Hello, and ladies and gentlemen, welcome to GFT's Capital Markets Day 2025. It's great to have you with us here in Frankfurt or online. Great to see you today. Today, we want to give you an inside look on how we are working with our clients on some of the most forward-leaning projects in the industry, from AI-driven modernization to next-generation core systems and large-scale digital transformation. Artificial intelligence and emerging technologies are becoming central to how financial institutions operate and innovate, and GFT is playing a meaningful role in shaping that evolution. Let me start by introducing the leaders who will set the tone for today. Sorry, I need to go there. From our board, we have Marco Santos, our Global CEO, and Dr. Jochen Ruetz, CFO and Deputy CEO.
Both will begin with our five-year strategy update, sharing where GFT stands today, what we have set in motion, and where we see the next stage of growth coming from and why GFT is the Artificial Intelligence Digital Transformation Challenger. You will also hear throughout the afternoon from several of our senior experts, including Ignasi Barri Vilardell, our Global Head of AI and Data, and Regional Head of Business Development for Western and Continental Europe. We will have Dean Clark, our Head of Technology Office and Chief Technology Officer of GFT UK. We have Floris van Heijst, since January this year, our Senior Vice President for GFT Software Solutions, and Sascha Beck, Executive Director and Financial Services Lead at GFT Germany.
Before we move on, I want to extend a warm thank you to my Investor Relations colleagues, Nicole Schüttforth and Maren Dallas, as well as the event colleagues, Marielle and Sabrina, for their tremendous work in preparing today's event. It would have been impossible without that. Thank you. We are also delighted to welcome outstanding speakers and partners who bring valuable perspectives from leading institutions across the industry, and I will introduce them by order of appearance. We have Glaucio Joanico, IT Superintendent from Bradesco Seguros from Brazil. We will have Mike Laws, Managing Director at Deutsche Bank, coming from the U.K. We have Alexandre Graff, Senior Vice President and Managing Director of FICO from the U.S. We have Alexander Leisten, General Manager at DKB Code Factory, coming from Germany, and Éric Marcoux , Vice President, IT, Property and Casualty Insurance and Corporate Services at Beneva from Canada.
We truly appreciate your participation, your insights, and your partnership. Before we dive deeper into the agenda, let me briefly connect today's insights with our last Q3 performance and the progress of our five-year strategy. GFT delivered solid results in the first nine months, with double-digit growth in key regions like Brazil, APAC, Colombia, and the USA. At the same time, we continue to scale the strategic pillars of our plan, driving AI deployment across markets, expanding Wynxx as a core modernization engine, and strengthening our position as the AI-centric digital transformation challenger. These achievements give us strong momentum for the midterm as we move in the next phase of our strategic execution, and much of that you will hear today reflects exactly that. Let's take a look at our agenda. We start with our five-year strategy update from Marco and Jochen.
We will then move into agentic AI modernization with Wynxx with Ignasi and Dean. We will move into a coffee break then. Maybe you need to have some break and some coffee after that AI deep dive. Next, and this connects very well with the technical insights from Ignasi, we shift to the client's perspective with the impact of AI on productivity from Bradesco Seguros, Glaucio Joanico, and Ignasi. We continue with the crucial topic of AI and anti-financial crime, featuring Mike Laws from Deutsche Bank and Floris van Heijst. We stay with that topic of anti-financial crime with Alexandre Graff from FICO, who brings deep expertise on decision intelligence, analytics, and risk technology across financial institutions, and we'll talk about FICO's and GFT's global partnership, what we will announce shortly, so this is kind of a small spoiler.
We then explored the joint success with DKB and GFT for efficiency, agility, and digitization, presented by Alexander Leisten and Sascha Beck, and this will be followed by future core systems and tech leadership with Éric Marcoux from Beneva and Marco Santos again on stage, and Marco will then also return for a brief closing message. This is the agenda. I think we put very interesting things together, and with that, thank you again for joining us. We appreciate your engagement, your partnership, and your trust in GFT. We are excited to show you how we are shaping the next chapter of AI-centric digital transformation together with our clients, partners, and all of you. Having said that, Marco, I would hand over to you. The stage is yours.
Good afternoon. Welcome, everyone. Thank you very much for joining us here in person, and thank you very much for those who are joining virtually. Let's get started. We have a pretty full agenda, and I would like to start with a video, a video that our marketing team created that is helping us on bringing the positioning of GFT. Let's take a look on this video, please.
This is how revolutions begin.
Smart contracts and NFTs are the future of business.
Blockchain technology will change the world.
The impossible is now possible.
The next era starts right now.
By AI.
AI.
Everything changes.
It's the AI.
AI.
Others create hype. We create impact. Let's go beyond the hype.
That is GFT. Let's go beyond the hype. What you see out there, too much noise, too much hype. We create impact with artificial intelligence. We believe in that, and we are doing that. We are the artificial intelligence digital transformation challenger. That is our positioning. I would like to also share with all of you some personal insights and learnings that I had. I met two brilliant minds in the artificial intelligence industry. One of them is Demis Hassabis, the Google DeepMind CEO and founder of DeepMind, who takes care of all artificial intelligence projects at Google on a global level. He has 6,000 data science, AI, artificial intelligence engineers at Google. Everything is under him. I met him in person in the United States, in California, this year, in the second semester.
It was amazing to see the way that the artificial intelligence is evolving with building blocks of models like Gemini and other models, large language models, small language models, and elements and agents that they are building on top of each other. That is exactly the vision that we have for Wynxx, and we're going to talk later on about it. I also met in person in Berlin, in Germany, actually two months ago, Sam Altman, which is the number one mind and person, individual in the world in artificial intelligence. I met him in the Axel Springer events, awards for a dinner, and then for a workshop on the day after. I met, I talked to him in person. I could talk hours here about my learnings. It was an amazing opportunity for me, for GFT.
One thing that stands out, the artificial intelligence, the progress and evolution of artificial intelligence has been material. This year, in 2025, things are moving and evolving so rapidly. He, Sam Altman, believes that in three years from now, there will be so many changes, so many things that are difficult to predict. Obviously, he is working 24/ 7 to be leading on that, and in the same way, I am working 24/ 7 to also lead with artificial intelligence for our industry. That is the good learning. Things are changing so fast, and we are going to see the strategy of GFT that is to tackle these transformations. This was, for me, it was an incredible learning.
Now taking you to what's going on, trying to bring a real understanding about the transformation and impact of artificial intelligence into our industry, information technology, IT. Because there are lots of people talking. When you talk to investors and you talk to analysts, when you talk to clients, lots of questions and lots of inputs, feedbacks. I'm going to bring you not the hype, tangible results. Let's try to understand this. To do that, I usually utilize a quite known analogy, the Gutenberg printing revolution. Before this, before the Gutenberg printing revolution, we had, we were writing books with hands for thousands of years. Monks were writing books by hands. With the Gutenberg printing revolution, we created a complete change in the way that we think, that we learn, that we create, that we share ideas, that we scale and mass production, mass product books.
We created an infinite number of jobs. We scaled it up completely, massively. We were able to create universities because of that. We changed the way that education works. We created the Renaissance, and the modern age arrives from the Middle Age to the Modern Age. That was the change. We created lots of jobs. We even created companies to create the machines for that. We created inventory companies, inventory. We created logistics. We created even companies to sell books. We created e-commerce companies to sell books. We created amazon.com to sell books. That was the beginning of Amazon. It is a massive, massive, massive scale-up and changing. In the same way, the same analogy, that is what is going on now. We understand that, GFT. What we are doing today, we are writing software with hands, handwriting, hand coding.
With artificial intelligence, we are unlocking a completely new set of opportunities to obviously produce things faster, be more efficient, time to market, to reimagine the way that we think, learn, and create technology, software, and naturally laying down the foundation of a new era with artificial intelligence. This is beautiful. We have today with Wynxx and artificial intelligence around 50-53 case studies of real impact. I'm just going to talk about simple things. One major financial service, car manufacturing company, our clients, we put, they started a journey to modernize their core banking loans. We put two proposals. We are doing that project with AWS. We put two proposals. One proposal doing the first piece of the project of the core banking modernization, which is the documentation, just the first phase documentation, one proposal, six people, one year and a half.
One year and a half, $1 million. Six people to work on that. We put a proposal. We put a second proposal using Wynxx, artificial intelligence, generative AI to do the documentation of the same system. Six people, six weeks. EUR 100,000. The client chosen. The artificial intelligence one, we already delivered. It is not hype. This is reality. We already delivered that. Client is happy. By the way, the deliverable that we generated with six weeks using artificial intelligence for the documentation of this has a better quality than if I had six people working for one year and a half trying to document millions of lines of code. This is groundbreaking. This is artificial intelligence creating impact in a simple case.
I could go on and on with more complex cases, like in a regulatory change in Brazil that they changed the social security from numbers to numbers and letters, which is a huge transformation in the whole industry, multi-industry in Brazil. We deployed artificial intelligence to solve that problem. We simply wiped out all the competition. We put proposals over the last three months, and we won all of them in financial servicing, banking, insurance, in telecom, everywhere. We are using artificial intelligence to do something different. We are doing something new. It was a regulatory request. I could go on and on and on. Pragmatic, simple, tangible results. We have, now let's talk about our strategy. I talked to Sam Altman.
Sam Altman said, "I wish that all companies would move to become an AI-centric organization, regardless of the industry." We are more than ever confident and happy to have designed and have communicated that strategy. We want to be the best responsible AI-centric digital transformation company in the world. That is our vision. We have the mission to bring AI-centricity, digital transformation, software development for technology services for all the industry. We are positioning ourselves as the challenger. I want a challenge, and I am challenging the IT, the traditional IT service industry. I am a challenger inside my clients.
I want a challenge and help the clients challenge the status quo, the legacy systems that are there, the current ecosystem of partners that are doing those legacy maintenance for 20, 30 years, doing the same thing, super hard to change, complex to deliver new functionalities, costly. We want to, and we are the challenger on this. That is why we are positioning as the artificial intelligence digital transformation challenger. Our five-year strategy, so we talked about the vision, mission, position. We have strategic goals. The strategic goals are number one, fast learning, adaptive, and an innovative organization. As Sam Altman told us, as Demis Hassabis, if you are not this, if a company in the IT industry is not a fast learning and adaptive organization, it is challenging.
Because we need GFT, we need to be prepared for a next change that happened in one year from now, two years from now, three years from now, whatever, something new comes that replaces OpenAI, ChatGPT, or replaces completely Google, whatever. We want to be positioned on the forefront of that shift, of that change. That is our position. That is our strategic goals. Naturally, an agile company that orchestrates our job, our work with agentic work, naturally a global AI-centric market leader and democratize AI as well. We want to, that is my commitment. We want to create a company to last on these super changing environments that we are in information technology. I want to have a company in three years from now, five years from now that is ready for the next shift, a next leapfrog, a next wave of opportunities.
Vision and mission, strategic goals that are long-term goals to last. We have our ambitions. We have ambitions, and we have ambitions and bold goals. I want to almost double the company on our long term. That is our ambitions. We have that ambition to make our revenues EUR 1.5 billion, to improve considerably our margin to 9.5% EBIT adjusted. To do so, we need to increase the high-value-added service that we have, transform everything that we do, know AI with AI, high-value-added services, and also improve our cost structure with more near-shore and offshore. We have several strategic initiatives. Myself and Jochen are going to touch, we are going to cover the great majority of them, but we are not going to cover today, just going to mention.
I want to, and I strongly believe on that, and the team also strongly believes on that, to globalize more the company, coming from a federated silos company to a more global organization. That is a strategic initiative that we have that is changing many dimensions of the company. It's moving. Naturally, we want to transform ourselves as an AI-centric organization on the software development with Wynxx as our spearheads and also all the other services around it. We are also focused on positioning ourselves into the market, positioning as the AI, artificial intelligence, digital transformation challenger with a next generation brand design. We launched our new brand and so on and so forth. We also won the Generative AI AWS award. We also won many other elements of Gartner positioning of generative AI and so forth.
We naturally want to keep innovating, investing in asset creation as we did with Wynxx. We want to grow Wynxx. We want to create more Wynxx. The other strategic initiatives that we are going to cover right now. Let's talk about strategic initiatives for sustainable revenue growth, areas that can bring large-scale opportunities for us. First, implement our global delivery platform focused on smart shore and startup India. That is one important fundamental element of our five-year strategic plan. It is simple. Before GFT, we had some delivery centers, and the delivery centers were federated, also connected with one market and another one with one or two markets. Now we are harmonizing everything, bringing that into a big platform of delivery. We have one central demand leader for that, one center supply of all the delivery centers in a global platform.
Every proposal that comes across the globe for a project that has large-scale projects that needs efficiency, brings differentiation skills, we use that to deliver the proposal and win the deal. That is what we did successfully this year with MAPFRE, one of the largest insurance companies in the world that we started to participate in a strategic process with them, RFP. We won because we were able to articulate our delivery capability from Colombia, from Sophos Solutions, the acquisitions that we did from Colombia. It was a requirement on the RFP, and we were able to deliver that combined with Brazil and other centers of excellence. We were able to win a strategic project at MAPFRE this year. Fantastic. Result of this strategic initiative. Other result of strategic initiative, we also won this year a strategic project in robotics here in Germany.
It was a project that required a large-scale team of data, AI, and cloud. Impossible to do that with one or two centers. We had to bring all this platform together, Poland, Spain, Brazil, and India to put a proposal to bring such a large-scale deal. We won it, and we delivered that. We have the same message. India, we started up India. For, I'd say, I cannot say the name, but I'm going to tell you one of the top two largest retail banks in the U.S., top two, one of them. We were able to stay on the game on the core bank implementation that they are doing. It is their requirements. You need to have a footprint in India, a delivery center in India. Because we had India, we were able to be part of the game, participate, and we won.
