 3.211 billion at the start of the year.
This deleveraging is mainly connected with the strong cash generation during the course of 2021. The other points to be mentioned are the impact of the acquisitions and divestments closed in 2021, EUR 315 million worth, mainly concerning the acquisition of Handelsbanken and Cardlink, and also the effect of the booking of TSS according to the IFRS five standard, which contributes for EUR 186 million and corresponds overall to the free cash flow generation 2021 by the entity. If we add the amount that will be received at the time of the closure of the divestment of TSS to the net debt at the end of 2021, the theoretical debt level of the group at the end of 2022 represents about 1.5 x the OMDA.
As you know, there were a few further acquisition moves made in the earlier part of this year. Let's now look at the Q1 of 2022.
We're well on the way to achieving our objectives, we think, for 2022. This fine performance in terms of growth was achieved in spite of the headwinds that we hadn't anticipated during the Q1 , the current geopolitical crisis in Ukraine, and the immediate enforcement of international sanctions against Russia. In terms of organic growth, all of our divisions fed into the results of the Q1 . Double-digit growth of our merchant activities, up by 15.8%, a performance of financial services and MeTS that are quite in line with our expectations with a strong Q1 for MeTS and the start of the year that was in line for financial services with the trajectory provided for this year, forecast for this year. In the Q1 also, we finalized the acquisitions of Axepta in Italy and the merchant acquiring activities of ANZ.
These two transactions provide a significant contribution to the Merchant Services activities with about EUR 230 million worth of additional revenues on an annual basis and double-digit growth and a strong increase in our merchant base with about 110,000 new merchants in our portfolio. Finally, the finalization of the divestment announced of TSS to Apollo is well on track, as Gilles said in his introduction. It's well on the way, and we've already received the opinion of the works council, and we hope to fully confirm our timetable with finalization planned in the second half of this year. On the basis of this very strong head start in the year, we've confirmed at the end of April the annual guidance for 2022 and our medium-term ambitions.
In the Q1 of 2022, the revenues of Worldline stood at EUR 939 million, posting sound growth, organic growth of 11.6%, driven by Merchant Services at 15.8%. This service line represents now 67% of the revenues of Worldline and the development of the strong growth in the payment volumes throughout the quarter in terms of the in-store activities and also online activities and our commercial momentum with the new merchants that we onboarded on our platforms. Financial Services posted organic growth of 2.5% as planned, with good business developments enabling us to offset in part the effect of the historic renewals of the Equens contract.
Finally, MTS also posted organic growth of 8.4% and availed of strong activity, project activity with new clients and existing clients, as well as sound momentum in the transactional activities in the sector of transportation. All told, this strong performance in the Q1 confirms the trend observed in the last quarter of 2021 and falls into line fully with our trajectory for our plans for our forecast, that is, for 2022. On this basis, we confirmed our annual guidance that I'd like to recall. Organic growth of 8%-10%, an improvement in the OMDA margin comprised between 100-150 basis points compared with the pro forma margin estimated for 2021 of 24.8%, and also a conversion ratio of the OMDA into free cash flow of the order of 45%.
The lower part of the bracket of the objectives for 2022 integrates COVID-19, localized COVID-19 restrictions and temporary restrictions, also limited resumption of international travel and some disruptions that would be limited in the delivery of terminals, payment terminals connected with the extension of the current shortage of electronic components, of course, and the impact throughout the year of the international sanctions on the e-commerce activities of Merchant Services in Russia. I'll give the floor back to Gilles now. Before concluding, he'll present an update on the stock market trend in our business sector, in our industry, and he'll talk about Ambition 2024 for our group and also this year's CSR strategy. Thank you. Gilles.
Following what Marc-Henri and Grégory and myself recalled a while ago, I'd like to go into some more details about what struck us all regarding the market developments in the payment sector and especially technological stocks in the last part of 2021. All the players in digital payments in the world, that is the Americans and the Europeans, everybody, you know, saw their high valuation point in the course of 2021. They went through a high point, and all of our industry around the world started to go down as of the second half. In Europe, it was the Q3 . Behind these trends, there are very unusual, abrupt reasons, and of course, we didn't escape those consequences. They're exogenous. They're externalities. Nothing to do with our industry.
Firstly, you have some deep-seated reasons that we have on the top of the slide here. The change in the macroeconomic context because we were coming out of the COVID crisis, but there was overheating of the economy in the second half and a return of inflation, putting pressure on, you know, wage rises, prices, and some shortages in many commodities. Also in the payment sector in the U.S., we saw certain investors starting to think that there was a possible disruption on the side of players like FIS, Fiserv, and Global Payments in the U.S. There are consolidations in the industry in the U.S., of course. They started to think that FIS, Fiserv, and Global Payments might lose market shares because there were more innovative players born in Silicon Valley.
Since February of 2022, as you all know, we're all contending with a massive shockwave of the invasion of Ukraine by Russia and the consequences in terms of hyperinflation of that and the shortages in critical commodities that have made certain economic activities grind to a halt. In areas that are very exposed to energy sources from Russia, of course, well, it's pretty disastrous. There's a lot of hyperinflationary pressure in countries like Germany. After all those major upheavals, we had a turnaround in the monetary policies of the central banks. They thought that the fight to abate inflation was a priority compared with the supporting of growth.
You know, I mentioned the overheating after the COVID crisis, but they started to really hike the interest rates up. After the easing policy that went on for many years to support growth given the many various macroeconomic shock waves that we all went through in the last few years, the subprime crisis, the sovereign crisis. There's a major change, a major game changer, really. We've had negative interest rates for many, many years. This is a huge change impacting all companies that are growing because growth is less fashionable than it was.
You see the markets had to absorb all these macroeconomic shocks that were aggregated together, and that led to two waves of drops in the stock prices in the payments segment, even though we were in highly performing industries, highly performing companies, and we often overshot our guidance. Now, in practice, in the second half of 2021, we saw an about turn in the valuation of our industry at large, as I said, sped up by the narrative about this disruption possibility that was born in the US. The companies I mentioned in the US, some European companies too, and they saw a contraction in their valuation of about 30%. This was for all companies in our industry, of course.
The multiple on average, that was about 18 times the OMDA moved down to just 13 times at the end of 2021. The multiples shrank. We went down quite a lot in terms of valuation. This was the industry-wide. In the start of 2022, there's the second wave of drops. Our type of activity started to go down with others in the industry. We saw new players coming into the payments industry. Some names are familiar to you, like Adyen in Europe or Square in the US. They were similarly beneficiaries of the disruption hypothesis. They saw a huge drop in their stock price of 45% since the start of the year and 70% since their all-time high in 2021.
All of this against a backdrop of collapsing of valuations of the tech companies in general, including the big technology platforms that are well-known, like in the US Nasdaq Composite, which is a big index in the technology industry like ours, 30% down between its all-time high in 2021 and what happened after. The collapsing in the technology stock, sorry, and also changes in paradigm macroeconomically speaking too, of a substantial extent that you see on the next slide. We therefore are on the left. We think we're consolidators, traditional consolidators in the payments industry. Our U.S colleagues are mentioned here too, as you see.
If you compare this with the seventh of June in 2022, the drop in valuations on average in our sector of industry compared with the all-time highs we all had, well, we now stand at before a drop of about 40%. The other segment you see in the middle, these are new players in the payment segment that were born about 10 years ago, Adyen, Toast, Square, PayPal and so on. Their drops in valuation are of the order of about 70%. Obviously, they're more in line with the drops in the technology stocks. We mentioned some here, Uber, Netflix, Facebook, and so on, Spotify, down by about 60%. This is like a crash in the technology stocks, and that affected companies like ourselves that are technology companies.
Obviously, this is part of the whole backdrop we're, you know, contending with. We've seen an abrupt correction in the stock values of our industry. In spite of the high quality of our results, we just didn't escape this groundswell trend. It's to do with externalities. It's exogenous factors, nothing to do with what's going on in the payments industry and the sound companies in it. It's nothing to do with the quality of our earnings or our prospects going forward. I'll go back to that in a minute, that are considered to be really robust and promising. That's really the next point.
It's a total decorrelation, essentially, between what happened at the middle of 2021 and the financial performance of your group, and then the, this break, this disconnect that took place all of a sudden. There was always a good correlation between our stock price and our financial earnings. Then there was this disconnect, as you see here. Here you see the different three-year plans that we fulfilled rigorously each time, each and every time. We started off with a growth ambition of 3%-5% and the OMDA margin of 19%. The next one, the following one, growth, we were shooting for 5%-7%, and the OMDA margin up to 21%, roughly as you see here. Growth then 6%-8%, OMDA margin progressing at 24%.
In the period, the stock prices were then totally correlated. You see the equity story here on the screen. Now the new plan, much better than the previous ones. Look at the high numbers here. You know, with the major transformation that took place was in Ingenico, of course. Now, from now on, we hope to deliver 9%-11% growth. As you see, that's our ambition. OMDA margin, circa 30%, 300 basis points. This disconnect in the stock price, as you see, compared with performance levels that have been better and better, very robust. There's a total dislocation in the marketplace, decorrelation, not reflecting the track record we had.
