Well, why don't we get started? I wanna thank everybody for coming today. Welcome to our Analyst and Investor Track here at Interactions 2018. Most of you know me. My name's Marty Cohen. I'm Head of Investor Relations. Also with me today is my IR colleague, Yisca Erez. She's sitting over there. Let me take you briefly through the agenda for the rest of the day, and then we'll begin. For the investor track, we're gonna hear presentations from different members of our senior management team. After that, we'll have a senior management panel discussion, and you'll have a chance to ask questions. We have Barak here, Barak Eilam, our CEO, Beth Gaspich, our CFO, and Eran Liron, who's Executive Vice President, Corporate Development and Strategy. Also with us today is Shiri Neder.
She's head of HR, and also David Kostman, our chairman, sitting right over here. Barak will provide a general overview of our strategy. Beth will discuss our financials, and Eran will provide an overview of our financial crime and compliance division Our president of financial crime and compliance, son is graduating from college today, unfortunately he apologizes he couldn't make it. Following the investor track, we'll break for lunch in the room next door. Management will join us. We'll sit down and have lunch with senior management team. After lunch, we've arranged for you a private tour of the demo showcase. At the showcase, let's make a few stops. We'll hear about RPA, CXone, and also one of our newer solutions called Compliance Center.
After the tour, we are also gonna follow up with some product breakout sessions. You'll hear presentations on RPA and AI, customer engagement analytics, and we'll also hear from a customer and a partner who are leveraging the CXone platform through different APIs. That'll be the end of the investor program. For those of you who are staying tonight, I should flip the agenda before. Those of you who are staying tonight, we have our party at the Universal Studios, so, you know, please feel free to join us. You can all read that, and I'll invite Barak up to the front of the room.
Thank you, Marty. Welcome, everyone. Great seeing everyone here. All of a sudden, it's much smaller than on the big stage. I promise no holograms on this session. I hope you enjoyed our opening. We always try the opening to give our customers an audience. We do so many different things, but we're trying to give a bit of a taste of everything. Of course, there is the rest two days where people will go for the breakout sessions, and you'll see some of that as well. Meet our experts.
Of course, the most important thing is similarly to the session that you've seen of just a sample of three customers on the main stage, there are additional 127, if I'm not mistaken, sessions by customers. That's a big part of the content of the event. We're switching over to the reason why we are here, and this is to spend some time with you, with our investors and analysts that are covering the company. I'll try to give you a broader overview beyond what I've done over there on the stage, with respect to a bit of what we have done and what's the plan now moving forward.
Obviously I see, I think I'm familiar with almost all the faces over here, and we've been working together for several years now. I believe you are familiar with the story or the majority of the story. As we progressed in the last several years, every time we provided you with more rationale about how we are moving forward at the beginning with our NICE 2020 strategic plan and then NICE 2B. A different dimension or view to look at what is it that we have done in the last two years and also what is the future for us.
A lot of the things that we have done, actually the majority of the things that we have done, goes to a problem that we have identified somewhat, I would say four years ago, a bit more than four years ago when I stepped into the CEO position. This is that while we played in the past, back in 2014, as a market leader in two great markets with a strong leadership position, strong market share in these markets, we realized that this is not enough to fuel our growth. All of the steps that we've done since then till, I would say, last year, it was all about expanding our total addressable markets.
In the several or the last few earning calls in the last couple of years, I've shared with you the impact of the different moves that we have done, acquisition, organic and inorganic moves, with regards to how you should think about it, in, in the sense of our total addressable markets. As we stand today, we find ourselves playing in very healthy markets. You can look at it as two markets or three markets, we estimate the size of those markets overall today at roughly $7 billion. The even more exciting thing for us moving forward, that all of those markets we believe are growing, and will should be able to fuel our growth for many years down the road.
At the beginning of this year, and those of you who attended the earning calls that took place, you heard me talking about that we realized at a certain point that we are at that point that instead of after so many years constantly looking for more places, more markets to play in, and that was kind of the past strategic question at NICE and every morning where to play. We shifted our effort in the past, I would say 12 months, to how to win in the current markets we are playing in because we believe that the TAMs that we have today, as you've seen before, should be able to satisfy our growth for many years down the road. Hence, our effort is now about how to win.
By the way, if I have to choose, probably for every company between the strategic focus number one or two , obviously I prefer this one. I will talk in the next few minutes about why we believe we have the right assets in order to win in those markets we are playing in and how we're planning to go about it. This is not new. You know that in the last several years, we are working under those four strategic pillars. You heard me talk a lot about some of them over there on the main stage. You heard me talked about them in the past as well. It's very important for us to have those strategic pillars because we measure ourself constantly.