Now we are growing on that client with a next-generation core banking project. Without India, last year, one year ago, zero, not possible to compete, zero. Reality, our five-year strategy. I tell you more. Two weeks ago, we signed a new master agreement, service agreement, MSA, with one of our top four clients in the world, GFT, with India rate cards. We have been operating with this client for several years. This client looked at GFT as the European shop, a European partner. We unlocked India now. We unlocked a new world of possibilities because there are a new set of programs and services that are done with an India platform. Now, when we had two weeks ago, we signed the master agreement for the first time, becoming a European regional company service provider to a global one.
No need to mention about our AI strategy. 12,000 engineers, 1,200-ish are already working with Wynxx in projects. Most of the team, 96% trained with AI tools and so on and so forth. A second strategic initiative from our five-year plan is to first move everything that I do, this is soft application development, soft engineering to soft engineering for AI, the AI-centric thing, number one. We also have some other, let's say, core elements of our high-value-added service offering that we are putting focus. One of them is the next-generation core banking, which stands out for us. We are the number one in the world, delivering Thought Machine projects, delivering 10x, delivering Mambu, delivering Oracle FLEXCUBE, and now a new partner, which is Visa Pismo, that I'm going to mention a little earlier later. That is next-generation core banking.
GFT, number one in the world, very well positioned and moving forward. Also on the front of the ISVs, like Salesforce, like Guidewire that we are going to talk later on with a client, Beneva, and SAP, a new element of ISV specialization that we brought on our system, on our ecosystem. By the way, we already sold, and we announced that last week on our Q3 announcement, already a new project with SAP in one of our clients, hyperscalers, AWS, Azure, Google, clouds, and our products, SmartAct, Engineer, and Wynxx. I am going to put highlights on the AI data intelligence and artificial intelligence modernization in a sec. Just to complete, we have our products. SmartAct is our anti-money laundering compliance solutions. I am going to announce that now.
We are going to have Deutsche Bank here formally coming to picture and talk about their decision to move with SmartAct at Deutsche Bank Germany. This was a competition that we participated in, and we won that. Deutsche Bank is going to come and talk in a few minutes about it. This is very good. Last week on the Q3 announcement, I did not mention the name of the clients because we still did not have the approval, but now we have the approval to do that. This is fantastic news for our software solutions practice unit, sorry. We also have Engineer that we also communicated last week that we announced that we closed a three-year deal with Audi, Volkswagen Germany, and Wynxx. That is, I am going to, that is a chapter that I am going to talk soon.
Among all those partners, two new ones, which is Visa, Pismo, with the most advanced core payment systems that are coming to play. GFT is already doing some projects with them, and we are creating a global partnership with Visa, Pismo, and also with FICO that we're going to have Alex Graff soon talking about FICO and why FICO chose GFT as a strategic partner. For us, I could not be more proud to have FICO, the largest rating scoring consumer company in the United States of America and USA, and one of the largest anti-money, anti-fraud companies in the whole world that are choosing GFT to be a strategic partner.
Moving from the strategic initiative of focus on high-value-added service- and offerings, let's talk about our global accounts, the strategic initiative that is focused on what is going to move the needle, tier one, tier two clients, global accounts. We have a strategic initiative that is moving all GFT because I want to, that's our current footprint. That's our current, I would say, wallet share of clients. We have four clients today, more than EUR 25 million, 20 clients, more than EUR 10 million. And then I have almost 40 here, tier three clients, more than 500 clients tier four that generates less than EUR 2.5 million. I tell you that in several areas, in several units and markets, we are putting more effort here than I'm putting on here. Moving the company, moving GFT to focus on what matters. Let's focus on tier one and tier two accounts.
Let's focus on those guys here in order to bring my offering, industrialize my offerings, my capabilities, my differentiations to move those guys, have more tier one, have more tier two, move tier three to tier two, and be smart to focus on the tier four that can become a tier one. The laggers, those clients that are requiring more energy than other accounts with low profitability, this is definitely, there is no space with GFT, right? We are going to simply put the right focus. This is simply a glimpse about some of our clients. You see the clients that we have, HSBC, Citi, Deutsche Bank, Itaú, the largest bank in Brazil, Latin America, BBVA. We are one of the key partners on modernization of BBVA, one of the benchmarks of technology in Europe. We need to grow here and many others, right? You see?
Many others that you cannot mention. This is one of the top two largest retail banks in the United States of America and many others here. That is our no open logos for us yet. What do you want to do? I want to focus prioritization, industrialize, industrialize the process of taking my offerings, my differentiations, my capabilities, and bring to them to grow them. Bring also my capability, my strategic initiative of SmartShore and my offering of India, bring to them and bring and then create a spinning wheel, right? A virtual cycle, engineering growth, engineer growth, accelerate growth into my business.
Naturally, not only bringing growth to the current tier one, tier two clients that I have, take the tier three to become tier two, bringing all the capabilities, differentiations that I have into the clients that I have, industrialize this process, and obviously engineer profitability because on that process, I'm going to engineer in profitability because I want to get rid of tier four clients that are clients that cannot take us to more than EUR 1 million, never. We have low profitability or we have not a nice profitability. We need to put the right energy on the right things, on the things that are going to scale. I do believe that this combination of strategic initiatives creates and can create and will create a large-scale growth.
You know, just if we bring and we make one new tier, one new tier, one client per year over the next four years, you can get eight clients. I can double it. And so on and so forth, right? We can really, so that's our goal to have those, obviously those percentages are approximately percentages, but our expectation is to have more of the company around 70%-ish on the tier one and tier two clients in the long run and have less energy, less dissipation of energy and heat here, right, on tier four. Be smart, be smart here, right? That's what we are now industrializing, pushing forward, pushing forward, pushing forward. That's a combination of strategic initiatives. Now let's get back to the high-value-added service offerings and differentiation.
I mentioned about, I touched a little bit on the next-generation core banking and on the ISVs, hyperscalers in our products. Let's talk about artificial intelligence modernization. This is immense. This is huge. Artificial intelligence modernization. AI is breaking down, steering down the barriers of changing legacy systems across the board. These are unlocking opportunities that were not there before. There were no opportunities before to change legacy for some legacy core banks. The barriers of change were super high. They were there for 25, 30, 35 years to change that. Programs, endless programs, risky, risky, enormous costs. Now with AI, we are making modernization projects feasible, affordable, less risky, impactful, and transformative. 62% of the U.S. companies, they rely on legacy modernizations.
75% of the banks on a global level run on legacy, and they are failing to deliver what they need in order to deliver their goals. HSBC estimates 5,000 applications need to go to modernized. 86% of the bank executives say modernization is critical. This is huge. We are the best company positioned to do the artificial intelligence modernization, this artificial intelligence accelerated journey, artificial intelligence accelerated modernization. We have a complete set of offering capability unity with a sense of the strategy to the top-down approach, bottom-up, and important to highlight, Wynxx, with an agent, a functionality that is our legacy transformer that is moving forward in the market, bringing 40% of efficiency at minimum with the example, one simple example that I mentioned before. Artificial intelligence modernization, we need to deploy AI. We have our technology, our differentiation.
Wynxx, important to highlight, we're going to talk more about Wynxx. Clients improving this year from 25 to 58. We expanded from one country to eight. Bradesco Seguros, we're going to talk here. 40% improvement in terms of productivity with a large-scale team. It's not a toy POC. It's a real 180 team working, large-scale, delivering development and modernization. Question, does or did Bradesco Seguros ask GFT to reduce the team in 40%? No. We are growing the team now. I have more than 200 because capital is smart. Capital flows to where return is higher. Capital flows it. If I deliver with more productivity, I am going to get projects from the competition. That's what's the effect that's happening at Bradesco Seguros, and you can have the clients talking in a little while to all of you.
Staggering figures, right, in terms of documentation, of code fixing, and etc. Could not be more proud of the Wynxx team, what they have done with the creation of that technology, what we are doing on a global level. I could not be more proud of that position. Finally, AI and data. AI data and intelligence. That is a major practice that we hav-e. We have 224 clients, more than 1,000 projects that we have already delivered, more than 2,200 AI data specialists, six global centers of excellence, and leader at Gartner 2025. We have a complete unit with enablers, offerings, cases, accelerators, services, differentiators, including the ADA Marketplace. Ignasi is going to talk later on. Naturally, what are some logical steps for GFT with this? Some logical new industries where our experience, capabilities, offerings, differentiation, and even our roots as a German company is in high demand today.
We got it. Robotics. GFT has been selected as a strategic partner for NEURA Robotics to develop the software platform powering the next generation of physical AI for NEURA, public reference. We did that large-scale team for GFT and NEURA. And that's the quote of David Reger, the founder and CEO at NEURA Robotics. With GFT, we have found a strategic partner that shares our vision of bringing cognitive robots into a real-world application with a deep knowledge in AI software engineering. That's our differentiation in complex and highly regulated industries. We made it. Obviously, again, that's a capability that we have. It's in high demand. Welfare is moving from hardware to data to software. Since 1987, we've been delivering complex projects, mission-critical projects, high-volume metrics, security-sensitive, and for highly regulated industries. That's GFT. Since more than 30 years.
We have been pulled into several discussions right now with defense companies to help them what? To discuss about how to modernize. We need to modernize. We all need to modernize. We need to help us to accelerate this transformation with AI data software. GFT plays clearly as a German champion for that, a German champion in AI data and modernization. This is in this transformation. This is something that is coming. We are discussing now a major project in defense in Poland. It is a pitch. I am discussing right now 350 deal size, 350 FTE size in a defense company in Germany right now. Does it mean that I am going to win that? No. Does it mean that we are going to win 100%? No. This is wonderful to have that opportunity. This is wonderful because we have a strong capability, a global capability, international data AI cloud.
This is in high demand for Europe and for especially Germany and all Europe, right? I think that we come into play with good credentials on that. Jochen, I would like to invite you on stage. Otherwise, I keep talking the whole afternoon.
Thank you, Marco. Warm welcome from my side, everybody in the room, all virtual participants. I will talk about two more work streams of our five-year strategy. I will talk about the Gravity Program and our M&A strategy. Takes about 10 minutes. Gravity Program is a self-chosen title. What does it mean? That is in the headline. Focus on simplifying and optimizing countries, offices, and shared services inside the GFT group. We have some KPIs here. They are going to repeat on the next slide. Let me highlight them there. Let us look at what we have done in the year 2025, 2026.
I'm looking at the bullet points on the left side right now. We are doing one thing in all countries, which is we are reviewing the clients, especially the subscale revenue and margin clients and their contribution. Do we want to work with them in future? That's the tier fours Marco was already mentioning. We're looking for major accounts, and we have to be critical on all the tier four clients, which are the very, very small clients. Second bullet point, review subscale countries. We're currently in our budgeting process for the next year. We're going to have our reviews end of this week. We are going to discuss also our small countries, the subscale countries, the countries which are not generating economies of scale as of now, but we need economies of scale across the GFT group in future.
Third bullet point, optimize G&A cost, cost base, and location. Of course, we do what everybody does. We simplify, we optimize, and if it cannot be simplified or optimized, we move it to cost-optimized locations. The fourth point, reduce office space with low utilization. GFT is following a very strong work from anywhere, work from home approach. You see this office, it is pretty full when you walk the aisles right now. This is where projects are happening, where senior sales is happening. A lot of the coding our people are doing must not be done in a GFT office. Therefore, office space, we are critical about, and we reduce where we can. Now, what are the proof points of the year 2025-2026? You see that on the right side. The U.K., we had to reduce by 50% in workforce in 2025.
There is nothing to really be proud about because we were not able to staff our people in projects locally anymore. After COVID, there was a high demand for local resources, and the demand diminished again when the workbench from Eastern Europe and India was working well again, demand reduced for local resources, and we had to right-size our U.K. organization. This year, 50% down, productive people, but also in the back office teams, we had to right-size the team. I'll come back to U.K. on the next slide. Software Solutions, our second turnaround topic of the year 2025. We went into the year with a too strong workforce. We brought on board a strong manager. Floris is here with us today. We reduced the workforce by 15%, and now it better fits the revenue structure of the business.
We're set to go into 2026 on a better cost base. We will still invest in that business, but the cost base is now far improved. Third bullet point, we have reduced our global G&A workforce by 6% in 2025. Something that is still ongoing today. This is work in progress, but it's our target to get the right size. People we can't simplify or optimize, we have to move to low-cost locations. That's happening right now. Strict cost control, the fourth bullet point, I will not go deep, but office space, we reduced in Germany, Italy, Poland, Brazil over the last 12 months by 7,500 sq m. This office here is roughly one fourth of the size of the former office, which was around the corner. We didn't manage it down. In this case, we had to wait. Sometimes you have to wait.
There was a long lease contract, but we had taken the office on board before COVID, and we learned we need less space. We have reduced globally office space by 7,500 sq m. Now, at the bottom, the five-year strategy about this, the mentioned cost effects on the right side, they will all materialize next year. This year, many of them have been more a cost than a benefit. The benefits will come in years after. Until 2029, we believe we can improve our EBIT adjusted with Gravity Program work by at least one percentage point. Let me highlight again the U.K. story. In the U.K., the Gravity approaches, we leverage what works best. I'm again on the left side of the slide. We are replicating in the U.K. our blueprint from the GFT U.S. The smaller bullet points say it.