There's a kind of panic mode, like what we had temporarily here in the first wave of COVID-19 period, as you see here in the middle of the screen that I'm pointing at right now. You know, this is what happened in the first wave of COVID-19 when the stock price plummeted because there was panic in the stock markets. Of course, this created a major shockwave, but it went up again after that. Now, this decorrelation that we see here is also identified by the analysts, of course. There are 18 analysts covering our Worldline stock right now in their reports. 90% of them have a buy recommendation for our stock, and the objective of the average stock price for them is EUR 63, 60% of an upside potential.
They've analyzed our three-year plan, these analysts, and they think it's credible and totally within our reach, feasible. That brings me on to say that, you know, when you're a captain of industry, we here in Worldline, you have this quality that we have in our management team. You know, we feel in our position that there's no point in crying and lamenting about what's going on in the market. You know, you need financing capability when you've got to get involved in strategic acquisitions. You know, you've got to be ambitious, and there's no point in crying over spilled milk, so to speak. This is just the way it is, and we have an action plan that's clear and sound opposite all of this.
We want to continue doing what we do well, execute our plan, deliver results that'll be in line with the expectations and objectives that we've set ourselves. Grégory recalled this a while ago. Our prime ambition is to deliver our planned growth to 9%-11% in the coming three years, and we have finished off 2021 very well with the second half at more than 10%, and we have got off to a head start in 2022, quite in line with the pace expected already. The second thing is that we're going to pursue the execution of the strategic dimension of our plan too.
That is obviously pursue with the business development that Marc-Henri Desportes commented upon, also our strategy regarding synergies that we want to derive from Ingenico, and we've got off to a good start, as Marc-Henri Desportes said at the start of this year, and also pursue technological and innovation development. We're going to be researching and developing a lot more than EUR 200 million worth going into solutions for our platforms and solutions that we want to invent in the future. That's the best thing we can do for the markets, and we want to be an active consolidation player in the industry. As I said, you know, there are shifting sands out there. The banks are looking for partners more and more for payments to help them to adapt to the payment transformations going on.
We've got to bear in mind this is a hyper volatility period. The investors have seen all these macroeconomic shocks going on, and they've withdrawn from the equity market, some of them, because they don't know where we're headed, because of all the uncertainties, you know, the central banks, geopolitics, hyperinflation, you know, some commodities becoming scarce, and the transformations going on in our economies that's necessary to abate the problems of climate change. More than ever, we've got to work side by side with the investors, and we've been doing that with the investor relations teams, Grégory and Marc-Henri.
We've seen more than 800 investors in the last six months, and we'll continue talking to them individually so as to describe to them the exceptional period we're going through in the payment sector, that you shouldn't throw the baby out with the bath water is what we're telling them. You know, we can generate free cash flow. We've an established track record in terms of growth. We can execute our integration plans and do it well. They're not promises, you know, that we're giving in thin air. We've a good track record on this. It's an exceptional market phenomenon. We're in Europe, which is a much better market in terms of electronic payments than the U.S, where there's more cash still that should move to payment platforms.
Banks still hold more than one half of the market, and they're making a transition towards companies like ours these days, the banks. It's a question of critical mass in Europe that nobody else has. Nobody else has forged a leadership position like Worldline has done, with the support of our board and our shareholders, of course, and that is what we're going to continue doing. Hammering home, it's the message we're going to hammer home to the analysts and the investors. You know, our peers in this industry have the same devaluation of their stock problems like we have, and they're putting in the same efforts as we are, of course.
I'm convinced that none of us has delivered over the last nine months a profit warning or a revenue warning or has changed their medium-term prospects or guidance. There is no fundamental reason for this dislocation, this disconnect I showed you on the screen with the stock price. It's something that'll have to be corrected, will be corrected over time. I'd like to finish on this, talking about ambitions for 2024, and this is what we had the opportunity to mention. I just want to say since listing on the stock exchange, we have profoundly transformed Worldline, and this is in line with what we predicted in 2014.
We want to accelerate organic growth of Worldline and make it an active player in this industry, create a leader, an European leader as well. Now due to this combination of factors that we have carried out, Worldline has multiplied its turnover by three and more than doubled its organic growth, as I said before, multiplied by four its surplus operating costs, so by 700 basis points its profitability rating. We have realized the phase I of the transformation, and despite the drop in the stock and in terms of our stock market listing, we have a performance which is of more than 50% in terms of the performance rate.
Now from our transformation is much more visible when we look at the main businesses where we have managed to multiply and increase the size of Merchant Services, EUR 400 million when we started in 2014, and now it's close to EUR 3 billion this year, so multiplied by nine. This is our first growth engine, and we think this growth will achieve more than 10% a year. We've also more than doubled the Financial Services, and so this has made us a partner which a vital partner when bank is thinking about its the future of its activities in terms of payments. From that point of view
Moving forward, I'd like to point out that we have also improved the quality of Worldline. We've transformed its activity portfolio. We've derisked its exposure, and which is very strong in Benelux countries. This is what you can see on this next slide. We have a presence which is very balanced in many countries, which are leadership countries in terms of payment services. We're not dependent anymore on certain geographies as we were a couple of years ago, and this is due to the acquisitions, Equens, and also Ingenico. This has given our group not just a stronger base, but also the ability, distribution ability that Marc-Henri Desportes talked about through the partnerships.
This map is about the activities of Worldline payment services, but it's also the map that shows partners when a brand in terms of payments wants to have access to the European markets, wants access to banks and merchants. They look at this map, and they know they have to talk to Worldline. Worldline is able as quick to allow a company who wants to penetrate the European market to be accepted in point of sales in e-commerce as well as in physical sales. It's also a unique capacity, a way of accompanying merchants who want to become more and more international.
In all the distribution groups and retailers, they want to group together their payment activities in one single contract, and there are very few companies that can do that. This consolidation strategy has a rosy future in all the different regions of Europe. 55% of this activity belongs to about 100 banks, and these banks are now thinking strategically about this activity and the need to use industrial players like us. That was our three-year plan. I'd just like to finish by saying that, of course, the three-year plan that we have carried out was based on three main trends.
The first was the increasing complexity of the ecosystem, which is something positive for us and an incalculable number of different brands in terms of payment services who want to set up in Europe, want to create an alternative to Visa or Mastercard, and create very powerful companies for payments. This complexity, which the merchants are experiencing, lots of different brands that they have to deal with, and one of the value proposals that we offer is that we simplify things, and this allows them to concentrate on their retail activities. We've got technology.
This activity was basically a banking activity, and it's become an activity where technology is more and more important. The critical mass of Worldline is very important in that respect. We have a platform, as I said, and a pan-European presence to accompany the merchants who are becoming more and more international. It's all this research at the very heart of the three-year plan, which we'll summarize in the next slides before I give the floor back to the chairman. Accelerating growth over the next three years and really profiting from the recovery in the post-COVID era. More and more electronic payments, digital payments.
The competitive differentiators that we have created, increasing profitability, and this comes from acceleration of growth, execution of the synergies, strengthening this role of an innovator and orchestrator, and having partnerships with third companies, so we can distribute, then, and also the continuation of sectoral consolidation. All while contributing to a more responsible economy and also taking into account all the stakeholders through our Trust 2025 program. The Trust 2025 program is the matrix where we carry out our corporate social responsibility, environmental policy. This is an activity that I am directly responsible with the director of corporate social responsibility, who is here in the room.
He has a very sort of ecosystemic vision of things, and all our partners are involved in this as well, the shareholders, our customers, our partners, our employees, the company in the broadest sense, also the local communities that we accompany, and also our production and co-production ecosystems. Our company is one of the leaders in terms of corporate CSR. We are subject to many different assessments, and I have great pride in telling you that we have 17,000 employees. This has made our efforts in terms of CSR, so this has allowed us to distinguish ourselves.
We sign contracts for 10 or 12 years with banks, so it's important that they know that this company does what is necessary to exist over the long time and long term, and takes into account all the needs of its partners. I've come to the end of this part, this presentation. I just want to point out that we have the great satisfaction to have delivered on the 2021 results. These were fully in line with our ambitions. We will continue this in 2022.
Acceleration, which is in line with the three-year plan, consolidation of the different sectors that we were able to move forward with next last year, new prospects for them, and then the three-year plan, which is the most ambitious that we have ever had since we were listed on the stock exchange, and we were able to take advantage of all the benefits of the acquisition of Ingenico. This is mentioned on this slide. This is your company, and we want to reach between 9% and 11% growth. So the OMDA we hope to be more than 400 basis points over the 2022-2024 period.
Then a conversion of the OMDA, well you saw the results on the board. Thank you for your attention, and I'm going to hand over now to the chairman.
Thank you, Gilles. Thank you to all the team for these very clear presentations. I'm going to talk about governance of your company. Let me remind you that the details on the functioning of governance are in the universal registration document for 2021. I would urge you to consult that. I'm going to concentrate and focus on the most important aspects. As we said at the beginning of this meeting, governance of corporate governance has changed this year with my nomination in October last year as chairman of the board.
