Good morning, everyone. I'm David Daly, part of Worldline's strategy team, and I am really delighted to welcome you here to our Capital Markets Day. Both those of you who are here in person, and of course also those of you joining online as well. We really appreciate that you're taking time out of your schedules to learn more about Worldline, where we are today, the actions we're taking, and also where we're headed. I do just want to remind you that all the materials for this morning's session are available on our website. Of course, we also have the usual disclaimer—here it is—that we will be making forward-looking statements. Of course, there's naturally some level of uncertainty and risk associated with them. In a few moments, I'll walk you through the agenda for the day. Before that, to make some opening remarks, I would like to welcome onto the stage our Chairman, Mr. Wilfried Verstraete.
I'm more than delighted to see so many people in the room this morning for our Capital Markets Day. On behalf of the Board and the whole team that is presenting today, I am more than delighted to see that there is so much interest in our company. We will today present a number of new things that you might not have seen or heard before, but I will not disclose them at this point. I'll leave that to the team, as I would say, the big piece of the meal for today. Pierre-Antoine and his team will present today our North Star 2030 in detail. What I want to insist on is that this plan is designed to make our company the European payments partner of choice for merchants and financial institutions. More importantly, I would like to. Convey three messages from the Boardroom.
The first one is that since the arrival of Pierre-Antoine as our new CEO, the team has done an outstanding job in navigating numerous obstacles and unforeseen events. The group transformation Pierre-Antoine initiated is on track and has successfully delivered several non-core asset disposals. The target is to become an integrated, disciplined, focused, and streamlined group ready for the next stage of its successful transformation. My second message is that the Board fully and unanimously endorses the strategic roadmap that will be presented to you today. the Board believes and is fully convinced that it will create significant value for our customers, our employees, and of course, our valued shareholders. We are confident that we have assembled the best possible team to raise our ambition and establish ourselves as a true leader in European payment services.
My last comment relates to the EUR 500 million capital increase that is envisaged during the first quarter of next year. It will be through a two-leg structure. The first one of circa EUR 100 million capital increase is reserved for a group of core institutions, most of which are already shareholders today. The price for that has been fixed at EUR 2.75 per share. The second capital increase of circa EUR 400 million is opened to all our shareholders through preferential subscription rights. We strongly believe that the proposed transaction is essential to deliver the accelerated transformation of our group. It will anchor a stable base of European financial institutions as our core shareholders. Of course, it will strengthen as well our overall financial structure. These were the three messages I wanted to convey from the Boardroom. So, without any further delay, let's go to the core of our day today. Thank you.
Thanks, Wilfried. As you can see, we have an absolutely packed agenda. We will start with our CEO setting out to you our current position, the actions that are already in motion, his vision for the future of Worldline, and also his commitment to our transformation plan. Our CTOO is going to take you through the details of that plan. We have a short break after that, and we have a number of product demonstrations set up for you in the foyer. Please take some time to look at those during the break. After the break, we will come back and we will go through our go-to-markets: financial institutions, small and medium businesses, enterprise, and global commerce. Our CFO will take you through our financial strategy after that.
We will have covered a lot of ground, and we will open up for around 30 minutes of Q&A where you will have a chance to ask any questions that you may have. For those of you who are here in person, we also have a light lunch afterwards. All the presenters will be there too, so you'll have a chance to discuss and interact with them directly. Now, to kick things off, without further ado, I would like to welcome to the stage our CEO, Pierre-Antoine Vacheron.
Good morning to all of you. Thanks a lot for being here. It's good to see family offices, those who are the experts in following the payments industry, and as well some of our advisors, board members who are here. It's the opportunity, obviously, to thank Wilfried and the Board for the continuous support over the last months, which has been a bit bumpy. The quality of interactions we have with the Board, the quality of dialogue that we have within the Board, has been instrumental to deliver the plan, to design the plan that we are showing today. Seven months in this company, and I must say I'm even more passionate, excited, and confident in the future of this company. There are many reasons for that. Just a few of them.
The first one, obviously, is that in a few months, we have demonstrated that Worldline could be in motion. All what we have delivered over the last quarters is really impressive. Last night, we signed the third transaction, the third disposal in four months. It's not a big asset, Cetrel. It's a business we had in Luxembourg, which is delivering transaction monitoring for stock exchange. It's in Europe, but it's not payment, so we decided to let it go. Last night also, we finalized the documentation for the final signing for the disposal of METS, transaction that we announced in July. We signed today, this morning, and we will close in the second half of H1 2026. As planned. All this demonstrates, like the transaction of North America that we announced last week, that we are super disciplined in this execution of.
Risk copying the company to what we want to do, which is payments and payments in Europe. This is just a few examples of what we've been delivering over the last months. The second reason, obviously, for this confidence, this level of confidence, is the support that we have on our plan from the Board. This decision to call for a capital increase of EUR 500 million gives us, as management, it gives you as investors, would you be equity investors or debt investors, peace of mind for us to enter into this transformation journey. That was extremely important for me as CEO to make sure that everybody had this peace of mind and that you just had to trust in the transformation ahead. The third reason why I'm so confident in the future is the speed with which I've been able to build.
This new executive team all align on the same vision for the company, that this company should be the leader in payments in Europe because it has the asset for that. All align on the fact that to make this happen, we had to conduct a deep transformation of our operating model. To move a step further after all the acquisitions that have been done over the last 10 years. This team brings a high level of experience, obviously. They're all seasoned. They're all here. You will be able to interact with them. It is a team which is diverse in terms of culture, in terms of gender, in terms of skills. Obviously, what you need the most when you are entering into such a transformation is diversity in your executive team. This is what we have. For you to.
Keep that in mind as we are entering into these presentations that we will go through this morning. Our target assets are in place. A lot has been said about the technology of Worldline. What you realize when you enter the company, when you've been there for a few months, is that the infrastructure has been reinvested. The issue we have is an issue of convergence on the target infrastructures, but the target is there. I will detail that. The second element, the second message, is that we have a plan. This plan is already underway. We are building on what has been done successfully in silence by the teams over the last quarters. Third element, the momentum is clearly building. It's building within the teams. It's building with our customers. It is building with our partners. That's extremely helpful.
These assets that we have, they will help us to consolidate what we are. What we are is a leading pan-European acquirer and a leading operator of critical infrastructure. I'll just give you two examples that you don't know, probably. If I take Austria and the Netherlands, in those geographies, obviously, we are, like in many other geographies, from Finland to Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, we are processors of card payments for banks. Sometimes also instant payments, sometimes also acquiring payments. We do that in many geographies. What we do in those two countries is that we are also operating the CSM. The CSM is the platform that does the compensation between all the banks when it comes to payments. It is completely systemic. If you take another example, which is the French market. On the French market, more than 50%.
Of the transactions in commerce are going through our acceptance gateways. Meaning that if we fail, the commerce falls in France. To give you an idea of the size of the scale of Worldline, look at the number of transactions that we process. 47 billion transactions a year. It is close to 1 billion transactions a week. You can compute what it means in a second. If you take the volumes that we acquire from the merchants as a financial institution, EUR 480 billion in 2025. This is something like the GDP of Sweden, the GDP of Singapore. It is meaningful. To look at the financial figures, we took the option to present you the figures of our scope after the disposal of the three entities that we already announced. That makes, on a proforma basis.
On the basis of the latest guidance that we have confirmed last week, EUR 4 billion of revenue. It will be easy to see if we are in the guidance or not. Between EUR 720-EUR 745 million of EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA. All this with 16,000 employees. The EUR 4 billion of revenue, it's super simple. 20% financial institution, 80% merchant services. If you think about net net revenue, meaning excluding the scheme fees and the interchange fees, it's more 30/70. Let's stick to the 20/80. Within the 80, we have half of our revenue, which is done with SMBs. The SMB business is extremely important for the company, which is good news. One-third is done with big merchants, large merchants. Would it be global commerce?
The global e-commerce players or what we call regional commerce, which is more the brands that we have, the retail brands that we have, like Auchan, IKEA, Sainsbury's of this world. All our strategy is based on a modern target infrastructure. Target, because I'm speaking about the infrastructure on which we are converging. A lot of investment has been done by Worldline over the recent years. These investments have been done on the target platforms. Our issuing platform has been significantly refactored over the recent years. It's fully API-based. It's real-time. It's working in the cloud. It is the same with our instant payment platform in Europe. Okay? When you take our acceptance gateways, you take the e-commerce acceptance for SMB and regional commerce, what was OGONE in the past, it has been totally refactored.
This is the one on which typically Crédit Agricole is now migrating its merchants. This platform is state-of-the-art in terms of acceptance for e-commerce, and it is the same with our main acceptance solution for retail, which is the Axis platform. We have now the refactored solution on which we are starting to migrate our merchants, and it is state-of-the-art in terms of architecture. GlobalCollect for global commerce has also been significantly refactored. We have very advanced API to ease the integration by the merchants. The back office is also refactored. We are finishing that in the first quarter of this year. This platform is also state-of-the-art when you talk to the airlines, to the hotel chains with whom we are working. Regarding the acquiring, we have one main target platform, which is the one inherited from SIX. This platform is extremely advanced.
We already process half of our transactions on this platform. Obviously, we have to converge the remaining, which is not on that platform. This platform is able to process, obviously, and is processing international schemes, Visa, MasterCard. It is processing local debit schemes. We are already on CardBKR that will be operated out of call. It is also processing bank wallets like Wero. Wero is available for the merchants from this target acquiring platform. This target platform has the value of being able to operate for different financial institutions in a segregated manner, but with the same functionalities. Typically, we have started this year to operate with a U.K. license, which is now out of Europe, with the same technology on a segregated infrastructure, but with the same functionality. Those functionalities are super advanced. Obviously, it is multi-currency.
It is also able to serve the most demanding verticals that we have and that we serve, coming from airlines to gaming companies to retail. In-store, online. The very key message that I want to convey here is that the platform on which we are converging is state-of-the-art. This is not where the issue of Worldline is. The same on the hosting. The hosting setup that we have is extremely complete. Obviously, we still have the traditional way of data centers for some platforms, and we are streamlining that. Candice will share more on that a bit later on. We are operating certain platforms on public cloud, like Google and Amazon, because there is no sovereignty issue and there is access to additional tools on those platforms, on those clouds that we do not have on other operations. We also have our own sovereign private cloud.
Which has been built over the last five years by Worldline. It is a unique asset to serve the financial institutions in those times of sovereignty concerns. The third element that we have is a very diverse and expert talent pool. Some would say that we are too many, but at least we have those skills. Those skills are not only in Western Europe. They are also in our global competence centers that we have in India, in Poland, in Romania, and where, step by step, we are ramping up. Those global competence centers will be one of the key elements of our transformation journey. We will come back to that, obviously. The last point is that this talent pool has proven their ability to embrace the GenAI revolution. We have.
A significant number of use cases which are at scale already in the company. We are a bit silent on that. Would it be for, let's say, optimizing conversion on e-commerce with smart routing that we have already shared to the community? Would it be agentic deployment for our back office activities, for our operations? We have already scaled in deployment of GenAI within this company, and obviously, that's also something that will be super important in the coming years. That is one of the topics on which we are investing in this GenAI, in our innovations which are underway. I will come back to that, but we will be probably, in the course of the first half of 2025, one of the first players in Europe to deploy agentic commerce with real merchants. We have gone through a milestone that has been.
Extremely important in terms of MVP together with Google. We are now working to identify the right merchants, the right vertical on which we will have our first use cases. There are many examples, and we will come back to that along the day on our innovations. The key message on innovation is that the way we do innovation at Worldline, and the way we will do it in the coming quarters, considering our financial constraints, is our ability to partner. That is something that has been in the DNA of Worldline, and that is something that we are pushing. The good news is that many of the large players or even the startups of this world are happy to work with us and to use our go-to-market to enable and to deploy their own innovations. That is the case, again, on agentic commerce.
You have seen, for instance, the partnership that we have announced to enable our merchants to do settlements in stablecoins. We do not do that ourselves. We just piggyback on a partner that is bringing the technology to us. Another element which is important and which is distinctive at Worldline, and which is again an asset when we talk to enterprise merchants, when we talk to financial institutions, is that the CSM is embedded in our model. It is embedded in the bonus plans of our team members. It is ten years of commitments, of experimentations, of deployments, of initiatives to improve our footprints and to give insight to our customers about their own footprint when they are using our payment solutions. That is something that we will keep on going, keep on investing in the years to come. Another element which is specific to Worldline.