All of our investments, all of our decisions, organic, non-organic, decision based on those four elements or based on those four pillars. Every decision that we take, we want it to be accretive, to be on one or more of those items. We manage the company this way. We have about 6 ,000 employees in the company, and the way that we manage our objective, the dialogue, every employee, regardless of the geography, can find or have a line of sight to either one or more of those strategic pillars. Every decision that we take about investments, stepping into a new product, new development, of course, acquisition, we measure that, how accretive and whether they are well aligned with those strategic pillars.
We believe that these are those strategic pillars because they are going well with our strength, but they're also going well with where the market is investing today. I in my job, get to meet a lot of CIOs and C-level, I'm sure like yourself. It's it will be a very common conversation that their top investment plans for the years to come falls at least under one of those strategic pillars, if not, if not more. We feel that we're in a great place in the center of where investment are happening these days. This is an effort.
This is, of course, not a detailed metrics, but this is an effort to show you just a sample of some of the investments that we've done in the past few years, some of them organic and some of them non-organic, and how they are aligned with those strategic pillars and how they are contributing to overall strategy of the NICE 2B. I won't go one by one, but just to mention a few, obviously, the acquisition of Nexidia took place about two and a half years ago. I was very happy with this acquisition. It allowed us to move very, very nicely.
I would even take it further down because it also allowed us to advance dramatically our cloud journey in analytics, but obviously analytics and artificial intelligence follow on by the Mattersight acquisition, which I'll refer to a bit later on in the rationale behind it. ActimizeWatch, which Eran is going to speak about, purely organic development, but a great match between analytics, artificial intelligence, and cloud. You heard me talking in the recent earning call about the increased rate of subscription of very large financial services that are standardizing now on ActimizeWatch. You saw today NEVA, which is yet another effort to help organization to really adopt robotic process automation.
We're really at the early stage in the market in general about the adoption of RPA and where RPA can be several years down the road. obviously, inContact you heard today, I think you've seen the journey. We are going to celebrate, if I'm not mistaken, in just a few days, right? It was May 16 or May 17 of 2016. The signing. This is going to be celebrating two years from the signing, not from the closing. in just you see in two years, you saw CXone today. You saw the integration of all the products in one place.
Some of you are maybe not very familiar with the details of the contact center or the customer service domain. It looks obvious what's the problem to have all of those things administered in one place. What's the big thing? It's huge. Those customers, the 2,000th customer that sat in the audience, other customers that are seeing this for the first time, it's a dramatic change. Dramatic change to sit all in one location with such an open platform with integrating on many different partners. You saw some of the example of IBM and a few others over there. That's a way to look. This is how we think about investment internally in the company.
As I said, we believe we are playing in the right TAMs at the moment and also in the near future. It's about winning. Obviously, it's not obvious, but we do believe that we have a winning strategy. Before I talk about our assets and how are we planning to win and how we're winning today, there are kind of four items that we keep in mind all the time when we're thinking about our winning strategy and how do we take bigger share in those exciting markets. The first one is the cloud adoption acceleration. We definitely see the market adoption of cloud accelerating. When we first acquired inContact, you heard me saying about the roadmap of us going upmarket with the adoption of enterprises.
Personally, I thought that it will take maybe a year or two later to what we see today. The acceleration, as you heard on our recent earnings call, is happening in a much more rapid pace than I personally expected, which is great. That's one thing. We see the same thing, by the way, in our financial crime and compliance business. Eran will talk about that as well. The second thing that we have realized is we invested for many years to take different innovation that we had and put it under a single suite from the understanding that software, there is a saying, say that, you know, software is taking over the world, but platforms, what we like to say, platforms are eating software.
Platform are winning, you'll see in just one second how we think about platform. You understand that CXone now is a platform, and a lot of meaning to that. It's not just a suite of products, but we are thinking platform across all the different businesses that we have. You heard a lot in this morning, but also in the past few earnings call about AI, natural evolution from us from analytics. Cloud is a big enabler for AI because you have the data, and you can apply much more sophisticated analytics. You can share data, of course, with the relevant privacy and control.
As a result of that, AI algorithms that were true, by the way, 20, 25 years ago, given the availability of data and the cost of computing, today, moving AI from fantasy to must-have. We are infusing analytics and AI to every corner of our portfolio. You saw just a sample of that this morning, and later on in the showcase and a few more demonstration, you'll see that. We had a slight problem with the analytics Nexidia demonstration this morning. Maybe you'll see it in the showcase. Great example of how we put all of that together.
Related to that, data is fueling innovation, and we are fortunate to be in the center of several markets that the ability to leverage data, again, whether in financial crime and compliance, customer engagement, driving a lot of our innovation and driving a lot of the solutions that we're bringing to the market. What is our winning building blocks? A way to think about what we're doing is that basically, we are operating in, I would say, three markets. The first one is the customer engagement market or the customer service market. We have announced last year in beginning of August, the availability of the CXone platform.
