Hello, everyone. I'm Dominic Ball. I cover the payment names here at Redburn Atlantic alongside my colleague, Fahed Kunwar. This session is with Dax Dasilva, the CEO of Lightspeed, and it's part of the 2024 Redburn Atlantic CEO Conference. This session is being pre-recorded, and if there's any questions, please do reach out. My email is dominic.ball@redburnatlantic.com, and we will try our best to accommodate. So hello, Dax. Thank you very much for joining.
Thanks for having me.
Thank you. For those not too in tune with the story of Lightspeed, could you give us a little bit of a high-level introduction in terms of where Lightspeed has been, where you are right now, and your vision for the future?
Yeah, founded Lightspeed in 2005, so we're going to be celebrating our 20th anniversary next March. We serve retail and hospitality customers in North America, Europe, and APAC, more of the high GTV merchants, merchants doing more than $500,000 and above in transaction volume annually. So the more complex merchants that have complexity to their businesses that are multi-location. And we just crossed $1 billion in run rate in this last quarter. So yeah, nice sort of note for our 20th year.
Yeah, 100%. And so again, back a little bit to the basis, I guess, why do merchants choose Lightspeed? What unique advantage do you think that you or Lightspeed does offer that's slightly different to the competitors?
Yeah, on the retail side, and that's where the origins of the company started. I built the first retail product for a complex merchant, an Apple dealership, Mac dealership, actually, and became a standard for Mac dealerships around the world, and so the origins for retail, we serve those complex multi-location businesses that have a lot of needs for inventory management, so tens or hundreds of thousands of SKUs in their database, serialized product, high-value product. They also rely on Lightspeed to manage all their omnichannel capabilities, so selling across, of course, different physical locations, but also online and on social. We have integrated payments, and as well, we offer a capital product so that folks can, the businesses can borrow from Lightspeed to fund more inventory, for example.
On the hospitality side, we do front of house and back of house, manage the ordering workflow, but also all of the kitchen workflow. We manage all of the connections to delivery and order ahead. We have analytics. We are very prevalent in Europe on our hospitality platform, so fiscalization to comply with regulation in different countries, and of course, there we also offer payments and capital, and as I mentioned, it's omnichannel with those order ahead and delivery capabilities.
That makes sense. And the SMB space, specifically in the U.S., integrated payments, hardware software payments, is quite competitive. How has this dynamic evolved and sort of how has Lightspeed adapted with that as well?
Yeah, this has always been a competitive space. Lots of different players that serve different segments. And so our segmentation for Lightspeed is doing that medium to high complexity merchant that's doing $500,000 in annual GTV. And they have unique needs. And so our merchants largely have a brick-and-mortar location or multiple. And for that, in the case of retail, they have to manage inventory across all of those locations and online. And so a cloud-based system is a good fit for that. And there's some similar dynamics with complex hospitality where the restaurants have multiple parts of the restaurant and lots of different channels. So we really build our feature set such that it's tailor-made for that kind of merchant and its needs. And that segment of the market represents half of the $10 trillion that are shared across SMB. SMB is about $10 trillion.
$5 trillion is generated by that 2.5 million merchants in the more complex segment, and that's out of the 65 million merchants in SMB, so yeah, we're targeting a smaller segment, but it represents half the transaction volume, and so we've got a go-to-market that's tailored for it as well as a product line that's tailored for serving that market.
Yeah, and the equivalent take rates, I presume, are higher for SMB merchants as well. In Europe, the integrated hardware software payments landscape is quite different. Let's say quite far behind the U.S. Should we expect Lightspeed to grow in this region faster than the U.S.? Is this increasingly becoming a priority, or does that mean that Europe actually has higher barriers to entry for Lightspeed?
Yeah, I think our major areas for growth are North America retail and European hospitality. We started our business in hospitality in Europe about a decade ago. And so we have a really great lead there. And we're really the only pan-European solution, meaning that if you're a restaurant operator that wants to open restaurants at scale in multiple countries, Lightspeed is your choice because we've fiscalized across so many different countries. And so I think there's less competition for us and almost no competition on a pan-European basis. Europe has some natural barriers to entry such as language and regulatory requirements, and those are technical details that we've solved.