It is our unique footprint in Europe, again. When you look at the number of merchants that we have, 1.2 million merchants. When you look at the number of bank branches that we use to distribute our products, 23,000 in a very diverse number of geographies, thanks to the very strong partnerships that have been built over the years. When you look at the number of ISVs with whom we are working. And just to give you an insight, I mean, ISVs, it's already 30% of the distribution of our solutions in SMB. Okay? So, banks are 20%. ISVs, 30%. Is the other way around. Okay. So, it's 20% ISVs, 30% banks. But it's much more than people would think. And obviously, the last element which is significant is the number of banks with whom we are working.
To give you an idea, the number of cards that we are processing is 20% of the estate of payment cards in Europe. 20%. That gives you an insight on top of the number of banks, of the footprint that we have in the financial sector in Europe. Europe is our market. More and more, we will focus on Europe for the time being. The segment on which we are focusing within the European market is a segment which is not growing that fast, 4%-5%. At the end of the day, it's quite consistent with the most recent releases of our competitors. The market is slowing down because the shift from cash to card, from cash to digital payments, is progressively getting mature. The markets on which we are investing, those are segments which.
Are in motion, which are themselves in transformations, for whom there is a need to differentiate, there is a need for digital journey, there is a need for innovation, and there is a need for support. If I take our four segments. SMBs, there is this expansion of the gig economy, obviously, which is boosting the market. Many macro merchants are coming on the market, and there is also this need for digital journey. Enterprise, the need clearly is to expand in omnichannel journeys and also to help them cope with the fragmentation of payments in Europe, which is ever increasing with the number of wallets and with the willingness of the large merchants not to be too dependent on the international schemes because of the cost. Global commerce, there is obviously an underlying trend of growth in digital and in travel that we are leveraging on.
I already mentioned agentic commerce. There is a need always to get more value in terms of performance, in terms of success rate as a transaction, and this is a differentiator that feeds the growth. Financial institutions is a different story. Payments are strategic for banks and for financial institutions, and they remain strategic. There is a push towards sovereignty, which is helping us because we are European in Europe. We are not American. Payments are increasingly complex. For the banks, it's an increasing challenge to be able to cope with the new technologies, tokenization, and so on and so forth, the evolution of the fraud schemes. How can I cope with that? The convergence of fraud mechanisms between real-time payments, instant payments, and card payments. There is a need for support. I mean, all the customers I've been meeting since I joined.
They claim, I mean, they ask for support from us. The last piece is that they want a diversified business model. Sometimes they want full BPO. Okay, I give you everything. I am the issuer, and sometimes I'm not even the issuer and do all the job for me, including the back office. Sometimes they just want a software as a service because they consider that they are missing a brick, fraud, for instance, and they want to be able to add this service to their suite, and that's good enough for them. That is also feeding the growth because it is a sale that we can do with our bank customers. I will not come back too much on 2025. As you can see, on top of what I said, there are two elements that I would mention. First, we have fixed.
The Android terminal issue. On each of our markets, each of our segments, our products are available. It takes time. It took time, but it is done. The same, we have made significant progress in the decommissioning of platforms which are not targets. In the course of 2025, we will have decommissioned five platforms. Not always the biggest, not the biggest by definition, but at least that gives us data points on how to make things happen. How to manage customers so that we do not lose them when we make them converge on our target platform. We have challenges. I was told not to be too heavy on the challenges. We have two types of challenges. Some commercial challenges which have impacted us in 2025. Obviously, the decision that has been taken in 2023 to clean up the portfolio is forever.
I mean, those merchants will not come back. Remember that it is EUR 120 million-EUR 130 million that have disappeared from our revenue, and that is good. The second element is that we have been in a dip in financial institutions because of lack of focus. It is not the technology issue. It is not an issue of reinforcing from banks that you sometimes hear, which is absurd. It is really an issue of defocus from management that has been, as many players, focusing too much only on merchant services. We have lost customers because of quality of service, because of lack of attention in 2022, 2023. This is impacting us. 2024, 2025, again a bit in 2026. In the meantime, we have not won significant new customers to offset that. That is the mission, obviously, that we have with Madalena, which is to conquer again on financial institutions.
It will take some time because the sales cycle and the project cycle of banks is a bit longer than an SMB, obviously. It will take some time, but we are absolutely convinced that starting 2027, we will grow again in financial services. Beyond that, we have some internal challenges. The good news is that it's exactly the same as those that I had identified when I joined. We still have to converge platforms to be able to streamline our investments, to be more robust, and to have an improved asset turn, and so more free cash flow generation. We still have a very fragmented operating model coming from the history of acquisitions and acquisitions of acquisitions, and we need to overcome that if we want to overcome the last challenge, which is automation of our processes. It is clear that as long as you are not integrated.
Automating is much longer, takes much longer, and you are less robust in your operations. To fix that once and for all, we have designed this plan that we call North Star 2030 to be back to growth alongside with sustainable free cash flow generation. Why North Star 2030? Because we have defined our North Star. The one that will animate us and the one that will keep us happy and positive when we have challenges. This North Star is to be the European payments partner of choice for merchants and financial institutions. Each word matters here. We speak only about payments. We are a payments company. What is not payments is out. We are European because we have the footprint. We can differentiate because we master the complexity of payments in Europe. We are sovereign in our technology. Partner of choice because we have the ambition. To.
Be outstanding in terms of customer excellence. We have the ambition to be the thought leader in payments, and we have the ambition to offer a breadth of skills that help the financial institutions and the merchants to meet any payments challenge. The last piece, merchants and financial institutions. We do consider in this management team that there is a significant synergy between merchants and financial institutions because the models have evolved towards the same direction in terms of growth. There is convergence of wealth, convergence of technology between merchants and financial institutions. The market now is much more mature and the banks accept that an acquirer can compete on some fronts but provide the right solutions to the banks and to the financial institutions with the proper Chinese world to make that happen, to reach that ambition.
We have defined that we needed to be innovative. We are working on that. To be multilocal. To cover the value chain end to end. Thus, the synergy between financial services and merchant services, because the technology that we use on both sides are complementary to each other increasingly because of the evolution of the ecosystem. We need to be more integrated. To have a much more efficient operating model. Our cash flow generation is a good illustration of that today. To be integrated, we consider that we can leverage on our global competence centers. To have centers of excellence, which are beyond the boundaries of each of our local entities. Combining local presence and center of expertise and center of excellence in our global competence centers will make us able to have this integrated operating model.
The last element is to be scaled, to be robust, and to be sovereign. All this will be coming from the convergence of our platforms that will give us scale and asset turn. The robustness would come from automation of our operations. The sovereignty, obviously, is embedded in the fact that we own our technology for most of them. This plan, North Star, on which we are committing today, is based on four basic drivers of transformation. Candice will enter into the details, but just for you to memorize, it is based on simplify our model, which is coming from the disposals that we are doing and also from the streamlining of our organization that we already announced with merchant services being directly managed by the ExCo. It comes from convergence of our platforms. The idea is that at the end of the journey, we will just have.
Two acquiring platforms, one very specialized on specific verticals and our main platform. That will be the same in terms of ambition for financial services. Integrate our operations, as I already said. The last piece, obviously, is growth. Growth that will come from the outcome of the three other drivers because of the quality of service, because of the innovation capacity of the company, and the efficiency of our processes. That will come also through more strict management of the sales efficiency that we have. We have identified that there was potential of productivity improvement. The last piece, which is important, which has started already this year and which is kicking up in this Q4, and we start to see the numbers, the good numbers, revenue management, which was probably something on which we had to invest. What is interesting in this plan.
It is that it is a progressive plan. It is a staged plan. It is a plan that works. In line with what an organization can absorb in terms of project, what an organization can absorb in terms of delivery, and what customers can accept in terms of timing to migrate to a target platform. The beauty of this approach of a staged plan is that, obviously, it is more progressive. It is less risky. It helps to generate the savings and the contribution to EBITDA along with the investment. The plan will be cash positive as of 2027, meaning that the improvement of the EBITDA coming from the plan will more than offset the restructuring and the CapEx of the said plan the same year. That is extremely powerful. The other value of such an approach for such a transformation is that it has to take time.
Is that, obviously, it's less costly in terms of restructuring because it is much more progressive. It helps us to anticipate the evolution of the workforce. Why will we succeed? First, because this phased transformation. The second point is that it is based on a focus perimeter. Our life is much easier, much simpler when you do not have any more operations in the U.S. You don't have to take the plane to see how things are going there. You can focus on what's happening in Europe. Most of the actions are based on initiatives where we already have proven execution. I mentioned the platform convergence. We have a real track record. I can mention the global competence centers. Already, we already are scaled in those global competence centers. We know how to hire people. We know how to make them work well with our Western European guys.
They are well integrated, and this is reducing the risk of execution. The last piece, obviously, is the committed management team, not only the exco that you have here, but all those who have been involved in the design of the plan. 2030. The ambition is super clear. I do not have to repeat it. Four transformation drivers. We already are in motion, and 2025 demonstrates that. This plan will deliver in 2030 on a recurring basis more than EUR 200 million of EBITDA. When you look at our targets, they are quite reasonable at the end of the day. What we say, 4% CAGR as of 2030 towards 2030 with an exit at 5%. Meaning that our ambition is to grow like the market on some segments a bit faster, but average, the ambition is to grow like the market, not more than that.
EUR 1 billion of EBITDA. A much stronger EBITDA to free cash flow conversion since the ambition is to reach between EUR 300 million and EUR 350 million of free cash flow in 2030. Srikanth, obviously, will give more detail. Regarding the improvement of EBITDA, 210 is coming from North Star, and 150 is coming from the organic growth. North Star will be presented now by Candice. We will come back with the go-to-market after the break to explain to you how we will have that growth that will generate this EUR 150 million of additional EBITDA. Thanks a lot, and I'm super happy to call Candice Dillon, our CTOO, who joined in July this year and who's done already a tremendous job. Thank you.
Thank you. Thanks, Pierre-Antoine. Hi, good morning, everyone. Welcome. It's great to see you all today. I'm Candice Dillon. I'm our Chief Technology and Operations Officer, and I've spent my career doing exactly this, right? Building technology solutions for banks, for payments companies, for insurance companies, and for telecommunications. Along this journey, I've led teams that have modernized platforms. I've done some complex conversions, rebaselined infrastructure onto cloud, moved applications to be cloud and to be modern, as well as adopted operating models to be driven by agile. I'm extremely excited to be here. I joined in July, and what I've seen so far has invigorated and excited me. If I look around at our technology platforms, our targets are robust, they're strong, they're built on modern infrastructure and on modern architecture standards. In addition to that, and probably even more importantly, we have fantastic tech talent across the company. As well as very, very deep payment skills. That's unusual and unique in any industry.
When you can sit down with the technologist and you can talk to them not only about their technology specialty, but you can talk to them about the industry and the customers that they serve. That really is unique, and that is Worldline. I'm fully committed to our transformation journey, our North Star 2030 vision, and the very robust transformation plan that we've built over the last months. I look forward to sharing this with you and to answering your questions at the end. Let's start having a look. As Pierre-Antoine emphasized, our transformation initiatives are ongoing. We're not starting these things up. They're in flight. We've spent time in 2025 resetting and laying the foundation. We'll continue to do this in 2026, and from 2027, we start scaling. We've built this across four key drivers that I will detail out for you in a couple of minutes.
You will also see innovation, like Tap on Mobile, which enhances our payments capabilities, and Wix boosting our e-commerce transformation, both in the demos as well as in the presentations. Now I'd like to share the details of our transformation plan with you. Let's start with simplifying and streamlining our operating model. We start here with our go-to-market unit enhancement. This is about simplifying our go-to-market organization so that we can make impact in the areas that we're in and have a very, very strong segment focus. We're also enhancing our agile ways of working. We've built multi-skilled product and tech teams. They sit in our business units. They deliver value every single day. And when Joachim shares the SMB story, you'll really see how we've been fast to market with some key initiatives: Tap on Mobile, Wix, and Wero. These, sorry.