Since then, we're experiencing a rapid pace of innovation because the minute you have the platform, the ability to innovate in a very rapid and frequent way, we see a significant acceleration of that. You saw a demonstration of some aspect of the platform earlier today. The second platform is the Autonomous Financial Crime and Compliance platform. Eran will talk about that. It is taking what we've done with Actimize financial crime and compliance in the past. Most, if not all of the big financial services already using our suite of products. Moving that part from just a suite to a platform will allow us to do a lot of different things. I don't wanna steal the thunder from Eran's presentation, you'll see that coming.
The other part, I think today you got a bit more information about it, is our cognitive RPA platform. It is a platform today. As I said, we are at the early adoption of robots, whether at the back office or the front office. We have the great advantage as a company due to the fact that we understand the front office, the front line, but we also understand back offices, and you cannot resolve them without connecting the two together. The combination of robots with chatbots give us great advantage. But as I said, it's just the beginning. We are stepping into an era where there are a lot of low-hanging fruits about deploying robots.
There will be a lot of disappointment in the market, hopefully not from our product, but in general in deployment of enterprises. After organization crossing that chasm, what will come is how do you manage environments with couple of million robots in a single organization? Who manage them, who administrate them? What do you do with exception handling, and so on and so forth. We believe it's just the beginning of something extremely big, and for that, you need a platform. One of the thing we know for many years how to do it NICE, we understand enterprise-wide deployments. It's not just about let's deploy a robot here and there and, you know, pray that they scale. That's how we think about it. You saw a customer on stage today, Sky, that are deploying it.
A lot of customers are coming to us, are the customer that really would like to take it to a massive scale. The beauty in to all of those platform is that we are sharing domain expertise and technologies, giving our expertise in cloud, analytics, and AI. A lot of the thing that we do on cloud basic infrastructure for the CXone platform are relevant and are being used with the other two platform. Our analytical capabilities, our data scientist teams are being shared across those three domains and three platforms. Why do we believe that we are winning and we have the ability to take a share and win those markets? I'll go now market by market. Of course, there are many. The list of advantages we believe are significant.
If I had to kind of synthesize the top three for each. In the customer engagements, I believe that number one is that we have a complete offering, and you've seen it this morning with the CXone demonstration. We invested a lot in putting together inContact the best omnichannel cloud offering out there with Nexidia which is the best analytical offering with obviously WFO which is the best WFO offering out there. Putting it together was the first step. What we see right now is a lot of workflows and value that we can bring the minute this offering is put completely together. Yes, we have competition, but none of those competitors that we believe today have in-house best of breed under one platform, and that gives us a very significant advantage. The second thing is the ecosystem.
We have a great ecosystem of partners, both those that are actually reselling and supporting us, but also the technology ecosystem. We signed up more than 100 partners to the DEVone program. I think you saw this morning, once again, just an example of how our customers putting together with our partners a very robust customer service environments. Lastly, we have full market coverage. NICE historically was catering to the higher end of the market. inContact came with a very effective machine at the lower end of the market, and we have put those that to work.
We can take the offering of the omnichannel routing with CXone all the way to the upmarket, but you also see a lot of customers, smaller customers, taking offering of WFO Analytics with CXone all the way to the smallest customer. It's also true geographically, our presence in Europe and in Asia-Pacific. I think you've seen the growth that we experienced in the 1st quarter in EMEA and in APAC, and it's starting to yield results. The second part is financial crime, the second market. Once again, we have a complete offering. We are the vendor that have AML fraud, case management, trading surveillance, all under one suite, all using the same case management platform. We are not familiar with anyone else that have such a broad suite.
This is a work of many, many years that was put into that, and we have a lot of customers seeing the benefit of using all the solutions together. With the launch of Autonomous Financial Crime Management system that Eran will talk about, you see how innovative it is and how much more innovation we can bring, and what are the reasons that this market is looking for innovation these days. We have a very, very strong brand reputation. The NICE Actimize brand in this market, well known for what they are doing and domain expertise. Among the corridors of NICE Actimize in the Hoboken office. Some of you visited us in this office. You'll find a lot of ex-compliance officers and ex-fraud officers, and that brings together the technology and the domain expertise.
Lastly, on the robotics automation, that is relatively new. It's not completely new to us. It goes all the way back, if you remember, of the eGlue acquisition that we have done, Eran, keep me honest, 2009? Sorry, 2010. This was the core of the technology. We invested heavily in innovation over there, and now it's the prime time for the technology. We have a very unique offering because we bring attended and unattended robotic process automation, which is quite unique in this market, and the ability to bring because of that, the contact center together with the back office. We have the broadest install base. We shared with you some numbers in the past, and the amount of robots being deployed are significant.