Gilles Grapinet will be the CEO. Despite separating the chairman of the board and the CEO functions, on the recommendation of the nominations committee, we decided to preserve the function of the referent administrator so that we are in line with the best governance practices, but also to take advantage of the major experience of Georges Pauget. As we said last year, the board is made up of nineteen corporate officers and two representatives of employees. We have a censor as well, and we also have a representative from the social and economic committee. The board is composed of independent corporate officers to the tune of 70%. 41% are women and an equivalent proportion of foreign corporate officers.
The current composition comes from this desire to have a balanced board, especially after the rapprochement between Worldline and Ingenico. It takes into account the level of independence as well as the agreements that come from the operations carried out by the group. It allows us to have adequate representation of strategic partners, among others. AXA Group, AXA, which is a major partner group. Bpifrance, which is a significant shareholder, and DSV Group, which is a partner in terms of the joint venture, PAYONE joint venture with the Sparkasse, the German Sparkasse. Also, the board is balanced in terms of diversity and gender parity, and also in terms of competence and expertise.
The current composition allows the board to benefit from different profiles, and this provides complementary competencies, especially in terms of payment services, investment strategies and governance, but also in terms of risk and compliance, but also CSR. You will also see on this particular slide a very high number of members of the board who have deep knowledge and experience of the payments landscape and world. This is not common in terms of CAC 40 companies. The diversity and the complementary nature of the different profiles, the different competencies and skills of the board members are perfectly illustrated on this slide.
Throughout 2021, so one year after the acquisition of Ingenico, we had an external evaluation of the board carried out, and this assessment and the details are in the universal registration document especially. This highlighted especially the fact that the structure and the composition of the board is well adapted to the company. It brings together the adequate competencies due to board members who are extremely well involved. This assessment also showed the very positive dynamic within the board, and it underscored, in particular, the relevance of the different subjects covered, as well as the quality of the preparatory work done and the quality of the debates.
What is also very important is the relationship between the board and the management team. This is based on respect, transparency and also trust. The board is extremely efficient, and the decision-making is very fluid. Progress made over the last couple of years in terms of governance, that progress will be continued due to the improvement plan, this continuous improvement plan. This is under my supervision and also under the supervision of the referent board member, the lead independent director.
I have weekly meetings and I meet personally with the board members, and I can say that we have high-quality relations and also good communications between the corporate officers and also with the management team. We are very satisfied with that. In terms of the board, 2021, this was a very dense full year if we look at the different work carried out and the nature of the different subjects that were handled. The board met 13 times in 2021 with a presence rate of 75%. In terms of the five different committees of the board, they met between three and nine times a year with a following of almost 100% presence.
This remarkable presence shows the commitment of all the different corporate officers. Your board and its different committees have been extremely active in 2021, especially in terms of integrating Ingenico, in terms of the major evolutions, in terms of the group's scope. This has been gone into in detail, the strategic review of TSS services and for terminals and the disposal which is currently being finalized. There have also been some external factors, such as the pandemic, the COVID-19 pandemic, and more recently, the war in Ukraine. The corporate officers also worked thoroughly on the major strategic axes for the group. Now, if we look at the evolutions in the market, investment strategies, and this was to prepare the three-year strategic plan.
This plan was communicated in October last year, and of course, this is an important development step for the group. Each year, we organize a two-year seminar for the whole of the executive committee and also for the board, and this is where we discuss the strategy of the group. The board reviewed the remuneration of the managers, and this will be looked into in a moment. We also worked collegially on the composition of the board so that we could define a trajectory to gradually reduce the size of this and become close to the standards. We wanted to achieve a balance and also, of course, have the smooth functioning of the board.
Apart from a review of results, budgets and objectives, financial communication, the board also looked at risk, compliance, cybersecurity. Extrafinancial performance was monitored, and the board also worked on the corporate social strategy for the group and also the corporate social CSR program, which is being implemented. This is called Trust 2025, and we have a dedicated committee on CSR with Georges Pauget, our lead independent director. We also did our work in a very open spirit with the management team.
The nominations committee began discussions and work in 2021, and this was to potentially reduce the number of corporate officers so that we can have a size which is more in line with the other boards of other companies, comparable companies. This is to respond to a concern which has been expressed by a number of shareholders. On the recommendations of the nominations committee, the board decided to gradually reduce its size and to have a kind of a target size of 13 corporate officers plus two administrators that represent the employees. This is by 2024. This reduction in size will be very progressive, and it will start in 2023 for the year 2023.
During that year, the board will lose two corporate officers, the Censor as well. There will also be two other further reductions in 2024 so that we can have thirteen corporate officers. We want to maintain the balance and the smooth functioning of the board as well as the complementary nature of the profiles and competencies. We have pursued our work with the independent lead director and with myself in order to identify those directors who could leave the board in 2023 and 2024. We are being guided by this idea of equality of treatment and the objective of having a balanced representative of key shareholders and also strategic partners.
We also want to have a high level of independence, and preserve the complementary nature and the robustness of the different profiles and competencies. In line with the equality of treatment of directors decided by the board, all the profiles will be reviewed and discussed independently of the date of renewal of their term of office, so that we can achieve the best adapted configuration. We propose the renewal of the directors whose mandate is coming to an end this year. I'd like to remind you that their biographies are available in the convening brochure. Very quickly, let me remind you of their names. Georges Pauget...
I talked about the importance of him as the lead independent director, and also because of his past experience. Mette Kamsvåg, whose experience and in terms of payments are recognized, especially in Nordic countries. This, of course, is very valuable for our company. Now we've got Caroline Parot, who previously was on the board of Ingenico, and she provides experience as independent director previously, and also is a member of the audit committee. Luc Rémont, who has executive experience and a lot of operational experience. He is in charge of the remuneration committee. He played a major role in terms of improving our practices in this respect.
Dr. Michael Stollarz. He allows the board to take advantage of his major experience in Germany, which is a key country for Worldline. He is CEO of DSV Group, which is a very important partner for the group in its PAYONE joint venture in Germany. Susan M. Tolson. She allows us to benefit from her financial expertise, and also she gives an Anglo-Saxon point of view, which is very useful. Next we have Monsieur Jos Dijsselhof. Sorry if I'm mispronouncing your name, monsieur. He provides us with his experience as CEO in SIX Group, which is the prime shareholder in the group and a strategic partner for Worldline. All of these terms of office are up for renewal at this shareholders' meeting.
I'd like to recall that the term of office of Marie-Christine Lebert, who is with us today, she is a lady board member representing the employees. Her term of office is due to expire at the end of this meeting. Monsieur Arnaud Lucien, who is also a board member representing the employees, he resigned from his post, and this will take effect following this shareholders' meeting in order to anticipate the effects of the divestment that's underway of the terminals business that he is part of. The Economic and Social Committee of the company renewed the office, re-elected Marie-Christine Lebert, congratulations Marie-Christine, as the board member representing the employees and appointed Mr. Olivier Gavalda for the second post. Olivier Gavalda, who is with us today too.
If the proposal to amend the bylaws that you will be voting on later on, if this motion is carried, well, then the duration of their term of office will be one year. Now, the board, upon the recommendation of the nominations committee, already intimated that the composition of the committees would not be changed if the renewals proposed are approved by this meeting. I'd also like to recall that their composition, that you see displayed on the screen right now, shows total compliance with the recommendations of the AFEP-Medef code. Also, each committee is composed of at least 50% of independent members in line with the best market practices. That concerns the governance of your company.
I'd like to invite now Danièle Lagarde, who is an independent member of the Remuneration Committee, to present the report from the Remuneration Committee in the absence of the chairman of that committee, who is Luc Rémont.
Thank you. "Good afternoon, everybody," says Danièle Lagarde. Ladies and gentlemen, dear shareholders, in the absence of Monsieur Luc Rémont, who is the chairman of our committee, who expresses apologies and has asked me to speak in his stead today. I would like to therefore present the report from our committee. My presentation will concern, for a start, the main items of compensation for 2021 of the corporate officers and also the compensation policy that will be applicable on them this year.
You will find all the details, by the way, in the universal registration document for 2021 that I would invite you to refer to. I'll therefore focus just on the most salient points. Firstly, the 2021 compensation package, the ex post say on pay. Now, firstly, the compensation of the board members and the censor. The total package stands at EUR 911,000 in 2021. That's substantially below the total package that stood at EUR 1,200,000. Mr. Bernard Bourigeaud, Chairman of the Board of Directors, receives only fixed annual remuneration for his post, the annual amount of EUR 300,000. His remuneration pro rata temporis for 2021 stands at EUR 56,539.
Insofar as he took up his post on the 25th of October 2021. If you don't mind, we move on now to the remuneration of the executive corporate officers for 2021. The remuneration committees studied in detail the consequences on their remuneration of the strategic focus to divest from terminals business operations, as reflected in the three-year plan announced this year. Concerning the variable annual in-cash compensation, the objectives were not adjusted to take account of this strategic orientation to divest the company from terminals business operations. We adjusted upwards to take account of the M&A operations conducted during the course of the year. This holds true for the objectives associated with the supplemental pension scheme that the CEO avails of, which is also based on annual objectives.
