Worldline SA (EPA:WLN)
France · Delayed Price · Currency is EUR 0.2642
+0.0024 (0.92%)
May 14, 2026, 5:35 PM CET
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AGM 2021
May 20, 2021
Ladies and gentlemen, dear shareholders, after this short film, nice little film, recalling the major event of the last year for us in more than life, which was the acquisition of Ingenico, I'd like to wish you a warm welcome on behalf of our Board of Directors. Welcome to this 2021 shareholders meeting. On behalf of our Board, I'd like to express our regrets that given the health constraints, we still have at the moment, we are unable to hold the meeting in the presence of shareholders. It's got to be behind closed doors. We've got to take care of our health and the health of our people, and that made it an inevitable decision to hold this meeting again behind closed doors, in line with the government regulations.
And of course, it's in line with marketplace practice, as you know. Our priority will nonetheless be to conduct this shareholders' meeting with as much interaction as possible. And we thank you in advance for attending and for interacting with us before this meeting. Also, thank you for the turnout that we have seen taking place remotely. Thank you for, of course, voting on the resolutions.
We will, of course, speak about the resolutions later on. And also, I'd like to thank the people who are online and who are attending this conference via our website, showing your strong commitment vis a vis this major event in the life of our shareholders. I'd, at this point, like to open the meeting more formally. And firstly, in line with the regulatory requirements, we've got to set up, of course, the committee of the meeting. I'll chair the committee.
We have the scrutineers here by my side, Mr. Thierry Sonnier, who represents BPI France, strategic shareholder of the company since the finalization of the Ingenico transaction and also Mr. Lionel Parizeau, who is a Portfolio Manager in French Equities in Amondi, another important shareholder in our company. So thank you to Mr. Somerly and Mr.
Pariseau for making themselves available to be the scrutineers. And on my left, we have Charles Deterfin, the Secretary of our meeting, who is the Chief Legal Officer and the Secretary of the Board of the company. So we now have a duly convened committee. We also have Mr. Marc Henry Deporte, who is the Deputy CEO of the group.
He's with us today. Eric Urto, who is the CFO Ms. Virginie Paltor, representing the joint auditors, statutory auditors, whom I'd like to thank warmly for coming along along personally to be with us in person here today at this meeting and Ms. Emilia Correa representing the Economic and Social Council here at the shareholders' meeting. Of course, the appropriate health measures have been enacted so as to respect all of the protective measures required as required by our health authorities, and we have made sure that we respect as less we can also the recommendation of the AMF in terms of shareholders' meetings that are taking place behind closed doors.
I'd like to now hand over straight away to our secretary to do some summing up on the documentation made available, the agenda and the quorum. Thank you, says Mr. Tafin. Thank you, Gilles. Hello, everybody.
The documents that have to be communicated to the shareholders meeting were published on the website of the company for the 21 days prior to this meeting as required, and the other ones were made available to the shareholders in the 15 days preceding the meeting in line with legal requirements. Hence, I would ask your meeting to kindly dispense us from reading all of these reports before you. Concerning the universal registration document, I'd like to recall that it's accessible on the website of the company, and you can also obtain a copy on request. Even though people can't attend the meeting in person and vote at the session given the state of health emergency that we're living in still, the shareholders were able to vote according to the implementing arrangement set down by law, that is by voting remotely, and by giving a proxy to the Chairman or to any other proxy holder of their choice. The shareholders also were able to send their instructions by post and via the Internet via the secure platform that's called boot access that we made available to you.
I'd also like to point out that the total number of shares to be taken into account for the calculation of the quorum is 279,590,686 shares, representing 316,702,795 votes, taking account of dual voting rights that some shareholders avail of as they are registered shareholders, and they've continued to be shareholders with us for more than 2 years. So this shareholders meeting is meeting on the 1st convening notice. So it's the 1st invitation and it requires for the ordinary part of the meeting a minimum quorum of 20 percent of the shares with voting rights. That's 55,000,851,638 shares required. And for the extraordinary part of the meeting, a minimum quorum of 1 quarter of the shares, that is 69,000,000 814,547 shares.
After taking count of the votes and the proxies sent on before the general meeting, the quorum stands at 77% for the ordinary part of the meeting and also for the extraordinary part of the meeting. Also, this quorum was closed the day before the shareholders meeting at 3 p. M. As was announced. As the meeting is being held behind closed doors, therefore, no voting at the session, these quorums are definitive.
Hence, the meeting has the quorum required by the law, and we are therefore duly convened, and we can validly pass resolutions at this meeting, at the combined general meeting. We will now open the session, Mr. Grafinet. Thank you. Concerning the agenda of the meeting, there were 31 resolutions submitted to you to vote upon today.
You've taken cognizance of these resolutions in the convening notice and the notice in the French official gazette and also the convening notice made available to you on the Internet. Now no shareholder has used their right concerning the registration of points or other resolutions on the agenda for us today. So as we're holding the meeting behind closed doors, shareholders cannot present amendments to resolutions that will be put you to vote on today or they cannot, therefore, propose either new resolutions. So I'd like to start off by personally presenting in a minute the highlights of 2020. The highlights of 2020, of course, marked by the success of the acquisition of Ingenico Group and also the rollout of our new 5 year plan concerning corporate, social and environmental responsibilities.
Marc Andre Deporte, our Deputy CEO, will present then the situation and the outlook from the operational point of view. And Eric Urto, our CFO, will present the financial earnings for 2020 and the guidance and objectives for 2021. The Lead Director and the Chair people of the committees in charge of Appointments and Compensation We'll then present a summary of the report on the corporate governance. We have Mr. Charles Fauger, who is the Lead Director, who will present the proceedings of the Board in the course of 2020.
We have Mr. Laurence Van Habensburg Lotterningen for the Appointments Committee, who will detail out the main items in the policy of the company concerning governance. And then Mr. Luc Raymond for the Compensation Committee will present the policy concerning compensation. Each of them will explain certain of the resolutions that are put to you on the poll here today.
And then Ms. Virginie Paltor from the Grant Thornton office will present the reports of the statutory auditors on behalf of the joint auditors before Q and A session. As we're holding the meeting behind closed doors, it is not possible, therefore, for shareholders to ask questions orally here at this session. However, as was said in our introduction, shareholders will be able to ask questions via the webcast interface. Since the start of the session, the link is on the screen.
And of course, you'll receive a question during the Q and A an answer, sorry, to your question during the Q and A session. We'll complete our meeting by the presentation of the results of the polls on the resolutions that were proposed to you. And I'd like to thank those who voted remotely before the meeting was actually opened. I'll now make my presentation on the highlights of the last year. So it's a pleasure for me to start off by sharing with you a certain number of items concerning the highlights of 2020.
And I'd like to, 1st of all, put 2020 in perspective with respect to the general strategy of the company, which, as you know, has developed very strongly and also has unfailingly implemented its acquisition strategy since it was IPO ed 7 years ago. So as you see on the slide here, the company was IPO ed, as you all remember, in order to avail of the deep seated transformation going on in our electronic payments industry, which itself is the result of a whole accumulation of groundswell movements, changes in regulation, the setting up of the euro currency, also the setting up of new European regulations, the advent of new technologies and also a lot of consolidation going on in the industry triggered in part by the deep seated transformations going on in terms of the operational arrangements in actually doing the payments job for the last 15 years. So obviously, we've seen consolidations of payment platforms and economies of scale associated with that. And in that context, Wireline has been executing its plan for the last number of years as set down, and we acquired 13 companies since the IPO, 4 in 2020. So the objective that we've asserted is to speed up the growth of the group, obviously, organically speaking, but also via the synergies achieved when we make external acquisitions and given the ongoing transformation that's going on of our value proposition.
So the combination of all these growth factors, organic and inorganic growth factors, has enabled us to multiply the revenues of the group by 4.5 in the same period. Obviously, we therefore have established Worldline as being a center stage player in the European Payments Industry. We've grown much faster than most of our peer companies and partners. In parallel, we also considerably enriched our offering so as to be able to meet the needs of new emerging needs given the transformation going on in the industry. And we have in a rather unique manner now managed to cover all of the value chain, especially of the nature, the form or the channels required.
And particularly, thanks to the acquisition of Ingenico, we have enhanced the portion of our exposure to distant commerce in general by 30%. And also, this is the kind of industry where you've got to look to the long haul, lots of capital expenditure, more than €300,000,000 of euro pumped into our platforms and our solutions every year. So it's a very long term kind of business. We've got long term relations with banks that trust us. And for us, corporate, social and environmental responsibility is not just a question of meeting market trends and espousing market trends.