This is not just about how many customers, which we have a lot. This is more importantly how many robots a customer deployed. We have customers with phenomenal numbers of hundreds and thousands of robots in production, enterprise-wide deployments. That brings me to the last point, which is this is enterprise-ready. We see a lot of players out there, eventually, at the larger, at the higher end of the market, winning the enterprise is a very important thing. Lastly, before I conclude my part, just a few more words about Mattersight, the acquisition, and what stands behind it. We knew, obviously, and I believe some of you also knew Mattersight for many years.
When we saw the opportunity to bring the two companies together, we saw several things that, after a very, very detailed due diligence, we saw certain things that got us excited, actually very excited. You got hints to some of those things today on stage. I cannot reveal everything because we have certain things that we are planning down the road. I will tell you, first of all, on the analytics space, if you think about the journey that we went with from the early days that NICE had analytics, adding Nexidia and now Mattersight. In the early days, when we sold analytics to customers, we focused mainly on the technology itself and software. The delivery was we come, and we deploy it, and we hand off the day-to-day to the customer in many cases.
What Nexidia brought to the table, beside the phenomenal technology that was nothing that we have seen out there, is also managed analytics, meaning that we are working today with our customers as part of a managed analytics. To help them fully utilize the technology. The domain expertise in Mattersight actually take it all the way to full white glove service to customers that really would like us to be extremely involved in their operation, giving the expertise that we have in managing customer service. That was one part. The second part, even more exciting, is PBR. You heard me talking about today the end of routing and start connecting. This is exactly what we see. At the beginning, I must tell you, I was skeptic because it sounds like science fiction.
We're a very serious company, and we've done very deep due diligence, and we tested the technology. We talked to all of the customers, it's phenomenal. PBR is working, matching customers with enterprises based on persona. The benefit are there. We talked to all of the customers that are using PBR, and one by one, they all spoke about the benefit. They show us the metrics, the indexes, and there is a great excitement out there. They just launched it about three years ago, if I'm not mistaken. They were a small company. They managed to get to 15, 20 customers on the PBR front.
Obviously, with the expertise at NICE, the go-to-market expertise, as well as with the different databases and the customers we have now with NICE and Nexidia, we believe that we can change dramatically the way organizations matches consumers to service this day. This is what we're planning to do. There are a lot of innovation that we're planning to do on top of that, integrating into CXone, and I can also reveal all the exciting things we're going to bring to the market with that. That was, as you know, that we've signed this acquisition several weeks back, and we expect the closing to happen sometime in the second half of this year. With that, I'll hand it over to Eran to discuss our financial crime and compliance business.
Thanks, Barak. As Marty said, Joe wanted to be here, but his son is graduating from college. I did offer him that he will come here, and I'll go to his son's graduation. He preferred to keep it this way. You have me. Just what I'm gonna discuss, I'll remind everyone what we do with financial crime and compliance, give you a bit of an update from what we discussed about one year ago and talk to you about our strategy and Autonomous, which Barak mentioned, and is a major initiative for us, and show you a little bit of how it's actually happening. Just I love this. I love to say this. What do we do? We stop bad people from doing bad things.
I love to say it because first of all, it's cool, and second, it's true. How do we do it? We do it by finding unusual behavior earlier and faster than anyone. This relies on a few capabilities that we have. First of all, the platform that Barak talked about. Second, the fact that we support all the process from the analytics to detect the issue to the tools to actually mitigate the issue, all the way even to reporting to the government when that is required. Of course, we have that domain expertise. No less important, the brand. You know that in the world of compliance, brand is very, very important to give customers the comfort. The brand that we support in this in this market is second to none.
What happened since we last met a year ago, besides the fact that you used to have Joe and now you have me, or at least temporarily? First of all, we launched Autonomous Financial Crime. I will talk more about that in a couple of slides. It is a revolution in this industry. It will change, we believe, everything. We've continued to expand in the cloud, both in the mid-market that we discussed before, but also to support Autonomous, and I'll discuss that. The cloud is now propagating not only to the mid-market but also to the upmarket, where it provides value, and you'll understand in a minute.
We've also signed up one of the major core banking providers in the world who adopted our platform for fraud and AML. This will be a major channel. This adds literally thousands of banks that potentially can join our Essentials mid-market product. We've continued the expansion beyond beyond financial services, beyond banks. Two markets that have kind of picked up steam in the last year, one is virtual currency, which, as you know, is coming more and more under the watchful eye of the regulators, as well as MSBs, Money Service Bureaus. Here, in both of these cases, it is actually an interplay between the cloud and beyond financial beyond the core banking. Just to kind of remind everyone, how are we growing?