As we move into boosting the tech operating model, you'll see that we'll focus on our enterprise architecture, stabilize it out, modernization journey way forward. It is really, really clear, and our enterprise architects are guiding this transformation across the company so we're efficient, standardized, focused, and delivering leading-edge technology everywhere. We will centralize our critical operations in the areas of risk, in the areas of monitoring, and in the areas of security. We'll be unifying our AI and data organization to provide data excellence across the company. This underpins our risk efforts, which is incredibly important, as well as our compliance efforts. As we embark on even more, even bigger pushes into generative and agentic AI, having these highly skilled teams sitting and working together will make a massive impact.
These two pillars unlock a 20% time to market improvement by 2028, as well as a 20% productivity increase of our tech teams by 2029. Our final pillar is the simplification of our corporate and group structure. We are simplifying our group structure, and this will enable us to simplify and enhance the HR and the finance organizations, supporting our employees to deliver value, to be focused on their jobs, and to minimize the amount of rework that we do across the organizations. Secondly, having impactful shared services enables us to deliver efficiency across finance, HR, as well as corporate IT. This together will bring us 5% of our North Star 2030 adjusted EBITDA. Overall, these three areas will make Worldline more agile, will make Worldline more efficient, and better positioned to deliver value to our stakeholders. Let me now move you on to our second transformation pillar.
This one's a little bit more complex. I think you might have picked that up from Pierre-Antoine's sharing. It has four key areas. I'm going to spend one slide on each of these four key areas, and then we'll loop back into our third transformation driver. When we talk about converging our platforms and automating operations, we talk about platform convergence. That's the convergence of our applications and our platform landscape, how we are transforming our hosting, our infrastructure, our AI excellence, and how we will be operationalizing compliance. Let's grab the first one. Converging platforms. Today, what I'm going to share with you is about the rationalization of our digital acquiring and processing platforms. Worldline has a strong foundation in modern platforms. We've invested in these over the last years. They're market competitive. They deliver a broad set of services that our customers demand from us.
We have a very, very significant opportunity to accelerate our convergence. That is exactly what we are going to do. Myself and the whole team at Worldline is going to do this with rigor over the coming years. We are decreasing the number of platforms, as you can see on the slide behind me, while we increase our volumes across those key platforms. Number of platforms go down, volume on those platforms go up. This allows us to improve our time to market because we are building things in fewer places. Our operational scale increases around those platforms, and we leverage our target assets. We have already initiated this platform convergence in 2025.
By the end of this year, we will have converged five of our platforms, proving that we can migrate our customers from our legacy platforms onto our target platforms, and we can do that with ease and without incidents towards our customers. As we move into 2026, we will reduce a further three acceptance platforms, which will make a significant impact for us at Worldline. This reduction delivers the first EUR 15 million of the total EUR 80 million that we will deliver with this area, and it will deliver that in 2025 and in 2026. What I would like to do, oh, sorry, before I move so quickly, we are going from nine acquiring platforms, just to be clear, that we are with in 2024. We have taken out in 2025, and towards 2030, that becomes two acquiring platforms.
That's our target platform Pierre-Antoine spoke about, which is our major platform, as well as a secondary differentiating platform for specific use cases. In acceptance, we're at 23 today, major reduction here to 12 platforms. You may ask, as I did, why is 12 the right number? Still might seem a little bit high, but here we really want to continue to differentiate towards our customers by providing the local payment schemes. Doing that on single platforms is significantly more, significantly more time intensive to do that. It means that your markets go into a prioritization area. When the markets have their own platforms, you're really able to hit it in a very, very targeted way. Finally, our merchant portals go from the diverse 15 that we have today to three that are aligned to the segments in our portal.
Area, we are building something that we call our Launchpad. This will allow our customers to onboard with ease. It provides them a very, very easy understanding of how you go through your onboarding journey. It provides them with self-service capabilities that they can log into and that they can look at. It allows us to level up on our risk and our compliance activities as well. Instead of me telling you more about it, I'd like to show you a short video of what this will look like.
In a world where small businesses move fast, Worldline is moving faster. Reimagining how SMBs join and grow with us through a fully digital AI-powered onboarding journey that takes minutes. With our new self-service merchant portal, every business will gain instant insights to understand, adapt, and thrive. Worldline is redefining the SMB experience because helping small businesses grow, grows us all.
Great. In addition to the 34 platforms that we will reduce, we'll also be converging platforms across the company. This delivers an EUR 80 million recurring savings in 2030, which is 40% of our North Star 2030 adjusted EBITDA contribution. In addition, this enhances our time to market. It allows us to achieve operational scale, and we will have vastly rationalized digital environments able to provide our customers with exceptional self-service capabilities. Overall, this is a critical pillar as we move forward as an organization, and it will have focus, priority, and will be executed with rigor. Okay, let's move on to the second part. Optimizing our hosting services. Today, within Worldline, we have three types of hosting. One, we have classic hosting, which is in our data centers. We have multiple data centers across. They are well-run.
They provide stable services, but the infrastructure approach in those data centers is still a more legacy approach. We have the Worldline Sovereign Private Cloud, which is our own modernly built private cloud. It mimics technology that you have in Google or in Azure or in AWS, but it's built in our own data centers. It is built on an active-active setup. It is highly redundant. This is an incredibly important differentiator for us as Worldline. As sovereignty becomes more and more a topic in Europe, we need something that is robust, stable, and modern, and is able to host modern applications with a high degree of sovereignty. We run a lot of systemic payments within Europe, and the sovereignty of the ability to run those payments on our own infrastructure is absolutely critical. What is very, very valuable about our Worldline Sovereign Private Cloud as well.
It is efficient. It runs incredibly well. The way we have built it makes it scalable, predictable, and very, very secure. As we shift forward, we will be converging our data centers. We will be consolidating and optimizing these, moving our applications to either the Worldline Sovereign Private Cloud, where sovereignty and systemic payments are involved, or to public cloud infrastructure for innovation, GenAI, and application modernization. Towards 2030, we are going to scale and enhance the Worldline Sovereign Private Cloud so that it is able to continue to scale with our business, and we will continue to partner with the hyperscalers in what they do best. By 2030, we will have delivered a 28% reduction in the meter squared across our data centers. While this may not sound like a massive number, it includes the presence of the Worldline Sovereign Private Cloud in those data centers.
Eighty percent of all of our transactions will run on modern infrastructure, being either the Worldline Sovereign Private Cloud or public cloud. Our third area, as part of converging platforms and alternating operations, is GenAI and Agentic AI. GenAI and Agentic AI will allow us to automate at pace and at scale, innovate towards our customers, and accelerate our deliveries. We have a very strong foundation today, and tomorrow we want to be an AI-driven payments company. We have the foundation to be able to do that. It is not a dream. At our core, we have an employee GenAI and Agentic AI platform that allows our employees to automate standard tasks that they have, whether they be operational tasks or whether they are development activities. We have our full development landscape, so GitHub, Confluence, etc., all integrated into our Agentic AI and GenAI platforms.
This not only brings productivity, which of course is important, but impact that you can make as a person within the company is even more important. This allows our people to make impact every day. We utilize GitHub Copilot across our full development scale, automating development activities, providing us integration opportunities from a CI/CD pipeline, improving quality of the code that we develop every single day. We have trained 35% of our employees, and this number goes up every day as we roll out trainings on AI. This is not just technology. Technology is trained, but this is product, this is operations, this is my personal assistant who gets trained on this so that we all make an impact every day and are highly efficient. We also have strong product launches with AI. We have got AI-based transaction routing.
This has increased authorization and conversion rates for key customers with us. It's a proven technology that we will now start rolling out across the board. We've got predictive fraud models in place, and Madalena will share some more on that in the financial services section. I'm using it for incident detection and predictive AI, and it is currently showing a 2%-5% faster incident detection than standard market solutions, which I'm sure you understand is critical for us. If we can be ahead of a blip on the radar, an incident that could happen, a database that is being heavily utilized, and we should be switching loads, this is absolutely essential for us for its stability. As we move towards 2030, our focus in 2026 will be to build an Agentic AI platform for customer user journey.
We'll be plugging it into our onboarding journey, assisting our merchants in being able to go through that journey in a really easy way. We'll be automating operations across the organization, specifically as well in our risk use cases, and I'll share some more on this just now, as well as our development use cases and predictive observability and risk monitoring will be in place. By 2030, all of our journeys for our merchants will be AI-assisted. We'll have collaborative AI ecosystems, and you'll see an example of this in Pierre-Antoine's presentation around enterprise with the hotel booking agent-assisted journey. In technology, we'll have AI-driven deployment, AI-driven quality control, and AI monitoring across the whole of our technology landscape. This delivers 10% of our North Star 2030.
Adjusted EBITDA, but it is also absolutely critical in positioning Worldline as a leader in AI-driven payments and setting the stage for sustainable growth. Our final area in converging platforms and automating operations is our AML operations, which will be driving through more automation and through more technology. This is built up of two areas. One is about automating first-in-line AML operations. We will have faster and smarter decisioning on any incidents that we detect or any behaviors or transactions that we see across the landscape. We'll be accelerating our monitoring, specifically our transaction monitoring across the entire landscape. End-to-end compliance workflows will be embedded into our system so that they're monitoring every single touchpoint that our customers have, every transaction flow that runs across our company. Our reviews will be in line with alerts and won't only be periodic, and our manual touchpoints will significantly decrease.
The goal here is to have 60% faster decision cycles and enhanced incident detection. We're also harmonizing and operationalizing our end-to-end risk and compliance flows. We'll be aligning and strengthening the compliance operating model, simplifying and streamlining all of our compliance processes across the organization, but we will also harmonize the balance between local risk management and control, which is very important for our local regulators, as well as our overall centralized controls. We're moving from detective controls that we have today to preventive controls. What we've seen is there are often early signs that you only pick up when you've implemented AI in the end-to-end process and compliance by design in our operating model.
Finally, our goal here is also customer satisfaction because it's as important to our customers as it is to us that we manage risk compliance, AML, KYC really well for them, as well as towards our stakeholders. Okay, let's now move on to our third transformation driver: integrating our operations through our global competence centers. Our goal here is to move our GCCs from a pure delivery function into an innovation hub. Pierre-Antoine shared today we have a very strong presence in our GCCs. We've achieved an overall 16% nearshore and offshore across three centers. So 16% of our FTEs today sit in one of our three GCCs. In India, we've got 1,300 people driving value-based payments, end-to-end delivery, and development, as well as supporting our product and tech teams in development, in testing, in implementing automation, and in AI drivers.
Our exceptional multilingual teams in Poland help us with customer services as well as risk remediation. We have 700 people in Poland, and our 600 people in our Romania GCCs support HR and finance operations, as well as deliver our cybersecurity services. You can see this is a very, very strong foundation, yet we want even more from this. Moving forward, our GCCs will be innovation hubs. We will move more and more of our end-to-end payments to be developed, delivered, and conceptualized in our GCCs. We will have a very robust service catalog supporting our onshore teams in Western Europe, and our intention is that they will continue to be a driver of GenAI and Agentic AI. As we move forward to 2030, our goal is to have 25%-30% of our total FTEs in our three GCCs. Driving efficiency, effectiveness, access to exceptional talent.
Pools, and able to accelerate our overall operating model. Okay, now moving us through to our last driver. This one is about GROW. When we think about GROW as part of the transformation plan, we think of it in three areas: products and services simplification, commercial productivity, and revenue management. In the products and services simplification, our goal is to wow our customers. We want streamlined, easy-to-understand, easy-to-purchase products and services for our customers. We want robust leading-edge digital journeys that are intuitive and where our customers get led through by AI. State-of-the-art converged payment solutions. We have really strong multiple payment solutions. We want to converge them so they're really easy for our customers to buy in packages. We will keep our localization by nature. Our customers expect us to be local to the geography and/or the country that they do their business in.
Commercial productivity is about next-generation sales tooling for our salespeople. It's improved sales practices across the company, and it's also providing our salespeople to provide targeted advice and not generic advice to their customers, ensuring that the products and the services that we provide to our customers are next level and meet our robust customer needs. We'll drive revenue management through two areas: optimizing our scheme fees and value-based pricing. This pillar delivers 20% of our North Star 2030 adjusted EBITDA contribution, and it will help us deliver simplicity and speed at every touchpoint to accelerate growth and to wow our customers. I now get to conclude my section for you. I hope it's provided you with better insights into our transformation journey and key insights into the robustness of the plan that we have put together. I'd like to leave you with four key messages.