We have a very efficient local team in the U.S. today. It is roughly 40 productive people plus sales plus administration in the U.S. and they are mostly managing the 95% offshore delivery that we have. This generates a mid-teen margin today, which is comparable to what peers generate. Simply, our U.S. business is only 9% of total GFT. This blueprint we are bringing to the U.K. right now. We are revising the go-to-market strategy, the leadership, and the organization. We are implementing a new country manager. He will be on board somewhere in the first quarter. The new governance for sales, operations, and delivery are underway. Outlook for next year, this year 2025, but also 2026 are transition years. In 2026, we will already see the margin improvement. We should see a black break even for the U.K. and we will return to revenue growth in 2027.
I promised my team I will only bring one financial slide today, right? Only one. Because this is all about the business side of GFT. This is the financial slide. I am trying to highlight the isolated GFT group performance of the non-turnaround countries, which is by far the majority of the GFT group. First, the two turnarounds, GFT U.K. and Sophos Solutions, including the numbers and the decline on revenue and profitability basis. We have a third enemy this year, which is FX. The euro is so strong that we have a lot of headwinds, especially on the revenue side. It is also burning the profit. If you take out these three effects, GFT in constant currency is growing by 11% this year.
This is happening on the back of a very strong Latin American market, of a strong North American market, and a somewhat weaker and not growing European market. It is already the blended growth rate of these three markets, but excluding U.K. and software solutions, 11% growth. We are at a 9% EBIT adjusted margin. This is where we can take this. Turnaround programs happening under management will take one or two years to get closer to the group numbers in those turnaround markets, but we are on track for that. Now, M&A strategy. Come on in. Take a seat, please. M&A strategy we have also refined with the five-year strategy. Again, the headline is highlighting it. We focus on bolt-on acquisitions of high-value added services company in existing GFT markets. On the bottom, you do see the history of our M&As.
We've done 13 M&As over the last 14 years. We are quite experienced. We've done them in Europe, North America, South America. Now the strategic focus is a bit changed. It's on the top right. Countrywise, we stay in our existing markets. We don't go for M&A outside of GFT existing markets. Gravity program, focus on markets, maybe even reduce the markets, and we focus M&A on the existing markets. Second, technology, unlock new ISV solutions and business to strengthen the core. Marco was talking about ISV a lot. M&A strategy has to follow that. I'll get to the example on the following page. Clients, of course, we want access to future tier one and to tier two clients via M&A. Current priority list on the right side on the top, it is North America.
Again, as I said, we have good margins in the U.S., but it's only 9% of the GFT business. It should be 30% of our business if it would be like the market share that the markets globally have from the U.S. North America, high focus for clients, more clients access. We all know America's is not cheap. So that's a challenge. The second, Latin America, here our strategic approach is to buy ISV companies and by that also get their clients. And number three, a bit more opportunistic in Europe, also looking for ISV clients. So software implementation product companies with their client base. That's the fundamental M&A strategy. Now the one example that we implemented in the year 2025 is the company Megawork in Brazil, an implementation partner for SAP software products.
Megawork, now more on the left side, is a EUR 15 million-EUR 16 million a year company right now. We are consolidating since September. That is why we only will show EUR 5 million of revenue this year from Megawork. They do a 20% EBIT adjusted margin. ISV business is highly attractive margin-wise. It is roughly a 300 people team. How does it fit into the strategy? We focus on existing GFT countries. The client, sorry, the M&A target is in Brazil. Obviously, we are following the strategy. We will later roll it out into other existing GFT Latin American markets, potentially Colombia, Mexico, and maybe even beyond into Europe, but currently focuses on Brazil. The second M&A strategy, expanding client base, cross-selling potential.
In this case, we have acquired a company that has a diversified client structure in health, pharma, public sector, utilities, manufacturing, and we want to cross-sell GFT services into them. Also the other way around, we want to cross-sell the SAP expertise into GFT client base. This has already succeeded in one case after roughly four weeks after buying. That is, I think, a record for GFT. Number three, focus on high-value adding services. While it is an SAP product implementation business, we are showing the margin over here. That fits. Last but not least, the GFT AI portfolio that Marco talked about a lot should support the M&As. In case of SAP, we still have a bit of work in front of ourselves, but we want our Wynxx suite to also support SAP services in future, something to work on for the next years.
Implementation of the M&A strategy at work. That said, Marco, conclusion is for you.
Thank you, Jochen.
I clicked one backwards.
Conclusion to go direct to the points, we are executing our five-year strategy with a mission focus and to be the artificial intelligence digital transformation challenger as I presented, as I mentioned to you. We are engineering growth and profitability while also focusing on initiatives such as the acquisition of high-value added service companies in current markets that we have. There is a clear path for large-scale growth opportunities in several fields, as I mentioned to all of you, the artificial intelligence modernization, the AI data and intelligence, the robotics, the defense, our core banking part, and ISVs and clouds, but especially on the artificial intelligence modernization with an immense, huge opportunity in terms of legacy architectures modernization.
The path ahead is bold, is ambitious, and full of opportunities. GFT is ready for this to lead on the AI-centric digital transformation. That is what we are positioning for. I think that we have been moving strongly as I presented before. I would like to thank you for the time and open for some questions. I do not know how we are with time, but go ahead, Andreas.
Thank you very much for your update and almost staying in time. Almost. I think before we proceed with our tech expertise, I would allow one question to keep the dialogue a little bit flowing, but then maybe move the other questions to the coffee break. If there is a question in the room, we have one. Maybe two.
Yes. One question to the recent acquisition and the SAP topic you mentioned.
Is there any risk that you get in conflict with SAP's own AI strategy?
On the contrary, one of the reasons of the acquisition is that SAP has a strong agentic AI and AI strategy for their products. We do not want to do the traditional, the vanilla SAP. We want to definitely be the lead on this AI-centric transformation of SAP with the agentic platform that they are doing, number one. Number two, to also use AI to accelerate the migrations from the ECC to SAP 400. That is what we believe is a strong opportunity. We already started cross-selling, right?
Are you talking to SAP on that topic?
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I met with some in the event of Sam Altman, I met one of the board members of SAP here in Germany, global level.
We are talking in many countries, not only in Brazil, but in Spain. The global head of partnership, which sits in Spain globally for SAP. We have been, let's say, active discussing with them. Very happy, very happy with SAP. By the way, for me, this is gold. We simply brought SAP on an ISV. It is a global SAP brought into our ecosystem. We created a cross-selling immediately. In less than one month, we already sold SAP into one of our clients that we have. For me, this can really, our expectation is to do more than the business case that we bought, that put on top.
Thank you. We have another question in the second row of Knut Henkel.
Yeah, I have got one question with regard to the focus on the tier one clients.
I remember that you pursued very successfully this land and expand strategy. The question for me would be, is that now dead? Have you changed the strategy with regard to that? How should we think about that?
Yeah, I think, may I? If you want to take it. I believe that the land and expand strategy was a strategy that took GFT from EUR 100 million-ish, right, several years ago to the size that we are today, EUR 885 million. That is our guidance for this year, years. I think that was quite an important and relevant strategy for us. What is the situation now? The situation now is that I have quite interesting and strategic clients list of tier one and tier two clients, as you saw. I also have lots of more than 500 clients on tier four.
I need to rebalance the focus of the company because I'm clearly investing the same time and effort of our sales team, marketing, pre-sales, technologies, architects into these long-tail tier four clients. I'm investing the same amount of effort in clients that you look at the clients and say, wow, these clients will never give me more than EUR 1 million, never, because there is no size for that. By the way, my margin is not that good. It is no brainer. Let's invest the time on the ones that matter that can move the needle, tier one and tier two clients.
Obviously, let's be smart to keep doing the land and expansion, but smartly land in specific clients that can be a tier one and then have a right plan and measure that every quarter, every six months, every year and see the plan evolution to take it from tier four to tier three to tier two to tier one. That's the mission. Focus on what matters. Because if I double my tier one and tier two, I can double the company. They have scalable, right, and capabilities. Obviously, it's not simple. It's not trivial. On that journey, we're going to lose some. We need to win others. That's our mission.
Perfect. Thank you. I think there will be more questions in the coffee break, and we will have also the opportunity to talk about other questions later on.
Thank you very much for that update on our five-year strategy.
Thank you
For showing us how our five-year strategy is taking shape and for demonstrating how AI is breaking down the barriers of change in legacy systems and unlocking new major opportunities. We exactly take it from here when we now move from strategy to execution to the technology that is already transforming client projects today. Please welcome Ignasi Barri Vilardell and later on Dean Clark, who will take us deeper into the world of agentic AI modernization with Wynxx. Ignasi, it's your space.
Thank you. Thank you, Andreas. The first statement that I want to say is that GFT was founded in 1987, right? And for more than 10 years, we started doing AI projects. We haven't jumped into the AI wagon last year.
We have more than 10 years working around data and AI projects. One thing that I want to share with you is a set of examples, some of them being spoiled by Marco at the beginning. I am going to try to speed up a little bit that part. I also want to share with you that whenever a company is adopting AI, the impact of that adoption, it is different. We have seen different flavors and colors. The reason being is because this impact, it is not uniform. That is the reason why at GFT we have a very, I would say, concrete offer when we are going into the market to help our customers to do this AI adoption in a very measurable and impactful manner. How are we starting this type of project?
The first thing that we need to understand and that we love to demonstrate the value with measurable impact, it comes for individual productivity right there. This is automating individual tasks that you have to do in your daily routine. As we do that, and we are accumulating experience, we are ready to jump into the next step, which is precisely improving the process-based productivity, which is automating entire workflows across different business units. The importance of having this stage, let's say, approach is because companies require time to get confidence on what is the possibility of AI, to also change and adapt the cultural impact that represents the AI adoption, and at the same time to start realizing that this exponential ROI that AI will bring as long as they move into an AI-centric enterprise, it requires this step-by-step approach.
This is what we are currently doing. Of course, at GFT, we are determined to go to the next growth phase, which is this AI-centric enterprise. Every lesson learned, every project, every success that we do, we make sure that we capitalize those and we make it tangible in our set of products, Ingenion, Wynxx, and Smaragd to continuously helping our customers. If we have to think about AI adoption, the most, I would say, immediate area where we should adopt AI is a very, I would say, mature arena. It is precisely the software development, right? This is the area where AI has been largely adopted over the past years. Quoting Gartner, by 2028, 90% of AI software engineers will be using AI. That is a tremendous jump from 2024. Sorry, here you go. Only 14%. That is a massive jump of AI adoption in that field.
GFT, we are not just, let's say, watching what's going on, but on the contrary, we are actionating this trend by helping our customers with Wynxx to generate better documentation, to generate better code, to generate better tests, and also helping them to maintain their systems. This is clearly a trend that GFT is capitalizing and that we are helping our customers across the board. Now, as I know that you would like to see some examples, I'm going to be covering some of them. The first one is in Mexico. It's a tier one multinational bank that you see more or less here. The rationale of these cards is we see in blue, let's say, the model of the project. In that case, it's testing automation at scale. And then we have the pre-AI baseline.
The customer not using GFT services, not using Wynxx, which is our AI-based product to accelerate SDLC. On the right-hand side, we have the results after adopting Wynxx, after engaging with GFT. Here, what we can see is that we have decreased the amount of time required to do test execution from five days to two hours. This is a 98% reduction in the times. Similarly, if we look at the human-based intervention, we see that we decreased from the 75% human intervention in the test execution to only 5% of manual execution. Going to another customer, we are still in LATAM, one of the largest customers and banks that are operating in Colombia. We are seeing more or less the same behavior, right? In that case, not only in testing, but also in different steps of the software development life cycle.
Generating code, we reduce 72% of the time required to do so. Identifying code vulnerabilities, we reduce 88% of the time required to do this check and to fix them, which is the next step. The same for code review, generating user stories, etc., etc., etc. This is changing completely the landscape for our customers whenever they have to produce code at scale. The last example in this slide is in North America, another tier one institution. Again, we have a baseline of lack of documentation, very slow process to have coverage on the code, testing, etc., etc. Using Wynxx, we are able to improve dramatically the entire situation.
In a nutshell, in just these three examples, we are seeing how Wynxx and how GFT is improving significantly the times, the quality, and the coverage that we are providing to our customers between 70% and 95%. The most important thing that we need to highlight as well, that's a message that I want to share with you, is that the more that the customers are engaging with GFT, the more that Wynxx is used, the better results that we are obtaining, the better efficiencies that we are generating. If you do not trust me, because we never met, right? Later on in the process, Bradesco Seguros themselves are going to be sharing that story with us.
I'm going to spoil myself a little bit, but the story is in early 2024, the customer launched the challenge to all their IT providers saying, "Guys, we need you to deliver more business value with the same budget." The result of that challenge, GFT was the winner party, achieving the result of 40% efficiency and productivity and 80% faster code correction. Again, later we are going to be, we are honored to have Bradesco Seguros themselves, one of the largest Latin American insurance companies, to share with us this project and these initiatives. As I said, we started in the software development life cycle. If we have to think about what's the next step, immediately we think about business processes. This is precisely what we've done. Back office processes, middle office processes, front office processes.
This is where AI could help all these financial institutions and industrial companies, insurance companies, etc., etc., to automate many of their functions. Some examples could be document management, where we can apply AI and actually we've done it, credit risk assessment, customer service, etc., etc., etc. I know that you'd like to see some examples, so let's go for it. The first one, let's think about a mainframe system. This is a very critical infrastructure. Every single minute of downtime, it is actually affecting that the customer is not able to transact, right? He's not able to buy, he's not able to pay, you name it. Definitely reducing the times required to fix incidents, it's critical. It's key. This is what we've done at GFT. We take an existing service. We download all the data from the customer, of course, with their permission.