We have kind of a three-prone growth strategy in financial crime and compliance. The first is we grow in the core market. We're far from over. The journey is far from over in the core market. Autonomous is gonna be that next vehicle to take us much further in the core market. The second thing is move to mid-market. We discussed with you in the past that mid-market banks, mid-sized banks had kind of a free pass. Because as you know, in the world of regulation and compliance, it's not only about having the rules and regulations apply to you, it's about having actual regulators go after you and fine. Otherwise, people are kind of lax. There's been a step up in the last couple of years of regulators paying attention to the mid-sized banks.
Kind of makes sense. If you're gonna do money laundering, if you're a money launderer, if you know that there's kind of a whole set of banks that are not being regulated or not being monitored very carefully, that's where you're gonna do your money laundering. There's been a lot more attention to that, and that's creating an opportunity together with the cloud to address a market that is literally hundreds and hundreds of banks.
Lastly, organizations that were not thought of as financial institutions are becoming more and more under the eyes of the regulator and under the eyes of the perpetrators' targets because they're starting to move money and more and more organizations than we would have never thought of as organizations that would that are subject to these kinds of technologies need to adopt. In fact, one of the cool things that I that I like about our technologies, we actually have the two largest customers in the world as it as it pertains to money movement.
We actually have the customer, the company that moves the largest amount of money of any company in the world, any institution in the world, and we have the company that moves the largest volume of transactions of any company in the world. Do you want to make guesses which institution moves the most amount of money? Sorry? No. Alipay. Well, I think you heard it before. JP Morgan. JP Morgan literally moves the entire U.S. economy every week in terms of volume. It is unbelievable. Who is the largest transaction volume? Alipay. You know Alibaba? Alipay, our customer. We have both the largest volume and of dollars and the volume of transactions. All this is relying on three pillars. You know the pillars. Barak talked about it. No need to repeat.
Cloud, AI, and analytics. Let's talk about the expansion in the core market. What is this autonomous that I'm talking about? Let's start with a problem. The problem is, first of all, the regulation and the complexity of the regulation, regardless of what is you hear is advertised, is not going down. It actually continues to go up. The second thing is the fraudsters are becoming more and more sophisticated, and that requires a lot more sophisticated tools and pace, and as a result, the costs and the pressure on risk and compliance is only increasing. In fact, if you look at what happened over the last six to seven years in the large institutions, they have grown their staff in compliance and fraud. In some cases fivefold. Fivefold.
Their staff is up to the tens of thousands each in each institutions, yet they cannot keep up. The number of alerts that their existing analytic systems are generating is just skyrocketing. This is again, because of the volume of transactions as well as the threat, the increasing threats. They cannot continue this path of adding more and more people. Already, the cost is in the billions and many billions of dollars a year. That as an approach is out. Advances in analytics, machine learning, many startups are trying to sell on the idea of machine learning will solve everything. The fact of the matter is it helps, but it's not enough. What they need to do is combine two things.
They need to combine advanced analytics, machine learning AI with automation so that they both detect more smartly, but also they react to the detected items in a more automated way. This is exactly what autonomous is. Autonomous is changing the mindset from having people assisted by machines to letting machines do the work and having people assist them. What is at the heart of autonomous? First of all, you need to look at the barriers today. Today, to do better analytics, better machine learning, you need a lot of data. You need many data sources. You need many data types. Today, the process of ingesting new data is very time-consuming. It's extremely expensive, the banks are limited by how much data they can bring in. With Autonomous, we will fix this.
It will become easy, flexible, and quick to add data sources. The second thing is how fast it takes to tune these models. When a new threat profile comes up with a new way of defrauding the institution, how quickly can they react? How quickly can they respond and tune their models? Today, it's months before they can deploy a new version. We're talking about moving from months, not to days, not to hours, but to minutes, minute by minute. The last thing is once something is detected, how much interaction, how much of a human intervention is needed? Today, every alert requires sometimes hours, sometimes days of people's time to address it and work on it, and we're talking about reducing that dramatically. How is this possible?
It's possible by bringing in three elements. The first is big data, the second is machine learning and AI, and the third is automation. NICE is in a very unique position because we have all this technology in-house. We're probably the only organization in the world that has all these capabilities in-house. We've put it to ourself a very, very ambitious goal. We want to reduce In the next 36 months, we want to reduce the time it takes to resolve an issue by 70%, and we want to reduce the number of issues that they deal with, the false positives, the false alerts, we want to reduce by 30%. 30% may not sound like ambitious enough to you.
You may say, "Well, why aren't they going for 99%?" Well, if you talk to our customers, 30% reduction is a revolution. It's huge. It's bigly. This is not only theory, it's actually happening. We're introducing SAM 9, not here. It's our new AML product, and SAM 9 is already the first incarnation of autonomous, and it already will provide our customers 30% reduction in false positives and 70% reduction in investigation time. Let me give you kind of a sense and a feel for why? How can you do that? Well, first of all, think about what happens when there's an alert for suspected money laundering. The first thing that the investigator needs to look at is the person or the company moving the money. This is an investigation.