Conversely, the board decided upon the recommendation from our committee to adjust the objectives in terms of the internal performance conditions associated with the multi-annual stock-based compensation to take account of the announcement of the three-year plan, reflecting the strategic orientation to divest from the terminals businesses communicated upon in public at the same time to the markets, that is, and to the employees. However, the board of directors has listened to the recommendations concerning votes and the opinions expressed by the shareholders at the previous shareholders meeting concerning these adjustments conducted last year concerning the 2020 objectives in view of the exceptional context of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In this way, after holding debates with the main parties concerned, the board decided to reduce by 25% the total number of stock options and performance shares that would exist by virtue of the 2019 plans and the ones that would be vested in July 2022 for the corporate officers. In doing this, the committee took account of a major need, which is to motivate our people and to retain the beneficiaries, and more generally, in terms of fairness and competitiveness in terms of the compensation packages in the context where we've got to attract and retain highly talented people. This is a major challenge in this industry, and we've got to particularly maintain the community of interest with the shareholders.
In this regard, we've got to recall that the positioning of the remuneration of our corporate officers remains at levels that are, in fact, lower than the lowest quartile of companies in the CAC 40 Index. The details have been set down transparently in the universal registration document. I think at this point, I'll come on to talk individually about the items of compensation of the executive corporate officers that are in line with the policies for compensation for 2021 applicable to each of them adopted by yourselves last year. Firstly, let's look at the CEO, Mr. Gilles Grapinet. We have the details here on the slide.
In particular, the fixed annual compensation of EUR 691,154, supplemented by a cash variable compensation package of EUR 761,624 in line with the achievement of the objective set down by the board, and the granting of performance shares as stock options in respect of fiscal 2021 for an amount of which the fair value under IFRS standards has been estimated at, as a total of EUR 1,368,800. It being recalled that these securities will be delivered or will be exercisable only in 2024 if the performance conditions pertain. By the way, Mr. Gilles Grapinet did not receive any remuneration by virtue of his board membership functions. Let's now look at our Chief Operating Officer, Marc-Henri Desportes.
This is resolution number 21 here on our agenda today. The items are as follows, as you see on the screen. A fixed annual remuneration of EUR 298,462, supplemented by cash variable remuneration of EUR 375,037, in line with the level of achievement of objectives set down by the board and the granting of performance shares and stock options in respect of fiscal 2021 for a total amount of which the IFRS fair value is estimated at being a total of EUR 809,101. I recall that these securities will be delivered or will be exercisable only in 2024 if the performance conditions have been achieved. Mr. Marc-Henri Desportes received no remuneration in respect of his functions as CEO of Ingenico Group SA .
Let's now look at the 2022 remuneration that is the ex-ante say-on-pay. I'd just like to say that a gradual revaluation was decided upon last year. No revaluation has been proposed this year, but the question will be raised again next year given the positioning of the current pay packages of your corporate officers and given the current context. Now, when it comes to the compensation policy applicable to non-executive corporate officers for 2022. Firstly, the remuneration of the board member. The total package of EUR 1.2 million will remain unchanged for 2022, just like the compensation policy that you see in detail here on this screen. Just like previous years, Mr.
Gilles Grapinet, the board members representing employees and the person appointed by Bpifrance will not receive remuneration in respect of their office as board member or committee member. The compensation policy for 2022 that's already underway, of course, that's applicable to Mr. Bernard Bourigeaud for his term of office as Chairman of the Board of Directors. That is annual fixed remuneration of EUR 300,000. That remains also unchanged. Let's now have a look at the compensation policy applicable to executive corporate officers of the company for 2022. In line with what was decided on last year, the compensation proposal 2022 will be broken down as follows. For the CEO, fixed compensation of EUR 750,000. Short-term target variable compensation corresponding to 117% of his fixed remuneration.
That is EUR 880 thousand. Multi-annual remuneration made up of performance shares and stock options that will be attributed or granted in the course of fiscal 2022. IFRS fair value standing at EUR 1.37 million. It being recalled that these securities will be delivered or will be exercisable only in 2025 if performance conditions are achieved. For the COO, fixed remuneration of EUR 440 thousand. Short-term variable remuneration, the targeted value corresponding to 100% of his fixed remuneration. That's EUR 440 thousand. Multi-annual remuneration in the form of stocks made up of performance shares and stock options, which will be granted in respective fiscal 2022, and the IFRS fair value of these stands at EUR 810 thousand.
It being recalled that these securities will be delivered or will become exercisable only in 2025 if the performance conditions are achieved. The supplemental pension scheme and the compensatory guarantee availed of by Mr. Gilles Grapinet will be maintained without any change compared with last year for 2022 as well. Also, I'd like to point out that in order to support the ambitions and objectives developed in the context of the corporate, societal, and environmental responsibility policy of the group's Trust 2025, and in order to align to the best market practices, the board of directors decided to introduce a combined criterion that will combine external performance relating to societal and environmental responsibility into the short-term variable remuneration policy for executive corporate officers.
This criterion will represent 20% of the short-term variable compensation in respect of the second half of 2022. Now, the slide you see here shows you that the position is balanced and transparent, totally aligned to the performance of the group in the short term and long term. Let's move on now to the presentation of the main characteristics of the stock-based multi-annual compensation plans for the period between 2022 and 2024. You're familiar with the structure of this. We're combining here performance shares and stock options, just like in previous years. The definitive vesting of these shares and stock options will be subjected to the satisfaction of demanding transparent, quantified, and verifiable performance conditions measured over a period of three years.
These conditions are based on three financial metrics to the tune of 80% and one non-financial indicator, a combined indicator, to the tune of 20%. The financial indicators concerning the internal performance of the group remain unchanged compared with previous years, correspond to key factors regularly communicated upon to the shareholders in order to monitor the achievement of the ambitions of the group. That is revenues, OMDA, and free cash flow. The non-financial indicator connected with societal and environmental responsibility of the company this year is underpinned by a combination of external indicators and internal group indicators. Unchanged compared with last year, with the exception of the introduction of a criterion relating to the reduction of CO2 emissions in the context of the Science Based Targets initiative.
The latter is now replacing what we used in the past connected with the Carbon Disclosure Project used in the plans in 2020 and 2021, which the group has already achieved the highest possible score. It becomes redundant now, when it comes to the objectives for the reduction of CO2 emissions. An elasticity curve enables us to accelerate upwards or downwards the percentage of vesting for each indicator as a function of the level of achievement. I'd like to point out that the percentage of total vesting can in no case be higher than 100%.
Finally, we introduced, as of 2022, a rule for prioritization of vesting of the performance stocks and the stock options not yet definitively vested on the date of retirement of an executive corporate officer in order to align ourselves to the best market practices in this respect. This rule shall be enforceable on the plans granted as of this year. Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, dear shareholders, I'd like to thank you for your attention.
Merci. Je vous laisse la parole. [crosstak]
Monsieur le Président. Merci. Merci, Danièle.
Thank you, Danielle. I will now invite Virginie Palethorpe, who represents the board of auditors. At the same time, I'd like to ask you not to read the report because these reports already exist in the reference document. You have the floor.
Thank you, President. I have the pleasure on behalf of Deloitte & Associés to talk about the year which closed December [31], 2021, and give you a summary of the various reports issued. I'll give you a summary of all those report. First of all, concerning our reports relating to the approval of the annual and consolidated accounts. These are pages 316-249 on the universal registration document, which is available on the company website.
The objective of our work, in accordance with the professional standards, was to obtain reasonable assurance in line with the accounting standards. Also the Worldline annual accounts drawn up in accordance with the French accounting standards. In order to do this, we had an approach and diligence that had been adapted to the organization of your group, its specificities, and the risks identified on the basis of quantitative and qualitative criteria. We relied as necessary on the internal control framework, which was put in place by the company. Our two firms worked in France and abroad, with lots of entities on your group, and so we looked at day-to-day operations as well as specific events of the year. I would also like to recall that your work took.
That our work, excuse me, took place in the context of COVID-19, which created special conditions for the preparation and audit of the accounts for the financial year 2021. The key points of audit identified as having a significant relative weight in the accounts, as well as the high degree of estimation and judgment necessary for the valuation relate to the consolidated financial statements. The recognition and presentation of the terminal segment, so solution services, in assets, liabilities to be divested and discontinued operations in accordance with IFRS 5. The second point concerns the finalization allocation of the Ingenico purchase price. The last point is the transactional activities in terms of the annual accounts.
The valuation of the equity services, and in particular the valuation of the Ingenico shares taken into account the proposed sale of the TSS business. All our work and the detailed conclusions have been regularly shared with management and the audit committee of your group and of course with the board. On the basis of this work, we certify that the consolidated accounts and the annual accounts of Worldline are regular and sincere with regard to the accounting standards in force. They give a true and fair view of the result of the period and the financial situation of your group. Our reports also reflect the specific audits provided for by law that aim to ensure the sincerity of certain information given in the management report.