We have a clear and detailed transformation plan that will deliver both efficiency and growth. We've proven our ability to execute starting this year, with important steps being taken across all of these four pillars, and we've proven our capability to converge platforms, which is something that is challenging, but we know how to do, including migrating our customers and decommissioning those platforms. Our North Star transformation plan will allow us to achieve our targeted increase of EUR 210 million adjusted EBITDA. Finally, collectively, these transformation drivers position Worldline for sustainable growth, operational excellence, and continued leadership in payments. Thank you so much for your attention, and I look forward to your questions.
Thank you, Candice. We will now take a short break. As I mentioned earlier, we have some fantastic product demonstrations for you to have a look at. We've got Tap on Mobile on display. We have our Android-based SmartPOS solution. We have a number of our partner integrations. We have our fraud management software. We have the interoperable QR code solution that we've developed, and also the tech behind our tokenized payment solution. Please grab a coffee, have a look at the demos, and then we'll see you back here in about 15 minutes at 10:40.
Thank you. Welcome back, everyone. Hope you managed to get yourself fully re-caffeinated. Just a quick reminder of where we are in the agenda. Also, we're running a little bit behind schedule, and we want to make sure there's a full amount of time to get through as much Q&A as possible. We're going to extend the finish time to 12:30. In a moment, we will walk through the go-to-markets, financial institutions, small and medium businesses, enterprise, and global commerce. And then our CFO will take you through the financials before we have the Q&A. Now, without further ado, to start with our first go-to-market, I would like to welcome to the stage Madalena Cascais Tomé .
Thank you. Good morning, all. It is a pleasure to be here today. I've just recently joined Worldline, starting from October to head financial institutions globally, but also, more recently, to take a more transversal role on processing and product capabilities in order to accelerate our synergies and our innovation across the different go-to-markets. I've been serving financial institutions for more than a decade now. I was leading an interbank company and serving dozens of financial institutions across several markets. I am driven by innovation.
I was also leading many of the European prominent initiatives, like the European Mobile Payment Association, but also very much committed to developing European standards, like the CPAs for contactless payments. The reason I've joined Worldline, I think it's obvious. Worldline is the payment champion, European champion, one that has a true role in the backbone of digital infrastructures in Europe, one that is serving financial institutions across all of Europe, and one company that needs and has the role to play in driving European payments going forward. Let me guide you through our vision for financial institutions. As Pierre-Antoine mentioned, financial institutions are strategic for Worldline, and we'll step down in this strategic positioning going forward.
But also, Worldline is strategic for financial institutions, and together, we are strategic for driving European payments going forward, making sure that it continues to be the most innovative space, but also one that is sovereign and that is well anchored in our own infrastructures, in our own capabilities, serving European citizens. Today, I would like to share with you our North Star for financial institutions, as I mentioned, starting with what are our key strengths, what are the root causes for our recent performance, but more importantly, what is our plan going ahead, and how we are already starting to execute, and how we are already in motion. Let me start by sharing financial institutions at a glance and our scale and operations across Europe and also in Asia. We serve 320 financial institutions, and in Europe, we serve 80% of the top 20 banks.
We process annually 47 billion transactions. On average, this means that per second, we are processing 1,500 transactions. We serve 156 million cards. One in every five cards in Europe that is now being used and paying is processed and managed by Worldline. We have a unique set of talents, the most comprehensive one, not only because it shines expertise, but also new capabilities. Our talent pool is the longest and largest standing talent pool in payments in Europe, with 4,900 talented technicians, but also payment experts. We are the critical payment infrastructure across 10 countries, and we are generating EUR 80 million in revenue annually. Our core strength is our core processing capabilities, our core payment software that is self-built, self-operated, continued to be deployed and enhanced, and also that is served with our Worldline sovereign infrastructure, cloud infrastructure.
This is a unique set of capabilities around which we have built a diversified portfolio of service lines, ranging from issuing processing, acquiring processing, account and instant payments, and also digital services. This different portfolio of activities is well balanced, but also well anchored in the activities that have the highest growth potential, namely instant payments and digital services. Not only that, we are able to adapt our go-to-market capabilities for the different segment needs, for the different client needs. We provide the traditional BPO and outsourcing capabilities where we manage operations end to end, including the technological part, but also the backend part. We also provide payment as a service and also payment software licensed, which means that we are able to address the different client segments, the different client needs. All of these built in our own self-built, best-in-class processing solutions.
This is absolutely key, and I would stress the best-in-class platform. New generation platform that we currently manage. We are starting from a strong position, and this is reflected in our diversified client base. We have a solid and diversified client base, ranging from long-standing relationships to new clients that we are now onboarding, ranging from financial institutions, PSPs, fintechs, but also central banks and even all communities that rely on us to provide their central infrastructures. We have a very strong presence in Europe, and we are the critical supplier of critical infrastructures in 10 European countries. Some examples that Pierre-Antoine already mentioned: in the Netherlands and in Austria, where we provide the clearing and settlement central switching mechanisms, which is absolutely key at the country level, but also in France and in Belgium, where we enable most of the e-commerce transactions to our strong customer authentication solutions.
On top of these 10 countries, we have a very strong presence. We are also providing at-scale services in 15 other European countries. We are also present in Asia, in 10 Asian countries, where we serve more than 70 financial institutions, mostly through our Pay Suite solution, which is payment as a software. This means that we are able to serve different segments, different clients according to their needs with our different go-to-market capabilities.
What is also unique in the way that we go-to-market and in the way that we serve our clients is our complete range of payment brands and suites that we deploy, going from card schemes, global card schemes like Visa and MasterCard, but also domestic and European card schemes like Girocard and CardPancare, for instance, going from the most prominent account payment schemes, like both in retail and wholesale, for instance, SEPA and SWIFT, but also, more recently, serving all the digital solutions that are becoming stronger and more present across Europe and also in Asia, where we are not only one of the key partners in many of these initiatives, for instance, TWINT and Wero, but we are also enabling these solutions to strive in the payments ecosystem, being towards financial institutions, issuers, and also acquirers.
By actively working and contributing to all of these, we are ensuring that European payments remain connected, competitive, and sovereign. We are also significantly strong and distinctive in the way that we are comprehensive across the payment value chain. We provide not only core and more traditional card processing, namely in the issuing and in the acquiring space. Even there, in this most traditional business, we see that payments are evolving significantly. For instance, in issuing, we are coming from the core card management processes to wallet and digital enablement of cards. Also, in the acquiring, where we serve not only ATMs, also evolving to VTMs, but also now in the e-commerce space, going from the traditional acceptance to the omnichannel capabilities that we are also providing our financial institutions.
We are also deploying account and instant payment solutions, being instant payments, open banking, SWIFT capabilities, and also cross-border payments. In the digital service space, that is an area that is increasingly evolving, going from wallet enablement to tokenization to new forms of stablecoin and virtual assets enablement, and also agentic AI-driven solutions. All of these embedded with value-added services that are becoming increasingly important to make sure that the payment journey is trusted, smooth, and frictionless, namely our fraud and identity solutions and authentication and authorization suites. Not only are we comprehensive, but we are able to integrate all of these solutions into a unique and integrated framework, enabling our clients with more seamless operations and integration across the payment value chain.
This framework enables not only, as I explained, multi-rail and multi-instrument solutions that are integrated and interoperable, but also that can be deployed across the different channels of the financial institutions, enabling seamless and integrated and consistent customer journeys, but also that can be multi-geography, which is a significant enabler for our clients that operate across Europe in different markets. Our business is all about the future. In fact, Worldline has been investing significantly in our future next-generation solutions. We have a full suite of next-generation solutions that are already cloud-enabled based on our Worldline sovereign clouds, API-driven, open, modern, and future-proof. These new modern cloud-based solutions are enabling our clients to onboard more easily, are enabling us to have more agility in developing more functionalities, faster time to market, and it's also enabling more smooth scalability. With core investments in security and resilience going forward.
Still, we continue to support our clients in their legacy platforms. We have a unique knowledge of how to do that, and we have long-standing relations in supporting our clients in their own core platforms. As the future is evolving quickly, we are also actively supporting our clients in their modernization strategy, going from legacy solutions into the next-gen solutions. We are uniquely fitted and capable of doing that with a unique proof and track record of not only managing the two stacks, but also, more importantly, enabling our clients to transition and to modernize their own technological infrastructure, including the payment architecture and the payment solutions.
Worldline is and will be future-proof and future-driven, supporting our clients, our new clients in onboarding quicker and more agile in our new platforms, and also in enabling our clients to modernize their payment solutions, leveraging our open API-driven core processing platforms. We have had adverse performance and challenges in our past. We acknowledge that. Some challenges that hindered our financial performance and also our client performance. The first of all was the lack of strategic focus on financial institutions and on organic growth more broadly. This is something that is already being addressed, clearly stated. Financial institutions are a core pillar of our strategy going forward. In this context, we had persistent loss of contracts. That was impacted at an effect and will have an impact still in 2026. With that wind ongoing. On top of that.
We operate in an industry with long sales cycles, which has delayed our revenue impact from new business. Nonetheless, as Pierre-Antoine mentioned, Worldline is in motion, and we already see significant and consistent progress, not only in what we have improved in terms of order entry, in terms of new business, but also the share of new clients in this new business. We have also improved our contract renewal rate and our customer satisfaction levels, and we have been consistently over the last three-year period delivering on efficiency with 3% reduced on our cost base. We are strengthening our position and will continue on this path. Our commitment and our continued improvement in our go-to-market will be anchored on three key pillars. Being very much focused on clients and on delivering client satisfaction, client delivery, and innovation. The first one is our ramp-up in sales and growth.
We are streamlining our sales execution, providing additional services to the existing clients, and expanding into new target segments based on our adaptability and our core capabilities. We are improving the quality of services and delivery by enhancing our expertise. We are bringing it to clients with thought leadership and, more importantly, driving solutions more than just products, but also streamlining and accelerating on AI and automation, namely in the development and deployment cycles, but also in harmonizing our service capabilities. We are accelerating innovation and the target platforms. We continue to support our clients in their journey towards transformation and modernization, leveraging on our target robust platforms. We continue to accelerate innovation in the new areas of growth, namely digital services, tokenization, virtual assets. We will continue to also enhance the different payment solutions that are striving to continue to contribute to European sovereignty and to payment interoperability.
By doing this, we'll increase our growth in new business, we'll improve client satisfaction, and we'll reduce time to market with the aim of achieving market growth by 2030. We'll continue to create more value for our clients and strengthen our core role as their trusted partner. A word about innovation. Innovation is really important. It's a cornerstone of our strategy, and it's our direction towards the future. We'll share some of our innovations in the market today. Our multi-rail AI-driven suite that is not only comprehensive across the payments value chain, so it enables for a full fraud control across not only card payments but account payments with an integrated 360 perspective, but also it's AI-driven with very precise prediction models and service, enabling trusted but yet frictionless payment experiences.
Our second innovation that I would like to highlight is our Worldline QR Code payment, one that is setting the standard for QR code payments in Europe. Our Worldline QR Code enables payments at the point of interaction, be it in-store or in e-commerce, enabling different brands of payment, being, for instance, EURO or BANKCONTACT. By doing that, it is also contributing to European interoperability and to the deployment of new payment schemes. Also, tokenized payments. This is the next generation of money movement. We are enabling not only closed-loop solutions, asset tokenization, but also offline capabilities on tokenized assets and also digital currencies. We will continue to help our clients integrate this new generation of money movement into their current payment suite, ensuring that we can also accelerate, continue to drive innovation with impact.
All of this is done with our clients at heart, but also with our client, with co-creation with our clients and also with our partners. On this last topic, for instance, we are also helping enhance our clients in everything that is related with European initiatives, namely, for instance, the digital EURO, where we have been deeply involved, including developing prototypes and new use cases. We are prepared also to enhance our clients in these new regulatory enhancements that will for sure come. Over the past weeks, I've been meeting several clients, wanting to understand exactly what their needs are, what keeps them awake at night, and more importantly, what do they expect from Worldline. The voice of the market is very clear.
There is a huge opportunity to help our clients, for instance, on how to navigate the increasing complexity in payments, and namely the increasing complexity in regulatory requirements. There is a huge need from our clients to make sure that we can enhance their capabilities to continue to innovate in a context where talent is scarce and payment expertise is also scarce. There is an increasing need to reduce reliance on non-European solutions. As I mentioned, this is one of our core strengths. There is also an increasing need for our clients to have our support in making sure that they can cope with cyber threats and also with anti-fraud and fraud engineering and social engineering challenges. Also, can we help our clients in enhancing that they can compete in this new digital world?