It doesn't require six detectives and a whole staff, but the person will now go and start investigating the suspicious customer. How would they do that? They go out to multiple data sources. They bring back data. They look at it. They think, and they try to figure out, is this person a legitimate person? Is this a criminal? Does he have any record in Google of a suspicious type of activity, et cetera. If you think about all this data gathering, the data gathering part of it can be automated.
We can actually have the robots go out, bring in the data, organize the data, and just leave for the person the task of looking at the data and figuring out if this person is really suspicious or this is a benign activity. The fact of the matter is the brain is that one decision of whether this is legit or not. The time is all spent on going to different databases, gathering data, and this we can cut out. This is autonomous, and we will be rolling it out in the next few years. The first version is coming out this year, and as I said, we believe this is gonna be a huge impact on our customers.
If we can achieve even a 10% reduction in their expense, we're talking about literally billions and billions of savings a year for all these institutions. Another example is ActimizeWatch. ActimizeWatch is actually both a cloud and AI. What did we realize? We realized that each one of our customers is actually dealing with the same threat, the same types of threats. What happens? Fraudsters understand there's a new way that they can get at money. Once they discover it, they go bank by bank by bank by bank and try to defraud the bank. Well, this kind of propagating problem means that everyone has the same problem, but each one of them is dealing with it completely separately. What's the idea with ActimizeWatch? We already have most of these large institutions. They're already our customers.
If we had a way to bring in the data from all of them, find the first time that the bank is defrauded, any one of them, and then share that knowledge through the models, we don't need to tell them. We share the knowledge through the models, we can be much faster for all of them. Most of them will have, think about it like inoculated even before the disease hits them. This is the idea behind ActimizeWatch. The other thing that ActimizeWatch does is it automates the machine learning. In many of these institutions, they don't have the skill set or the knowledge to actually develop these machine learning models. They may have them in the trading, but they may not have them in the fraud.
That's the other thing that we do is we will, they will send us the data, and we will use that to automatically develop machine learning models. ActimizeWatch is, we launched it about six months ago, and we already have quite a few customers. The more customers we will have on ActimizeWatch, there's a strong network externality effect here, where the more customers we have, the more useful it is for the next customer to join. This is what we're doing in the core market. What are we doing in the mid-market? We launched Essentials in 2016, and as you see, every six months, we've added a big additional pillar to Essential s. We started with AML. We added fraud.
We're adding now, advanced machine learning and analytics. In addition, as I said, we added one of the largest, core banking provider that has adopted us. We believe that Essentials in the next year or two will be a huge vehicle for us to get into that mid-market. Lastly, adjacencies. We've been talking about adjacencies for a while. You know about casinos. About two years ago, there was a big heist that started with SWIFT and moved money. It was an attempt to steal about $800 million. Most of it was caught, but $90 million disappeared through cash out of a casino in, actually Macau.
From then, the regulators have been paying a lot of attention to gaming, and we've seen a wave of adoption in gaming. It's still at the beginning. There's still a way to go. The other thing that has happened in the last six months is the regulators have started paying a lot of attention to cryptocurrencies exchanges. By the way, we have a pretty unique technology in actually de-anonymizing a lot of these cryptocurrency transactions, which is very important because as you know, once someone is on-ramped, once money makes it into the crypto network, if it's not, if it's not identified at that point in time, there's no way to attach the movement to a person.
You have to catch it when it comes into the network or when it leaves the network. The next thing is MSBs, Money Service Bureaus. There are few Money Service Bureaus in the world. The nice thing about them is each one of them supports thousands and thousands of customers. What we're doing is we're partnering with them, through our ability with the cloud, we can now reach these vast networks of customers. ABC, which we talked about in the past, this is our foray completely out of the financial services market into helping customers find issues of fraud and bribery and corruption that may escape their company. Some people kind of look at us and say, "What do you mean bribery and corruption?
How can you find bribery and corruption? It's like it's all cash envelopes, right? How is it even possible to detect that? Well, if you think about it, millions and millions of dollars of a bribe do not come out of someone's ATM. It has to somehow make its way out of the company and into someone's hands. That kind of behavior, that kind of siphoning money is exactly like money laundering. The same types of models that we can deploy for money laundering, we can deploy to find bribery and corruption in industries that before were completely opaque, like pharmaceuticals, like mining. Usually, you look for it where people need to get government licenses. These are kind of how we are deploying our technology to broader verticals.
To summarize, what we're doing at Actimize, we're leveraging those same core technologies of cloud, AI and automation, and analytics, and we're leveraging that to grow both in our core market, downmarket, and to adjacencies. We believe we have a long way to go. With that, I'll pass it to Beth.