The report of the board of directors on corporate governance and the documents sent to the shareholders. We have no comments to make on these subjects. The company published for the first time the annual and consolidated financial statements for 2021 according to the single electronic information format in application of the European regulation. We have no comments on this subject. Moreover, in application of European regulation, Worldline also published pro forma consolidated financial information, which reflects the impact of the disposal of TSS activities as if it had taken place on January 1st, 2021 for the income statement and on December 31st, 2021 for the consolidated statement of the financial position.
Our report on this pro forma financial information is on page 248, universal registration document, and does not call for any specific comments. With regard to a special report on the regulated conventions at page 320 of the universal registration. During the year, an agreement was approved and concluded with the DSV Group concerning the final terms of Worldline's contribution to its payment activities in Germany and Austria to PAYONE GmbH, a joint venture created with the DSV Group. We have no comments to make on this convention. This report also recalls the agreements already approved by the General Assembly and whose execution continued during the past financial year.
Finally, Deloitte also issued a report, presented at page 226, concerning the consolidated statement of extra financial performance, for which it certifies the compliance of the declaration with the provisions provided by law and concluded that there were no material misstatements relating to the information provided. As part of the assembly meeting and on an extraordinary basis, we issued seven reports that refer to resolutions 28-38 and on the intervention of the board to carry out various operations. These reports do not require any comments from our side.
Thank you. Now we will go to the Q&A session. I'm going to ask Charles-Henri to be the master of ceremonies for this particular section.
Thank you, Bernard. I don't know.
Were there any questions in the room? We've got some hostesses with roving mics, and they will come to you so that you can ask your questions. We also have some written questions that have been posted on the platform.
Good morning, Alex [Titian]. I'm from [Futura Management Company]. We had one company on resolution number six, which will integrate the mission bonus. Can you tell us about this resolution for this year?
Good morning. This is what we do every year. This is part of our usual policy. This is what we did when we acquired SIX Payment Services. Each time there's a very significant operation which impacts our capital, then we proceed in this manner.
This allows us to match the reserve, and this is in case we have to pay out for any dividends. Go ahead. Good afternoon. I'm just a shareholder. Two questions. The first, I'm a bit surprised, this presentation is all very nice, very interesting, but everything is good, everything is positive, and I noted that there are no threats, no risk for the future, whereas many things are in the pipeline, so no anomalies. There are some, however, which are quite significant.
It's a picture which is all very rosy, but I would have liked to have had you talk about the expansion of the company, what are the difficulties that we may encounter in the future in terms of competition, in terms of the world events that are taking place? I would have liked a bit more information, and I'd like things to be put into perspective. In terms of the remuneration general, I'm a bit surprised to see the difference between the CEO and the delegate to CEO, or the corporate, the COO. I can see the EUR 2.8 million, so that's the total for the COO, so the fixed, plus the stock options. I don't know anybody. I've been a shareholder for a long time, so I don't know anybody here.
The COO. This is a big difference, and this remuneration doesn't correspond to the post. I'm talking about 2021. Thirdly, as shareholders, we do this at our own cost. We are shareholders at our own cost. You talked about the weakening of the tech sector, but some analysts are talking about specific problems concerning terminals, but I didn't see that in your analysis. Those people who bought EUR 60, how long will it take them to recuperate their outlay, the initial money? Thank you for your question. Okay, I can't talk about the issue of remuneration. I just want to talk about the legacy plan.
We have continued to adapt our remunerations of corporate officers, and this is in line with the review that we carry out every year. Going back to your first question. You are quite right, and I would like to reassure you immediately. This was mentioned in the presentations given by the president of the board and the activities of the board, and specifically the audit committee. A lot of our activity concerns analyzing risks, preparing plans, and to confront those risks. Like any companies, we do risk mapping for the company, and we measure the efficiency of our response mechanisms or the need to reinforce those mechanisms. There are many risks that exist for all companies.
Let me start with the most important risk that you mentioned. This is the capacity to preserve the competencies within the company and to recruit enough competencies and train people in a sector which evolves very quickly. We want to be a brand of excellence for us and be recognized as an employer of excellence. We want to maintain and make loyal our employees. We want people to think about the future with confidence. Of course, so that remuneration is in line with effort. Those are the kind of risks that we manage. You also mentioned the risk of technological evolution and the competition risk in its broadest sense.
This is at a constant monitoring that we carry out in terms of our investment plans, EUR 900 million for platform. This allowed us, because we are a company which generates free cash flow, and this allows us to reinvest that money and to fund our development. We constantly, as the management board, but also in the board, we have a competition grid, and this is we are part of this grid. We have competitors at different levels. Our legacy competitors are banks, so they're not tech players because as I pointed out, the most of this activity is done by banks, and the banks are aware of the evolution of the industry. They have to deal with those risks.
We do this through mergers, acquisitions. This allows us to strengthen ourselves and the banks to reinvent themselves and also while achieving an economies of scale. We also have pure tech players that are in competition with us. Some are going through private funding and looking at short-term profitability, but we are now in our scale-up phase. That is part of the competitive environment, and this is why we accelerated the transformation and our offers and solutions. It's also part of our corporate culture, the culture of Worldline. This is why for all these years, we have focused with Marc-Henri Desportes on the transformation of Worldline to make it a company which is PayTech, i.e., a FinTech company.
We just specialize in payments, and the technological dimension of that is becoming increasingly important vis-à-vis the legacy activity, which was a para banking activity. We are more and more focused on the technological dimension. There are natural risks as well, the evolution, the changes in development of cybercrime. We secure our financial flows, and we also carry out reviews in terms of our exposure to risks. We also have response plans that we review in terms of our investment and expertise. Our business is not to go over the risk landscape as well, which would be infinite.
We do our work with the board, with our partners, so that we can provide the appropriate response, and also so that we can make our customers loyal, which is also a major risk. As I said, we sign, and we have very long relations with our partners. This is our business model. We invest a lot of CapEx in that respect. Investment is done over a long time. The quality of service to the customer, the quality of response, our behavior towards our customers, these are very important aspects in terms of the value and the perception of the company. That's just as important as the progress I said. Well, I could.
I spend about 90 hours a week working on this. Like all people who are involved in such a huge project as this. But I understand your frustration in terms of the stock price. I'm also frustrated because 70% of my assets is invested in this stock. Now I would say that the market is what it is. It doesn't belong to one company to turn around the perception of tech companies. If you look at all payment companies, they can't do anything in the short term. What will happen in the short term, as I pointed out in the action plan, is to, first of all, to focus on the execution of our budget and our ambitious plans, which are feasible.
We have the 17,000 employees to carry those out, and we have to deal with the risk and evolve rapidly, and then to continue to participate in consolidation of this industry. The size and scale is extremely important in this business, and the value chain as well requires a certain scale. All companies, even small ones, want to be big companies. Critical size is very important. We have to have intense dialogue with investors. Well, you're an investor, so, and you have to follow the markets. You have to be as close as possible to the investors to capture the right moment when they feel that they should join these very robust companies that have good prospects.
We will continue to transform this company as we have done so. This will have a positive effect on the stock. I'm frustrated just as you are, but it doesn't stop me continuing our daily business. I'd like to add to the response from the CEO to say that the company, since it's been listed on the stock exchange, has always delivered the results that were announced. Unlike many companies, we also have a three-year plan. It's completely transparent, so very strong indicators to back it up. We're moving towards a growth, double-digit growth, with an increase which is quite significant in terms of our operating margin, cash creation as well, which is quite significant.
There are a few companies, nowadays, who are as transparent as we are in those aspects. Despite the risks that you mentioned, the second point, and I would say that, nowadays, Gilles Grapinet and Marc-Henri Desportes are very complementary in terms of the work they carry out. Perhaps this hasn't been sufficiently underscored. Marc-Henri Desportes has a very operational role to play, managing on a daily basis all the different operations. Gilles Grapinet, he's much more involved in the development side, not just commercial development, but also development of our partnerships. The two functions are absolutely essential, and they're very complementary.
Marc-Henri Desportes, who works with Gilles, who's been working with Gilles Grapinet, for many years now, for about 10 years, is preparing to go on to more important functions. I think I have two people who are extremely involved, and having that is very important for a group, because it removes a risk that would exist otherwise. Our company doesn't depend on one single person, which is the case in other companies. It depends on a tandem, which works very well together. This is backed by an operational team of extremely high quality. I'm not going to comment on the remuneration aspect, which we have discussed with the remuneration committee. Perhaps Danièle Lagarde wants to add something.
Good afternoon. I'm also a member of the Remuneration Committee, and what I wanted to say was that on the one hand, as I mentioned in my presentation, the salaries of the CEO and the COO are in the lower quartile in terms of the benchmark for the market. Most of the companies, 99% of companies, pay the median rate. We are well below that. It will take us some time to catch up with that for the CEO, but also for the COO, and this is due to his seniority within the company. You asked the question, why was there such a difference between the two salaries? Sorry, comments off mic.