Is the go-to-market strategy slightly different in Europe as well? Yeah.
Yeah, you know we've leveraged inbound marketing, inbound marketing funnels, but now we're turning to do more and more outbound as we focus more and more on what we call our ICP customer, our Ideal Customer Profile, which is those customers transacting 500K and above in annual GTV. It's better to do outbound motions where you've got feet on the street in major cities to be able to identify the merchants that are a great fit for Lightspeed.
Would there ever be a possibility going forward for Lightspeed to try and distribute through banks or have bank partnerships? That's one area where we've seen legacy or incumbent payment processes in Europe.
Lightspeed has its own payments offering, right? Lightspeed Payments, which is something that we did over the last six quarters, have now penetrated across 37% of our base. And we actually have some, not a lot of that. A lot of that is in North America retail. And so we're now currently really working hard on penetrating all our European base and all net new customers that sign up for Lightspeed go on to Lightspeed Payments. So collaborating with banks when we're really doing the payments business is more challenging. And we're also providing our own capital services. And for businesses that can't do a loan through a bank, Lightspeed's a great option because we see the transaction volume.
We can assess the ability for a business to take a merchant cash advance, and we can deduct from their monthly payment flow from the money that we're receiving as their payments provider. So I think we're well positioned to do some of the banking functions in terms of payments and capital. But we're always looking for distribution partnerships, and partnerships is a big part of our go-to-market strategy.
Yeah, that makes sense, and talking about Lightspeed Payments, is the adoption curve in Europe, so I think you guys expand Lightspeed Payments later in Europe than the U.S., is the adoption curve somewhat similar, or is there less sort of willingness to adopt in Europe? Anything on that would be great.
Yeah, no, I think we started, of course, we started in North America retail, that being sort of our original customer base. And we had more work to do to roll out Lightspeed Payments across all the countries in Europe where we have customers and that we support. And there was a lot of annual contracts that are more prevalent. So when we usually talk to customers when they're up for renewal for their contract, if they're in our base and they're not using our payments, so there's that opportunity to connect payments into that renewal. And there's also some non-competes with some existing payment providers which are expiring now, some of which are in Europe, that we can now offer those customers Lightspeed Payments for a more integrated experience.
I think at the end of the day, having software and payments together in the same solution and managed together, it's a net positive for the business. It really simplifies the business and allows them to also access our other financial services, such as instant payouts and our capital offering.
That makes a lot of sense. So can you speak a little bit more, then, about as more merchants adopt Lightspeed Payments? Is there, then, software ARPU that you see accelerate because they can gain access to other software products as well?
Yeah, so I think our ARPU number has seen really strong growth. A lot of it's because of payments. But we have been shipping a lot of modules. We've shipped a major module for retail and hospitality in every quarter since the last several quarters. We have a lot of velocity on our retail and hospitality flagship products. And we think that by launching some of the module feature sets that we have, such as Retail Insights, which gives you visibility into your stock levels and warns you of stockouts that might happen that might reduce your profitability. And on the hospitality side, we recently launched Benchmark and Trends, which is an AI-driven tool to help you compare against other venues in your neighborhood and compare pricing on similar menu items and other metrics.
These are the kinds of tools that we're launching quarter after quarter that help us move our customers into the higher pricing tiers and build up the software ARPU. On the transaction ARPU, I think once a customer starts with payments, we can also increase transaction ARPU with offerings like capital and instant payouts, which is also becoming very popular.
That makes sense. And more on the software modules part, I think there's a peer out there that does around about $500 a month in software ARPU. I think the last time Lightspeed, you can sort of back out the numbers, it was more like $150-$200. Do you think there can be a point when you get to a similar level going forward?