To navigate in this increasingly complex and dynamic payments landscape is for sure a challenge, one that Worldline is the trusted player and partner to help. We will continue to help our clients grow faster with confidence and scale. I'll share a testimonial of one of our clients in an ongoing project where not only we are helping modernizing the payment platform, but we are also enhancing for cross-border and multi-geography payments, helping and supporting our clients in their European footprint. ING and Worldline are proud to continue the strong collaboration. After the successful migration of ING Germany to Worldline's new card processing platform, ING Netherlands is now transitioning 9 million Dutch clients to the same modern standard. This was made possible through a successful and collaborative development and testing phase.
For us, this milestone marks the end of in-house card processing and the beginning of a new era with Visa and MasterCard debit schemes cards for our clients, offering broader acceptance and enhanced features for our customers. The feedback of our clients is highly motivating, and it's exactly on this path that we'll continue to pursue. Financial institutions are core and strategic for Worldline. Client delivery and innovation also. They are our path forward. To conclude, I think it's sure that we operate with core strengths in the payment landscape, which is increasingly complex but also evolving at an accelerated pace. We start from a position of strength. We have a plan on how to continue to double down on our client delivery and on our growth for financial institutions. Our plan is ambitious, but it is focused.
More importantly, we have the right team in place to deliver. We have a proven track record in doing so. We will continue to be focused on execution and together with our financial institutions, not only advancing European payments forward, but making sure that we continue to be the continent with the most innovative and advanced payment systems. For that, our North Star for financial institutions is to be, and our commitment is to be the trusted partner to financial institutions delivering tailored, modern, and global solutions at scale. Thank you very much for your attention, and I'll now hand over to Pierre-Antoine, our CEO.
Thank you. Happy to come back. I am with Joachim Goyvaerts , who joined back in the company already in July.
Six months already.
Six months already. Okay. Joachim is in charge of SMB, 50% of our revenue. Just before Joachim speaks, just to remind you of quick snapshots on merchant services. It is EUR 3.2 billion revenue, EUR 2.3 billion in NNR, meaning excluding scheme fees and interchange fees. Obviously, we leverage on the scale that we have on our network and on our acquiring platform. Everything starts from acquiring to feed our three go-to-market SMBs that Joachim will present, enterprise and global commerce that I will present after Joachim's speech and pitch on SMB. Thank you, Joachim.
Thank you, Pierre-Antoine. Good morning to everyone. It is great to be here. I am Joachim Goyvaerts . I am indeed leading SMB now for about six months. Having spent more than 20 years in the payment industry, it continues to be fascinating how this area enables technology to scale and create that convenient digital payments reality. Madalena said 1,500 transactions per second that Worldline is processing to give you that perspective. I've been in partner, product, and general management roles, but the reason why I rejoined Worldline after 14 years is that European DNA. We empower the local economies and, in particular, the entrepreneurs. It's great to be part of that new team that focuses again on the core, on delivering that value to the customers. Worldline has a strong presence in the European payment market, in the merchant market. There's 17 million. Shall I maybe also show you what I'm talking about? Worldline has a leading position in that 17 million merchant market. We have a 14% market share in merchant service sales volume, so in payment volume. That's one transaction out of seven. We are the strong leader in six Western European markets.
I'm also impressed by the high-growth markets in Italy and Central and Eastern Europe. We have that coverage across Europe in many markets through partnerships. What does make Worldline stand out? There's 3x the word local. We provide local payment methods at the checkout. We remove that complexity for merchants by offering whether it's Girocard in Germany, BANKCONTACT, TWINT, but also alternatives like MealVouchers are very different in every market. Behind the scenes, we're also strong in that local best-in-class acquiring, the processing of the payments. We do that in a very efficient and reliable way for our customers. Thirdly, we have the local people on the ground, sales and support, to support the merchants to run their business, and we bring that expertise of the local ecosystem. With those core strengths, how does Worldline go to markets?
We have three ways to go to market. The most important channel is a direct channel. We have more than 1,000 people who are the local experts. We have localized marketing and digital sales, and in particular for medium-sized merchants like small retail chains. They rely on our expertise, and that's there where we see the continued payment volume growth and the trust. Secondly, banks are and remain a key partner for Worldline. About 30% of our business is driven through partnerships with banks, whether it's to generate leads or have alliances or even joint ventures with Worldline. For instance, with KB, the franchise of Société Générale in the Czech Republic, we have renewed our alliance for long-term relationships. The distribution power of the banks with 23,000 branches remains a distinctive asset. Thirdly, we work with a lot of partners.
We have more than 400 partners around in Europe. They are the gate, the access to the small and the micro businesses. We have long-standing relations with them, and there's a large variety of cash register providers, independent sales organizations, and software companies. That is actually the trend of today. While banks remain crucial partners to Worldline, it's the ISVs, the independent software vendors, that global trend that's now also a reality in Europe, and they are outpacing the growth in the European markets. Looking into the business reality of Worldline today. We have to acknowledge that we haven't been meeting all the expectations of our merchants. First, we have been delayed with delivering state-of-the-art terminals, upgrading the terminals. Secondly, the complexity of our platforms has limited the way to cross-sell and to really leverage our base.
Last but not least, indeed, we have not been consistent in addressing the ISV trends with one consistent solution. You would understand that we have not waited to take action. We are now acting against a clear plan with a new operating model against clear priorities. If you aspire to be the European partner of choice for merchants, what to expect from us is state-of-the-art payment solutions. We not only have upgraded our terminals. Merchants expect today an integrated, seamless, integrated payment solution into their business operations. I will talk later about how we address that need with our Android SmartPOS terminals and how we scale the innovation of Tap on Mobile. Next to running the business, our merchant wants us to help to grow their business. We are driving now commerce solutions beyond payments with Worldline Web.
If you want to start selling online within the day, we can enable that with you with a full solution without requiring any technical skills. Secondly, we're deploying innovative merchant cash advance. I'll come back again on how we're scaling these value-added services by accelerating our roadmap and working with industry leaders. Thirdly, having best-in-class payment solutions and value-added services with commerce solutions should be very easy to access. It should be very easy to deal and to do business with Worldline. We are creating that single digital merchant experience, what we call our Launchpad. Candice has already referred to it. It's an AI-based solution to board within minutes, to allow us also to operate at scale and really leverage the technology into our customer base. Last but not least, also the partners expect that easy solution, and with Worldline for Platforms.
We're bringing that to the market now. Worldline for Platforms is empowered by an online payment platform. It's a company we invested in three years ago, and we're expanding that solution now into a full embedded solution. We're acting today against those four priorities. You have to understand that already the payment solutions and the commerce solutions are around in the market now, and we're operating with it. Let's have a look on what we're currently offering as payment solutions. SmartPOS are Android terminals. We're live in 16 countries today. What they do is actually they do three things in one. It's payments, the localized payments that Worldline is strong in, and the customers expect us to continue to do. We're adding functionalities like a tip or splitting the bill.
Beyond that, we give access to the merchants to third-party apps so that they can run their complete business on our solution. Think about order management, loyalty, gift cards. It is all on the SmartPOS. The demo was there in the back during the break, so I hope you have been able to enjoy it. Next to that, Worldline is a frontrunner in scaling innovation with Tap on Mobile. We are live with Tap on Mobile in 23 countries. We see triple-digit growth, more than EUR 500 million of processed volume year to date. What it does is a Tap on Mobile app from Worldline enables you to accept payments on every device, whether it is iOS or Android. That is not just mobile phones. It is kiosks, it is order devices. Larger merchants are embedding that into their flow. Also, department stores, we have the kiosks here again in the demo here during the break. Tap on Mobile, we can multiply the number of acceptance points. It enables you to fully run your business in a digital way and cashless. Let's have a look on how that played out this summer in the Swiss festival of Zermatt-Anplatz.
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Our teams understand the language of the customer. I hope you understand that we have upgraded the way to accept payments. And beyond payments, as said, we are enabling our merchants to grow. The approach we're taking, and I think it's a fantastic example of how focused execution can really accelerate us to drive value. The way we've taken is to team up with industry leaders. I'll talk now about two commerce solutions, Worldline Web and merchant cash advance. Together with Wix, we're now live in a first market in Switzerland, and we provide that simple solution.
Anyone without any technical skills to have the idea today to start selling online or to expand from the in-store sales can do that within a day. It is the design of the website, it's the e-commerce part, it's the hosting, and the Worldline Gateway and payment capabilities that are fully localized. That is a setup that also now not only is live in Switzerland, but enables us to scale that in all markets. I think it's core to our mission to help merchants to be successful, not just in-store, but also online. The second example is that we have launched an innovative growth solution for merchant cash advance for our merchants together with YouLend. This solution is live in two markets today, in Belgium and the Netherlands, and we'll launch a third market before the end of the year.
What it does is that if you have a broken dishwasher in your restaurant or you want to take that opportunity to buy more stock, a merchant needs those funds instantly. YouLend is the leader in that domain. They provide that embedded financing solution where they use real-time payment data, they provide the instant funding, and then they organize the repayments along with the card sales. We have a referral partnership with YouLend. We do not take the credit risk, but we do offer the flexibility to our merchants. We benefit jointly from the success of our merchants. We increase the value per merchant, and we anchor the relationships for a longer term with our customers. Next to state-of-the-art payment solutions to run the business and commerce solutions to grow the business, the third priority is indeed to make that accessible in a digital and simple way.
Merchants today, if they want something, and it's like consumers, they want it very fast. We'll enable that boarding within minutes. Of course, we'll do that with AI these days. What it means is that we'll provide a full agentic experience to give the keys and the control back to the customer. If they want to order additional services from us or even the third-party services that we bring to our customers, they should be able to do that autonomously whenever they think that's needed. We'll do that in one consistent way to enable full automation so that we can operate at scale, and that's in particular important in KYC and risk domains to demonstrate that we're always in control. Why this is so important for Worldline to invest in this is it's one platform. It's focused on that experience end-to-end.
It enables us to scale, to add functionalities and markets, but do that in a consistent way. Last priority, indeed, as introduced in the intro on the go-to markets, the ISVs who already have 400 partners. This is the growing trend in the market. And to make them successful, we're enabling that with Worldline for Platforms. With Worldline for Platforms, those partners can very easily integrate their tech stack to get access to the rich payment functionalities of Worldline, whether it's POS payments with terminals, whether it's online payments or Tap on Mobile. It is the mix from the software company to decide how omnichannel they want to act to the merchants. We give the access in the back as well to the Worldline core localized acquiring. The merchants operate on the software of the partner, of the ISV.
Worldline is embedded, is in the back, it's inside, but empowering that monetization for both the merchants and the partners. As said, this is high-end technology that's already running at scale for online marketplaces with Online Payment Platform. We're expanding that now as a fully embedded solution. The first reactions in the market are really good. We see continued traction now with our partner teams and also already with the signed deals, we have the reach of thousands of merchants through this solution. In summary, we have a very strong position with SMB in Europe. We have enduring trust, we have continued payment volume growth. With this plan in action, we'll turn around again to growth already in 2026. We have state-of-the-art payment solutions. We can help the merchants beyond payments with commerce solutions. We are creating that one digital experience with the Launchpad.
We have then the digital partner experience to scale across Europe and address that opportunity into the micro and small merchants. As we go along with the transformation, we'll continue to fuel growth, accelerate in number of merchants, in payment volume, and in financial outcome beyond the average of the European SMB market of 5%. SMB for Worldline, SMB is the core engine of Worldline as that European partner of choice in payments. Thank you for your attention. I'll hand back to Pierre-Antoine.
Okay, I will, if you allow me, I will accelerate a bit because I know that the star you've been waiting for is second. Considering the audience that we have here. I will cover quickly enterprise and global commerce, and if you have more questions, we can continue on that. Enterprise and global commerce, we decided to split the two. David Gebhardt, who is somewhere here, joined back to lead the enterprise, and Shten is leading the global commerce. To make it more simple, I am presenting it. On enterprise, to make it simple, we have very strong footprint and market positions in some of the key markets in Europe that you can see here. France, obviously, as I said in the introduction, Germany, Switzerland, but also the Benelux. We have also some good presence in Spain and in the U.K. for acceptance solution. There are some markets where we are a bit more challengers. In kiosks and self-services, we also have strong positions, more specialized, more verticalized, but with the same approach of acceptance and potentially acquiring. That makes 70%-30%. As you can see, we follow the merchants on a multi-country basis.