Thank you, Eran . Before I begin, and jump into some numbers, I wanted to spend a few minutes talking about the new accounting guidance for this year. At the start of this year, effective January 1st, NICE adopted ASC 606 for GAAP reporting purposes. NICE adopted using the modified retrospective method. What that means is that for 2018 and looking forward, we will be reporting our results for GAAP purposes under the new accounting guidance. As we look back historically for 2017 and the prior years, our results will continue to be reported under ASC 605, which is consistent with the methodology. Also related to the actual adoption of the modified retrospective method, there was a one-time adjustment that goes into retained earnings as you move into the adoption.
How does it impact NICE? There are really two areas where it primarily is impacting NICE as an organization. They're around term licenses and product revenue and sales commissions. With respect to term licenses, under the prior accounting for ASC 605, term licenses were generally recognized ratably over the life of the term. Under the new accounting, under ASC 606, term licenses are now generally recognized with the product revenue up front at the time that you actually ship the product. You know, what should you expect when you look at 605 versus 606?
If you look at 606, the estimated impact for us is that there will be slightly less revenue under 606, and that relates to the term revenue that was from the historical periods and the backlog that was there, which has already been moved into retained earnings at the time of adoption. For commission expense, what you can expect is that sales commission expense was for subscription-based activity being recognized generally over that subscription period. Now with the adoption of 606, what you'll find is that the commission expense is being recognized over the average life of the contract.
What that means for us in terms, again, the estimated impact if you're looking at a comparison of non-GAAP 605 to non-GAAP 606, is that we will actually see a slight increase from going into 606 versus 605, and that relates to those active contracts which are still in effect, and the commission expense that now is going to come into the year related to the average life of the contract. It's expense that's already been recognized, but given that it's active, it's now being stretched over the life of the contract, and that pulls it into the current year.
With respect to how we elected to adopt this new guidance, we've already highlighted on our earnings calls that we have continued to report our non-GAAP results under ASC 605, as well as our guidance is also reported under 605. We've intentionally done that. We did that really with trying to ensure that we create the best transparency into our numbers. By doing that, we create an apples-to-apples comparison between the results in 2018 to the results in 2017, which are both now reported under ASC 605. At the same time, we are actually measuring under non-GAAP 606 as well.
What that means is as we move into 2019, in 2019 you can expect to see the new non-GAAP under ASC 606, and you'll see it relative to 2018 and ASC 606. That's just a high-level overview. As a reminder, as I talk about all of the numbers in this presentation, again, all of the numbers are based on non-GAAP and ASC 605, again, for that year-over-year comparability. Moving into our Q1 results, we released our earnings last Thursday, and we're very happy and pleased with the results that we had in first quarter. Our revenue grew 11% over the same quarter of last year. Really that the growth was fueled from our cloud business.
We had 33% growth in the cloud business, and a lot of that being fueled by the adoption of CXone, and Barak talked a lot about some of those examples on our call last week. As you look in terms of how that impacts our business, you'll see that our recurring revenue is continuing to expand, it increased to 69% of our overall revenue is recurring for the first quarter of 2017. As you look across the remainder of our financial results, you'll see that not only did we have strong growth in our revenue, but we had very strong performance across really all of our key metrics, gross margin, operating income, operating margin, EPS, and then all the way into the cash generation. We've seen strong revenue growth over the last several years.
Starting from 2015 and then moving into the guidance for 2018 this year, we've had a compounded growth rate of 16% over that time frame. A lot of the drivers around the revenue growth, we've talked about, which include the cloud revenue growth, which you've seen this quarter, but that's also fueled the growth over several years, as well as analytics. We talk regularly about analytics being embedded really in everything that we do, and analytics has been a big driver of that growth, as well as the financial crime and compliance business.
It's important to say that, you know, as we look across our end customers, we have very healthy markets, we have a lot of continued growth in business with our existing customer base, and at the same time, we continue to add a lot of many new logos each quarter. Again, on the call last week, we've started talking now about a lot of the adoption and the new logos. We've reached some records in terms of new logos that we're bringing into the company around CXone that are also help fueling that continued growth. Our revenue is becoming more predictable.
As you look at our recurring revenue, starting back at the first quarter of 2015, 47% of our revenue was recurring, and you can see that we're up to 69% in the most recent quarter. That recurring revenue really gives us more confidence in our ability to forecast future revenue streams. As we've talked about, the other impact is that we're seeing due to that increasing subscription-based revenue, we have more revenue which we are able to see in that first half of the year. It means that we're less back-end loaded in terms of the revenue coming in in the second half of the year. This is a look at the revenue breakdown and segmentation. On the left-hand side is the first quarter segmentation and geographies.