How these tickets, how these incidents have been solved over time. We generated this engine being able to help the operator that whenever a new ticket, a new incident is coming to the system, he or she can expedite the resolution of such kind of an incident. After just three months that we put this system in production, we reduced the average ticket resolution time by 30%. This is precisely what you can see here, the SLA time going down and down and down and down. I know that you like also to see some proof, graphical proof of that. Because another thing that we do at GFT is not only training and putting together all these AI engines, but also bridging the gap between the technology and those people that are not technology, but they need to use that technology.
Here you have some screenshot of this solution that is already in production, bringing that value for different customers across GFT. This is not just operational efficiency. This is strategic leverage. Because of that, now whenever we are pricing a new application maintenance for our customers, we can be more competitive. In those existing engagements where we are doing maintenance, we can also open the door for potential margin improvements. This is what AI is unleashing for us. Time is very sensitive, and I know that I'm actually running out of time already, perhaps. It is even more important when you are submitting and creating credit risk analysis. A credit risk analyst, whenever they have to create this report, what they have to do is some of all the tasks that you see here and beyond that.
This is just, let's say, a summary of some of the tasks that they have to do. As you can see, they have to download documentation, they have to gather information, they have to fill out some sections, they have to answer some qualitative and quantitative KPIs, etc., etc., etc. Together with Oliver Wyman, we created a pilot with one of our customers where what we said and what we did is creating an agentic approach that some of these steps could be enhanced with the use of AI and therefore reducing the time required to do these tasks. On average, we said that we can save between 30%-40% the times required by the analysts in conducting these credit risk reports.
For that particular customer that you see here, some key figures, how many analysts, how many customers, how many new customers, etc., etc., because that, of course, influences the business case. It means that in a single year, they can save between EUR 4 million-EUR 5 million. That is in a scenario where the customer is not growing. If the customer is willing to grow, which of course they want, that savings go much beyond that number. Since I know that you like an image better than me talking, this is actually the solution that we have implemented, that we are pitching and that we are using as an accelerator to help our customer to achieve these goals. This is not only about being able to deploy AI, but doing it at scale for enterprises. Last but not least, we talk about SDLC, right?
AI for SDLC, software development life cycle. We talk about the incursion of AI into business processes, back office, middle office, front office. We are not going to be stopping here. For us, the next frontier, the next jump, as Marco has said also at the beginning, is the capacity to go towards this new arena, which is a tremendous volume of opportunities for GFT, which is the large-scale modernization. We have seen over the last, I do not know, 10-20 years, many of these initiatives repeatedly stalled, not because of lack of vision, but because of the prohibitive cost of delivering such kind of a project, very long projects, a lot of risk, etc., etc. I am talking about projects such as mainframe modernization, re-engineering of machine control systems, you name it.
Nowadays, GFT with the use of Wynxx, we transform this forbidden type of project into something that we are actioning. We are delivering. Again, following the same structure that I've been following across the presentation, some examples. The first one, tier one multinational bank in Spain, mainframe, core banking, more than 40 years of a legacy system. The important thing, I know it's a little bit tiny here, but more than 428 million lines of code, more than 347,000 programs, more than 4,000 functional groups, all this entangled all together. Now imagine that you're an engineer and you have to serve in to understand all this complexity and to determine what is the best strategy to migrate this into a new banking architecture. I'm going to tell you, you cannot use AI at all. Not possible, right?
Unless you have a very deep pocket and a lot of patience, because that will take ages. GFT, with the use of Wynxx , we are transforming this opportunity into a reality. Not only for one country, but as you can see here, we are doing this for two countries at the same time. This example was already shared by Marco. Tier one multinational car automaker happens to be German, but in that case, operating in Brazil. Similar complexity, right? We are talking about core banking, 2,000 programs, more than 200 databases, more than 3 million lines of code. Again, you have to understand everything with no documentation whatsoever to then establish what is the migration strategy, the modernization strategy. Marco said before some numbers, right? You will see a variance of the Wynxx . The reason here is because we needed for them to deploy the LLM.
This is the more technical aspect of it. Even though this is a 69-time reduction of the original project without using GFT and AI for less than 10% of the cost. You may say, "Yeah, Ignasi, but before you were getting that and now you're getting this." Do not get confused. Before, we would never get that. That was prohibitive. That was not even a possibility for the customer. They did not start this type of project. Now they do. They are doing it with GFT. Last but not least, I am not bringing KPIs because we have started quite recently. If you think about industry, think about a German champion in the machinery space. Imagine the amount of lines of legacy code that is running inside these machines.
I do not know if any of you have quite recently went to China, but the competition being created there around machinery robotics is fierce. Definitely, they have now a motivation to accelerate the innovation, to shorten the time to market. To do so, they have to create new types of software to be run embedded into these machinery systems. This project, this challenge, even though it is not a core banking system, is very similar to this. Legacy systems, very entangled. You need to understand the business logic behind. You need to determine the migration strategy. You need to do that in a cost-efficient manner. This is precisely what we are doing. This is precisely what we are going to deliver out of this immediate project to then help them to achieve these objectives over there.
Now, everything that I've said shares the same common goal, right? Which is helping our customers to run this enterprise AI adoption while we can measure the value that we are bringing to them, which for sure I've been sharing with you. We are not stopping here. For us, as we said at the beginning, agentic is the next frontier. For us, as part of our strategy, is that AI, it is not something that we see as our customers should eat up, but something that internally we are adopting. What you see here on the left-hand side is our agentic marketplace. Every single process that we have inside GFT at the moment is being analyzed to see what can we do to improve the process and to bring agents to help us to be more efficient internally.
That is something, let me see if that works now. Yeah, there we go. That is something that we are creating internally to help our employees to get access to those agents, to find a way that we can build agents in a standard manner, etc., etc., etc. This is not everything. On the right-hand side, you have our agentic governance framework, which we have created to ensure that internally and to our customers, whenever we are creating an AI system, whether it is an agent or not, and in that case, it is, these agents are aligned to the business goals. We want to generate return on the investment. Second, we want to do it in an ethical and responsible manner. We want to make sure that it is compliant. We want to make sure that it is secure.
Of course, we are building all the technical underlying architecture to make that a reality. I know that you're thrilled to know a little bit more about what's behind the scenes in terms of the technical ins and outs. For that reason, I will welcome my colleague Dean Clark on stage to tell us about it.
Hi everyone. Welcome to this presentation. The idea that I'm going to talk about now really focuses on a few of the key messages that Marco was pitching to you in the beginning introduction. Firstly, before I move forward into what GFT are doing in terms of its future roadmap and where we're moving Wynxx , where we're moving our AI adoption, what I want to do a little bit is just rewind for a second.
Just understand where the market is, what we're seeing in the market, and how we're going to react to that. Right now, today, you can already see a number of organizations are adopting AI. It's now part of business as usual. Everyone is trying to embed it in their processes. We've seen a large number of use cases where it's being embedded in coding assistants, like GitHub Copilot, for example. We want to make sure that we are not competing with those, but we are contributing additional savings. What you've already seen from some of the existing case studies and success stories with our clients is that we are achieving those things alongside the other coding assistants. That's a key part that I want to talk about at length later.
In order to try and progress a little bit, right now, we need to focus on how AI is already transforming both the world and how it's transforming the possibilities that large organizers and enterprises have in terms of modernizing their estates, moving forward with their productivity, bringing AI into their products, into their services, into the offerings for their clients. The way that people are already doing that is that they are already seeing AI doing what is traditionally seen as automation, really, of the low-hanging fruit. The manual repetitive tasks, the research, the data processing. These are activities that everybody has already been looking at using AI for four years. Generative AI, of course, is making that a lot more easy. Generative AI, of course, focuses on that content creation, the content summarization.
Now, in addition to that, we've also got use cases where people are starting to enhance their products, where they're able to personalize customer journeys. They're able to personalize or hyper-personalize user interfaces, customer journeys, be able to target specific products and processes around people's thoughts, wishes, demands. Finally, the third point around how AI is already embedded in our world today is purely and simply amplifying human potential. Really, for me, this is the fundamental concept of why AI is really being adopted at wide scale by some of these larger enterprises. This isn't about how tools are there to replace humans. This is about how tools are there to amplify their potential. It's about lifting that up to the next level so that we can do more with less or ideally more with the same. Now, if it will change, there we go.
In the market today, we've already seen that we are moving on as GFT. Marco mentioned already that we have our legacy modernizer agent. That is GFT's first agent built within Wynxx . Wynxx , as a platform, is an exceptionally mature product already that sits alongside the software development life cycle, pointing at successfully improving a number of the processes along that route. Now, in order for GFT to grow, we need to take into account all of the market trends. We need to make sure that we aren't following everybody else, but we are leading other people. We understand that today's ecosystem, we have a number of our clients already looking at and indeed implementing agents. There is a challenge today. Marco mentioned at the beginning, there is a lot of noise around AI. How do we rise above that noise?
How do we create that level of impact? Gartner coined about a year or so ago the term agent washing. This is something where existing large organizations created their new branding around their existing platform. They did not take into account the true agentic need. It needs to be autonomous. It needs to make decisions, and it needs to execute something. What we have seen in the industry are a lot of applications, a lot of software products be labeled as agentic when they are not. They just purely use AI. Now, one of the things that we are doing, and you have just seen it from our agentic architecture that Ignasi has displayed on the screen, or at least the governance model anyway, we are ensuring that every product that we build that is labeled agentic will be truly agentic. It will make decisions. It will be autonomous.
We have created a governance framework. We have created a model. We have created architectures and blueprints that not only are we using internally on Wynxx , but we are also starting to embed on our client projects. One of the interesting aspects of this is how can you identify what is truly agentic? Without sifting through it, without using it yourself, it is very difficult to do that. What we want to do is build the trust in the level of execution that we perform with our clients, with the products that we build. GFT's name is synonymous with being that challenger in the industry all around AI and agentic AI. In order to move forward, we cannot just make our platform agentic. Other people are creating agentic platforms. Why does that make GFT special? It does not. We need to focus on moving that forward.
We need to look at the evolution of those agentic platforms. To date, GFT has obviously focused its Wynxx product on the software development life cycle. Now, Wynxx in itself, as you can see from the slide, has focused on design and planning, development, testing, validation, deployment operations holistically. The features that we have sit within the software development life cycle. They are there to enhance what you can get by buying something like GitHub Copilot or Cursor or using Anthropic Claude AI. Now, those specific tools are aimed at code generation, code completion. They will create a README file. I'm sure if you've done any reading on Wynxx or you've heard some of the presentations today, you understand that our product doesn't focus in those areas specifically. It can touch on that. It does some of the fringes.
There are a number of articles that you can probably find on the internet right now by Gartner, by McKinsey, by Bain. They all state the same thing. A developer spends approximately 20%-30% of his time engaged in writing code. If you're looking at these coding assistants, which have come a very long way and are very useful, I use them myself, you are going to be focusing those savings on that 20%-30% of your day. GFT's Wynxx product focuses on the holistic software development life cycle. We try to get as much of the savings as we can from that other 70%-80%, which is a far greater share.
For that reason alone, without adding in the additional savings from using one of these coding assistants, that's why you're seeing some of these larger numbers in terms of our savings compared to the numbers that you're seeing from those traditional coding assistants. I mentioned that we need to move forward. I mentioned that we need to enhance our product beyond agentic. One of the ways that we're going to do that is that we are going to start to focus our product on becoming more of a general intelligence model. We are going to get our platform to think, how can I do this? What is my reaction to that?
The way that I, or hopefully many of you in the room, cognitively process things based on our surroundings, by our situations, by the things that we have at our disposal, like tools or a glass or a piece of paper, we are able to solve complex scenarios. We are able to understand the context of each of these things. We are going to create a central orchestration process within Wynxx as a platform. That orchestration, you can think of it as a brain. It is there to understand its context. That context might be architecture. It might be code. It might be documentation. It could even be an organization's IT security policy. We are going to be able to ingest all of these components into that central orchestrator or brain. It is going to then understand contextually the meaning behind all of these things.
It is then going to create a plan. Very important thing in agentic AI is to create that plan. The orchestrator is then going to be able to provide that sequence and that communication out to other agents or APIs or microservices to execute on that sequence, giving you an end-to-end transformative process. Now, both Marco and Ignasi have talked today about the importance of being able to transform organizations. This transformation is very expensive. It's very time-consuming. It's very complex. What we're doing here is we're going to provide a platform that is going to break down some of those barriers. It's going to reduce that time. It's going to simplify to the point where the risk of doing those migrations is reduced. Now, how are we going to do this is probably the question you're going to ask.
What I've described right now is probably the Holy Grail of products, the Holy Grail of platforms. How do I minimize my cost? How do I make it go faster? How do I reduce the risk and complexity? To date, I'm hoping that you've all heard of a large language model. The term has been thrown around a few times today. A large language model ultimately is therefore creation. I'm going to ask it to provide something. Based on its understanding or neural network within its large data set, it's going to provide some contextual output. A large action model goes beyond that. Whilst a large language model can create, for example, a plan, the construct that is now a large action model can actually take that plan and execute and communicate. This is going to be one of the central components of our brain.
Large action models are available today. You can find them in open source. They are starting to become a little bit, I do not want to say widespread because that would be exaggerating slightly, but we are starting to see bleeding-edge technologies that are starting to make use of this technology. GFT also wants to be a bleeding-edge organization taking advantage of this. This large action model adoption will essentially move the dial of where we are, where typically we would have to write a huge amount of code, a huge amount of logic, would have to build learning cycles, would have to build a memory. The large action model actually takes care of a huge amount of that.