No, we've got to make sure that our company is, in a sincere way, part of the landscape we're living in, that is meet the needs of all of our stakeholders going forward and project ourselves into the future being aware that at each stage of our development we've done our level best to make sure that all of these stakeholders can support our plans and projects. And we have just completed our Trust 2025 year plan. I'll go back to that later on. And in 2020, we spent a lot of time in setting up our new ambitions in terms of corporate, social and environmental responsibilities called Trust 2025. We'll talk about that in a short while.
So as we said earlier, the execution of our strategy enabled the group to double or more than double our revenues on a statutory basis. This is what you see on the slide here, strong uninterrupted growth. And you see statutory results here for 2020. But that only integrates 2 months of the contribution by Ingenico. That reflects, as I was recalling, the combination of external growth and the speeding up of our organic growth on a pro form a basis.
Integrating the contribution of Ingenico as a full year, the same growth then would reflect a multiplication by 4.5x of our revenue. So our group's ability to draw the synergies from its growth has been reflected in an improvement by 6.80 basis points of our margin, our OMDA margin since 2014, and we managed to record a multiplication by 2.6 of our free cash flow in the same period. So the 6 years of growth now behind us were also reflected by an increase, a strong increase in our headcount. We've had lots of hirings in most of our major countries regularly with creation of jobs continuously so as to underpin the expansion of our sales and also the widening of our geographical footprint and also the widening of our value proposition. So these achievements were reflected by a strong support from our shareholders for our strategy that you can see reflected, of course, in the ongoing trend in our stock price since June of 2014.
So this slide recalls the equity story of our group. We have multiplied our stock price by almost 5 since we IPO ed in 2014. That's an increase of 3 61 percent. Whereas in the same period, the stock market index, the Paris 1, the benchmark we use only progressed by 43%. So the market cap of Worldline was multiplied by 10% since June 2014.
And the group, you will be aware that the group in 2020 was admitted into the CAP 40 index in March of last year and that we're very proud of. So I'd also like to underscore in parallel the importance for our company of looking at this financial performance over the long haul. That is the reason why we've been putting in a lot of efforts in terms of corporate, social and environmental responsibility. On the screen here, you see the results of our program that we call Trust 2020, which is a program that concerned all of our initiatives when it comes to corporate, social and environmental responsibility. Now here you see we covered lots of different dimensions like the satisfaction of our employees, the supply chain, ethics, the environment and of course, the fight to abate the problems of climate change.
Plus 2020 proved to be a very powerful framework to mobilize people and to transform all of our organizations around 13 quantitative objectives that are part and parcel of the operational and executive steering of the group. We managed to successfully achieve most of these objectives, especially operationally, as you see here, remarkable results put in terms of client satisfaction and progression, industrialization, quality of service and also in the area of security, especially cybersecurity. Regarding our headcount, we progressed substantially in the satisfaction rate of our employees who are happy to work in Wireline, and they're faithful to the group and will be happy to stay with us for our future adventures. They consider it's a privilege to work in a group that is becoming bigger and bigger in the European Payments Industry. You can see in the management of our suppliers also, and we pay a lot of attention to ethics, too, Trust 2020 helps us to record a lot of important progress and performance levels that are now very high, as you can see through the Eco Badis independent rating platinum level we've achieved for the whole group.
Finally, in terms of climate change, the group over the last 5 years has been able to achieve significant reduction of carbon emissions. We were classified by Challenge as being a champion of the climate, and this is due to the reduction of our carbon footprint. And apart from that, we also contribute to carbon neutrality of Digital Payments. This is due to the offsetting of residual carbon emissions, and we've achieved ISO 14,001 in order to limit the to a maximum the environmental footprints of our office and of our data centers. Now this very strong dynamic in terms of corporate social responsibility and achieving these objectives is due to constant progress and this is seen on the slide.
It has allowed Worldline to be considered. I just referred to one of the classifications we received. This was published in 2021, but we are truly recognized as a leader when it comes to corporate social responsibility in this sector. We have been awarded and recognized by some of the noting agencies and recognized by GRICDP, Ecovadis, so just to mention a few. And you can see also on this slide the level of excellence that we have achieved in many of these independent class months.
We are often in the 1% of the companies that are recognized for this different type of issue. And of course, this is not a reason to rest on our laurels. We can see and it won't, I'm sure, be in the year of the pandemic to think that the world has to be more dynamic. So let's take advantage of this dynamic, which is very deep within the group. Woodlawn has put together its new program, Trust 2025, which wants to be a new chapter, which is even more ambitious in terms of CSR with the same desire as for Trust 2020, the previous program to create long term value, which is balanced and profitable for all our stakeholders.
Now this new ambition for the next 5 years is based on the same founding pillars that have been proved efficient, but these are now extended to new issues and have new levels of ambition in order to take into account the new activities that we've inherited from ENGINE Corp, for example, the ambition of echo design of payment terminals, reviewing of supply chains and electronic commands. So 2025 also takes into account the regulatory evolutions in different areas and also the market trends when it comes to CSR. So we are also very proud of co building this program with our board and more particularly with its CSR committee, which is headed by Madame Daniel Laguerre. Now on this slide, which I'm not going to go into, this slide is available within the universal registration document. You have a summary of all the levels of ambition that we are following in TRUST 2025 with all the quantitative indicators that have been defined with the heads of business lines, with the group functions, amongst others, and this going right up to the Executive Committee.
So we'll be very happy to go into the details of this program when we hold our Investors Day, which will be held in the second half of twenty twenty one, when we will be able to meet physically for this very important event. And finally, before we come to taking stock of 2020, I'd like to point out and show you the new identity card of the group following 2020. And this is the result particularly due to the acquisition of Ingenico. So we have a strong turnover, €5,000,000,000 and we are by far the leading supplier of digital services in Europe. And we are now recognized as the 4th global player in this industry.
With 20,000 employees, we're present in more than 50 countries, and we serve more than 1,000,000 merchants of all different size, and we have more than 1200 financial institutions. We cover the whole of the value change with market positions,
which are quite exceptional in a
number of major European banks. Now for a clarification on your question to hikes for 20 and E and should start with the group because we're saying that as in all companies, we have just as in the usual. I don't think that on the Rafiki and the Board spending growth, both related strong resilience of activity despite the effort and sticking to the core of dealers when it's all in effect to Tuktok Beam. That's by the rollout of distance working, which affected 98% of our employees, but they were able to adapt their working methods with their managers in order to ensure perfect continuity of service for our customers and also ensure continuity for paying an arbitrator and the demand for the year. Of course, we had very solid results despite the difficult environment.
At the
same time, we are able to control the pace of our profitability while paying attention at all times to the fact that there would be an after the pandemic and that we should continue to invest massively in all the priority projects and strategic investments of the groups in order to return to growth as quickly as possible. The pandemic, which was extremely painful for our economies, will nevertheless have some positive outcomes for the Payments sector. And And it has accelerated the market by provoking in Europe and all over the world changes in behavior of consumers and merchants, especially small time merchants. And these changes, of course, will be more and more favorable to us as we come out of the crisis. We've seen a massive acceleration in 2020 of what we call the cashless society, payments in cash.
Those will be become less important when it comes to payment in stores. We also have seen an acceleration of digital payments in all its formats, but also the way in which merchants sell and also control their own activities. Online payments as well, we have also seen in 2020 new initiatives in Europe in particular like EPI, which is the European Payments brand. And the first thing is about EDPIA. So this was a remarkable year for the group, but 2020 will it was also the year of acquiring Ingenico.
So this was the one which has changed our company the most since 2,040. It was this acquisition was announced before the first wave of COVID-nineteen. And with Bernard Borijo and our teams, we implemented and did everything possible in order to carry this out and to stick to the time line announced despite the great volatility of markets and also the great uncertainty that we had in the second half of twenty twenty. Now this is a real satisfaction and a source of pride to the team working with the teams of Ingenico and Worldline to be able to go through all these different steps, building this new group on the 30th October in the evening. So I'd like to thank you very warmly, thank the hundreds of workers from the 2 groups that made this possible.
Now I'm coming back to the key figures of 2020 that are present on the next slide. This just shows the strong resilience that I was referring to before. And so we can we have exceeded all our objectives for 2020 and as expressed on the 23rd April 2020 when we were in the very middle of the first wave of COVID-nineteen. So to take into account the impact of the pandemic, but also the effect of the very strong measures of adaptation, especially in terms of costs. So to adapt to this context, the turnover for 2020 was €2,750,000,000 organic drop of only 4.6% despite the very despite the closure of millions of merchants throughout Europe.