It is more the tier one, tier two merchants and retailers. We support them in the expansion, which enables us to have different models depending on the geographies. The last thing that you need to see here is that the MSV we process, globally speaking, in acceptance, is EUR 600 billion. It is really significant. Only EUR 200 billion, which means one out of four transactions, is acquired by Worldline. One of our key differentiators in this segment, indeed, is that we offer to the merchants the flexibility of providing just the technical acceptance. Typically, take the transaction, send it to the acquirer to make it super simple, or to do on a full-service basis—acceptance and acquiring. All this, in-store and online, obviously, and the value it brings to the merchants.
Is that in their domestic geographies, especially the French merchants, they like to work with their bank for the acquiring. They take our acceptance, but not the acquiring, because on the acquiring, they work with their Crédit Agricole or other bank. When they go outside of France, they like to have an all-in-one solution that provides the acquiring, that provides. The acquiring, in that case, is coming from Worldline, potentially alternative payment methods done by Worldline, and so on and so forth. Okay, ultimately, what this means is that there is potential for us to upsell our merchant base and to get more acquiring when it is relevant for the merchant than what we have today. The beauty of what has been built by Worldline, and that's how we made some kind of handicap.
A competitive advantage is that we have step by step built what we call a hub, which connects our various acceptance solutions. The online of GoPay, the in-store of Axis, for instance, with the modules that we have developed and that are shared between our various platforms. Typically, a French customer can have access, thanks to us, through the acquiring hub, to the Crédit Agricole acquiring and to some other acquirings in one single integration. He can have access with the same integration, the same API, to the value-added services that we provide, typically digital dynamic currency conversion in this example. He has a portal on which he gets all the insights of his business, whatever the geography, whatever the acquirer.
On top of that, thanks to this portal, he can manage the omnichannel use cases, typically refund by web, click and collect, because we do have the tokenization of the card, which is embedded in the portal. This solution is a real asset for Worldline and for our retailer merchants. It is an asset for Worldline because that enables us to share the connection to the various acquirers, for instance, with all our acceptance solutions. What you have seen in the presentation of Candice is that we will keep a number of acceptance platforms. The fact that we have all the integrations to all the acquirers through the Acquirer Hub made available to all those acceptance platforms is obviously a significant synergy for us. The ambition here, obviously, is to be the European champion in omnichannel enterprise.
To cross-sell the acquiring, and more importantly, I would say, to leverage on the convergence of platforms that we've been discussing about, to have better asset turn, more functionalities, and more innovations with lower investment. Regarding the global commerce, here it's a different ball game. What we are speaking here is serving global e-commerce players like Lufthansa, Emirates, Google, and to offer them through one contract, one technical integration, and one financial flow and reporting access to more than 150 markets, okay, on a multi-local basis again. It is extremely powerful as a value proposition. The value that we bring on top of that to this segment is advanced management of the conversion and the success rate of transactions. This platform is connected to different acquirers, including the acquiring of Worldline.
We are able to optimize the success rate, which means more revenue for the merchants for the same connection. We have a strong position, and we decided, because there is some competition, obviously, on this market of the global merchants, those merchants are very demanding in terms of verticalized solution. We have decided to focus on two main segments, travel and hospitality, because we have a very strong position there. We are very much integrated into the ecosystem of the booking solutions and so on and so forth, and digital goods with, again, global players who want to have access for small transactions to many markets with one integration. That is typically the case of Blizzard in the gaming edition. We have been doing a lot of modernization on this GlobalCollect platform over the recent years. The API has been completely refactored.
Having discussed with one of our customers, I mean, we can be very proud of the quality of this API. We have a modern portal that enables them not only to have the right insight on their transactions, but also to drive the performance as they want to make it happen. Beyond the back office, we have invested quite a lot over the last quarters on digital subscription, recurring payments, which are so important for digital goods. This segment is the one where there is the most of innovations because those merchants are the most sophisticated. As I explained in the introduction, the way we approach innovation on this segment is to partner with third parties that bring us the proper technology. One example is what we call Virtual Pay. Virtual Pay, what is it? It's super simple. It's digital card issuing.
Commercial cards where the interchange for us is quite high. And this Virtual Pay is provided to online travel agencies to ease for them the payment of their suppliers, which are airlines and hotel chains. Okay. The beauty of cards versus account-based payment is that the traceability of the payment and the reconciliation is extremely easy for the merchants. So leveraging on our issuing technology on FS or acquiring know-how on GlobalCollect and the commercial partnership with Visa, we've been able to put this product on the market, and we are already live with three OTAs. Don't come back on AI smart routing that Candice mentioned, but I will, I mean, so I also mentioned already the stablecoin payout.
This is for GlobalCollect that we are doing this partnership, as you understand, because those are the merchants which are the most interested in settlement in stablecoins because that does reduce, obviously, the friction linked to cross-border settlements. The last piece I want to mention, and I want to show you a video, is agentic commerce where we've been making significant progress, as I said, with Google over the recent weeks. A quick video on that. Sorry. This is super exciting. And for you to understand the value that we bring, what we are speaking of is to delegate to an agent the payment. Okay? The consumer delegates the payment to an agent that goes until the end of the transaction. What we bring here, a very specific protocol has been developed now, which is called Agentic Protocol AP.
What we do provide as Worldline is all our know-how, all our knowledge in fraud detection, fraud prevention, to make sure and to ensure the consumer that the agent that will, and to ensure the merchant also, that the agent that will initiate the transaction is a valid agent and has all what it is supposed to have in terms of authentication to make sure that there is no fraud. There is a lot of value coming from Worldline here. Combining our value proposition to the one of Google or MasterCard or Visa on this type of segment will make the success of agentic commerce because that will bring the security that everyone is asking for. To conclude on merchant services. As you understand.
Our very core priority in terms of growth is SMB, and we are here making a radical step change in terms of digitalization and upsell of additional services to the merchants. That is the mandate of Joachim. The second point. The two other points are that we will accelerate our differentiation and our efficiency in merchant services through the two main areas that we already discussed of North Star 2030, which are platform convergence, because we are mostly talking about the platforms in merchant services, and the operations industrialization through the GCC, as Candice described them. Finally, the approach is to expand through the upsell of our acquiring when it makes sense, and also for differentiation in additional innovation. Thanks a lot, and I leave the floor to Srikanth for the financial strategy of the company. Thank you.
All right. That's a pleasure to see all of you. Many of you here, everyone online, super excited. Thanks for taking the time to engage with us. To join Worldline at this point of transformation with the energy and the excitement and the experience of that exec team, super highly motivating. I will, with Pierre-Antoine, bring focus, rigor to monitor and deliver that transformation plan that we've just been presenting to you. We've taken a hard look over the past couple of months on what are our priorities. We've taken decisive steps on resetting our financial foundations, and we'll follow that through. 2026 is a year of transition. It's got a reset, it's got a consolidation piece, and a transition piece that I'll explain to you. We will grow beyond that between 2027 and 2030. We look forward to a candid and constructive discussion with you.
Looking at the guidance that Pierre-Antoine and I, we guided the market through two weeks ago as part of our Q3 results call, was a low single-digit percentage decline in sales at EUR 4.5 billion. Adjusted EBITDA between EUR 830 million-EUR 855 million, and a free cash flow between -EUR 30 million and zero plus. We've talked about the three divestments that we are making. The METS, the North America, and Cetrel. That brings an impact of EUR 500 million on revenue, EUR 110 million on adjusted EBITDA, and EUR 55 million on cash. The proforma numbers you've seen already, the EUR 4 billion of sales, the EUR 720 million-EUR 745 million of adjusted EBITDA, that brings our cash between minus EUR 55 million and minus EUR 85 million. The cash in from disposals of those three entities will all be received, as we expect to close all of them in 2026, is between EUR 350 million-EUR 400 million.
Looking at how that EUR 4 billion is split, you've already seen the first pie when Pierre-Antoine presented, 80% merchant services and 20% financial services. I wouldn't go into it again. On the right-hand side, you see how we are split by geography. We've been saying our core is payments and Europe, and you see why. 90% of our core is in Europe. The others is 10%, including a small but profitable business of financial services in Asia. This diversity across segments, products, and geographies delivers us resilience today and gives us the right basis for the transformation growth tomorrow. Now, looking at tomorrow, the target 2030, from the EUR 4 billion we want to now match and beat market, as we evaluated earlier with a 4% CAGR in the intervening years, with the exit at 5% by 2030.
EBITDA goes from EUR 720 million and EUR 745 million to a EUR 1 billion +, taking the full benefit of North Star 2030. The free cash flow from -EUR 85 million to - EUR 55 million in 2025 to a 30%-35% free cash flow conversion on our EUR 1 billion EBITDA, bringing us to EUR 300 million-EUR 350 million of cash. 2026, as I have said, is when we transition, consolidate, and reset. Why? In terms of adjusted EBITDA, we are at EUR 720 million, and we expect at the end of 2026 to be slightly lower than our 2025 number for three reasons. The organic part. Where the reset has happened, Madalena has already talked about our impact and overhang in terms of financial services. We continue to be impacted by that. On the other hand, we are stabilizing the churn in SMB, which was particularly a problem in 2025.
We are also stabilizing in enterprise with the POS and terminals delivery, which has been an issue in 2025, but we start to consolidate in 2026. While you still see a negative number, there is a minus and a plus. We invest in remediation measures. We want to clear the deck for us to grow in the future. We have a backlog of ongoing due diligence, and we want to invest in them so that we clear on the remediation process. It was one of the points we mentioned as well as part of the Q3, which was how do we level up all our implementation across our various units in terms of remediation, and we invest in 2026. You see a small increase in the transformation plan as we start embracing the 2030 North Star plan.
In terms of free cash flow, from the minus €55 million to minus €85 million, we expect our 2026 number to be at the lower end of the 2025. Again, there's a plus and minus. On the positive, we contain our CapEx. It's the end of spend of Power24. On the other hand, there's a high level of interest cost that we will need to bear in 2026. There is a high level of tax cash out in 2026 for the profit in the earlier years of 2022 and 2023. Finally, there is a North Star 2030 implementation cost that you saw in the slide of Pierre-Antoine earlier. In terms of the revenues now looking forward to 2030, the building blocks is again staged two steps. We guide, we expect to be at a low single digit in 2026.
We are doing the 4% and 5% that we've talked about over the plan. There you see still the overhang on financial services in 2026 in terms of revenue. In the midterm, on the financial services, we are growing on issuing and digital services with the plan that Madalena has outlined. On the SMB, as Joachim has outlined, we got to defend and grow our key markets in Western Europe, Switzerland, Benelux being key markets. He has also explained how a channel to market in the Nordics has been through ISVs. It is still a strong market and continues to grow, and through partnerships, we need to still defend and grow that market. There is the CEE, where we have been growing quite a lot in the recent past, and we expect to continue to grow there.
It is broad-based across all verticals, and we expect CEE to be an important part. On enterprise, we have been lagging behind a little bit on retail, and we've been growing a bit more on travel, and this is an unfavorable business mix. We expect now to, in the midterm, regain our retail footprint. In global commerce, we'll be selective in terms through our innovative products, including agentic commerce, to grow on global commerce. Strengthen core markets, unlocking midterm innovation, and outpace market growth will be the key for us to beat on revenue. On adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow now. Looking at 2026 to 2030, we've again looked at what are the two important parts between EUR 700 million-EUR 1 billion. We've got EUR 150 million of organic that flows with the volume growth as well as us to protect the contract margins.
The EUR 210 million has been pretty well articulated by Candice and the rest of the exec team so far as to what are the four pillars on which we secure the EUR 210 million. How does that flow into free cash flow? While we have the dip in 2026, or the negative number in 2026 as compared to 2025, we are going back into cash flow territory, which is positive in 2027, and progressively grow to 2030 with the EUR 300 million-EUR 350 million. What we absorb in there is another EUR 120 million of interest cost. Now, that's an estimate at the time of 2030, subject to market conditions and how our liquidity is. That's an assumption right now in 2030. Looking at what is in the cash cost components below adjusted EBITDA, we've got primarily five blocks.