We can leverage all of GFT's existing learnings coupled with that simplified technology stack, enabling us to go to market quicker, more effectively, to a much better output for our customers. Now, what we've heard from Ignasi earlier today, and we've heard from Marco already, these legacy transformations are highly complex. We've heard that they can take several years. They can cost millions and millions of pounds. One of the larger cost components of these types of transformation projects is the validation. If I write a piece of code, someone's got to check it. If I release a piece of code, it needs a review. If I write a document, it needs a full-eyes check. All of these stages across that process require somebody to put a second pair of eyes on it and effectively sign it off. Now, with agile release processes, we've obviously seen DevOps toolchains.
We've seen better workflows that have enhanced this. Ultimately, it still comes down to someone needing to check. One of the benefits of, again, the large action model and some of the technology understanding of our architecture around putting inspectors or auditors into the loop is our AI platform is going to validate at each stage a lot of that output. The winner of the race for transformation is going to be the organization that manages to build in as much of the solution validation to their product as possible. If we can reduce that amount of validation that typically can be 60%-70% of a project's timeline and cost, this will be groundbreaking for our clients. This is where GFT can essentially pick up the baton as a leader in the field.
What we're hoping is that we can compress those 18-24 month projects by using our new platform to under six to nine months. We've seen some of the savings that Marco has talked about. We've seen some of the savings that Ignasi has talked about. We are looking to go beyond that. Now, I've spoken a little bit about how we're going to evolve Wynxx as a platform. What I haven't said is what the future for that platform involves. Now, it's going to become an agentic platform. It's going to be able to communicate externally with other agents.
Not only are we going to turn all of our features into separate agents, not only are we going to add them to our agentic marketplace, both our internal client-facing agents and our internal ones that are actually going to be added, all of these agents will essentially be able to be accessed by our central orchestration or our brain. The brain will also be able to use anybody else's agents. There was a great question around the SAP. Are we going to be aligned with SAP's AI strategy, or do we conflict with it? This is a great example of how we are going to work with it. Our brain will be able to reach out to SAP's agents. We will be able to embed those within our workflows. Our brain will understand the complexities of what the SAP agents are doing.
We can teach it how to embed those in its sequencing to solve even more complex problems. That is a great example. Thank you for that question, by the way. Teed that part up nicely. Now, the next stage of the vision is not just to use this as a platform or a suite of products. It is actually to start to become a de facto member of a human-AI partnership. We are going to embed Wynxx not as a tool for engineers to use, but actually as a worker, as part of a holistic team unit. We are going to be able to offload a number of specific tasks. It will go and autonomously complete those end-to-end. That is the vision for Wynxx .
Did I do it on time?
Almost.
Thank you very much, Dean.
Thank you very much, Ignasi, for that insight and fascinating look into enterprise software and where AI systems learn, adapt, and collaborate intelligently and specifically. You have perfectly been in time. I think there are tons of questions in the audience. I suggest to have a coffee and address these questions directly to our speakers. We will again meet in, roughly 20 minutes at 4:00 P.M. We continue with the next session. Thank you very much.
Is this off?
Nope, it's not off. Okay, welcome back, everybody. I hope you had enough time to grab a coffee and to interact with our tech experts and also have a chat with the management. We now shift to the real-world client perspective. What does AI-driven productivity look like inside the major financial institution?
I'm very pleased to welcome Glaucio Joanico from Bradesco Seguros, together with Ignasi, to share how AI is making a measurable impact on delivery and efficiency. Please, Ignasi, the stage is yours.
Thank you, Andreas. I was a little bit jealous when Marco, you know, used the video, and that's why, as an icebreaker, I'm going to also add this video to start with and presenting officially what is Wynxx. We will go into this conversation with Glaucio. Please, whenever you can.
At GFT Technologies, we've spent decades delivering software that solves the most complex challenges for leading enterprises. Today, expectations are higher, timelines are shorter, and generative AI is transforming how software is built. That's why we created Wynxx, the industry's most flexible GenAI platform for enterprise software delivery.
Wynxx accelerates the 70% of work beyond coding, such as testing, documentation, and legacy modernization. Teams deliver faster with confidence, going far beyond what coding assistants can offer. It is built with governance and security by design and integrates seamlessly with your existing SDLC tools and infrastructure. Model-agnostic and deployment-flexible, Wynxx keeps you in control of models, data, and IP. In regulated industries like banking and insurance, customers report up to 40% productivity gains and 90% time savings on heavy-lift tasks. With Wynxx, you simply deliver better software faster. Wynxx. Built by technologists. Designed for impact.
All right. Thank you. As I said before, of course, we are 100% certain of what we are saying and what we are sharing with you in terms of KPIs, etc., etc.
I think that if we have the capability to bring a customer talking on our behalf around the experience that they have had with GFT using Wynxx, that's the best story that we can share. For that very reason, I'm honored to welcome our guest, Glaucio. Glaucio, welcome.
Thanks, Ignasi. Thanks for having me here.
Now I see you, Glaucio. Glaucio, before we jump into a set of questions, please, for the benefit of the audience, can you introduce yourself, your role in Bradesco Seguros, and tell us a little bit about yourself, please?
Yeah, sure. First of all, thank you, Ignasi and GFT, for the opportunity to be here with you.
I'm running the IT shop here in Bradesco Seguros, mainly the development team, so responsible to make sure that we have the most of our IT investment, the investment in technology that the company has. I can also introduce Bradesco Seguros now if you think it's a good time to do that, Ignasi.
Go ahead, Glaucio.
Yeah, so yeah, we are an insurance company, the largest in Latin America. We are based in Brazil, very focused on the local market. Last year, we had a revenue of EUR 20 billion, which was quite good, and it left us a net profit of EUR 1.5 billion. Fortunately, this year, the numbers are looking even stronger than that. We are presenting good results, and of course, the challenge that we have is to keep going with this level of outcomes.
Thank you, Glaucio, and again, thanks for coming here today.
We've been talking a lot around AI today, but also over the last two years, a lot of companies, everybody's talking about AI. When you decided back then, early in 2024, to start adopting AI for SDLC, what was the main motivation that sparked this change in your strategy and decided then to adopt artificial intelligence for your development processes?
I'm pretty sure that all of you know that the investment in technology is one of the biggest constraints every company has. The good side of our company is that we have an amazing sales team that is able to bring home a revenue of EUR 20 billion every year. On the other hand, we are obsessed by efficiency. We need to provide the most with the budget that we have for our annual investment.
That was the main motivation for us to look at AI. This obsession to make more with the investment that we have, it's not little, but it's always a constraint, right? In every company, the investment in technology is something that you need to take the most of it. The other side of this equation is that we have very nice and very good strategic partners like GFT and a few others that are connected with technology. Using these connections, we saw that AI was gaining momentum mainly in code development, but we asked ourselves together with GFT, what else can we do instead of just using for accelerating coding, but can we use in the overall system development lifecycle in other arenas as well? That was the main trigger that sparked the whole thing and got us where we are today.
During today's session, and usually when we are reading the market around the impact of artificial intelligence, we are very keen to explore what are the, let's say, the quantitative KPIs that are supporting this strategy. I'm interested also to know a little bit more about the qualitative KPIs. Did you experience any change between before, in our case, using Wynxx, and after using Wynxx in your operations, in your teams?
Yeah, absolutely. I think I can highlight three main things here. One of them is the shift to left. We are able to anticipate our gates of quality, security, so all of that.
It put us in a very good position to understand earlier where the showstoppers would be and get ahead of time in terms of being faster in anticipating what would be happening with the code when the code gets to a quality or security gate. We have less code being held in these gates, which means that we are more productive. The other thing is the shift right. We are also being able to give the product owner more previsibility about the outcomes when a certain epic or story will be ready, how much it will cost. It is more predictable now for the product owner to understand the whole thing. Probably the most interesting is what we are seeing in the screen now. We got a very simple word cloud from our tool.
Jira is the tool that we're using to store all the data we have about our agile development. That's the nice thing about having data, right? Before using AI, we got this word cloud. What was the scream in the cloud? The words that are screaming on the cloud were mainly about the process. We could see things like daily alignment, the ceremony of the agile methodology. After using AI, we start seeing these words changing to the actual objective of the squad. In a very insightful way, we noticed that the mindset of the team was changing from the process to the final outcome, from the objective of the squad. It was very interesting.
Glaucio, that question we cannot miss, right? Qualitative KPIs is for sure an improvement in the attitude of the team towards the adoption of AI.
We should touch as well the quantitative one. What can you share around those metrics that you're taking into consideration to say, yes, Wynxx was providing value to our operation?
That is all that matters, right? The bottom line, the results itself. What we noticed is once we are in regime, after implementing AI, we could see gains from 30%-40% in productivity. What does it mean in the real world? It means that this year, 2025, we are delivering with the same technology investment that we had last year, 30%-40% more to the business. We opted to do that, right? The other option that we could have is just save this money. Actually, we are doing that in certain areas.
For example, in maintenance, we are able to maintain the systems this year, costing 30% less than we paid exactly for the same maintenance last year. It is a cost reduction for you. For investment to develop new things, we opted to protect investment. This year, we are delivering 30%-40% more to the business in terms of the main metric that we use here, which is function points. We are able to deliver more function points to the business, 30%-40% more function points to the business this year than we delivered last year. One good thing is that we are using these metrics for five to six years. We are quite mature in understanding how our productivity behaves in the overall development cycle, how many function points each agile squad is able to deliver month after month.
We are quite mature in these metrics, which helped a lot us to understand and to measure these gains in an effective way.
I think that is instrumental to have a good methodology to measure performance of different providers, of course, including GFT. Clearly, that was the baseline for you to then determine that GFT was, let's say, one of the winners, right, in this AI race. I know that you also have some KPIs from Bradesco that you want to share with the wider audience today. Please, Glaucio, tell us about what we see on the screen at the moment.
Yeah, the gains that we had in productivity, they are many different flavors. We saw these gains in application modernization, in code conversion, in everything. The one that I like the most is probably what you can see in the left bottom of this screen.
We are calling vulnerability for the lack of a better word, but it's prevention against cyber attacks. We have many tools in the market that are able to identify a potential threat that happened somewhere in the world. We check our code against that threat and we start fixing to eliminate, to prevent being threatened by a similar attack. When we look at 2023, we acted in roughly 60,000 preventions, and we spent BRL 13 million. The following year, which was last year, we did three times more with half of the budget. It is an impressive gain. This year, we kept the same budget for this kind of activity and very likely will be delivering 50% more than we did last year.
That's the kind of repetitive work where AI is very strong, where we can see the results in a very strong and very positive way. This is to highlight one of the pieces that we have in the overall development cycle.
More value with the same budget, I guess your Chief Financial Officer is super happy, I guess, with the outcomes. Glaucio, thinking about,
I know very well that they are always asking for more. Our mission is to challenge you guys to deliver more. We are together on this,
and we are fully committed to deliver that as well. Thinking about and sharing more, let's say, details around the main features that the developers use the most, what can you share around this topic with the audience today?
We are using for the entire development lifecycle.
One thing that actually the analysts, they like quite a lot, is to use agents to help in the story creation. We measure the quality of the story by points. We can see that the story that was level five, for example, last year is punctuating something like seven this year. We have better quality stories being produced. A better quality story affects the whole cycle, right? It goes smoother through the whole development cycle. For the developer itself, what they do like is in this prevention to cyber attacks, which is a very good example, because the work that the developer used to do was to get dozens, hundreds of code, very similar pieces of code, and do very similar changes in those pieces of code. It was quite repetitive for them.
They did almost the same change in hundreds of different codes. Now what they do is work in a prompt that will be doing the work for them. They love it. It changes completely the mindset of the developer. After the prompt is done, they see the end result, and then they refine the prompt to get even better. That is where the productivity is coming.
Part of it is cultural change. If we talk about challenges, right, more than 180 professionals across more than 20 squads, what can you share around the challenges that we have had during this period?
Yeah, if we look at this number of 20 squads, it is what we have with GFT. If we look at the broader team, we have almost 200 squads running. I think there are two things that we noticed. One of them is the time.
The productivity does not come fast. We noticed that we spent three months in a setup and ramping up the team. If we have a squad that's not using AI, for the very same squad to get ready, we need to train the professionals. We need to get the tooling ready. They need to get used to that. What we noticed is that it typically takes three months before the whole thing is ready. In these three months, we did not see any gains. Actually, sometimes we see even some worsening of the productivity. After that, the magic starts happening. In the following three months, we can see this number stabilizing. The productivity starts to show up, and the teams get their gears really going, and we see the numbers showing up. That was one thing.
You need to persevere in doing the work and get confident that results will come. The other thing that we noticed is that the results, mainly at the beginning over these first six months, are very heterogeneous across the different squads, mainly because what is very typical is that we start with the squads with the worst productivity. We see the major gains in them because they had bad productivity at the beginning. If we look throughout the different line of businesses, we saw that the gains were as high as 70% in one side and as low as 20% in the other. When all of these come together and stabilize after these six months, what we can see after all this turbulence is gone is that we end up with 30%-40% gains overall.
You need to pass through that to see a stable result at the end. Sometimes people are impatient to wait for that and anxious to see the results, and the results are showing something, and they think they can take that for granted. You need to give some time to get a stable number out of it.
I think that some parts of the KPIs or the aspects have already been shared in here in the following plot. Just for the sake of time, Glaucio, I'm going to jump to the next one, which is part of the story that you were sharing in the latest question, is related to having this perseverance, having this strategic vision that needs to be implemented and wait for the results to come. From that angle, are you redefining the concept of your workforce in this new AI era?
Yeah, we are doing that. Of course, we need to change the way that the team is working, and it's very important. We need to change. You mentioned before, right? It's a cultural change. We need to change the mindset of the team to take advantage of the new tools that they have available. Being a developer, I know it's quite hard for a developer to believe that AI will be doing better than the developers. It's a very artisanal kind of work, and they love to do this stuff. Once they are challenged to do prompts that help them to do the work, it starts getting interesting. That's a very important thing. I think we are now moving to a different stage, right? Until now, we have been using AI to accelerate the work of the team.