OMDA was at €700,000,000 I. E. 25.5 percent of the turnover. This is an profitability comes from a very strong reaction to the crisis, cost containment, but also synergies in terms of our mix of activities. Finally, the disposable cash flow, EUR 349,000,000.
This represents a strong conversion rate of OMDA, 49.8%. This is 200 basis points more than the year before due to the strong management and control set up by Eric and its team where as the normalized net income, EUR 361,000,000 this is up 20% on the previous year. And the EPS, normalized and diluted, reached €1.76, up 8%. Now during 2020, the group wasn't just about managing the crisis. So I want to go back to this wonderful acquisition of Ingenico, but we also we continued with our very targeted acquisition strategy due to the fact that we were able to prepare for the integration of Ingenico.
From the 1st November, we were able to execute as we normally do at Worldline. We were able to conserve our agility to remain a central player of the industrial landscape in terms of payments. And from the end of 2020, we announced the control of services to merchants, so and with ANZ, an Australian bank. But also, we have the acquisition of GoPay in the Czech Republic, which strengthens our e commerce capacity and also Internet payments on a market which is very buoyant in Eastern Europe. And we also accelerated the strategic transformation of Ingenico in terms of payment terms.
So we had a model that was really based on the software with Cloud Services, acquisition of EasyPayments in India and Singapore as well. Now I'd like to conclude this part before I hand over to my colleague. I'd like to talk about the priorities for 2021. We are going to continue very ambitiously. We're going to continue to improve our growth profile just as we have been doing since 2014.
And as soon as the health situation allows for this. And we will also continue to improve our profitability with the rapid and rigorous execution of our synergy plans, which are already well underway due to the, preparatory work, which was done last year. Secondly, we will maintain a very strong dynamic on all our strategic initiatives with the objective of completing in 2021 the strategic review, which has begun on terminal activity and also the desire, which remains unchanged, to continue and seize the best opportunities possible when it comes to consolidating the payments industry. We are quite convinced that the New World line, which has been massively which has been implemented in 2020 through the acquisition of Ingenico, that this offers a very strong growth driver for the future. And we think that we will be the main consolidator in Europe and beyond of digital payments.
And we are eager to present this to the Investors Day, which we hope will take place in the second half of twenty twenty one. Now thank you for your attention, for your support for all over all these years. And now I'm going to hand over the floor to Mac Henry de Porte, who is our Deputy CEO, and he will comment the performance the operational performance of 2020. Over to you, Henri. Thank you, Gilles.
So good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. It's very clear that the impact of the crisis COVID-nineteen on our transaction activities has been unprecedented. So you can see on the graph, you can see the effects of the 2 consecutive waves of restrictions due to the decisions taken by the government in 2020. Starting from the left, you can observe that we have seen very good performance in January February last year, but this was interrupted by the first wave of COVID in March 2020. And this was triggered by strict confinements in most of our countries, and this had a very strong impact on the second half year.
You can also see that at the end of the second quarter, you can see the strong sensitivity of volumes of transactions and their ability to bounce back as soon as some of the stores were open again. And this was despite some of the restrictions that were in place as well. And the second wave that took place in the Q4 2020 triggered new governmental measures and also but allowed us certain flexibility throughout the period of Christmas. And so this meant that we had a Q4, which was quite good despite the global context. Now apart from this linear analysis, I'd like to point out that we have been less impacted by the later measures and this is due to the increased e commerce as well as the acceleration of the drop in the use of cash and the preference for car payments.
So there's another
on
the next slide, another important point that we should mention if we look the performance of the group for 2020, and that is the geographic exposure of Worldline that you can see on this slide. Basically, we are exposed to European, the richest European countries. And so those were the countries that were most impacted by the strict measures such as store closures during 2020. And so this situation lasted throughout the Q1 2021 despite the governmental restrictions in place in these countries. You should note these were accompanied by measures to protect the economy, which allowed us to have extra massive savings in terms of households.
We're talking about several 100 of 1,000,000,000 in savings for France and Germany. This is the first time that the saving rate has reached such a record level. If you look at this if you compare this to what happened with the subprime crisis in 2028. So there has been an inability to consume due to closures. And so consumption dropped 12% 2nd quarter 2021.
And then we saw in Q3, some of the measures were relaxed and so consumption was up. So exposure of Woodline to the countries most affected represented an opportunity to catch up when the restrictions will be lifted and in happier times. Now let's go to the integration of Ingenico with our strong integration culture due to our proven methodology. So we have announced 300 projects are included in the plan, including immediate and short term synergies.
The good start the plants have got off to gives us high hopes of achieving the synergies we're aiming at between now and 2024, €250,000,000 worth. And for 2021, we have firstly started to implement the integration of the teams, and then we conducted the commercial transformation of Merchant Services. And then we rolled out a full review of our technology platforms to generate economies of scale effects, I would say, via the convergence of these platforms. So we're also seeing the first benefits, tangible benefits of our scale effect, within particular, many, many development projects, of course, the bulking together of our sourcing and also the transformation of the back office and the support function. In sum, all of the initiatives I've just mentioned are well on track to achieve our objective of €66,000,000 of euro, positive impact on the OMDA in 2021.
Regarding the future, we're convinced that beyond the short term tensions because of COVID, our outlook in 2021, the medium term are more than just sound in terms of growth and margin improvement, mainly thanks to the complete execution of our strategic roadmap that's already underway. We can already see the positive effect of our new supplying of new services and solutions to our merchants. Also, I'd like to underscore a few items of success worth noting. Concerning SMEs, we can onboard thousands of new merchants every month now all over the world, thanks to an innovative digital offering and end to end solutions. Regarding major merchants, we have omnichannel capabilities connected with our possibility of doing full integration, transparent integration of the acceptance for the IT systems of the merchants.
And that enabled us to gain confidence and gain the trust more and more of 1st ranking players in the area of the merchants in general and also put together a rich pipeline for the coming quarters. Regarding Online Services also, our objective in parallel with the signature of new merchants was to widen the portfolio value propositions. We pursued the deployment of our powerful processing factory, as we call it, for payments in Financial Services, highlighting the perfect compliance with the requirements out there in terms of outsourcing of major banks like UniCredit or Commerzbank. Also, we deployed successfully terminal as a service solutions in Europe as well as new contracts obtained in the United States, underscoring the relevance of the as a service model and the needs of our bank and acquirer partners in this area. So to conclude now on the improvement of our profitability, we think we've got all the levers in our hand, thanks to our experience in this regard with the achievement of synergies on the base of acquisitions that we've made as you see on this slide.
You see the amount expected in the coming few years that were announced. Each of these acquisitions, of course, we made we made announcements at the time. And you can also see on the slide the amounts expected in coming years. And combined with the ongoing optimization of our cost base, we hope to achieve fine performance levels as we did in 2020. I'll give the floor now to Eric Ufteau, our CFO.
Thank you for your attention. Eric Ufteau? Thank you, Marc Henri. We will now give the floor to our CFO, our Chief Financial Officer, Eric Urtheau. Thank you, Marc Henri, and hello to everybody.
Firstly, I'd like to cover the items that make up our revenues for the full year of 2020. As you can see, we see a dip of 4.6% in organic terms. That underscores the great resilience of Worldline in a very favorable COVID environment. The division that most impacted was Merchant Services organic degrowth, therefore, down by 7.7%, mainly because of a drop in the activity level in stores in the second and fourth quarters because of the closure of nonessential shops. However, online activities and omnichannel activities remained very dynamic for verticals outside of travel, of course, such as digital goods, gaming and marketplaces.
Now Financial Services were very resilient in this environment with an organic drop of only 1.6%, thanks to the recurring payment flows and the ramping up of new major outsourcing contracts. TSS, with a contribution coming mainly from the integration of Ingenico in the first sorry, in the last 2 months of the year, dropped by 1.9%. The division availed a defined performance in mature markets such as EMEA, in line with the trajectory expected. Now the revenues of MTS posted an organic drop of 3.1% impacted by the discontinuation of public transportation in many places and of course, the associated ticketing volumes. Let's now move on to the next slide concerning the OMDA.