Definitely there's a huge R&D investment and a lot of velocity to build more modules. I think the number you're referring to is from a hospitality vendor. Restaurants do take more software generally, and so our numbers are higher on hospitality. The number that you stated for us is a blend of retail and hospitality, but we do expect that to grow. Ultimately, we're a one-stop shop for this more complex, sophisticated merchant, and if we can offer them more functionality that addresses more of the different pain points or different needs in their business, then they'll get those pieces of technology from Lightspeed because we are their trusted vendor, and they also rely on us to have it all well integrated, and I think that the other aspect here is that the more that we deliver software value, the more it increases the value of their GTV.
They transact more because they're able to do more business, unlock more channels. So those things really go together. We open up new avenues of growth through the different modules, new ways to do business, more efficiency, and it should also help those businesses grow to potentially have multiple locations and have more opportunity in their business.
Yeah, that makes sense, and some of these more newer software modules, are they going to then try and help your existing merchants accelerate in their same sort of sales as well? I think, is that something that we can maybe expect going forward as well?
Yeah, I think we've seen a lot going on the flagships, on the retail and hospitality flagships. We've seen more than 20% growth in transaction volume in the last quarter, and part of that is because these flagships have the most modules. They're the modern platforms. They represent more than 30% of our user base over the next couple of years. It'll be more than 50%, and so we expect there to be more uptake of modules and for them to drive higher GTV than the general same-store growth rate across retail or across hospitality.
Yeah, and one product you mentioned then is the Retail Insights as well. I think you spoke about hospitality analytics being a really high-quality offering. How has the retail sort of insights rollout been taken up by merchants? How's the adoption sort of been so far?
Yeah, we've seen really great uptake. It's in one of the higher pricing tiers. We've seen folks move up to that to be able to take advantage of Retail Insights. I mean, hospitality insights has been just a superstar on the hospitality side. It really gives hospitality business the ability to understand how to improve the guest experience, how to improve staffing, how to optimize menus. And on the retail side, it's also make or break for a business to have the right stock at the right time at the right place. And so it's certainly the same kind of advantages of just making the business that much more optimized and be able to seek out all the opportunities. I think that the top 5% of sellers in any store, you can no longer do that by just feel or instinct.
A lot of business owners know their business, but they have to be able to reorder based on data. And just making sure that that top 5% is always in stock and that you're always reordering that sufficiently with enough inventory turns can actually change the profitability mix for your business. So that's the kind of leverage that a retailer can expect to have from Retail Insights.
Yeah, 100%. And that sort of links into, I think, NuORDER as well, probably one of the most exciting propositions of Lightspeed. Can you give us an overview of this product and monetization plans going forward?
Yeah, NuORDER has all of the brands, the businesses, many of the brands that businesses are ordering from on a platform, and it's a B2B ecosystem where our stores can order from their top brands, and so that really closes the loop on having that workflow be separate from their point of sale. Because once a store orders from their brand or multiple brands, actually, this is where it gets really powerful, is they can order for a season from multiple brands, and those purchase orders, once they're received in Lightspeed, all of that information flows automatically, so they're not spending all of those hours in their week coordinating two systems and re-entering. It really allows them to create a really optimized workflow between them and their supply, so very, very powerful.
It's a workflow where, as we bring more and more brands onto NuORDER , it becomes very, very compelling for businesses that are in retail to sign up for Lightspeed in order to take advantage of that workflow, and for us, I think it really allows us to become prolific within key verticals where we have concentrations of brands.
Yeah, I guess two questions on that then. How do you convince all brands to sign up? I guess over time is the natural network effect that you have a lot of the merchants, specifically within some verticals like bicycles, I think. And then so how do you get the brands to sign up, one? And also, who are you sort of replacing in this aspect? So who are the merchants? Sounds like a basic question, but how does the merchant—what are the merchants already using, essentially, to order?
Yeah, so NuORDER, I think we acquired this business several years ago. It was really an enterprise product that was geared so that the Macy's and Nordstrom of the world and the Saks Fifth Avenue, all of those large department stores could order systematically from their top brands. So a lot of the top brands are on NuORDER because of the big department stores requiring those brands to be on that system. So it could be easily managed, and ordering could be streamlined. We still serve those large department store businesses. But that's, of course, not the SMB ICP of Lightspeed. Those larger department stores draw a lot of the brands, but they'd also like to—those brands would also like to expand into independent retail that has brands that also carries brands that would make sense alongside their brand, right?