Well, the gap, as you know, we work on benchmarks, and those are provided by companies which are specialized, in the market. From one post to another, there will of course be a difference. Sometimes it may be significant. Sorry, comments off mic. Remuneration policy. Well, it would take quite a lot, a long time to go into that or even a couple of days. The CEO is in line with the specific, benchmark, CAC 40 companies, and the COO, also has an equivalent benchmark. In terms of the function and the scope of these functions, they are positioned in the lowest quartile.
If you want to compare this to an equivalent post with other CAC 40 companies, this is a difference in terms of their positions within the company, and this is what we're explaining. This is the practice in all CAC 40 companies to have such a difference between the CEO and the COO because the scope of responsibility is different, as Bernard Bourigeaud explained.
Hello. Oui. Yes. Can you hear me?
Yes.
I just want to hark back to the stock price. We're all interested in that. Indeed, there's been a very strong correction, but when we look at the figures, you know, the capitalization value, I mean, the multiple is 25. It's not unreasonable, really. So is this correction something that is not due to the excessive developments of the past, where maybe people overbought tech stocks and now we're coming back to more concrete realities? In the present time, inflation has picked up again. The context has changed. There is a lot of money that flowed towards the tech industries at large, and perhaps that might explain why the stock price will never go back to the summits we've seen, the stratospheric levels we've seen in the past.
That's an excellent remark, Sir, Susan M. Tolson.
I would be tempted to share your opinion on that. These stock market ups and downs have affected lots of companies around the world, and the tech companies especially that have been subjected to a violent correction. I don't know if there were excessive developments in the past, if we went too high or what, but if you look at companies, including listed companies, that have reached EBITDA multiples of 150, 180 times not so long ago. Concerning what I know anyway, this is the payment sector. Unlike other tech companies, some were mentioned on our side. Well, there are three things that I think should give us confidence, and I think investors will come around to this mindset too. They'll see we're a quality stock. The long-term, very long structural growth prospects that we have.
The electronic payment sector is underpinned mainly, especially European companies like us. It's underpinned by a great structural development, which is the move from cash payments to cashless payments. It's not, you know, that we've invented a new technological object. This is a societal phenomenon. It's because of the digitalization of our economies. It's a groundswell trend, a mega trend. Money, you know, will follow suit along with the transformation of what's going on in, you know, the transformation of our economies. We've a real life advantage compared with the U.S. companies that are more advanced in the shift towards the cashless economy. Of course, about 80% of payments are digital, with about 50% only in Europe. We've a huge potential to tap into in Europe.
The other thing is the fact that our companies are companies with a high leverage effect insofar as we have fairly fixed costs and we grow the cost with the size of the companies, of course. Our ability, I mean, we can marginally convert the most recent transactions like we did in Worldline recently, and this is profitable growth. All the tech companies haven't always been able to post such highly profitable growth. They promised with hyper profitability, especially with platforms that claimed one day to become almost a monopoly in their sector of activity. Payments is different. It's, you know, something where structurally we have a business line with economies of scale effects, and we can enhance the level of profitability when we manage the company efficiently.
The last thing is that this growth is something that generates cash immediately operationally in a growing way, as we saw. If I look at all these parameters and take them together, it's a tech business line, but really enrooted in concrete developments. Now, obviously. We won't get back to the level we were at straight away, especially if the monetary policies remain what they are, people will move to other class of assets, maybe that might contain more risk. I think this area is really interesting for long-term investors interested in generating cash in an ongoing manner. I think when the dust settles, you know, after these violent headwinds, I think the payments sector will come out of the fray as being a high-tech asset that generates cash.
In Europe, we have industrial consolidation prospects ahead of us 'cause our market is still fairly fragmented. That'll be an accelerator of profitability too. That's the story we're continuing to write and, the investors are listening to us, but, you know, maybe, you know, less attentively than in the past with all the things going on around us. Payments company are a category of tech assets that are slightly different to others, I would say. Yes, there's a gentleman with a point, or a question.
Yes. Thank you. You've just been given the mic. Yes. I want to talk about the dividend. You talked about a three-year plan earlier with, good results potentially, but what about the dividend payout policy? I'd like to know about that. That's my first question.
Secondly, regarding the remuneration policy that's often connected with the dividend and the stock price and, in the remuneration policy, you often see a TSR, total shareholder return factor when it comes to performance shares being granted. It's a bit paradoxical to see that there's not a dividend being paid out, but that the remuneration is quite substantial that's being paid to the main corporate officers. Now, it's normal they should be paid attractively, but it's kind of paradoxical, I think. Sorry for repeating myself, that there's variable remuneration at such a high level and that, you know, there's no dividend being paid out at the same time.
Well,
Well, concerning the dividend payout policy, the company's always been clear. It hasn't changed its policy this year. As you've seen, the board hasn't proposed the payout of a dividend. The priority for us at the moment, in terms of making the best possible use of the cash in the company, is to fund the next cycle of acquisitions, and that is being part of the consolidation of the industry. The board does review this question very seriously every year, and the chairman would confirm that. But obviously, there will be a time when we'll think that the consolidation prospects will be lesser, less decisive for us, and the additional economies of scale might be of lesser interest. Then the board, in its wisdom, will review the situation and will decide to pay out a dividend when the time comes.
This is how it is, the strategic consolidation strategy that we are pursuing at the moment, for the moment makes us be in this position so that the dividend is not being paid out. Mr. Charles-Henri de Taffin, just to give you an explanation. The plans are connected to performance indicators that are connected to the performance of the company in terms of revenues, cash generation, and margin generation. When it comes to the long-term plans, they're broken down in two ways. Firstly, the stock-based plans and then the stock options. Now, the performance shares and the stock options. The stock options, for equivalent amounts, and the stock option part is, it's conditional on performance indicators, but also, it can be with respect to the stock market performance.
To that extent, it's correlated to the stock market performance. Maybe I could just take one of the written questions, Gilles Grapinet. That'll build on the question raised by the gentleman just now. That is regarding the dividend we envision doing a share buyback program. From that point of view, I'd say the same things I said on the dividend. The board has had debates on this question, and it's considered that it's not in the best interest of the company to use or to incur debt. As Grégory recalled, there's still some net debt in the company, so we're still an indebted company.
We want to drive down our debt, deleverage the company as much as possible, and it was decided that it wasn't in the best interest of the company to engage in a share buyback program at this point in time. This is something that will perhaps be revisited if necessary, and we'll take as a function of the divestment of TSS and so on. We also had another question that came in. I see it here on the platform. I'll read it out. The European Commission has given its agreement for the divestment of TSS to Apollo. What are the main steps along the way that remain to be engaged in before the deal is closed? Well, yes, indeed. We've come through a lot of the milestones.
We're moving towards the finalization of the process now, and I'd like to thank those involved in the perfect on-time execution of the industrial relations processes. We had to obtain the opinion from certain entities on that, on the proposed deal, and then the European Commission has validated the transaction too. We still have a few other authorizations from the antitrust authorities to obtain, and also work must be done in order to finalize the documentation legally, fiscally, and so on with the acquirer. We're moving forward, you know, on track. We think it will be finalized sometime in the second half of 2022. There's another question here too that has come in concerning. Have we got time left? He's asking Mr. de Taffin. Perhaps the last question before we vote on the resolutions.
Yes, Mr. Gilles Grapinet, could you tell us please the state of progress of the European Initiative on payments, the European Payments Initiative, the EPI?
Well, I'd like to recall that originally behind EPI, this European Payments Initiative, we saw certain European banks. There were 20 starting off. Now, there are about 15 players that are on board in this. The idea is to set up a pan-European setup that would compete with Visa and Mastercard for card-based payments in stores and also for payments that we're making more and more on the Internet these days or using our mobile phones. This European Payments Initiative is a pan-European thing. Some years ago, bankers would never have been working on this alongside players like ourselves.
Given the footprint we have these days and our importance with merchants and in terms of acceptance of means of payment too, the situation is such that we were offered the possibility of joining this venture, joining up and being part of this project. Now, the short answer is that the initial version of the project was unfortunately impossible to achieve, especially, regarding the payment cards dimension, the ones that you use every day, I'm sure, because of certain banking community people that thought that it was too costly and they weren't receiving subsidies from Visa and Mastercard. Or, at least they were receiving subsidies from Visa, Mastercard, and they didn't want to have to pay upfront themselves and have the out-of-pocket for this new project and they weren't certain of the results.
It's a pity that Europe is so dependent on others, you know, American cards. Why go through the U.S. if you've a euro-based transaction? You know, we want to build up the Europe of payments in the future, and we thought it was our bond and duty as Worldline to be part of this. Expert appraisal had to be done to see if the whole venture was feasible. The project has decided to explore a less costly avenue in terms of investments, focusing on the twenty-first century uses. In the twenty-first century uses, in-store payments remain highly important still.
Nonetheless, we want to explore the way in which in-store and Internet-based payments can use a cardless solution based fundamentally on a wallet in your mobile telephone, which will trigger a payment from your bank account, especially using innovations in European regulations, instantaneous payments. You know, instantaneous transfers you've done yourself, I'm sure. You can move money in 10 seconds using instantaneous payment means. This project hasn't yet received the go live approval from its partners, including Worldline, but we think it's a feasible path to tread, and it's a more reasonable level of investment that won't have the same impact in terms of competition compared with the big payment banners of U.S origin. It could enrich the European payments landscape and give us a bit more control over certain payments in Europe.