The OMDA remained overall fairly at €700,000,000 in 2020, but it does show an improvement of 60 basis points in terms of margin percentage, reaching 25.5%. This performance is due to the achievement of synergies at the reverse hotspot crisis and more generally, the business model. More in detail, the profitability of Marketing Services is up by 150 basis points, 24.9%, availing of the cost control actions that we set up in the course of the year to offset the impact of COVID-nineteen on our revenues, also the execution of the SPS synergies and the cross cutting actions to do continuous improvement in our productivity. The division also revealed of variable cost base that was higher than what we had in Financial Services. So the Financial Services division, you see the performance remained sound at 31.2% in spite of a shrinking of 2 40 basis points because of the strong proportion of fixed costs in an environment where the volumes were going down.
Also, the margin was affected by investments connected with the ramping up of the major contracts that we signed recently. In parallel, cost measures were set up so as to mitigate the contraction of the OMDA. Finally, Financial Services did not avail of the usual volume of project business in the context where investments were more limited on the side of our clients in the latter part of the year. The performance of TSS was pretty strong with an improvement of 6 60 basis points in the OMDA margin, mainly thanks to the geographical mix, with the strong performance in Europe in Q4 and particularly thanks to the transformation and cost cutting plans launched at the start of 2020 that led to a reduced cost base, opposite higher revenues. Now the profitability of MTS was affected mainly by the trend in electronic ticketing, especially in the U.
K. And in the Latin American market because of health constraints. In this context, the margin went down by only 90 basis points, thanks to the measures enacted in the course of the year so as to adapt the cost base to the revenues. Finally, regarding corporate, we pursued our energetic corporate actions so as to contain and rationalize our cost base. Let's now move on to the other items in our P and L.
The nonrecurring items stood at 11,000,000 euros and are made up mainly of the amortization of the allocation of the acquisition price, €114,000,000 and also cost for integration and acquisition, €105,000,000 corresponding in particular to the integration costs for 6 payment services and also the costs connected with the acquisition and integration of Ingenico. Consequently, the operating earnings for all of 2020 stood at €245,000,000 The net financial charges stood at €28,000,000 And that includes the net cost for financial debt €20,000,000 worth for the interest for the bonds and the convertible bonds, Oceon ones, issued in 2020 and the effect in the full year of the instruments that we issued in 2019. I'd recall that the financial result in the net financial result in 2019 availed of the fair value adjustment of the contingent counterparty connected with the acquisition of SiX Payment Services, €118,000,000 worth there. And the accounting of the adjustment, the tax charge, €51,000,000 represented an effective tax rate, which showed an improvement of 170 basis points at 23.4 percent as opposed to 25.1% in 2019 normalized to take account of the contingent counterparty effects connected with SBA. We haven't any significant minority interest since the acquisition of the minority stake in Equinix Worldline and taking account of the consolidation of Payone in 2 months only.
Finally, the net earnings group share stood at €164,000,000 impacted by nonrecurring elements that were higher and fewer exceptional positive elements than in 2019. The normalized net income stood at €361,000,000 up by 20.2 percent. And our diluted normalized earnings per share achieved a level of €1,760,000 up compared to the 2019 figure of €1,63,000,000 Concerning the free cash flow, our CapEx stood at €155,000,000 That's 5.7 percent of the revenues, complying with our objective of 5% to 6%. In fact, in spite of the uncertainties connected with COVID, we maintained our CapEx intensity so as not to impinge on
our future growth.
The trend in the working capital requirement is in line with our anticipation with the positive impact of €46,000,000 in the continuous trend we've been observing in the first half and turning around the negative trend we've seen in 2019. Now the integration costs went up slightly concerning mainly Ingenico, of course, and the start of the integration as well as the integration costs of other recent acquisitions. So the figure excludes, however, the €54,000,000 for costs connected with the transaction with Ingenico. All told, the free cash flow for the year before the transaction cost of Ingenico, corresponding to the indicator in our guidance for 2020, stood at €349,000,000 representing a conversion rate of the OMD of 49.8 percent, an improvement of 200 basis points. Including the transaction cost of Ingenico, our free cash flow stands €295,000,000 Now let's move on to the net debt of the group.
The net debt of the group went up and achieved a level of €3,165,000,000 as opposed to €641,000,000 at the start of the year. The main component in this trend is, of course, the cash out of €2,800,000,000 worth for the acquisition of Ingenico. Our net debt is, of course, in line with our expectations at the start of the year and with our plan aiming at reducing our net debt to OMDA ratio, thanks to our free cash flow generation. To round it off before recalling our financial guidance for 2021, let's look the underlying hypothesis. As you can see, we think that there will be a gradual recovery throughout the year, enabling us to achieve our cruising speed in the second half.
So our scenario is built up as follows. For the first half of twenty twenty, we're 2021, we're expecting flat revenue, slightly down perhaps in terms of organic performance because of the government restrictions that are fairly strict and especially in the first quarter, including the closure of nonessential trading outlets, the curfews we've seen and restrictions on the borders in most of our key countries. Also, the partial lightening of the restrictions in the first half of twenty twenty one, in particular in the second quarter. However, we don't anticipate any significant activity in terms of traveling among European countries for the moment, no intercontinental travel, and we anticipate an acceleration of the vaccination campaigns. There are our underlying hot boxes.
For the second half of twenty twenty one, we also forecast a new acceleration towards organic growth in double digits based on an easing of the national restrictions with the end of the restrictions for non essential traders and the end of the curfew measures and the border restrictions. We think that intra European travel in Europe will be authorized and there'll be a gradual turn a return to streams of travelers, so as we've seen in the past. So this scenario, we've taken on board to put together our annual objectives presented on this slide. You see in terms of revenues, we're anticipating organic growth of about 5% or more. For the OMDA margin, we're envisaging an improvement of about 200 basis points compared with the OMDA pro form a for 2020 of 23.9%.
And free cash flow representing a rate of conversion of the OMDA of about 50%. That concludes my presentation as CFO. And at this point, I will give the floor to the next speaker, Georges Poggier, who is the Lead Director. Thank you, says Mr. Grafinet.
Thank you, Eric and Marc Henry as well, of course. And of course, Eric and Marc Henry will be staying with us in case you have questions for them later on. We'll now continue through our agenda. And given the current context that we're living in, for the presentation of the work of the Board, we'll have a recorded presentation by Georges Porges, who is our Lead Director. And that is going to be screened now.
His video is going to be screened. He will present the work of the Board and some he'll give you some insight into the work that's been done by your Board for the last year. Thank you, dear Chairman, dear shareholders, Sebastien de Poche. I want to present the work of your Board for fiscal 2020. I'd like to recall that all of this report features in the universal registration document for 2020 that I would refer you to.
So I will just limit to myself to the main salient points. Your board and the board committees were particularly active in the last year given the transformation going on in the group resulting from the acquisition of Ingenico and the need to manage the impacts of the pandemic and also work concerning Trust 2025, the new CSR program for the coming 5 years. Your board met on 16 occasions in the course of the year, and the attendance rate was 93%, which is a very high level. This level is even higher, going up as far as 100 percent for the committees, as you can see on this screen. This remarkable attendance rate, given the high level of activity going on, reflects the great commitment of all of the board members when it comes to the work of the Board and the Board's committees.
As Lead Director, I also was in charge of the evaluation process for the Board. The main conclusions of the annual evaluation feature in the report on corporate governance and are also on the screen before you. The composition of the Board is very diverse and very appropriate. The number of Board members is quite high after the widening that followed the acquisition of Ingenico, but it's a very balanced Board in its composition and the skills of the board members are indeed complementary and very sound skills. We were particularly attentive to integrating as best we could the board members who came from the board of Ingenico, and an in-depth training program was set up.
Your board also manages to work efficiently in spite of its size and also despite the limitation on physical interactions because of the current health context. I'd like to underscore the quality of the work pursued in the board in the course of the year. The board members actually expressed their satisfaction in this respect, and we will be trying to make progress the whole time. There is a continuous improvement plan that's being decided upon by your Board. Among the important pieces of work done by the Board, I'd like to underscore the management of the health crisis, which we're still going through now and the business combination with Ingenico, 2 major cases to be addressed that were addressed very successfully.
We've revisited the remuneration of the corporate officers, especially given the impact of the health crisis on their objectives, as the Chairman of the compensation committee will explain in more detail in a short while. Apart from reviewing the results, the budgets, the objectives and the financial communication, the board also looked at the risk related aspects, compliance and cybersecurity, which are particularly important for our area of business. The board also reviewed the major thrusts of the group strategy against the backdrop of the market trends and also the investment and financing strategies associated therewith. Then the non financial performance was reviewed as well, and your board worked on the CSR strategy and the new 5 year plan that is going to implement our strategy is called Trust 2025. As the Lead Director, I also made sure that we properly integrated the new directors but also organized discussions with the Board members outside of the executive members from the company.