So we can help brands that want to expand into the independent retail network find the right stores for them. And then we can also, of course, facilitate all that ordering through NuORDER. So it is a bit of a network effect, but NuORDER serves some of the very large enterprise retail, and now we're helping it serve the independent SMB retail.
That makes sense. And then for Lightspeed, in terms of monetization, could you speak about where that can derive from?
It's certainly helping us improve close rates in the verticals where NuORDER has a lot of concentration of brands. On our last earnings call, I spoke of a number of customers that we closed because of the NuORDER integration, because it's just a game-changing workflow for how they're ordering from their suppliers. Over time, there's 10 billion of GTV that's flowing through that network from brand to store that we haven't monetized. That's potential as well. It will help with closing new stores, new SMB locations, but there's also a lot of GTV to, at some point, monetize. In addition, when a store is doing another inventory turn and they don't have the capital at hand, they can access our capital offering to bring another inventory turn, potentially that's been suggested by our Retail Insights module.
You see now how the whole Lightspeed ecosystem is suggesting an inventory turn. You can order it directly through NuORDER and maybe have it financed by Lightspeed Capital. It's a virtuous workflow where the store gets a lot of efficiency and gets a lot of maximizing of profitability by being able to have that stock in the right place at the right time. We also benefit from multiple touchpoints in that journey.
Yeah, makes a lot of sense. And it's all in one location, one-stop shop. SMBs sort of really love that. I mean, this part of Lightspeed is really unique. Like the NuORDER, we don't see anyone else sort of doing anything similar. Slightly, I mean, it's somewhat related, but Lightspeed obviously had a history of going around acquiring a lot of POS companies. That's been done for the last. It's three years now when you did the last one. It was September, October 2021. The amalgamation of all these different POS companies and NuORDER, is there much technical debt that remains? Was largely being fixed? And has this helped sort of launch more software products as well?
Yeah, so as I mentioned earlier, we've had the two flagship products in market for the last 18 months. And how the flagship products came about is we had a massive technical effort to choose one of the key platforms as the future foundation, so the one with the most modern architecture, and re-engineered some of the best software components like analytics modules or omnichannel modules onto the most modern foundations in retail and hospitality. And those are our two flagships. And that's why we have so much velocity in terms of product. More than 165 features shipped across these two platforms in the last two quarters.
For me, as a product guy and built the original Lightspeed, it's fun to see everything that's happening from a product perspective, from us bringing together all of that incredible technology, and of course, some of the best SaaS developers in commerce to create those flagships. Of course, we do have some non-flagship platforms that still exist, but they're very low-cost in terms of R&D and support. So they're a great contributor to EBITDA, but with minimal investment. Of course, we will move folks over to flagships if they grow their business or have more ambition and want to access the latest innovation that's being shipped through the newest modules.
Sure. So I think please correct me if I'm wrong. Around about 40% of the merchants now are on the flagship products. So going forward and historically, has that come from switching merchants over from the legacy products, or has that come from winning new locations and merchants?
Right. So there was already, we based the retail flagship off the Vend platform. So it was already existing merchants and the hospitality platform off the iKentoo foundation. Then, of course, brought a lot of the other technology pieces to those foundations. So those already had an existing user base, but every net new customer that Lightspeed is adding is on a flagship, right? We're not selling any of the other platforms net new. Of course, if somebody wants to add a location to their chain and they're on one of the non-flagships, we will sell that. But everything net new is on the flagship. So that number should hit 50% and go beyond over the next years.
Yeah, and I imagine. I think you mentioned earlier the close rates as well and the software output and then the Lightspeed attachments, the profitability, but also the ability to win with these new products, I presume, are higher.