Worldline considers that it could also be in our best interest to be around the table in this kind of payment scheme. It would be the only one where we'd be a partner or shareholder, and we'll have to see how all of that evolves. A player like ourselves, we think, should be part of such a venture and co-construct something that some day may become a major Pan-European payment scheme. Now, in payments, things don't always move forward that quickly. There's a certain amount of inertia in terms of usage habits and so on. So it's a long-term process, really. It takes 10-15 years to change people's behavior patterns and habits.
You know, 45 years ago, when the first debit cards were issued, nobody would have thought that they would represent almost 50% of large payments these days. You know, it's taken us just a few decades, really, to get that far. To move towards electronic payments, in some countries, it's a very high percentage indeed of cashless payments. You know, it took a long time over history to move forward in terms of legal currency and then cashless payments and so on. It all happens over time. The last question then we'll take the vote on the resolutions. Yes. Mr. de Taffin is giving the floor to the last person in the room with a question.
Bonjour à tous.
Thank you for the quality of your explanations, and thank you for going into all the details so we can grasp all of the issues at stake. The first question I had to do with the divestment of TSS. I gathered that there's a fixed amount, and then there's a variable amount as per certain indicators. Now, I'd like to know a bit more about the terms of the deal, the variable part especially. Just have some kind of ballpark figure about the final amount that Worldline might in cash, will in cash, and what would be the use made of those funds? That will come into the Worldline coffers after the closing of the deal. Second question, regarding the maps you showed us, we have a good level of penetration in European markets by the look of it.
In the dark green countries, you have a good footprint. What about the lighter green countries, Spain and the U.K. in particular? What are your plans for Spain and the U.K.? I also saw in Western Europe, a country that was all gray was Ireland. I wanted to know what's the position on that. What's your plans regarding take-up on the Irish market too? I think you said some time ago that Worldline is really focused on Europe, and you were talking about diversification, geographical diversification. I think you mentioned Australia. What about the future then? Will Worldline remain just in Europe? There's lots to be done, I know, in Europe all right, and lots of developments going on. After that, do you think you will extend the geographical footprint and the appetite of Worldline?
The last question has to do with what you mentioned when you talked about the payment players of the older generation and the new generation payment players that are going to be the big disruptors, as they're called, in the industry, and that might potentially threaten the future revenues of companies like yours. Well, what are the assets, the main trump cards of a company like Worldline so as to contend with those new players and, come to terms with their competition? Can you reassure me on that score, please? Thank you.
Thank you. I suggest we give our CFO the first question, Mr. Lambertié, and then Marc-Henri and myself will answer the second question and the last question, and I'll take the middle question on strategy. Yes, Grégory Lambertié .
You're right, there are two parts of the price to be paid by Apollo when we close the deal. A little bit later on, there's the first half of 2022, that is the deadline, EUR 1.7 billion in enterprise value, therefore, that we should receive. Then the second part, that is the earn-out, which is aligned with the returns for our partner, Apollo, as a function of the performance of the company and its capability to sell TSS in the future. To give you an idea of the price levels and the amount of achievement of the business plan that will enable us to receive the earn-out. To receive all of the earn-out, EUR 900 million worth, you've got to achieve about 90% of the vendor business plan, which was analyzed by Apollo.
So as to reach the value level that we've recognized in our books and that we published when we communicated on our financial earnings in February, that is EUR 600 million, that is 80% of achievement. The payment starts as of 70% of the achievement of the figure. The earn-out will depend on the horizon for exiting the timeline and the selling price that Apollo will be capable of setting down to for the divestment of TSS. It just shows that everybody believes in this business plan.
Regarding the price and the EUR 1.7 billion that we will receive initially, and perhaps the earn-out that we'll receive later on, as was recalled by Gilles Grapinet a while ago, we think in our advisors and consultants, supporters listed, there will be a lot of growth opportunities still on the European market. 50% of the market is held by banks still. These consolidation opportunities that will come up, when our net debt would be lightened and at a time when our competitors will be much more indebted than ourselves, would enable us to fast-track our positioning, and it would be a key differentiator for us in the future.
You know, we talk about the stock market price and the stock price and the multiples, but we want to execute our roadmap and stand out from the bunch, so to speak, have key differentiators in our favor. That's a good transition, Gilles Grapinet, to your second and third question, sir.
Where do we want to develop Worldline in the future? You're quite right. You've seen the map, and you've seen all the details. We're in Central and Eastern Europe, and now we're widening our efforts to encompass Italy and Greece, the southern part of Europe. We still have the western seaboard of Europe to take care of. In a way, we're not totally leader or not even present much there.
Now in the U.K., we suspended our operations in the U.K. until we could see our way clearly regarding the regulations that would be enforceable after Brexit. With the wrong sorts of assumptions, we froze everything. Now we're starting to see the regulations come out, so we're having a look at the U.K. again. I won't tell you a lie. The U.K. market is quite different to the European, the other European markets we're interested in. It is a huge one for electronic payments, but it's very much penetrated and occupied by large U.K. banks and U.S. companies. So it won't be top of our list, but we've got to obtain our operating license to operate from continental Europe in the U.K. If there's an opportunity that may make sense for us in the U.K., we would grasp it. Beebop.
There's a second country which paradox is France. We're some of the leaders in terms, we're leader in terms of acceptance of payments, capturing e-payments, but we don't provide guarantees to provide payment guarantees to customers. This is done by French banks.
France is historically speaking, and the French banks have been very much attached to this kind of activity in the past, but they will be changing, and they are changing. We'll have to see where this leads. The rest of Europe has already gone through this phase, but now the French banks have started to do it as well. Then we've got the Iberian Peninsula consolidation in Spain and Portugal, a very good tourist destination. That would be a good idea to penetrate those markets and set up in those countries. Also, banks that are starting to think about various options. Outside of Europe, we will be very cautious.
Australia was a wonderful example, very good partner who wanted to work with us on the Australian market. This is very much like the European market. The only thing that changes is the distance. We do believe strongly in this market. It's driven by Asia more so than Europe, but it's a good outlook in terms of limited investment to adapt ourselves to this market in terms of products and maturity of customers. We'll always try to find for this type of investment countries which resemble Europe, and where we can use a lot of our technological expertise. Africa as well. Nothing is like it is in Europe, and they have.
They don't have banking cards, for example. The banks have very ill-equipped. Our investment there was very cautious. We invested very little there. We invest in a Senegalese startup already present in 10 countries, and with the industrial partner of this startup. But they're in charge of their products, and then we'll see how this relationship develops. We also have a partnership with TotalEnergies. These are two other partners who believe in this particular startup. This is a way of us to penetrate the African market, to work with very brilliant, creative people locally while respecting the culture, and this is a way of moving forward, which is cautious.
Of course, Africa can be a good growth reservoir, a good consumer base, and we hope that it will take off economically speaking. It might take a long time, and it won't have necessarily an impact on the stock price, but it would be a shame to miss that. Perhaps disruptive technologies. Just a couple of words on that subject to talk about our position in there and our reaction. In terms of our position, we have this universal dimension, so we are very good in terms of online payments, also good on physical payments, and we're very well distributed across Europe. We know how to deal with things locally and do their work efficiently.
In terms of the new disruptors who are coming onto the market, they're much more specialized in a certain segment of the market. We have very large online companies or very small companies who want to go into internet activities or players that come up with a payment solution that they try to this is a very specialized payment solution. We are a universal player, and so this is a strong point for us. The payments world is very complicated, and when the merchant needs somebody who will simplify things, a one-stop shop and a single entry point, and this strategy, we saw this in our figures, this does work very well. It works increasingly better with the technology that we have. We're
We deal with payment in stores. We encourage merchants to sell more, but we want to really, you know, exploit those positioning and to have as many merchants as possible. We simplify the access of the merchant to all these different payment solutions. As soon as a new solution emerges, when they have to have access to this market, and there's a massive scale effect. We can be well-positioned there. It's a virtuous circle then, and it makes our offer to these merchants very attractive as well. That's how we positioned our strategy. It's our strong point. It's a whole host of things that we've acquired over the years. We're gonna continue with M&A. Thank you. Bernard, I suggest we close the Q&A session.
It was very important to take some time to answer those questions after an absence of two years. I suggest that we go to the voting of the resolutions now.
I just want to say before we start the vote that the ordinary resolutions those will be adopted at a simple majority, and the extraordinary resolutions that will be by qualified majority of two-thirds. I'll ask you to accept that only a summary of each of the resolutions should be read and presented before they're voted on. Before we go to the vote, let me give you the final quorum. 226,329,000.
That represents 80.7%, which makes up the share capital and the right to vote. Explanations concerning the practical arrangements of the electronic voting system and the function of the tablets, those have already been communicated to you when you entered the meeting. I suggest now before we go to the voting on the resolutions, we'll show you a video so that this will remind you of how to use the tablet so that you can vote. To vote on the resolutions for the general assembly, you have been given a tablet. It is strictly personal, and it is only for this general assembly. When a resolution is put to the vote, a window will be displayed automatically on your tablet. Even if this is not active.