So to facilitate interactions and feedback, I can guarantee you that there are high quality relations and good communication goes on between the board members, but also with the managerial team. And I'm very happy to note that. Also, I took part in discussions with the main shareholders who so wished so as to present the resolution, the main resolution submitted to the vote here today and explain the rationale to them concerning aspects of governance or compensation, a particularly sensitive issue this year given the exceptional impact of the health crisis. Finally, you will note with me the spectacular changes that have taken place in your company under Mr. Gilles Grafinet and his team.
Since the company was IPO ed just 7 years ago now, worldwide, so its revenues constantly progressing, now reaching almost €5,000,000,000 worth. Now we have more than 20,000 employees in the group around the world. At the same time, this is important, the stock price was multiplied by 5 and the market cap by 10. Worldline originally was controlled by the Atos Group, has seen gradually its equity base opening up so as to now become independent. And recently, it became part of the CAFD40 Index.
The business combination with Ingenico positions Worldline as the 4th largest global payment player. After making this major acquisition, your company has sound governance and an appropriate governance structure that enables it under the use of the management team to pursue its growth strategy and a strategy whereby it will be an active player in the consolidation of the industry. Your company will continue as in the past, and this is the firm intent of your board, to maintain the highest possible standards in terms of corporate governance. Thank you very much for your attention.
So on behalf of all of us, I'd like to thank Georges Page, our reference administrator, for his incredible commitment, the service of your company, also of his governance as well and his report, of course. Now we're going to move to the nominations committee and their report, and we will have the possibility to listen to Laurence Van Hasburger, who has accepted to make a video, and he is at the head of the nominations committee. So please can you project the video? So Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, shareholders, it is down to me to present the works of the nominations committee throughout 2020. And I'd like to remind you that all the details are in the universal registration document.
Now in terms of the nominations committee that I am at the head of and on the slide, you can see the composition of this. 75% of members are independent. We met 4x in 2020, and all of its members participated in all the meetings. Throughout the works, which were particularly rich in 2020, we have issued a certain number of recommendations on the management of the company and also the composition of the board and its committees within the framework of the acquisition of Ingenico. We, moreover, are assured of the existence of a succession plan for managers should there be any resignations.
As you can see, your board is now composed of 70 members, and there is quality to the tune of 41%. It has a large majority of independent members to the tune of 65%. As Mr. Georges Porges pointed out, your Board has acquired 6 new members from the board of Ingenico following the successful acquisition of this company. The board that has been enlarged aims to be inclusive and diverse in order to encourage the success of the ongoing integration and the development of the group.
Its composition is the result of a balance between Board members from the Board of Ingenico and those from Worldline, which is in line with the capitalistic clout of each of the 2 groups before the acquisition. Now this balance is also assures the representation of the main shareholders given the level of their participation and the voting rights within the company. The composition of the board takes into account all the agreements concluded with 6 Group AG since the acquisition with Worldline and its payment activities. And then within the framework of the Ingenico acquisition, this composition reflects its status as main shareholder, which confirmed the strategic character of its investment in Worldline and has taken the commitment to preserve its shares to the end of the first half of twenty twenty one and moreover, has fully supported the acquisition of Ingenico. In terms of the new members from the Board of Ingenico, the Board has also welcomed an administrator who had been named following the recommendations of BPI France given his significant participation.
And also an administrator represented DSV Group, I. E, the Kesteparnia, the German Casteparnia, which is a strategic partner of Eugenico and also part of Worldline in Germany and also part of a joint company Payone. The board also acquired a second administrator, who The slide that you can see on the screen shows once again the very structured character, the very balanced character of your Board with its high proportion of independent members. Now in order to reflect the new configuration, the more global configuration after the integration of Ingenico, the board has been configured so that it can represent diversity of nationalities and profiles, which will allow us to enhance even further the board in order to carry out our strategy for growth in the group in 2020 and in line with these objectives and the diversity policy. Your board has completed and strengthened its competencies and expertise, especially in terms of Payment Services, Investment Strategies as well as in terms of risk and compliance or even in terms of corporate social responsibility.
Diversity and the complementary nature of competences within the Board are illustrated on the slide. On the basis of the work carried out by the nominations committee, the committees of the board have been reorganized following the integration of the new board members from the board of Ingenico. And you can see on the slide the current configuration. Each committee is composed of at least 50% of independent members, and they are fully in line with the recommendations of the AFFECT MEDEV code. The nominations and remunerations committee has been separated into 2 separate committees.
Remunerations committee is now headed by an independent administrator, Mr. Luc Raymond. And it also has an employee an employed administrator as one of the members. The experience and the expertise of each of the members and the sensor, which is due to be renewed, are very valuable to the board in order to carry the company through to the new step, which is about to open up in terms of its development. Let me the biographies of the members and the sensor whose mandates are to be approved by you, those are available in the convening brochure.
Just as a reminder, we have Madame Agnese Audier, Madame Nasen Somme Ozergine, Madame Daniel Lagard, Mr. Daniel Schmucki, Mr. Johannes Dusselhoff as the Censor and myself. And finally, as you know, your company is headed by Mr. Gilles Grappinet, who currently is the CEO since the departure of Mr.
Thierry Breton in 2019. Now this governance mode seemed the best adapted in order to ensure continuity to secure performance of the group and also to execute the planned strategic projects. Despite the unification of functions, governance was not balanced given the important proportion of independent administrators. The clear definition of the powers for the CEO, the determination of the many different matters to be handled by the Board and also the presence of a lead administrator. As announced during the acquisition of Ingenico, Mr.
Bernard Bourgeault is to be named non executive Chairman of the Board at the end of Q3 2021. Once the personal reasons that have hindered him from taking up this position before are lifted, the functions of the President, of the Board and the CEO will be split since Mr. Jules Grabinet will still be the CEO. Mr. Marc Andre Deporte will be the Deputy CEO.
Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, shareholders, thank you for your attention. So thank you. On behalf of everybody, thank you, Mr. Laurence von Hatzweg, Lotringen, for your report, which is, as usual, is very rigorous and very clear. And we now have prerecorded video for Mr.
Luca Raymond, Head of the Remunerations Committee. So Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, I have the task of presenting the report of the Remunerations Committee. As a reminder, you can see on the screen the current composition of this committee, which is in line with the recommendation of the affirmative code as well as a summary of its activities this year. My presentation will mention the main elements of remuneration of 2020 for the corporate offices in 2020 and the policy for 2021. For more details, I would ask you to consult the universal reference documents.
Now I'd like to present the 1st of all, the impact of COVID-nineteen, a change in the scope of your Managers 2020. First of all, the variable portion long term has been adjusted given the changes of the scope, which resulted from the acquisition of Ingenico. Moreover, let me remind you that as a reaction to the crisis of COVID-nineteen, the Board decided the initiative of Milles Graffiti and Marc Andre de Porte to not implement the increase of the fixed portion of remuneration. As you know, the remuneration in cash is conditional upon the realization of performance and based on the indicators. Now neither the objectives of the first half year of twenty twenty or the second half year have been revised downwards despite the crisis, and the amount of the bonus has been reduced to 50%.
So stock options and performance flows, those will be acquired respectively in 2020, 2022 with as long as the present condition is met. So this will be aligned with the guidance revised and communicated on April 2020. The Board considered that the remuneration of the beneficiaries would have been sufficiently impacted by the context of the health crisis. The objectives of 2020, the Board has taken into account the following elements. So the health crisis and the governmental restrictions are quite exceptional and beyond our control.
It, therefore, is necessary to adjust the objectives in order to realign this with the guidance of the market from 2020 despite the evolution of the health crisis in order to align the interests of the shareholders with the beneficiaries in this global and difficult environment. Such an adjustment was justified if otherwise the whole of the plans to 2018, 'twenty nine would have been a loss because these former 3 year plans have been structured with performance conditions that need to be reached every year in a cumulative way and without any elasticity. We've also seen that the remuneration of managers that were severely impacted by the context of COVID-nineteen and also even though their remuneration is well below the other CAC40 companies. Now in those conditions, the realignment of objectives with the guidance that has been revised allowed us to ensure the motivation and the retention of these managers in a competitive market and also to align their interest with the shareholders. This adjustment was particularly justified since the performance of the customer was quite remarkable despite the context, and it led to an increase in the share price of more than 20% in 2020 and more than 100% over the period 2018 2020.