On the left-hand side, you see there is EUR 800 million of cash cost. The first one in purple is the CapEx and capitalized development cost for EUR 250 million for the scope we are presenting today. EUR 240 million is the restructuring and integration cost that will incur in 2025. EUR 130 million on leases, EUR 140 million on cash, and EUR 50 million in terms of interest. If we forward that on to 2030, we expect to have the same level of CapEx absorbing inflation at 2030, which will bring our level of CapEx on sales from 6% to 5%. With the platform convergence that we've outlined, we expect to have much lesser maintenance CapEx that gives us room for discretionary CapEx on spending on more innovative platforms in the future. Of course, at the end of the plan, the restructuring and integration cost falls close to zero.
We still optimize and absorb inflation in terms of leases by the end of 2030 by optimizing our real estate footprint. We have a tax cash out at EUR 140, and the interest cost is at EUR 120, which is embedded in our cash flow. From 2026 to 2030, what are the three key poles of our capital allocation strategy? Invest in the Worldline transformation. Balance sheet strengthening and deleveraging, and the EUR 500 million capital raise is an important aspect of that. As far as immediate concern is, and then we bring future cash flow during the plan. Portfolio streamlining that Pierre-Antoine has talked about in terms of our non-core assets that we will continue to engage on. It is a critical step now.
In terms of our group transformation, the EUR 500 million contemplated capital raise will bring our level of leverage from 2.6 today to under 2 by the end of 2026. The operational transformation plan, returning to profitable growth and cash generation in 2027, will generate between EUR 600 million-EUR 700 million of cash over the plan. The pruning strategy will bring us EUR 350 million-EUR 400 million of cash in 2026. A brief moment on the structure of the capital raise itself. Wilfried mentioned that, Pierre-Antoine mentioned that. In terms of transaction structure, it is a dual construct. We have a reserve capital increase as well as a rights issue. The reserve capital increase brings us EUR 110 million, and the rights issue will be EUR 390 million. The three strategic investors are bringing the EUR 110 million in the reserve capital, and there will be another EUR 135 million on the rights.
This way, we are covered for half of our total rights issue, and the rest will be brought in through the free float. The transaction rationale is, of course, as Pierre-Antoine mentioned, it gives us all peace, gives us financial flexibility. It anchors a stable base as reference. Financial institutions as our shareholders and secures our strategic ambition. The investors' commitment, as I said, they are going to be investing EUR 135 million into the rights, not selling the reserve capital in the meanwhile. Then 180 days after the rights as a lockup before. Of course, subject to customary conditions. Timing and approval, we target Q1, subject to EGM approval 2026. Looking at our liquidity, we expect at the end of December 2025 to have EUR 1.1 billion of cash.
With the contemplated equity at EUR 500 million, we still have the undrawn RCF, which has not been drawn ever so far, and we do not expect to. EUR 1.125 billion. Against that, you have the debt maturity profile in the future. Below that, you have the M&A cash-in and cash-out that we have. M&A cash-in I have already addressed. Cash-out is between EUR 230 million-EUR 330 million with a couple of puts regarding our Greek and Italian JVs, and we are discussing with our partners on both the valuation and the timing of settling them. Looking at the deleverage options. Beyond the plan, after the less than 2 by 2026, we will continue to deleverage with the organic plan, bringing EUR 600 million-EUR 700 million of cash. Enough liquidity to face all the upcoming debt maturities.
The new Worldline, you've seen that a couple of times now, last time now, which is to bring the four buckets of EUR 210 million. 75% are in the converge and integrate part, which is really the core delivery. The simplification and growth brings in the remaining 25% in order to achieve the 210. The organic part is the volume growth and contract margin protection. We bring back the 2030 targets that we've just been discussing on growth, adjusted EBITDA, and cash. I conclude with that. By 2030, Worldline will have achieved profitable organic growth acceleration, an efficient and agile operating model, renewed free cash flow generation, and provides us with the right basis for capital allocation optionality that will be value-creating for all stakeholders. Thanks for your attention. I now bring back Pierre-Antoine to conclude. Thank you very much.
Okay. I hope you're still alive. Just a quick closing remarks, and then we can have time for questions. Obviously, we have been in very challenging times over the last two years. The good news is that the way we have addressed them since spring has already brought very visible results, even operationally. The motion that Joachim has demonstrated is really happening, and you've seen that already in the Q3 performance. That shows and demonstrates that the foundation of this company is there, and that's something which is very important. Second message, there is a very strong commitment to be back to sustainable growth and solid free cash flow generation. We want, as a team, to fix this situation once and for all. Third message, one of the key topics of our strategy is to focus on our core markets in Europe and on in-payments.
Where we have a strong right to win and where we have the scale. We have a plan to build this robust operating model. Four drivers, very simple, very documented. Progressive, simplify, converge, integrate, and grow. We have a renewed management team which is committed on that. My personal commitment is to debrief you on every quarter on the milestone that we have reached. Thanks to the capital increase, we are having a robust financial structure, and Srikanth has demonstrated it. This is super important for us. This is super important for you as investors, equity and debt investors, because that gives us the peace of mind to navigate towards our North Star, being this leading European partner of choice in payments for banks, financial institutions, and merchants. Thanks a lot, and happy to get your questions with Srikanth coming back. Thank you.
Now we have the time for a good Q&A. Just a quick reminder how it works. If you're here in the room, some of you already raising your hands, raise your hand. We'll get a mic to you. If you're online below where the web stream is, you should have a box where you can enter into the chat your questions, and then they will come to me, and I can read them out on stage. Just in the interests of fairness and trying to get around as many of you as possible, I would ask that you please limit yourself to two questions. Also, when asking your question, if you could just start by introducing yourself and letting us know which company you represent. I think we should kick off. Perhaps we can begin with the gentleman who already has the mic in his hand, halfway at the back there.
Hello. Hello. Let's see if it works. Yes. You can hear me well?
Yep, we can hear you.
Emmanuel Madar from ODDO BHF. Thank you for this presentation, this roadmap. Two questions. First, a significant part of your incremental North Star contribution is based on the convergence of your platforms. What makes you confident to succeed in it? It seems very complex, considering that job was not done before at Worldline. My second question, you do not speak about Crédit Agricole in France and your joint venture. Maybe we can have an update on it, and what level of contribution do you expect from this joint venture for your roadmap in the next five years? Thank you very much.
Okay, I think I clipped a few on the way.
No, I'll leave it.
Okay, so on the platform convergence, I would say the paradox is that a lot of the preparation has been done over the recent years. I mean, the fact that we have those target platforms that have been identified, on which we have reinvested in terms of functionality to make sure that they were meeting the needs of the market, is something which is an asset now for us. Okay. The second element is that, as you've seen this year, there is an increasing momentum in terms of termination of non-target platforms. And what we see in our backlog, to some extent, if I may say so, is that a lot will happen again in 2026 because we are ready for most of what has to be done in 2026.
We know that 2026, 2027, 2028, we will have done, and we have, based on what has been done, we have a good level of comfort. Okay. Then 2029, 2030 will be more the financial services convergence because the commitment we have with the banks drives us to 2029, 2030 because obviously the banks, it's more complex. Nothing is granted, but I think that where we stand today, we are quite clear and quite robust in the assumptions for 2026. We've been gathering the commitments of customers, especially the enterprise customers, typically between the legacy SIPS platform on e-commerce in France towards GoPay. On the acquiring, we know what we will do in terms of convergence in 2026, especially starting with the Italian market. Okay, that's on convergence. Convergence is not rocket science. You just need to have the right features.
Available for the local markets because that's the way it works. And then to take your customers, sometimes by the hand when it's large merchants, or sometimes it's just different APIs on which they need to reintegrate, so that they move to your acceptance platform. Once we are mature enough, and which is the case, once your scope is stable, which is the case, you can deliver easier. The second question, Crédit Agricole. I mean, here again, the situation was a bit stuck at the beginning of this year, to be honest. Since then, we've been moving quite well. Now GoPay is distributed within the Crédit Agricole branches thanks to KAL. We are starting probably in Q3 this year the distribution of in-store solution to small merchants.
We are expecting, hopefully by the end of the year, the license from the local regulator, the ACPR, to start acquiring. A lot of call. Is it meaningful in 2026? The answer is clearly not. It will be even negative in terms of cash flow generation. It will be a ramp-up that will be progressive in the years 2027 and more, 2028, 2029. Do not over-speculate on the magnitude of impact of call, but the partnership is doing well.
Hello, yes. Is that on? I do not know if I am on my side. Could I? Yeah, thank you. This is Herbert Roy from CIC Market Solution. Thanks again for the presentations. Very energetic, and we hope best wish of success, basically, in this challenge. Coming to my two questions. The first one is back to convergence because a big part of the savings is linked to that.
Obviously, we will scrutinize that pretty strongly. What, in your view, are the biggest challenges there to do this convergence? Why is it that the banks and the financial services will take so much time to transfer? What are the constraints on their side that prevent you from accelerating the convergence? Because, as you said, it's not rocket science. That's my first question. The second question is more regarding the cash. Where does the cash sit? In the new pro forma model, if we exclude your divestment, I guess you have EUR 1.1 billion cash, if I'm correct. In that, how much will sit at the holding level? How much will sit at the subsidiaries level? How much do you need to keep at the subsidiary level? Should we expect that level kept for working capital at the subsidiary level to be reduced as you converge towards a lower number of platforms? Thank you.
Okay, maybe I will go quickly on the first question, focusing on financial institutions. I mean, and I've known that from the inside when I was at BPC. Typically, if you take card-issuing solutions, you need to embed this solution into your core banking. You need to embed your solutions into the mobile app and the digital journey of the bank. It touches many fronts of the banks as such. You know, the IT of a bank, I mean, it's a bit traditional, so it takes some time. They have issues in terms of priority as anyone and so on and so forth. That's also my experience. I mean, migrating from one platform to another platform, it's some kind of two-year journey. Take the one.
Yeah, on the cash. What we presented over the Q3 was EUR 500 million in subsidiaries, which was not part of the cash pool. What I did say during the Q3 is we were taking actions to reduce that number down. We'll continue to work on that number. I expect that to normalize around EUR 300 million to work for our subsidiaries' working cap needs and centralize as much as possible, either through dividend upstreaming or through putting them into the cash pool. Your second question was on the level of minimum cash we need. I said as well during the Q3 call that it could be anywhere between EUR 600 million-EUR 750 million. I would still keep that range until we have stabilized on our business in terms of. Cash flow generation. We have headroom in order to keep that. Again, I'm two months into the role. I need to understand better our intra-semester volatility, and that's something that we will continue to optimize. For now, I'll keep that.
Good. The gentleman just yes midway back. Thank you.
Thank you. It's Mohammed Moawalla from Goldman Sachs. I have two questions and one clarification. Firstly, thank you for the presentation. Again, back on the platform convergence. Obviously, it's a pretty ambitious plan to kind of streamline. In the payment industry, many have kind of tried, and we've seen very few. At least I have no recollection of a truly successful kind of convergence and transformation plan. Why does it work? One of the other things I've seen is your CapEx suggests it's going to be broadly kind of similar over the period.
Whereas others like WorldPay, Nexi, kind of called out at least a medium-term step up in that CapEx, which obviously then drives down maintenance CapEx over time. Why would that be the case and why you would not need to perhaps spend more on CapEx? Second question is. Obviously, SMB is a large chunk of the business. We have seen the kind of concept of platforms really take off in the North America market. It is starting to come to Europe. It is not just competing against the likes of a SumUp, but you see Shopify, Adyen, Stripe pushing down. Again, from a kind of competitive differentiation standpoint, what are you doing to stand up against that competition? My clarification was on the cash restructuring charge, Srikanth, is that roughly about EUR 90 million cash cost to generate the 210 of synergies, or is it more in line with the. Cost s avings?
Should I take the first one? Yeah. To generate the 210, the plan is costing us EUR 205 million. We had only the first two blocks that was put, but it is going to cost us EUR 205 million to generate 210. And the 210 as well, we had a figure of EUR 620 million, which will be the full return over the period. Mohammed. And you had another question on the?
No, that was a question.
Okay. On the convergence again. I mean. It is just a question of discipline on that front. I mean, the opportunity that we have to some extent is that we are such low level of expectations in terms of growth and cost reduction in the very short term that we afford and we can afford what those who are still in a very high level of guidance cannot afford. Okay.