I think we are now moving to a point where AI agents will be doing a complete piece of work by themselves. I think that's the next challenge we have together. How can we have mixed squads where we have some humans, but also some autonomous agents that we just ask them to produce a piece of code and test it, and we get it done and join with the rest of the work to have the whole thing ready.
Very aligned to our view as well. Now, for closing, Glaucio, what tips would you like to share with the wider audience that we heard here today face-to-face and also virtually connected to this session of all the journey that you have started more than one year ago?
There are four things that I usually like to share with the people.
First of them is that security is a must. If you have any doubts that your code will be protected, do not go there. You need to make sure that everything is secure from the beginning. Your code will not be shared with anyone else. Your data is protected. That is the very first thing. The second one is that you need to have the people train it. Investment in enhancing people's ability is very important. You need to get the tools to train, to understand how the technology is evolving. Keep the space is very, very important. The other two, I got this from Charles Darwin on his theory of evolution, right? He noticed that who survives in nature is not the strongest or the fastest. It is the most adaptable to change. I think it is so true in our corporate world as well.
Being able to change constantly is what differentiates us as a company. We need to understand that and keep this space as well. The last thing also comes from Darwin. He noticed that for a species to evolve, competition is very important, but collaboration is even more. That is why we love to share with other companies to learn from them as well, to evolve together. I read living here the invite for everyone for us to collaborate and go beyond.
Let me add point number five is working alongside GFT into that journey, but it is going to be me saying that, Glaucio, not you.
Thank you very much, Glaucio, for being our trusted partner in that journey, for being here today to share everything that you've shared with us, your experiences, the challenges that, of course, it is not an easy task to do, but definitely Bradesco Seguros is determined to go into that direction. We are honored and proud that GFT is part of that journey together with you. Thank you, Glaucio.
My pleasure. Again, thanks for the invite.
Many thanks also from my side, Glaucio. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Ignasi, for hosting that session and for the insights and sharing these impressive results, real tangible results from real projects that connect very well to the theory we heard before. We now turn into a topic that is absolutely crucial for the global financial stability, the role of AI in combating financial crime.
Please welcome my colleague Floris van Heijst and Mike Laws from Deutsche Bank for our next slot. The stage is yours.
Thank you very much. Warm welcome from me as well. We will be switching gears now. We heard a lot about Wynxx as one of our proud products. In my team, Software Solutions, we actually also are very proud to have the products of Smaragd, where we have been serving many banks, especially in Germany and in Switzerland, Austria, to stay compliant. A key capability of keeping the license and keeping the trust of your brand is actually being able to detect what kind of money flows through the bank and also adhere to all the regulations that keep on changing and keep on being added across the world to fight terrorist funding, to fight anti-financial crime, to fight money laundering.
We are very proud to have been serving Deutsche Bank for many, many years in this space. I have a great pleasure of welcoming Mike Laws into the call. If we can switch to the screen. Perfect. Hi, Mike. Good afternoon.
Hi, everyone. How are we doing?
Mike is actually in London. Mike Laws is responsible for all of the technology stack that Deutsche Bank uses globally to fight financial crime, which, as you can imagine, is a growing piece of technology because technology works both ways, right? You can use it for the good side. You can also use it for the bad side. Mike is the one that tries to keep up or even be in front of the bad guys by having the right technology stack in the bank. Mike, welcome to the audience.
If you would like to briefly introduce yourself and your role in Deutsche Bank.
Thanks, Floris. Yeah, Mike Laws. I've been at Deutsche Bank for over 15 years now. I've worked in many parts of the organization. Started off in their markets business, but always in technology. In about 2017, I was asked to take a professional risk and move into infrastructure, potentially to infuse part of the organization with a bit more of a commercial mindset. I've been kind of in compliance and AFC ever since 2017, predominantly based in London. I've done some time in, I did three years in New York as well. More and more so, I'm doing regular trips to Germany. I would say that's a nice brief introduction for me, Floris.
Very good. So 15 years in the bank, the last seven years only in fighting financial crime.
Let's first do a quick look back, right? What would you say is the biggest trend in technology in specifically your area of the bank? What have you seen changing much in the past years?
Yeah, it's what's changed or almost, I think what hasn't changed is often that's almost more relevant pointing out. I think one thing that's different to many other sort of commercial parts of an organization is that I find that in regulation compliance and AFC, we're sort of never finished. I like to keep with me a few examples of what was acceptable in terms of transaction monitoring or screening at the beginning of this journey. I'll pick on one, which is client screening. Obviously, every bank has to regularly screen not just its clients, but associated parties for sanctions, risks, internal watchlists, a variety of things.
If I go back to that first day in AFC and compliance back in sort of 2017, we could probably screen about 500,000 parties a day, and that was probably okay. If I look to what our plans are next year, we're going to probably be doing 30 million parties multiple times a day, and that's probably okay. Right? The expectation kind of moves rapidly in this space, and it's always just okay. I've had a few instances where we've been called out for some particularly good work, but generally, it's trying to keep pace with the regulation. Of course, the next one is, which I'm sure we'll talk about in a bit more detail later, is the utilization of AI and machine learning.
I don't think anybody involved in this space has not noticed that more recently, there's been far more willingness and increasing engagement from regulators around the potential for AI, which wasn't always the case. You could argue that you could interpret the new EU AML regulation that that kind of level of engagement has moved to support, which very quickly becomes expectation. Clearly, I would be surprised if there's many top-tier banks that don't have some AI detection next year. Just to round out this thing that we're never finished, there is this we must not only keep pace with regulation, but we also have to keep pace with business and market growth. If you pick transaction monitoring, the U.K. digital payment market, I think it's going to be about $450 billion this year. That's going to double by 2029.
Real-time payment transactions for the last two, three years have gone up, approaching 50%. Your monitoring environment is just expected to handle that. If I take some very real examples where we've introduced clients into Deutsche Bank that are merchant solutions, money service bureaus, payment service bureaus, we're talking about going from a system that probably has to handle 100,000 transactions a day or a month to tens of millions. We need notice to do that. I think the first big kind of challenge in the past few years is that sort of expectation, like we're never finished. More recently is absolutely this expectation versus actual progress that can be achieved with AI. I think those commercial products out there, like ChatGPT, Gemini, they are so gratifying, right? They are designed for the consumer market. They make you feel good.
You start thinking about how I could apply that to a regulatory environment. The margin for error is so low in what we do or the requirement to explain an error if it happens. I will just use an example from last weekend where I was trying to understand the internal temperature that I had to remove a joint of beef from the oven. I did not want to know what temperature it had to be. I wanted it to account for the resting period, the temperature increase. It told me that I should remove it from the oven when it was 5,658 degrees Celsius.
Now, if I had somehow applied that to a threshold or something in my transaction monitoring system, I would not be able to say, "Well, you win some, you lose some with AI." I still think there is that barrier that we kind of have this expectation that has been put on us in tech and we have not quite achieved. I would say the last one that I will talk about in terms of the challenges where I really think the value comes from is really understanding the bank's role in fighting financial crime. We do not arrest people. We do not go and find criminals. We are a part of a very, very regimented structure that informs kind of governing bodies and law enforcement regionally and in specific countries. We play a part.
Sometimes, if you do not truly understand the laws, regs, and guidance, you can actually sort of get a little bit ahead of yourself in trying to think, "Oh, surely we need to do this." Actually, that is not our part in the overall picture. One thing I think in more recent years is really understanding what excellence looks like in terms of our piece of the puzzle. Floris, I think those three challenges of the last year, right, of the last few years for me have been that expectation we are never finished, that AI is supposed to make everything we do super easy, but we still seem to be doing loads of work. Then this evolution around really understanding what excellence looks like for a bank and the role they play in financial crime.
Okay. Okay is never good enough or is just good enough, right? That's your emotional state in most days. Is that a fair statement?
Yeah. Look, as I said, I think we've had, I've had a couple of examples in my career. One example when we really moved to some cutting-edge technology around voice surveillance and how we were able to demonstrate lexicon hits on specific and have it graphically represented across the WAV file, the lexicon hits. We were actually presenting that to the SEC six years ago or something, and they couldn't help themselves. They said, "We've never seen something this good." Yeah. It can happen. I think the general consensus is that, remember, the regulators are not there to motivate us, right? They're not there to tell us that we're doing a great job.
They're there to ensure that we are actually complying with the laws, regs, and guidance that we're provided with. We're probably looking in the wrong direction if we're expecting them to pat us on the back for a job well done.
Over the summer, we presented our roadmap for Smaragd, where, very fitting to what you just described, we actually will leave 20 years of rule-based growth, right, where we kept on adding rule after rule after rule after rule, depending on what the regulator could see and could foresee what was happening, to actually say, "No, we need AI in the core," and then we will add as many rules as that we need for Germany, for Switzerland, for Austria, and for other countries.
As one of the results from the end of that discussion, also the dialogue with you guys, where we have a very intense dialogue on where we need to take the product also for a bank at your scale, you actually came back to us and said, "We have now made the strategic decision that you will be the leading platform for today and tomorrow in this space." I'm sure that part of that is this trust that our vision on the AI and the AI capabilities and the journey, but keep it regulated, transparent, and trustworthy, was a big part of that decision. Can you elaborate a bit on the reasoning and why you were able to extend that trust for the coming years as well?
Yeah, sure.
Look, I mean, I think our experience, one thing that's quite interesting when you look back at our history with Smaragd, as you said, I think you will know better than I the first deployment of Smaragd, but quite interestingly, it's been there for so long and despite attempted changes in strategy. We have looked at other products, but actually, in the background, the product's been maturing, we saw a quite significant uplift from version four to version five, which almost sort of incidentally, part of Deutsche Bank's technology strategy is that you must keep software within X number of versions. We were sort of, as a result, sort of forced to do the upgrade to version five, and actually, we were pleasantly surprised by a lot of the upgrades that we saw in that product.
I think from a usage platform, I think it offers the sort of versatility of your kind of indicator setup. You can be a low-tech-savvy individual and be able to construct indicators pretty readily. Because of the nature of the organization, GFT, and your exposure at Deutsche Bank as a CTP partner as well, very recently, I mean, I've been very appreciative of what we've achieved, well, what you guys delivered for us on Monday this week, which was some resource augmentation to actually get a number of those indicators set up in short order. Certainly, for us as an organization, that's something that's quite helpful for me as a CIO when I've got the product development partner is also a strategic CTP partner. Sometimes there's complexities from a procurement perspective if I'm picking up specialist professional services that are tied to a product, right?
Actually, as an organization and a parent company, I think you were quite uniquely positioned the last, particularly what we had to do this month. I think also we've had some very open dialogue recently in terms of trying to how we could maybe introduce risk scoring, very open around, obviously, what we need to do from a cloud migration perspective. I mean, that's kind of key for us, right? We are 100% cloud-first. That's probably, as we discussed only this week, that's probably the next big thing to fit into our joint roadmap is when do we think we can have a version of this stood up on GCP? I still think one of the things that if I was a vendor in transaction monitoring, I would find it very, very challenging to deal with the diversity of clients that you have, right?
You have on one side of the fence all these organizations that want to buy a solution. They want it out of the box. What they think they are doing is buying a product, and then the expectation is that gets them a score, that gets them a B minus. If they implement it, they get a B minus. It is good enough to move on. You have other organizations at the other scale that are like, "I know what I need to do. I know what the models are. I want to write my own models." I think what we have with Smaragd today is we have sort of been able to do a bit of both. I do not personally understand exactly how the transition to AI-based detection will work.
I've seen how we do the recall. I know it exposes, it opens up a whole new quadrant of risk that we can capture, but all these AI-based systems struggle to get a recall of above 80%, but then the messages that you're finding, you're finding another 40%, and that's the business case. Yeah, look, I think the product has worked well in our environment. Very important for us, at least, to have that kind of German centricity and the penetration of Smaragd into the German market. For Deutsche Bank, particularly, it's been helpful to have that partnership of a strategic CTP partner that GFT is, plus the software provider.
All right, so there's again, I think one of the things that Mike called out was the work we delivered on Monday. Why is that?
In the world of regulations, Q4 is always very, very busy because that's basically when you have to prepare for the rules of 2026, right? We have to always make sure that our system and then our clients are ready to actually adhere to whatever 2026 is added onto the system. That's why we are working very intensely now in literally adding those rules into the system as they fit into the work that Deutsche Bank wants us to do.
And then secondly, what you called out, and which actually is also in the end the reason why I recently joined GFT, that is the power of the combination of having software, but also having this long-term capability of actually being able to help large banks in the core of their business, connecting the right data, connecting the right software, and then adding our own intelligent IP to actually make sure that then their process not only works, but to keep them compliant, secure, and trustworthy. Mike, with that, thank you very, very much for being able to dial in. I know you were supposed to be in another meeting, so thanks for taking the time to join us here. With that, no problem. Greetings to London. See you next time. And thank you for today.
See you, Floris. Bye-bye, everyone. Bye-bye. Andreas.
Okay.
Thank you very much. Mike already managed. Thank you very much, Floris, for that essential deep dive into how AI is transforming and financial crime. Fascinating views into a very crucial topic. Now we broaden the perspective even further to decision intelligence, analytics, and risk innovation at scale. I am very pleased to, in a few minutes, welcome Alexander Graff, a Senior Vice President and Managing Director at FICO, who will share how advanced analytics and AI are shaping smarter, more predictive decision-making across the financial industry and how the global partnership between FICO and GFT, what we will announce very shortly, will help banks act in real time, stop fraud early, and simplify risk decision using AI. I welcome back Marco on stage for hosting that session with Alex, right? Good.