This was a reference period for measuring the performance of the plans mentioned. Let me now present the different components of remuneration for the CEO, Deputy CEO, which are in line with the remuneration policy of 2020 and adopted at the last General Assembly. The main points concerning remuneration, Jules Rapinay, CEO, are detailed on this slide, in particular. The annual fixed remuneration, EUR 622,500 variable cash portion, EUR 403,000,000 776,000 and performance shares, stock options in the framework of a 3 wheel plan. And the Farewell is estimated as 1,278,000 and 24.
Mr. Gilgepinae has not received remuneration for his functions as and also Chairman of the Board as this has as was planned. The remuneration 2020 of the CEO, and you can see a summary of that on this slide, is to be voted on in Resolution 13. Now the main elements of remuneration for the Deputy CEO Resolution 14 are the following: annual fixed remuneration, €350,000 completed with variable remuneration in cash, €196,280 The attribution of performance shares and stock options, part of a 3 year plan and the fair value is estimated at €662,496 Mr. Marc Henry de Porte has not received any remuneration for his functions as Deputy CEO for Ingenico S.
A. Now I'd like to present the remuneration policy for Corporate Offices for 2021, so which will change. Now given the increase in the size of the group and also the responsibilities of our corporate officers, the we deemed that this should be in line with the company Fortis. So once the revaluation has been taken into account remuneration proposed for 2021 will be broken down as possible. For the CEO, a fixed remuneration of €750,000 and it will be specified that this remuneration will remain unchanged during as he carries out his functions in 2021.
So target remuneration corresponds to 117% of his fixed remuneration, I. E, euros 880,000 a pure multiyear remuneration made up of common shares and stock options to the amount of 1,370,000. For the Deputy CEO, a fixed remuneration of €140,000 target remuneration of 100%, I. E. €440,000 of multiyear remuneration made up of performance shares and stock options.
And the fair value amounts to €810,000 This review presents an increase of a total of 15% for the CEO and 24% for the Deputy CEOs. Given the uncertain economic context due to the health crisis, the review of annual monetary remuneration will be applied from the 1st July 2021 so that the Board can take account of the situation. The supplementary pension for Mr. Gilles Garpinet remains unchanged for 2021 as this is in line with the new legislation. So the slide that you have on the board shows the remuneration structure for the Corporate Officers.
So you can see that it is transparent, balanced and also very much linked to the performance of the company in the short term and also in the long term. Now I suggest that we go to the incentive plans. The long term incentive plans, 20 20 1, 2023 to be implemented by the Board. The remuneration policy for 2021 provides for the attribution of a multiyear remuneration, which concerns combined allocation of performance shares and also stock actions as in previous years. The definitive acquisition of these shares and stock options, of course, depends on satisfying the performance conditions, which are demanding transparent and quantified and measured over the 3 year period.
These conditions are based on 3 financial indicators to the tune of 80% and one extra financial indicator to the tune of 20%. The financial indicators concerning performance, the same as in previous years, and they are regularly communicated to the shareholders. The extra financial performance are linked to corporate social responsibility and this year depend on external and internal indicators for the group. And kind of elasticity curve allows the increase or the lowering of this of the percentage based on the level of achievement. The percentage of global acquisition cannot be higher than 100% and could not exceed 90% in the case of non achievement of an indicator.
In terms of the nomination of Mr. Bernard Bojiro as Chairman of the Board, which due to take place the Q3 2021, we should also express the remuneration policy for him. He will receive €300,000 as fixed remuneration. This amount was determined based on previous studies of Chairman on current companies, and this is below the 25% percentile. No remuneration will be paid to the Chairman.
So and I'm going to be now present to you the policy of 2021 for remuneration. Let me remind you that the global envelope for remuneration has been is now €1,200,000,000 with and this will be put to your approval. This amount will remain unchanged for 2021 as well as the fixed amount of remuneration of your board members and the sensors. So it has been suggested that we increase slightly the variable remuneration depending on their attendance rate in order to be in line with the market. So as for previous years, Mr.
Gilles Rapinet and the administrator that represents the employees and the administrator nominated by BPM France will not receive remuneration for their job as administrator's Chairman. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your attention.
Thank you. Also on behalf of everybody, says Mr. Grafinet, thank you, Luc Raymond, for this very detailed and clear report. And at this point, I will invite Ms. Virginie Patoff, representing our statutory auditors, to come and present the auditors' report, including the report on the resolutions and the financial delegation.
I'd like to point out that the report of the statutory auditors on the consolidated statutory accounts and the related party agreements and corporate governance and so on are reproduced in full in the universal registration document. The reports on the resolutions on the agenda were also put online on the website of the company under the Investor tab as per the legal requirements in terms of deadline. Ms. Paltok, you have the floor. Thank you.
Good afternoon, everybody. On behalf of the joint auditors, Deloitte and Grant Thornton, I have great pleasure in summing up our reports following our assignments for the financial year that ended on 31st December 20 and give you a summary of the different reports issued. Now concerning, 1st of all, our reports concerning the approval of the annual unconsolidated accounts covered in resolutions 12 of your meeting, these are presented respectively on Pages 310 and 253 of the Universal Registration document available on the website of the company. The purpose of our work in line with our professional standards, the purpose of our work was to obtain reasonable assurance that the consolidated accounts of the group drawn off in compliance with the IFRS standard reference base and the annual accounts of the Worldline Company drawn up as per French GAAP did not comprise any material misstatements. Our two firms worked in France and outside of France in all of the material entities of your group.
Our approach and our procedures were adapted to the organization of your group, its specificities and the risks identified on the basis of quantitative and qualitative criteria. On the as needed basis, we used the internal control arrangement set up in the company and also covered the current operations and the particular events of the fiscal year. I'd also recall that our work took place in the context of the COVID-nineteen crisis, of course, that created rather particular conditions for the preparation and the auditing of the accounts of the fiscal year. In 2020, the key audit matters identified as such, taking account of the relative weight in the accounts and the high degree of estimation and judgment necessary for the revaluation concern for the consolidated accounts concern, the accounting statement of the acquisition of the Ingenico Group, the recognition of the revenues relating to multiple element service contracts and the recognition of the revenues ensuing from transactional activities and for the annual accounts concerning the valuation of equity securities and the recognition of the revenues relating to multiple element service contracts. All of our work the progress of our work and our detailed conclusions were shared.
All of these items were shared, of course, regularly with the company management and the other committee of your company and, of course, the Board. On the basis of this work, we can certify that the consolidated and annual accounts of the Worldline Company are therefore fair and accurate in the light of the accounting standards in force and give a faithful picture of the results of the period and the financial situation of your group. Also, our reports render an account on the specific verifications required by law, which aim at making sure of the accuracy of certain information communicated in the management report, the report of the Board on Corporate Governance and the documents sent out to the shareholders, and we have no observation to make in this respect. Finally, the company decided to postpone the implementation of the electronic information format until the following financial year. So our report does not comprise any conclusion on that.
Concerning our special report on related party agreements featuring on Page 315 of the universal registration document. During the financial year, 2 new agreements were authorized and entered into with the SIX Group AG Company. This is an agreement on the finalization of the acquisition of SIX Payment Services and a lock up agreement on its Worldline shares. Since the closing, the Board of Directors meeting on the 21st January 2021 authorized an agreement with DSV Group concerning the conditions for contributions by Worldline of its payment activities in Germany and Austria for the benefit of Payone GmbH, a joint venture created with DSB Group. We have no particular observations to make on these agreements.
This report also recalls the agreements already approved by the general meeting and which continue to be implemented in the course of the past financial year. Finally, Deloitte also issued a report presented on Page 232, which concerns the consolidated declaration of non financial performance for which it certifies the compliance of the declaration with the provisions provided for by law. And it concludes that there was no material misstatement concerning all of the information supplied. In the context of the meeting here today, this time on an extraordinary basis, we issued several reports which refer to resolutions 20 to 29 concerning the proposed delegation to the board in order to conduct different transactions on the equity of the company. These different reports don't require any particular comment on our part.
We have absolutely nothing to flag up. In that respect, thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your attention. Thank you, Ms. Pautzoff, Mr. Grafinet, for your report.