76% in the Americas, 16% in EMEA, the remainder in APAC. In the first quarter, we had growth in all three of our regions across the company. That included double-digit growth in both EMEA and APAC, and 8% growth in the Americas. As you look at the split of our business between our two business segments, Customer Engagement and Financial Crime and Compliance, this is pretty much a standard split you'll see in terms of the business breakdown about an 80/20 generally, 81/19 in the first quarter. For Customer Engagement, again, the growth that you saw in the first quarter results, a lot of that came from this side of the business, with a 13% growth in the first quarter.
On the financial crime and compliance, we had about 2% growth there in the first quarter. That was over a really difficult comparison to 21% growth in Q1 of 2017 relative to the prior year. This is a look at our gross profit trend. As you can see, if you look at the revenue and then the blue bar, at the same time we've been growing the revenues, we've also consistently been growing our gross profit. In terms of our gross margin trend, you'll see on the right-hand side, we also had year-over-year improvement in our gross margin. At NICE, we have a lot of attention and focus around our gross margin and really continuing to drive a lot of operational efficiency and profitability into our business.
This is a look at specifically our product and services gross margin. On the product side, you'll see the continued increase in the gross margin as well as the services. From the products perspective, we have started doing more development in-house, so there are less fees that are going to third parties, and that's been able to continue to expand our product margins. We've also renegotiated some of the contracts we have there with vendors. On the services side, this represents both maintenance and professional services. It's really been a very strong area of focus for the company over the last several years. However, it continues to be an important area of focus.
You can see that we still manage to continue to increase that services margin with over a point of increase in the most recent quarter. On the services side, some of the things that we've done is, first of all, just in terms of our staff, we're always monitoring utilization, so we're driving additional utilization from our teams. We do a great amount of tracking metrics and setting targets for our teams that they are attaining in terms of really monitoring and measuring the overall health and efficiency of the business. As we've mentioned in the past, we are also continuing to hire talent in lower cost regions.
That's another area for us where we've been able to find very strong talent outside of some of the higher cost regions, and that has also assisted us in boosting the margins. This is a look at of our cloud picture. Again, cloud, I will just remind everyone, this is cloud across NICE. This encompasses the CXone business, Actimize Essentials, as well as some other analytics in the cloud. What we're showing here, starting with the far left, is Q4 2016. This is the time when we actually closed the inContact acquisition in November of 2016. We had half a quarter there. You can see that quarter after quarter after quarter, we've continued to have consistent growth in the revenue. We have, again, great predictability and stability that we're seeing.
At the same time, while we've grown the revenue, you'll see that on the gross margin, we've also been continuously improving on the gross margin. One of the things that we've talked about on our calls is high-quality cloud revenue. What that means for us is that we are bringing cloud that's profitable, and you can see that really in our margins. As we look at our customer base, as we look in the SMB space, we're really focused more on the M of the space and obviously moving that more up into the large enterprise. That means we're focused on the end user that has higher retention, is stickier, and that really translates into profitability for us as a company.
In terms of looking into the future, we continue to expect the growth in the cloud revenue coming from Essentials on the Actimize side, ActimizeWatch, as well as really the again, the big driver of CXone driving that continuous growth. With respect to the margins, we do expect to be able to continue to expand the cloud gross margin by some of the steps that we've taken more recently. Some of the things we've done have been to look at our network providers and reroute calls to lower cost providers. We've also, again, there done some negotiation with our vendors in terms of our contracts.
We'll continue to look for those opportunities, as well as really just getting leverage as we add more revenue, and from the higher end of the market, again, dropping directly into the leverage of the model. This is a look at the operating income trend and the results and the gross margin increases that I've mentioned are showing up as well in the operating income. Again, you can see the consistent increase in our operating income and the year-over-year expansion in the operating margin. One of the things I would highlight here as well is that I mentioned we closed inContact in the fourth quarter of 2016.
It's also important to note that, when we acquired inContact, they were roughly kind of a break-even-ish company, and we mentioned that we would make sure it was accretive. I think we've demonstrated at this point that we've delivered on that promise, and that really is demonstrated in our performance here. This is a view of our EPS growth. Like the operating income, again, you can see the leverage in our model, that's showing the 14% growth consecutively in the last two y ears, as well as 16% growth from $0.89 to $1.03 in terms of our EPS in the most recent quarter. Then finally, I'll close with just a view on our cash flow from operations.
We have a very solid cash position as a company overall. If you look at our balance sheets, we actually went from $525 million of cash on the balance sheet at the end of December, up to $647 million at the end of the first quarter, and you'll see that in the high bar to the right. The healthy business that we're doing as a company, the way that we're keeping our eye on ensuring we have operational efficiency and we're driving that into our profitability, is really being shown here in terms of it's going all the way in terms of the model into really positive, strong cash generation as a company.
As we look across our competitors, this is also something that really differentiates us in being one of our strengths. Our cash flow from operations, and our cash and our health and our balance sheet overall is in a very positive place, and it really is enabling us for ensuring we have success in our future growth. That concludes my comments. Thank you.