Thank you, Andreas. Hi, Alex. How are you doing?
Hello, Marco. I'm good. And you?
Very good. Very good to have you here on the stage and on the virtual stage and welcome, right? Thank you very much for the opportunity. I would like to ask you, I know that it was quite short notice, right, this organization, and thanks for you to make it. I know that you are in a global event, right, from FICO in the United States, in the USA right now. If you can introduce yourself and you can introduce FICO, I think that obviously all the, sorry, all the American audience that is connected here obviously knows FICO. I lived in the USA, and I know how FICO is important for our lives, right, to buy a car, to buy insurance, and a house.
If you can introduce FICO and also talk about what we've been talking for a while, this global partnership and so on and so forth.
Absolutely. No, it will be my pleasure. As you said, actually, this week, I'm in Atlanta. We are running here our global kickoff. We just started our fiscal year now, early in October. It is a pleasure to be here with you, talking a little bit about FICO, about our partnership. I run our B2B and marketplace business. It involves all our partners around the world. I'm based out of Miami. I joined FICO 12 years ago. Actually, during this time, FICO has grown a lot. FICO is a global leader in AI-powered decisioning. Our platform brings together data, analytics, decisioning, and optimization into a single environment.
It enables financial institutions to move from manual silhouette decision processes to automated, explainable, real-time decision intelligence with governance and compliance built in. As you said, FICO is very well known in the U.S. We have two businesses. We have the scores business and the software business. We operate as a single company, but with these two lines of businesses. Talking a little bit about our partnership with GFT.
Sorry to interrupt, but what is the volume? Hello? Sorry to interrupt you, but if you can give a glimpse here, what is the market cap of FICO right now? What is the size in terms of revenue, KPIs that can go with number of transactions and the fraud positioning, the positioning anti-fraud in the world?
Yes, for sure. In terms of market cap, our market cap is currently around $40 billion. We have around 4,000 employees around the world.
FICO was launched in 1956. It means that next year, it's an important milestone for us, 70 years operating in the market. We operate basically globally, Marco. We have a global operation. Our presence in the U.S. is quite strong also because, as you said, everyone knows FICO well due to the scores and the importance of the scores in the credit market.
Fantastic. Can you talk about our partnership, what we envision together?
Absolutely. It excites me a lot. When we talk about partnership, as I said, FICO will turn 70 years. Until four years ago, FICO was basically driven by direct sales, direct sales motion. Four years ago, FICO decided to invest on another distribution channel, creating a new go-to-market motion, opening the opportunity to work with partners.
It means that we are still in our, let's say, initial phase, but we defined a very small number of selective partners to work with us. Partners that we understand that can move the needle for FICO, and FICO can move the needle for partners. Why GFT? Exactly because we understand that we can complement really well one each other. FICO brings to the market our technology, our platform. As I said before, we move it from silhouette solutions to a platform. We landed this new technology already in around 200 global financial institutions. It means everywhere in the world. We are talking about Latin America, U.S., Asia, Europe. With GFT, we can bring a very important IP that will allow our customers to accelerate their digital transformation journey.
It will allow our journeys, our customers to bring more innovation to their processes, which will translate into a better customer experience for their customers. At the end of the day, it's what the market is looking for. For example, we have discussed a lot about bringing an integration between Smaragd and our platform, how we can bring an AML use case to FICO platform, allowing customers that are already using our platform around the world to automatically connect with an AML solution, and also allowing your installer base to have an easier connection with FICO platform and also exploring other use cases that GFT can help us to implement faster with the workforce that you have across multiple countries and in multiple institutions. It is a win-win partnership and a partnership that we have big aspirations for.
It's a partnership that's already generating revenues, dollars, and euros for all of us, because we are working in two projects in Latin America and in Asia right now, which is very good. I love to talk about partnerships when you have results.
No, absolutely. I mean, before having results, I used to say that we are dating. Now we married. So we got married already. We have our first really real clients operating together with FICO and GFT. And this is the beauty of it because we know that when we have this step going to real customers, it tends to scale really fast. And this is our goal. It's to bring it to the market at scale and see a lot of financial services institutions working together with FICO and GFT.
Fantastic, Alex.
Any other thing that you'd like to bring for the audience here? A closing remark.
I mean, just highlighting once again my excitement about this partnership. One thing that is crucial for the success of the partnership is when the teams work in a very collaborative way and in a very integrated way. This is a kind of synergy that we have seen since the beginning between FICO and GFT. Both teams, they really operate as one group, and the customers, they feel it. This is why we could have success really quick, as you said, in two different regions, Latin America and Asia. Now we look for the success that we will definitely have also in Europe and in the U.S.
Fantastic.
For us, I would say that it's really proud and I'm very honored to have the opportunity to be part of the global list of partners of FICO and create this global partnership with such a company with that size, with your magnitude, right, $40 billion market cap, the number one company in rating score in the U.S., right? Basically, all the citizens in the U.S. deal with FICO every week. Also, you guys were recognized the number one in the world last year, right, in anti-fraud, right, in the whole world. For us, it's very important and proud to get closer. Let's move forward with our projects on core banking with the FICO elements of a platform, also bring Wynxx to accelerate the AI transformation of the projects that FICO are doing.
Number three, to bring SmartAct into the FICO store, right, and then bring that to SmartAct and also think on even new features, for example, crypto, anti-money laundering for crypto, right, which is something that is definitely a next-generation wave. We together can work on that. Very good. Alex, thank you very much for the time. Really appreciate it. Wish you and wish all of us all the best. Thank you very much.
My pleasure, Marco. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Marco. Thank you very much, Graf, for that insightful view into how decision intelligence and smart analytics power better risk decisions across the industry. Thank you much for the very spontaneous willingness to frame that global partnership between GFT and FICO in a few words. More to come in the next days.
We now move from analytics to operational transformation with a strong joint success story. Please welcome Alexander Leisten from DKB Code Factory and Sascha Beck from GFT to share how DKB is driving efficiency, agility, and digital delivery with GFT. Please, Sascha.
[Foreign language], Andreas. [Foreign language] . Very warm welcome. Today, it's a pleasure to meet you all, and it's a pleasure especially to welcome Alexander Leisten here remotely, Managing Director of DKB Deutsche Kreditbank. Very similar to Deutsche, but Deutsche Kreditbank, another business model. A pleasure to have you here, Alexander, remotely.
T hank you very much.
Really good. Maybe do you want to start with a short introduction of yourself and maybe give us a brief overview about Deutsche Kreditbank, DKB, what is the business model behind?
For sure. Thank you, Sascha.
Very nice to have me. Yeah, some words about myself. I'm Alexander Leisten, General Manager of DKB Code Factory. DKB Code Factory is a subsidiary of DKB. We have been together with DKB some digital products for our clients. We are doing this since 2018. We have currently something about 200 people here working at DKB Code Factory and normally all the kind of people you need to build digital products. Yeah. Some of the works of DKB, as you might know, DKB is one of the largest online banking in Germany. We have roughly around 6 million customers, mostly private customers, but also we are very strong in business customers. We are growing during the last years, and we want to grow in different kinds of areas.
When you read in the newspapers, some of you might realize that we are going also to more direction of brokerage. Also in this cooperation with GFT, we are building some nice products in this area.
Thank you. Great to hear that. It is a really success story when you see the growth of DKB over the last few years. Over the last two years, DKB and GFT have developed a really success story with build-up and build-operate transfer model. An own development delivery center in Valencia. This is the project we want to share with you all today. That is the story behind our success. Today, about 55 specialists are working in Valencia, working for DKB, developing software, cool stuff, innovative stuff. It is really good to have a look behind the scenes today.
Talking about results and behind the scenes, we should mention that we were able to reduce the cost in comparison Berlin to Valencia by about more than 30%. It is a really huge effort we made together with DKB to reach these goals. Also for GFT, it was a milestone because it was a crucial project for us. It was really important to get the right people on board to get the business model running to show that 30% of cost reduction is possible with a nearshore development center. It was really important for us to show our global delivery competence that we mentioned also earlier today. We are really happy and proud that we have this trust of DKB and the management team of DKB. The board members visited us in Valencia over the past weeks and months.
It's really a good story to share with you all. Now we want to keep a look behind the scenes. Maybe, Alexander, let's start with the look back at the beginning. What was the reason that you've decided to build up an own delivery development center in Valencia?
Yeah, you know, the starting point is what I always say now, digitization is not done. For us, we believe DKB has a clear strategy. We want to further strengthen our position as German leading digital banks. To achieve this, software development is or has to become a core competence. What I mentioned before, we have here also a hub in Berlin with more than 200 people from all over the world. We are standing in front of the question how to grow, grow in Berlin or grow in another place around Europe.
Therefore, we are looking for a location to make sure to have a hub where we are able to build stable, quality, and long-term teams. Valencia so far was a perfect choice with us. We took the choice together with GFT, and it offers a growing tech scene, strong universities, and a high quality of life. We were able to get talent, attractive talent. That is the main aspect. Together with you, we prepared this decision. Now we are here one year later.
Exactly. We got in contact three years ago, and we started with some small nearshore project, and then we delivered and we created and gained this trust. Maybe, Alexander, can you give us an insight? Why did you choose GFT for such a special project?
To put it in one word, trust.
Sascha, you mentioned a couple of times that is the highest level of relationship to doing such a trustful and very delicious project, to be honest. We know each other very well. For some certain times, we did a lot of projects together, and we created a good relationship. We had whatever good feeling that GFT is a good partner, have good technology experience, a good banking as well. Not only it's been a very, very good connection and local premises. Yeah, that was a starting point. I can also share with you that I was traveling around Europe to find a good partner and a good place because I was always saying when I go somewhere from Berlin, and as you know, we are a German credit bank. We are mostly located, or we are only located in Germany when we are going abroad.
You need a good partner. You get a reliable partner, a stable partner to start such a business. Together with GFT, that allowed us to start quickly to reduce the risk and to make sure that we will become such that everything becomes a success story. What I can say so far, I have all this feeling GFT was transparent or is transparent and trustful from day one. Now we are here one year later.
I remember the first conversation we had, and then we discovered several locations of the GFT universe. It was clear, okay, Valencia could be a great, attractive, sunny place to hire with our GFT network to universities, recruitment areas, and so on. Now, 55 people, specialists in core technologies to provide online banking services and so on in Valencia in our office.
We share our spaces, we share our expertise, we share our network with the local government and so on. Now we are in the phase working together. The 55 people are working exclusively for DKB, developing new code, new topics together with AI. At the end of next year, it will be an own subsidiary of DKB. The people will move over to a legal entity of DKB. That is our understanding of trust and partnership. We are able to release people we have hired to a client because we are convinced that this trust will evolve and we will participate together from this trust. Now we have mentioned 30% cost advantages and so on. Maybe can you give us some insights how you achieved that?
I guess it is a question of efficiency and structure.
We both together sit together and we try to rethought the processes, not the GFT process, also our process, and to build new teams from scratch. I guess that is one of the key aspects, yeah, to find good talent which have a lot of knowledge about how building digital products. DKB is, I would say, in a situation where we are changing from a traditional banking to a more tech company. For that, that can be a long, long path. These kind of teams, these new teams, these fresh bloods with new ideas is helping us to do this. The teams in Valencia are following the modern principles about DevOps and continuous delivery and test-driven development and stuff like that. That is helping us, yeah. It is also helpful that they have a good mix of seniority.
We agreed that we will have a good setup from 30% of senior, 30% of mid-levels, 40% of juniors. To build, yeah, a good, attractive environment for everybody and for stable teams. The cost reduction is a result of more also the efficiency of the organization.
Besides the cost, you have also managed to increase the quality and the output of codes, of line of codes, of story points, and so on. How?
Yeah, what I mentioned before, I guess a major point was to building these teams up from scratch. It was really impressive, really impressive how fast it not only was to find the talent, it was also impressive how fast it was that the talent were into the topics.
After whatever, three or four months, you were able to see how they were using the typical DKB language to understand the technology, to understand the problem, and the motivation to drive things forward. That was really, really impressive for everybody. Also, the working together with the teams closely with the colleagues in Berlin, you can imagine from the beginning on, we had some questions, how can it work, different culture, different languages, different kind of backgrounds. Is it really doable? Yeah, was it only a dream? It was really nice also from the DKB part that everybody was open to share, to collaborate. We have a lot of people coming from Berlin to Valencia and other regions. Everybody was really excited to be part of this journey. That was good. We were afraid for that. We hoped for that.
At the end of the day, we were very nice to have that. With all these setups, modern tools and methods, it was able to deliver fast and very, very short. We are more than happy. Yeah.
AI was the dominant topic today. Looking ahead also with you, I would like to ask you, which role does AI take in your strategy, in your technical topics you have to solve? Maybe you can give us some insights.
I guess you can bring it to the point. AI is a core element of our digital transformation. No doubt about that. The pace of change in the market, increasing regulatory demand and rising customer expectations all make it clear banking for the future will rely on intelligent use of data and automation.
With a new development center in Valencia, we created exactly the structure we need to scale a scalable development process, modern technology on the platform, and to have interdisciplinary teams and have the talent to go quickly into this technology, to get quickly on this data and these automation things and to be successful in AI. At the end of the day, you need people, you need the talent, you need the knowledge to drive these things forward. What we want is also to be more independent and to own this kind of knowledge by ourselves, to learn it and to make it ours. The setup enables us to develop these things fast, to roll out AI-driven, to build innovation. So far, the project was for more than an efficient initiative.
It led us the technical and organizational foundation for DKB to adapt AI in practice. From my perspective, a win-win-win situation.