Please extend our thanks to all of the other auditors, the many people who fed into the process around the world in helping you to fulfill your audit assignment, especially for 2020, which was not an easy year for you or for any other company. So thank you for your support. Next, if you agree, we'll perhaps pursue and continue going through our agenda. And we have now reached the time for the Q and A session, the question and answer session. We'll therefore fill some questions.
We will be receiving questions possibly through the web platform in real time. And in the meantime, I would suggest that
I
can give now answers to questions we received in writing before the event. Especially as is becoming customary, there is the Forum for Responsible Investment that has written to many companies, usually around the same topics, topics that we found in this year's questionnaire already present in the question set of questions for last year. And I think you will find on our website all the questions and answers. But there are a few of them that particularly echo themes connected with the pandemic and the way in which we manage certain consequences of the pandemic, be it in our supplier and client ecosystem or the impact of home working, that kind of thing. Interesting questions to bring up here with all the shareholders because this was a hugely important topic for everybody, the pandemic.
And perhaps I could ask some of our staff members to help me to give some answers to questions that were raised. So firstly, we have the support that we granted to suppliers and some clients as well. I'll read them out. The question is the following. Solidarity among economic players, especially with small companies involved, makes it really important to cooperate.
What about your efforts that you put in nationally and internationally to support your suppliers or clients affected by the crisis? Have you enforced differentiated policies for very small companies and SMEs? Has the crisis led to any change in your policy in that regard? I think we'll ask our CFO and the person in charge of sourcing in the group to perhaps provide answers on that. Erik Eartofa.
Thank you. We managed to maintain our business activity, so we had a continuing flow of business. And we managed, therefore, to support our suppliers nationally and also internationally. The group has also, since the start of the COVID-nineteen crisis, been working with the more embrittled companies, more vulnerable ones in our supply chain to make sure they remain going concerns. In particular, we set up interactions between suppliers and purchasers to help them to remain a growing concern and provide them with the necessary support they needed when it was deemed to be expedient.
We also worked with our clients to deploy to accelerate the deployment of certain projects like contactless payments and also pick up some challenges that emerged during the crisis. We have responsible sourcing policy, of course, and we bolster the importance of that on a national sourcing basis and also sourcing done in a way that will support very small companies and SMEs. Mr. Grafini, I'd add that during the different waves of the pandemic, especially for small traders who are to shop in many countries. We mobilized all of our sales people to offer them solutions that would help them to adapt their services as quickly as they could with remote selling
possibilities, remote ordering, click
and collect kind of solutions for them so that their clients click and collect kind of solutions for them so their clients could place their order on the Internet and collect their goods at the store. So to help them, as shopkeepers, to at least retrieve some of their lost sales volumes. And of course, we didn't pay the we charged the monthly payments that were would have been owing while their stores were closed during lockdowns. Now the next question concerns the actual staff impacts of Home Working. How, at group level, have you managed the employee impact associated with the massive recourse that's been had to Home Working, especially in terms of the management of cyclical risks and taking part in the deferring of expenses and how have you therefore taken care of your people working from home.
So I'll give the floor to Olivier Bourdieu, who is our HR manager at group level. I will give the floor to Olivier, who will shed light for you on that. It still remains topical, of course. Tubular is still working from home in many instances. Thank you, says Olivier.
In terms of volume, just to give you an idea of the ballpark figure we're talking about in Worldline, home working, 12,500 employees in more than 50 countries. We have more than 90% of our employees were working from home. And we managed and took account of the cyclosocial risks and the quality of life at work in the following manner. Firstly, we communicated a lot with our managers and our employees. We reached out to them, supplied to them handbooks and guides on how to work from home.
And that's for managers and our employees with the rules to be abided by to manage to successfully work from home. We have webinars that we set up. We had communication to our teams to help them to cope with the situation. We also communicated with the more solitary employees, people who don't have a family with them at home and who needed more help and support as they were working from home. In some countries, like in France, for example, we set up platforms for doctors and psychologists services to be extended and social assistance as well.
In terms of compensation, we have to defer expenses in terms of hardware and subscriptions. Depending on the country, the amounts varied. Also, we did a lot of people polls to see what our staff members thought. So to involve them in the way in which we were doing things, we had working groups that we set up, including in the people polls for the employees. We dedicated some of our questions in there to this mode of working and new modes of working after the crisis, too.
And then finally, the national management teams comprise managers and human resources people and logistics experts to make sure that we always have 2 fundamental pillars of our management available to help us to manage this crisis. It's got to do with the health of our team members and also the continuity of our business operations. Thank you, Achille, for giving me the floor on that. Thank you, Olivier. You may like to stay where you are because we have another question coming up now that is particularly that's one that particularly echoes the importance of corporate social responsibility.
And this concerns the tying in of social partners in the CSR policy. I'll read the question. How concretely have you tied in social partners at group level and locally to engage your company in a fair transition? Are you going to publish their opinion on your vigilance plan? Are you going to publish their opinion on your performance your non financial performance documents?
That's the question. There are a couple of questions. Well, we've tied in not just total partners but employees at large. And in several ways, firstly, at group level, currently, Worldline has become an independent group now, we set up a special negotiating body, an SNB, so to set up a European Works Council. So we're currently negotiating the setting up of that EWC.
And in the documents constituting that EWC, we suggested and certain partners have suggested we should comprise CSR for the future European Works Council. So the Solar Partners will be tied in at the highest level. Also, we've been tying in the employees via the 2 people representing employees who sit on the Board Committee in charge of CSO. You mentioned Trust 2025 already. That comprises all of the items concerning CSR for the coming 5 years.
And we have a lady representative of the Economic and Social Council who feeds into the workings of the Board and the CSR committee. Social dialogue also locally and nationally enabled us to take account of a lot of items to do with ethics corporately, the whistleblowing mechanisms, the diversity policy, training and these are there's internal dialogue that takes place, enabling us to report on new policies and new arrangements set in place. Also, the employees and the SOF partners take part in working groups as we held on the purpose of the company, the raison debt, as we call it in French, more than 600 employees and Social Partners too, fed into the process to define our purpose, our raison debt and the corporate values. That, in sum, is how we've been tying in the stakeholders, the total partners in the CSR policy elaboration and also comprising the different themes to do with the duty of vigilance plan, the ethics policy and all of the topics revolving around CSR that you'll find in Trust 2025. Thank you, Susan de Graafini.
Indeed, this is a very rich debating topic, including with our employee Board members and in the CSO Committee of the Board. Thank you very much, Olivier, for those answers. In the meanwhile, we have started to receive any questions in real time via the website. Here is the first one. It is, do you think that international travel will bounce back in the near term?
And in that context, would you review revise upwards your growth prospects? Mr. Julien Laferreux has asked that question. Maybe I could answer that. I think what I can say on that is that at the moment, it's premature.
It's early days yet to try and answer such a question. In fact, we've already actually integrated into our guidance the possibility of a certain recovery in the second half of the year of travel within the European Union. That is in the European Union, neighboring countries where we have the core part of our business. And Eric underscored the underlying elements in our guidance. So we think that we'll return to traveling once again, but mainly within the European Union to start off with.
So there's potentially something we did not take into account in our guidance. That would be a massive resumption of international intercontinental travel in the second half, the Chinese, the Americans, Latin Americans traveling around the world. Will that happen or not? We don't know. It's early days yet.
And at this stage, we don't observe bookings, advanced booking being made in hotels being made in hotels or with airlines. No massive bookings for now. But our guidance was put together saying at least so. That opens the door to other possibilities. If during the summertime, we anticipate massive flows of intercontinental travelers, business travelers or leisure travelers, if there are going to be bigger numbers than we initially anticipated coming to Europe, for example, we would then revisit our ambitions.
But for the moment, we just can't say. Here's another question that I'll perhaps take 2, which is the following. Mr. Jean Claude Liffreault asked us, do you intend to pay a dividend in the coming few years? That's his question.
Well, thanks for asking the question. It's part of the road map that the group has set down for itself that we published as soon as we IPO ed, that is in June 2014, subject, as you'll recall, subject to strategic development taking place because we do have to take part in the consolidation of this industry. And up to now, it's clear that our board considers that value creation for shareholders via this active participation in the consolidation of our industry, the payments industry, this justified the fact of postponing the payment of a dividend so as to retain monies in the company to plow into our future development. And I think that choice, as we've seen, as Georges Baugere recall, I think that choice proved to be the right one made by the Board.