It's very simple to vote. You press the button which corresponds to your choice for abstention against. Then press Okay to validate your choice before the vote is closed. Now, once your vote has been validated, you can no longer change it. Thank you. To give back your tablet when you leave the room, please. I suggest that we go to the voting of the resolutions. The first resolution, amendment of articles 20 and 28 of the company's bylaws to comply with the legal and regulatory provisions in force. Voting is open. Voting closed. The resolution is adopted, more than 99% of votes.
Second resolution, amendment of article six point one of the company's bylaws with respect to the term of office of directors representing the employees until we create an EWC. The voting is open. Voting closed. Adopted with over 99% of the votes. Third resolution, approval of the statutory financial statements for the financial year ending December 31, 2021. Voting open. Voting closed. Resolution adopted, over 99% of votes. Fourth resolution, approval of the consolidated financial statements for financial year ending December 31, 2021. Voting open. Voting closed. Adopted. Approved, more than 99% of votes. Fifth resolution, allocation of the net income for the financial year ended on December 31, 2021. Voting open. Voting closed. Adopted, over 99% of votes.
Resolution six, allocation of retained earnings to additional paid-in capital account and funding of the legal reserve. Voting open. Voting closed. Adopted. Approved, more than 97% of votes. Seventh resolution, approval of the second amendment to the business combination agreement entered into between the company and Deutsche Sparkasse. This was 25th November 2021, as referred to in Article L. 225-38 of the French Code de commerce. Voting open. Voting closed. The resolution is approved over 99% of votes. Eighth resolution, a renewal of the mandate of Director Mette Kamsvåg. Voting is open. Voting closed. Resolution approved, more than 97% of votes. Ninth resolution, renewal of mandate of Mrs. Caroline Parot. Voting is open. Voting closed. Resolution adopted more than 97% of votes.
Tenth resolution, renewal of mandate of Mr. Georges Pauget. Voting is open. Voting closed. Resolution adopted with more than 97% of votes. Eleventh resolution, renewal of the mandate of Mr. Luc Rémont. Voting is open. Voting closed. Resolution approved with more than 91% of votes. Twelfth resolution, renewal of the mandate of Dr. Michael Stollarz. Voting is open. Voting closed. Resolution approved with more than 97% of votes. Thirteenth resolution, renewal of mandate of Mrs. Susan M. Tolson. Voting is open. Voting is closed. Resolution adopted, more than 97% of votes. Fourteenth resolution, renewal of mandate of, as censor of Mr. Johannes Dijsselhof. The voting is open. Voting closed. Resolution approved with more than 67% of votes. Fifteenth resolution, renewal of the mandate of the Statutory Auditors, Deloitte & Associés.
Voting is open. Voting closed. Resolution approved with more than 77% of votes. Sixteenth resolution, non-renewal of the mandate of substitute auditors B.E.A.S. Voting is open. Voting closed. Resolution approved, more than 99% of votes. Seventeenth resolution, ratification of the transfer of the company's registered office in France. Voting is open. Voting closed. Resolution adopted, more than 99% of votes. Eighteenth resolution, approval of the information referred to in paragraph one of article L. 22-10-9 of the French Code of Commerce, relating to compensation paid during financial year ended December 31, 2022, and/or awarded for the same financial year to all corporate officers. Voting open. Voting closed. Resolution approved, more than 94% of votes.
Resolution 19, approval of the components making up the total compensation and benefits of any kind of payment during the financial year ended December 31, or awarded for the same financial year to Mr. Bernard Bourigeaud, Chairman of the Board of Directors. Voting is open.
Voting closed. Resolution adopted more than 99% of votes. Now let's move to the 20th resolution. The approval of the components making up the total compensation and benefits of any kind paid during the financial year ended on December 31, 2021, awarded for the same financial year to Mr. Gilles Grapinet, Chief Executive Officer. The vote is open now. The poll is now over. The motion is carried more than 88% in favor. 21st resolution. Approval of the components making up the total compensation and benefits of any kind paid during the financial year ended on December 31, 2021, awarded for the same financial year to Mr. Marc-Henri Desportes, Deputy Chief Executive Officer. We open the vote now. The poll is now over. The resolution is approved more than 88% of votes in favor.
22nd resolution: approval of the compensation policy applicable to the Chairman of the Board of Directors for the current financial year, that is 2022. The poll is now open. The poll is now over. The motion is carried more than 99% of votes in favor. 23rd resolution: approval of the compensation policy applicable to the Chief Executive Officer for the current financial year, 2022. The poll is open now. The poll is now over. This motion is carried more than 92% of votes in favor. 24th resolution: approval of the compensation policy applicable to the Deputy Chief Executive Officer for the current financial year, 2022. The poll is now open. The poll is now over. The resolution is approved more than 92% of votes in favor.
Let's now move on to resolution number 25: approval of the compensation policy applicable to non-executive directors for the current financial year, 2022. The poll is now open. The poll is now over. Resolution number 25 stands approved more than 99% of votes in favor. Number 26: authorization to the Board of Directors for the purpose of purchasing, holding or transferring shares of the company. The poll is open. The poll is now over. The motion is carried more than 97% of votes in favor. Thank you. Number 27: authorization granted to the Board of Directors to reduce the share capital through the cancellation of treasury shares. We open the poll now. The poll is now over. This motion is approved more than 95% of votes in favor. Thank you.
Resolution number 28: delegation to the Board of Directors of authority to decide the issue of shares and/or securities giving access to share capital and/or securities carrying a right to the allocation of debt instruments while maintaining preferential subscription rights. The poll is open now. The poll is now over. The resolution is approved, more than 95% of votes in favor. Thank you. Resolution number 29. Delegation to the Board of Directors of authority to decide the issue of shares and/or securities, giving access to share capital and/or securities, carrying a right to the allocation of debt instruments through public offerings without preferential subscription rights with a priority subscription right for shareholders. We open the poll on resolution number 29. The poll is now over. Resolution number 29 is approved, more than 93% of votes in favor.
Number 30, delegation to the board of directors of authority to decide the issue of shares and/or securities giving access to share capital and/or securities carrying a right to the allocation of debt securities through public offerings referred to in Article L.411-2.1 of the French Code monétaire et financier without preferential subscription rights. The poll is open on resolution number 30. The poll is now over. More than 91% of votes in favor. Thank you. Resolution number 31 is the delegation to the board of directors of authority to increase the number of securities to be issued in connection with the share capital increase, with or without preferential subscription rights. We open the poll on resolution number 31. The poll is now closed. This motion is carried, more than 90% of votes in favor.
Number 32, delegation to the board of directors of authority to issue shares or securities, giving access to the share capital as consideration for contributions in kind relating to equity securities or securities giving access to the share capital other than in the case of a public exchange offer. The poll is open now. The poll is now closed. This motion is carried with more than 96% of votes in favor. Resolution number 33, delegation to the board of directors of authority to decide to increase the company's share capital by incorporating premiums, reserves, profits or other items. The poll is now open. The poll is now closed. This motion is carried with more than 99% of votes in favor. Thank you.
Resolution number 34, delegation to the board of directors of authority to decide the issue of shares without preferential subscription rights reserved for beneficiaries of free shares granted by Ingenico Group SA and holders of Ingenico Group SA shares through a company savings plan and/or a group savings plan or through a company mutual fund. We are now opening the vote on resolution number 34. The poll is now closed. The motion is carried, more than 95% of votes in favor. Resolution number 35, delegation to the board of directors of authority to increase the share capital of the company without preferential subscription rights for the benefit of employees and/or corporate officers of the company and its affiliated companies as members of a company or group savings plan. Please vote on resolution number 35. The poll is now closed. Approved, more than 96% of votes in favor.
Thank you. Number 36, delegation to the board of directors of authority to increase the company's share capital without preferential subscription rights reserved for people with certain characteristics in the context of an employee shareholding operation. Please vote on resolution number 36. The voting is now closed. This motion is approved, more than 96% of votes in favor. Number 37, authorization to the board of directors to grant options to subscribe for or to purchase shares to the employees and corporate officers of the company and/or its affiliated companies. Please vote on resolution number 37. The poll is now closed. This motion is approved, more than 89% of votes in favor. Thank you. Resolution number 38, authorization to the board of directors to grant free performance shares to the employees and corporate officers of the company and/or its affiliated companies. Please vote on resolution number 38.
The voting is now closed. This resolution is approved, more than 92% of votes in favor. Thank you. The thirty-ninth resolution, powers to accomplish formalities. We open the poll. The voting is now closed. This resolution is approved, more than 99% of votes in favor. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to thank you for taking part in this meeting here today, and the tablets used for voting must be handed back to the hostesses, please, as you leave the room. I'll give the floor back to the chairman to close the meeting. Thank you. Dear shareholders, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming along and attending this session today and for asking your questions, and thank you for voting upon all of the resolutions put to the vote and approving them. We will therefore adjourn our general meeting.
Thank you again for coming. Thank you.