Okay, Alexander, thank you for these great insights. From my perspective, I think it's really measurable what happens when trust and the common goal and technological excellence come together and we build up something new from scratch. I think we can use this trust and the knowledge of the DKB to strengthen our partnership. We are happy to have you here as a client. Thanks for your insights, and we are looking forward to our collaboration. Thanks a lot.
Thanks for having me. Bye-bye.
Okay, thank you. Thank you very much, Alexander. Thank you very much, Sascha. Let's have a very short break of 10 minutes until we have our next client success case on stage. It will be Éric Marcoux from Beneva out of Canada.
We meet again in 10 minutes. Maybe you have a bio break or coffee or maybe something to drink.
Test, test, [Foreign language] Test.
Hello, Éric. Can you see me? Can you see me?
Yes.
Okay. Can you hear me as well?
Yes.
Okay, great. That's good. We have your voice. Do we have the picture of Éric also? Okay. Wow. Excellent. Thank you. It's working. Cool. We do just a short break, bring the people back into our room, and then we will immediately start. Thank you. See you soon. Thank you very much for your patience. We needed to have a short break to set up the technique again. Next, we look ahead at the future of core systems and technology leadership, and we'll talk about Beneva's modernization journey.
Beneva has gained a reputation for being among the most innovative insurers in Canada, especially by adopting new guided cloud features early. Please welcome Éric Marcoux from Beneva, together with Marco. Marco, the stage is yours.
Hi, Éric. Thanks for joining. I can see you. How are you doing? Good. Thank you very much.
Fine. Great.
I really appreciate your time and your dedication here. If you can start and give some glimpse about Beneva, right? What is the company and the business and also the strategic movements that you guys did with the merge that happened? You can again also ask some other questions about the GFT, the project, etc. Let's start with the Beneva, right? Also introduce yourself as well. Really appreciate it.
That's great. You still hear me well?
Mm-hmm.
Okay. Very well. Hello, everyone. My name is Éric Marcoux .
I'm IT Vice President at Beneva Insurance, in charge of property and casualty IT systems and also corporate IT systems. Beneva Insurance is an insurance company in Canada. We're located in the province of Québec, but we also have operations in the Ontario province. Beneva is currently the largest mutual insurance company in Canada, and eventually, we will operate in the other provinces of Canada as well. Beneva is more than 6,000 employees, a CAD 17 billion company. We have a broad range of insurance products to our customers, and some of them are P&C for personal lines and also commercial lines. Beneva is the result of a merge of two equal-sized carriers in the province of Québec called La Capitale Insurance and SSQ Insurance.
We did merge together to forge Beneva Insurance in order to have more capital, in order to be able to do acquisitions, to grow a lot more in the Canada country in our market, and also to survive the competition that is now worldwide because since COVID, as you may see, a lot of transactions are being done on the web. That brought a lot of new kind of competitors in the insurance and financial services industry. We wanted to do this merger in order to grow. If everything goes as we expect in January of next year, we will do the merge with Gore Insurance located in the province of Ontario, and there are other mergers and acquisitions to come in the other provinces of Canada. I think it gives you a good walkthrough of who is Beneva Insurance.
Fantastic, Éric.
What about in the midst of all those chains and all those merges and all those challenges? How comes into play the technology, right? The technology challenge that you guys faced, that Beneva faced, and you in your role and run those strategic projects to move the company forward?
Yeah. Good question. When you merge two insurance companies of equal size that each have their own IT ecosystem, what we have done is we have taken the best of both worlds on both companies, and then we have done choices in each of the areas: P&C insurance, group insurance, life and health insurance, financial services, BI, the office platform, and all of that you can imagine. We did plan all of that.
It was more than 200 projects that we have done at the same time during the first three years of the merge, so between 2020 and 2023. We have been delivering all of that. Meanwhile, we still continue to attain our objectives of the company and also to be there for our customers. We have chosen to be a SaaS-first company in order for us to not develop and build everything by ourselves. We are working very closely with our partners. We have also decided to ask help from our system integrators, our SIs, that we consider our partners like GFT. That has been very helpful for me and for us, for P&C, but also for group insurance and other areas where we have been working with GFT for many years now, but especially during the merge.
Can you give also more a glimpse and more inputs about this strategic technology program and then how GFT is working on that, the technology Guidewire, clouds, and the partnership of GFT on that, let's say, major program?
Yeah, of course. For P&C, property and casualty, on one side, we had the legacy systems before the merge. On the other company, the other side, we had the Guidewire on-premise suite that was deployed. We have decided to go forward with the Guidewire suite. First, we did migrate the on-prem version to the cloud version, and then we did the merge for claims, for policy, for billing. We have just got live last weekend for commercial lines. It has been major projects for the last five years, but the merge was most focused on the first three years for claims and policy and billing.
We have been working with GFT because GFT is local. They have very strong experts for Guidewire. They speak French because I speak French. Most of us speak French, but as you can see, we speak English also. For me, GFT was a key partner for helping us to be successful in that merger for Guidewire and also for one of my colleagues, Julie, who is in charge of group insurance, where GFT is providing the same kind of help for another product that we call high-tech in group insurance. GFT definitely is a key partner for us and for me. That being said, we are now investing a lot more, especially on GFT. GFT is my main partner in order to help us be successful and achieve very, very good success and results together.
I think that's our approach to have our global capabilities, GFT, but also play locally, right? This global local approach to have agility and talk and support our clients locally, right, with the agility that is needed, right, on the edge, right? If you're in Canada, in Québec, right? I have a question here, but you already started responding. Why GFT, right? That's the competitive advantage, the differentiation of GFT that Beneva perceives.
Yeah. First, GFT is local. That is very important for us, especially for the French language. As I said earlier, our natural language is French. GFT locally in Québec, they all speak French. This is very important for us. Your partnership with Guidewire because you have a lot of Guidewire experts, more than 100. A lot of them are with us, and I hope it will continue this way.
Again, also for you to have your market shares, I understand. This expertise is recognized here on the local market for the carriers local here, now more and more in Canada, but especially for Beneva. You are my main partner for Guidewire. It has been recognized for many years now. We have been working for more than 10 years, GFT and Beneva, around the expertise of Guidewire. You have been always there. What I like also with GFT is we work as partners, not only customer provider. We have regular follow-up meetings, exec level, every two weeks, every, I think, six weeks with my CIO and levels over me. We have been always addressing challenges, maybe sometimes issues, and always found solutions. That is why I call partnership. On my side, I try to give back. That is why we do press releases. We do customer testimonies.
Anything that you want us to do, to talk to maybe new customers, potential customers, that's the kind of thing we're doing in order to give back because you help us to be successful. You are part of the success of Beneva's merge, but also our current investments. Those are the many reasons why GFT is important for us here in Québec.
Very good. I also got to know that Beneva has gained a reputation for being among the most innovative insurance companies in Canada. Can you talk about that? Your appetite, the appetite for innovation, to move forward, to implement things new, to implement Guidewire, right, new technologies, clouds, etc. Can you also elaborate on that?
Yes. With great pleasure.
The first one, you want to innovate, I think one of the base foundations is to have an IT ecosystem that is up to date. As I said earlier, we have chosen a software as a service-first approach. The merge did bring that kind of amazing opportunity to invest in IT in all of the areas you can imagine in a company like us. We did modernize everything. Today, we are to the latest SaaS software we are using for P&C, as Guidewire, for group insurance, for life and health, for BI, and all of that. That brings out a lot of opportunities because we perform our updates regularly. We are always up to date with our providers. We have access to their latest features, their latest AI feature, GenAI feature, agentic AI.
One example of that is one month before Guidewire has done their annual event in Las Vegas called Guidewire Connections. They did announce a bunch of new features around AI and GenAI that we now have access to at Beneva. I think we're the carrier in Canada the most advanced in terms of IT because we have modernized everything. The merge gave us this incredible opportunity. Now we're more in the innovation phase. We are investing a lot in digital, in automation, AI, GenAI, because we have the technology that allows us to do that, and also the partners' ecosystem like GFT that allows us to do this. I think for Guidewire, we're one of the top two most advanced worldwide customers of Guidewire. We're using all of their latest products in the suite and features.
Because of GFT, we are not doing our three updates per year like they are asking all of their carriers to do. We are using things like the Advanced Product Designer because we have done the conversion with GFT. We are using G2O as digital because we have been working with GFT for going to the cloud and having access to these latest features. Those are many examples of the things we are now doing and we can now do, sorry, in order to innovate on our side. I think because we hear that quite a lot, we are now recognized for that here in Canada. Not only in Canada, but I have been traveling quite a few times in many places in the world in the last two years. We hear a lot more and more about Beneva worldwide, not only in Canada.
It's fantastic to be partnered with you and such a company that is leading, especially on the Guidewire platform, right, in the roads. It is very, very good for us, and we are very proud for that. Thanks for the partnership. To conclude, in terms of artificial intelligence specifically, we discussed a lot about this topic. How can we differentiate ourselves from the hype outside? The hype, lots of noise outside, but there are really potential interesting elements of AI that can be brought to the business or to the IT. How are you guys thinking on that possibility of AI for Beneva in terms of claims and the writing, you name it, right? How do you see that?
Yeah. At Beneva, we're trying to see how we can augment our efficiency, how we can also lower our operational costs.
Hiring new talent is not that easy. I don't know how it is in the other countries, but in Canada, it's still a challenge. We're trying to do more with the persons that we have. That's where GenAI comes into play in order to automate some business processes that we have for our employees, our customers. How can we bring more and more self-service online with digital on the mobile app? How can we improve the way we work in IT to automate some testing tools like unit testing, functional testing, user acceptance testing without having to perform all of that manually? How can the machine generate code for our developers in Guidewire?
Those are the many areas where we are having action items right now, early accesses with some of our partners like Guidewire and other things that we are looking to improve. Like when I've been asking GFT to do our three updates per year in Guidewire, and they are now automating that more and more with GenAI in order to lower the time we take for each update. That's the kind of example of the things we are in action, and we're looking at Beneva in order to improve our processes the way we and also maybe for the agents and claims adjuster can take more calls on the phone where the machine generates more information, and it takes them less time to analyze specific claims or on the other side to provide a code or a policy change more faster.
Those are other areas where we're looking to improve, and we're working that with our SI partners, and GFT are one of our major SI partners right now.
Fantastic, Éric. Éric, look, you could not be more proud and happy to have you with us. Any final message, anything that you would like to bring to the team here?
I would like to thank you, everyone, because you are a great partner. You've been with us for many years, and I hope that we will be together for many years to come. We have so much to achieve together. You guys are great. You're always there. We can do the real things together. You are always helpful for us, and I really appreciate that. I really look forward to all the many things we will achieve together, and we'll be proud to have achieved together as well.
Thank you so much.
Thank you, Éric. Thank you. Thank you very much. Éric, thank you for the participation. Andreas, thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you very much, Éric and Marco, for this inspiring insight into Beneva's journey and into the long and trustful partnership between Beneva and GFT. Again, framing the important role of AI shaping tomorrow's financial industry. All things need to come to an end, and we are approaching there very fast now. Marco, the last slot is reserved for you for some closing remarks.
Thank you, Andreas. I'd like just to reinforce some key messages that we have conveyed, right, across the whole event. First, we believe on our strategy. We truly believe on the creation of competitive advantage, differentiation using AI for the benefit of information technology. We believe on that. The team believes on that.
We have a strategy that is centered on that to be the best responsible AI-centric digital transformation company in the world, positioning ourselves as a challenger, as a company that I want to challenge the status quo. I want to really bring tangible results with artificial intelligence to our clients to challenge their legacy, the traditional ecosystems, the incumbents, and bring really competitive advantage for the benefits of our clients, for the benefits of GFT, for the benefits of our shareholders. That is number one. Number two, we truly believe on large-scale opportunities that we have in front of us. We discussed that a lot. The modernization per se is something huge, immense that is going to happen. It is going to happen. The companies must modernize, especially those major organizations, tier one, tier two, bank, payments, credit cards, insurance, manufacturing, defense, especially defense industry.
All of them need to modernize to take their technology to a next level. Those opportunities were never there before. They are unfolded now. They are unlocked, sorry, with artificial intelligence. I think that we lead in that journey with a technology that brings a clear differentiation for us, which is Wynxx. We can really be a strong player on that field. Also on top of that, we have our data AI business units, intelligence business units that are moving very strong with several cases that are moving forward. All our differentiation, our offerings and services with the ISVs, our own products like SmartAct. We are investing in SmartAct. We are going to make it really, really, really powerful and successful. It is a competitive advantage, a leading product in that. Now we need to keep moving, right, with the recent announcements.
By the way, the recent announcement today, and also GB, FICO, etc. We truly see some areas of large-scale opportunities and more than happy to, obviously, to move the company with focus, with prioritization. We need to focus on what matters. We need to focus on what has moved the needle with the key clients, the tier one, tier two, land and expand on clients that can become a tier one, push for the right profitability, and do what we are calling engineering growth for the company and engineering profitability and create a virtual cycle. Obviously, we have, I'm not going to repeat, all the strategic initiatives, and we are executing that with a mission focus. More than happy to be with all of you and look forward to see the next announcements, the things that we are bringing to the market, clients, partnerships, and results.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, Marco. With that, ladies and gentlemen, we officially conclude today's Capital Markets Day. A sincere thank you to all our speakers and all of you for joining us and contributing to such an engaging afternoon. We now invite you to stay with us for some drinks, at least the ones who are here in person. Sorry for those participating online. Outside in the hall, we prepared some small things, and please take the opportunity to network, to continue the conversations, and to enjoy the early evening in a relaxed atmosphere. Thank you very much again. See you soon.