So it's quite clear then that if we see how consolidation is still in full throttle at the moment, we can see how this is very much the focus of our Board in order to continue its strategic development for Igenico. This is a very strong priority for the group. But in the long term, Worldline has wants to achieve profitability growth and also wants to generate disposable cash flow, of course. And of course, this would make paying a dividend credible. We're working with the management team, and we hope to do both things at the same time, consolidation, but and also decide that we have the means to be able to pay a dividend.
But this is not the subject for 2021, as you know. So that was that question. Now I think we have the time to take a last question. Yes, we have a question which is extremely interesting. And so what do you expect in terms of the impact of the EPI?
So this is a European Payments initiative, which would give Europe a very large payment brand. It would be kind of like a Mastercard for Europe or a Visa for Europe. So would it be negative or positive for a group like Worldline? So I'm going to hand over to Martin Marie Leporte to answer this very important question in terms of payments in Europe. Thank you, Gilles.
So yes, very important pertinent question then. As you started to say, EPI is a new European impairments initiative launched by European banks in various countries, Belgium, France, Germany. And this was done in July 2020. This initiative was very positively received by the European regulatory authorities, and we added our voices to that recently. And also, Netza, which is another major payments service provider.
So this just goes to show this our support and our interest in initiative. Now how can this initiative then impact us? So we look at this from a positive standpoint, first of all, because by creating a European payment system, this will allow us to achieve a scale effect and also have better control over solutions for payments. And this will allow us to unify as well a payment system. So this is very interesting.
And also, of course, it's a long term project as well. On the other hand, this will be the opportunity to update platforms and also to propose these to consumers. And as we are processes of these financial institutions, it's an activity for us and a way of allowing us to evolve our solutions and of using the scale effects given our size in Europe and the different countries that we are present in. So I would say this is an evolution which is positive in terms of scale and also positive for our domestic market. Now once again, this is in the long term because creating payment system and getting this accepted by 100 of millions of consumers is something that takes a long time.
And of course, this will go on over the next 4 or 5 years to come. Thank you, Marco Nore. I would also add something to this comment as a European citizen, and I hope that many other people will share me share my point of view, excuse me. So this pandemic has shown us that the need to neither in Europe are very real. So this is a very good initiative taken by these 16 different banks.
They want to occupy this space, have a very authentic brand and payment system. So Europe created its own currency, but we didn't have brand for our payments. So we are a very powerful great power. So what the Europeans didn't do for themselves, of course, you have payment brands which are non European, came in to take charge of payments within Europe. So you can travel between various countries, Europe, but you do nevertheless pay commission to non European players, so for circulating the single currency.
So this is a geostrategic element. But of course, in the context after the crisis, I think that this project is part of the awareness raising in Europe that of this desire for independence and be in charge of our destiny. So I think that this is a major project. It will take a long time, but what is good is that there's a desire to do this and also everybody is aligned on this. So I think that we can be quite confident that Worldline can participate in this initiative.
We will play our part, And this is part of our role and also our mission as well to help where we can and participate in these large European projects and see if we can deploy this project and have a unified platform rather than very many different platforms. So we will keep you informed if this project goes ahead. It's often talked about in the media. So I think that we can all see how it progresses. And anyway, we'll talk more about this during the year.
So time is pressing, and I think that we have answered those questions. Now I'd like to thank our shareholders for those questions. And I think it's now time to go to voting the resolutions. I will now then hand the floor to our Secretary for the Bureau, Jean Louis Detafin, for the to present the results of the votes. And those votes so people voted online, and so the voting was open until 3 yesterday afternoon.
So thank you, Gilles. So we are going to look at the results of the vote. Then let remind you that the quorum is 77%. Now Resolution 1, approval of the company financial statements. This is adopted to the June of 40 49,000.
Resolution 2, this has adopted 99.98 percent of the votes. 3rd resolution on the allocation of net income for the final year, this has adopted 99.99 percent of votes. Resolution 4 on agreement centered into between Worldline and 6 Group AGEA. This was also adopted more than 99.99 percent of votes. 5 Resolution 5 On the business combination agreement between Worldline and DSV, this was adopted more than 99.99 percent Resolution 6 on renewing Madame Addis, this was adopted 99 point 54% of votes.
7th resolution, renewal of Madame Nasinsuma Ozogine as a Board member, this was adopted 99.53% of votes. 8th, 8th, renewal of Daniel Lagerre. This was adopted to the tune of 91.67 percent. The 9th, resolution on the renewal of Laurence von Habsburg Lotringen as a Board member, this adopted 86.46 percent of votes. 10th resolution renewal of Mr.
Daniel Schmucki as Board member. This was adopted at 92%, point 15% of votes, 11th resolution renewal of Mr. Johannes Duschlhoff Sensa adopted to the tune of 64%, 0.83% of votes. So So Resolution 12, information concerning remuneration for 2020 for all the corporate dollars. This was adopted 97.62 percent of votes.
Resolution 13, elements of compensation benefits of the financial year ending December 31, are awarded to Mr. Gilles Garpini, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer adopted 62.65 percent of votes. Resolution 14, elements of compensation benefits paid in 2020 are awarded to Mr. Marc Andre de Porte, Deputy Chief Executive Officer. This was adopted at 62.75 percent of votes.
15th, resolution on the approval of compensation product applicable to the Chairman and Executive Offices 2021 adopted 93% 72% of votes. 16th, resolution, compensation policy applied to the Deputy CEO for 2021 adopted 93.74 percent of votes 17th resolution, compensation policy for CEO 2021 adopted to the tune of 99.71 percent of votes 18th resolution, compensation policy applicable to non executive directors adopted 99.99 percent of votes. 19th resolution on the authorization to give to the Board of Directors for the purchase for purchasing, holding or transferring shares of the company, purposes for purchasing, holding or transferring shares of the company adopted 98.43 percent of votes. The 20th resolution delegation given to the Board to decide the issue of shares while maintaining the preferential subscription rights. So for shares or securities to enter tend to enter share capital adopts 89.82 percent of votes.
So 21st resolution on the delegation to the Board of Directors to decide on the issue of shares without preferential subscription rights conferring to the shareholders' proprietary subscription was adopted at 89.56 percent of votes. Resolution 22, delegation to the Board of authority to decide the issue of shares without a PSR for share securities coming right to the allocation of Debt Instruments through public offerings mentioned in article adopted 87.07 percent of votes. 23rd resolution to increase the number of shares to be issued with the capital interest with or without preferential subscription right adopted 84.27 percent of votes. 24th resolution delegation to the Board of Directors for Authority. This side tuition, the shares or securities given access to the share capital without a provincial subscription right and in consideration for the contribution in kind relating to equity securities or securities given access to the capital other than a public exchange offer adopted 98.19 percent.
25th, the resolution, delegation to the Board of Directors to decide the issue of shares without the PSR reserved for people with certain characteristics. This was adopted 98.90 26th resolution to increase shares with the BASF, so for employees, executive officers or affiliated companies or of group or company with the share plan, 90.57 percent of votes. 27th resolution to increase share capital in the company with the BSR. So this is for a benefit a class of beneficiaries consisting of employees and or corporate officers of the corporate foreign subsidiaries. This was adopted 90 point 59% of the 28th resolution on the authorization to be given to the Board of Directors to grant options to subscribe 402 to purchase shares to the employees and for the corporate offices of the company and or its affiliated companies, adopted 94.18 percent of votes.
29th resolution, a delegation to the Board to grant free performance shares to the employment and or corporate offices of the company and or its affiliated companies adopted 95.48 percent of votes. 30 years resolution, approval of the draft contribution agreement subject to the regime governing spin offs by the company of its operational and commercial activities and the related support functions for the benefit of Worldline France SAS, a wholly owned subsidiary of the company. Approval of the contribution, its valuation and its consideration adopted 99.63% of votes. And finally, the 31st resolution on powers, this has been adopted more than to the tune of 99.99 percent of votes. So thank you very much, Charle Henri, ladies and gentlemen, shareholders.
You will find all these results then on our website. I'd like to thank once again Thierry Sommer and Mr. Lionel Barinot for having been the scrutineers for today. I'd like to take this opportunity as well to say that, of course, normally speaking, and you will have understood this from the report of Mr. Lorenz Zapsburg, this is the last opportunity for me to chair this General Assembly.
So thank you for this honor that you have bestowed on me. And I'm going to pass over the chair then to Mr. Bernard Borijot, who will be and this will begin at the beginning of Q3. And I know that our assembly will be able to rely on his huge experience, and he will be able to ensure the continuity for the benefit of Worldline. Thank you to you all for your participation, and see you soon.