I mean, I've been in this industry for a long period of time. I mean, executing convergence, that works. I've done some when I was at BPC. We've done some at Worldline. Candice has done some in their previous role. Again, there is no magic. It's just the fact that when you do that, it's an effort, it's a cash out, and you need to make that happen. The good thing and the good news in where we stand today is that a significant part of the effort is already behind us. Okay. Just to give you an example between the OGONE Legacy and the GoPay platform, okay, so that's more or less the same product. I mean, we just have a remaining bulk of one-third of the portfolio of OGONE to migrate to the target GoPay. Okay. And that would take one quarter, David, if I'm correct.
In 2026. Okay. That's the answer. I mean, the proof will be in the pudding, but that's basically the answer. On SMB, under the control of Joachim, I would say that. I mean, for sure, we are taking the wave of DIZs, the platforms that you are referring to. As you can see, we are not starting from nowhere. It's already 20% of our go-to-market in SMB. What we have today is the multilocal presence, which is in a fragmented market like Europe, which is a real asset. If you take the European market, DIZs are much less strong than in the U.S. or in the U.K. because it's such a tiny market each time where you need to invest on the local specificities of the local market, including in terms of VAT.
Warehousing, payment method, and so on and so forth, that ISVs that are successful in most of the European market are local domestic ISVs. This is where we have an edge as compared to Adyen or Mollie because of this very detailed footprint. What we miss today, what we were missing, is this Worldline for Platforms solution that Mollie has, that Adyen has, okay, and that we have through OPP, in which Worldline invested a few years ago, that we now have, and where we have made the bridge between EMV solutions, so payment terminals and our GoPay, to accommodate this type of products. We did find in the last two months, I think, three distributors, three ISVs, which like our solution as well as they would have liked the one of Mollie. Once we are at par with this solution, then remains. The multilocal footprint, which is our USV.
Yes, you saw it at the front.
Hi, Fred Wu at Bank of America. Two questions, please. First of all, if we can come back on the capital increase. You mentioned strategic flexibility, stronger financial position, backing from reference shareholders. If we can be a bit more precise on the rationale of raising EUR 500 million with shares at no time loss, considering a high cash position, high liquidity, upcoming proceeds from asset sales. Can you share a bit with us what you want to do precisely with that cash? Secondly, coming back on the June saga, if you can update us on any review of your constitution platform, any further thoughts on potential areas that you might reconsider, any legal processes going on. Thank you.
You want to take the first one?
Yeah. Thanks for the question. One of the key areas that we wanted to also say, as we mentioned, was to reinforce our capital structure. You've seen our secondary bonds trading percentages, which have been extremely high. We are also on an S&P, with a BB with a negative outlook after having been downgraded two notches over the summer. Our 2026 cash flow was not looking good neither. With having that peace of mind to fund the transformation plan and to stop the negative spiral in terms of our rating, because one of our key vectors to grow as well as financial services, like we have said, we want to be seen as, and we have seen that we are systemic in the payment system, we need to have a rating which commensurates with the responsibility we have in that regard.
This was a first step for us to shore up our balance sheet, make sure that we have a capital structure which is stronger, and then progressively we can start stabilizing our rating with the cash flow generation in the future and gives us a bit of runway for 2026, without which I think we'll have continued with our downward spiral and we wanted to short-circuit that.
Okay. On your second question, obviously, this media campaign has been a real destabilization for the company in terms of brand. That's the reason why, quite quickly, I think it was day three of the crisis, we decided to do external assessments on our risk framework and the way it is implemented. That was Oliver Wyman. Second, on the portfolio of merchants.
The outcome of that, I mean, we've been quite clear, I think, last week or 10 days ago. The framework is fine. It's in line with the benchmarks. The rules are defined. The processes are defined. We are on the benchmark. What remains is the standardization among our various regulated entities, okay, which is extremely important to ensure the robustness of the way we control our controls, if I may say so. That is one topic, which is to make sure that we centralize more. The way the policy of the group is implemented is enforced in the various regulated entities so that when we do the controls, it can be industrialized and it's not a handy type of control. The second topic that remains is that in terms of industrialization of our processes for the KYC, for the ODD, for.
Transaction management, we are not industrialized enough, which is a bit linked to the first point, this excessive decentralization of our setup. That is why a significant part of the plan is linked exactly to that. Say, okay, now we do that centrally. We will do that out of our GCC in Poland where we can industrialize, and that is all the plan presented by Candice. What does it mean ultimately? That first, we have some remediation to be done because we still have some stocks of ongoing due diligence which are not up to date, okay? That is a cost that we will face still in 2026, as Srikanth said. There is CapEx in the plan to have this industrialized solution ready, okay?
The good news behind that, if I may say so, is that even if we are not fully standardized, when we do the audit of our merchant portfolio, would it be the high-risk portfolio or the overall portfolio, which is what Accuracy has done in the meantime? The conclusion was very clear on the fact that there was no. And you always have some merchants which are not in line with your rules or your risk appetite, but they have confirmed that it was extremely marginal in all our regulated entities. The picture is very clear for us, and I hope it is now for you. As we said, I mean, and I'm coming from a bank. Madalena is coming from the banking system. Joe is also, I mean, very senior and experienced in that topic.
I mean, there is no compromise on that front for us, and that's why we are putting all that money in 2026 to fix that once and for all. There is the question of what are the implications of all this media story for you with the regulators, with the legal proceedings, and so on and so forth. Obviously, we've been welcoming many regulators in our various entities who wanted to understand what happened, if they had missed something, and so on and so forth, with special focus, I would say, on the Belgium one, okay? We will see what comes out of that. We are obviously cooperating with them as much as we can, but the important information is that we don't have significant issues in terms of high-risk merchants in our portfolio.
There are some legal proceedings that, as you know, some have been, I mean, announced, not really initiated in Belgium. Some are making progress in Germany, and that was in the news yesterday. We will face that. I mean, we are quite clear on where we are today. We will manage as much as we can.
I'm going to take one of the questions from online, and then we'll have a couple from the room before we wrap up. Online, someone has asked, where do your cost savings come from? Is it people costs, IT spend, lower external spend, or other areas?
Take that one.
Yeah. Again, from the North Star, where we are talking about GCC, it is, of course, a kind of concentration or reducing the fragmentation. It provides us. An optimal way to leverage a lower cost of execution in the way of working and through automation. There is a people cost, which is a factor. On the top line as well, we've talked about the business mix where we want to rebalance, and that starts protecting our contract margin. That provides us, and the scheme fee optimization as well we've talked about. That has two vectors. There's a part in the organic portion that I presented. Of course, as Candice was talking about, there is a 20% of the 200, which is in the revenue management in terms of growth. We are attacking both the top line profitability as well as our cost-based structure in order to optimize. Of course, subcontractors is part of our cost structure, and that should automatically be a reduction as a result of our plan.
Yeah. Sorry, did you want to add? Yeah, maybe just to add to be very clear. Obviously, that means reduction of headcounts, okay, especially in Western Europe. The way we see it, considering the staged approach that we have for this plan, is that it will be headcount reduction of something like 6%-7% per year in Western Europe, which is something that is, I would say, quite much easier to manage because we have the natural churn, the natural turnover of our headcounts. We have reskilling opportunities that create some potential to reemploy people or to change their roles. We are, to some extent, and that's also, as I said, a way that we have to reduce the restructuring cost and to make that much more acceptable by the organization. It is not that we do that slowly because we do not want to face the situation. It's more that the way we have designed the plan, as a consequence, will help us to manage this evolution of headcount in a more smooth manner.
I think looking at the time, we'll probably have to just have one final question from the room, but you've been waiting very patiently, so yes, please go ahead.
Awesome. Thank you very much. This is Justin Forsythe from UBS speaking. Thank you for the presentation and the day. A couple of questions on my end here, if you don't mind. First, I wanted to talk a little bit about Srikanth, the plan for next year. Again, we've got a few different components in there. I think the low single-digit growth in revenues. We've got EBITDA declining. I wanted to focus on two other components to get to the free cash flow, which is the restructuring, really.
Maybe you could just talk about EUR 40 million, I think, cash out next year. Can you just talk about one of the components of the restructuring in cash that you're going to be spending next year? What is it that you're actually spending on? By historical standards and the context of other companies, that seems like, honestly, quite a low amount of restructuring. I know you have more phasing, and that's what I wanted to understand as well. I think you mentioned in response to another question, EUR 205 million overall, I believe I saw on the slides the EUR 90 million that was mentioned by the prior analyst. Can you just help us understand what the delta is there? Pierre-Antoine, a question for you. You used to run Ingenico ePayments. Obviously, that's still part of the business as it exists today.
I mean, maybe you could talk a little bit about what you came back to. I mean, has it changed at all? Has it improved? Have there been innovations? What is the competitiveness of that solution set within the market, whether it's GlobalCollect? I mean, you talked about upgrading the API. It seems from afar that these solutions are some of these solutions which are losing share in the market. Maybe you could just articulate your prospects for that business going forward and how it's changed since your time at Ingenico back from 2017, 2018.
Right. The 200 million we're talking about as restructuring cost is related to the North Star 2030 plan. Therefore, that relates to those four pillars we talked about. When you look at 2025, where we had EUR 250 million of restructuring, out of that, we had something like EUR 90 million related to the Power24. While that dies down to something like EUR 10 million in 2026, we still have a substantial amount of restructuring costs which are already engaged, and we'll continue to have a base level of restructuring costs. Or let's say integration costs, which is based on our IT systems for finance applications. We had some regulatory costs in terms of the investigations we've been doing in Germany for the last couple of years. There are costs on top for 2026. We are still looking at a EUR 170-EUR 180 million of restructuring, rationalization, and integration costs. That's weighing down. While the Power24, EUR 80 million goes down, what I was mentioning was that EUR 35 million of that has been taken up by the.
North Star 2030. We do have other rationalization and integration costs already engaged, which we'll need to have as a cash out. Progressively, that starts to reduce, and we start going in around EUR 80 million run rate, EUR 50 million-EUR 60 million coming from the North Star and 2030 on top. That's really, and then we finally come down to EUR 20 million at the end. That's a gradual reduction. It's not like we go from EUR 250 million to EUR 40 million tomorrow and then EUR 20 million the day after. I just wanted to clarify that.
Sorry. My mic. Thanks. The one other part of the question I meant to ask you and just slipped my mind at the minute was the RCF. I mean, you've got, what, a billion in capacity. Why is that undrawn? If you have such potential challenges and liquidity, why not draw on the RCF at potentially a lower cost to your shareholders?
There is no covenant on the RCF. Again, it's not so much about—I think by just drawing on the RCF is not going to help us reduce the leverage of the company. It's going to provide us liquidity, but not leverage. For us, the issue is leverage as to if you see how the bond markets is dealing with it. It's not normal. It's not just a liquidity concern, I would think. Pierre-Antoine?
Yeah. On your question, you have good memory. I think the two main evolutions of GlobalCollect as compared to my first time, if I may say so, they did invest a lot on the platform. The new API, the new portal, the new back office, that were the projects that we had to be more competitive on this market. They've done it. They executed my dream, if I may say so. The second thing they've done well has been to focus on the segments on which they wanted to compete and to narrow down the dispersion in terms of geographies, in terms of teams that were a bit everywhere. Typically, they managed to, and that's one of the platforms or two of the platforms that we have shut down this year, which were two platforms in Latin America. They managed to repatriate most of the customers to GlobalCollect, which means that we are reducing the cost because we don't need to have the guys to run those platforms. I think that's the point.
Today, they are quite competitive on those verticals on which they are. The challenge now for the team, because we are also quite strict on the risk appetite that we have there because it's heavy merchants in terms of risk. The challenge for them is to find ways and means to grow with a risk appetite which is defined.
I think we need to wrap up this Q&A session there, but I don't know, Pierre-Antoine, if you want to say a few final closing remarks.
No, no, I think that's it. I think we could have many more questions. We have a call with the analysts in the afternoon, if I'm correct. That will be the opportunity to answer more questions for the investors who are in the room. Obviously. We have to manage the business, but we will be at the same time on some roadshows with Srikanth in the coming days and weeks, and starting with Barcelona on the 11th and the 12th of November. I do not want to make any advertisement for that conference, just with the other brokers. We are available, obviously, for calls as needed. Thanks a lot.
Thank you very much.