Yeah, we alluded to it earlier, but NA retail and EMEA hospitality, these are our two growth markets. That's where the flagships have the strongest product-market fit, where we have the biggest competitive moat, and the close rates are the best in the company. The unit economics are the best in the company. We are excited about sort of thinking about the company in terms of growth markets and then parts of the business that are more optimized for efficiency, contribute to EBITDA. That's a strategic pivot that we've known those are our best markets, but now we're putting the pieces in place in fiscal 2026 that we have all the resources for growth focused on those two areas, selling the flagships. In retail, it's going to be North America. For hospitality, it'll be Europe.
Yeah, I can't really. I can't stress enough how much specifically continental Europe tech is quite far behind and how a high-quality proposition like Lightspeed can really come in and sweep up, to put it bluntly. But again, for Europe, I think you guys have softly or roughly guided to U.S. Lightspeed Payments adoption, maybe getting towards a 70%-80%. There's always going to be around about 10%, which is cash. And there's some verticals that you can't do Lightspeed Payments for, potentially, because the end vertical, the underlying processor doesn't want to do. Is this, first of all, correct in my numbers? And also, is Europe, the end goal, kind of similar as well, that 70% range?
So we have a target of about 40%-45% by year-end, our year-end ends in March. After that, we're going to trend towards 50%. And the upper limit is at about 60% because there's a mix of cash and non-eligible geographies. But with R&D work, we hope to push that upper limit further. And there is a trend, of course, with consumers to use more card-based payments and less cash. So that trend is also our friend, especially in places like Europe. I think that trend seems to be accelerating.
Yeah. And can you give us a bit of an update as well on the portion of the sales force that I think used to be working on adopting merchants onto Lightspeed Payments? Have they now gone back? And how has the progression been in terms of their ability to then cross-sell more software?
Yeah. The R-account management team, which their output represents typically half our software growth, they've been tasked for the last, for more than a year, on the payments conversion, unified payments motion. And so that is coming to a close. There is still, like I mentioned earlier, there's annual contracts that are up for renewal, a lot of that in Europe, and there's more conversion to do in Europe. So a good proportion of them have come back to selling software, but there is more of the payments journey to do, especially in places like Europe, in places like North America where a lot of that journey has already been done. A lot of that team is back to software.
Okay. Yeah. And I think since returning as CEO near the start of the year as well, profitable growth has been a top priority. The adjusted EBITDA upgrade has been quite remarkable. Looking ahead, we've seen much room for improving profitability. And also, as we just spoke about Lightspeed Payments, the incremental EBITDA margins must be pretty high on that.
Yeah. So payments has been a big part of getting to multiple quarters of positive adjusted EBITDA. This is our profitable growth era where Lightspeed's always been a very strong grower. And now we've been beating on EBITDA every quarter since I've returned. So there's a real lens on operational efficiency and how we want to grow the business. And I think part of it is focusing on growth areas where we have great unit economics and not trying to grow everywhere. I think where we focus on our best opportunities, we win and we build a much more profitable business that's growing in an impressive way. But in terms of laying out those plans fully, we'll probably do that as we complete our strategic review.
Yeah, for sure. So it seems like vertical-specific, geography-specific is very much the.
Definitely the growth areas as we concentrate and reallocate resources away from areas that maybe have smaller TAMs or where there's competitive dynamics that are less favorable to the really big opportunities we have in North America retail and European hospitality. The overall financial profile of the business will transform, and that's really the key to profitable growth. The other part, of course, is that payments penetration, which in six quarters, we've gone from 19% to 37%. So that focus has really now paid off in terms of improving the profitability profile, and capital is, I think, really contributing to that EBITDA line as well. That's been a really exciting part of our financial services offering that's been a big contributor also.
For sure. Is there a limit on sort of Lightspeed Capital, how much you guys can loan out versus sort of the demand that your merchants are asking?
Yeah. I think we're comfortable with loaning up to about $200 million off balance sheet on our balance sheets. And then when we go beyond that to start loading some of it off balance sheet, offloading it with partners. But it's a fast-growing business. We're growing more than 100% on that business. And so what's exciting is it solves a real need for our merchants that are the higher GTV merchants, but it also really contributes to EBITDA. And as this business grows, it'll be a bigger and bigger contributor. So we do expect to be loaning more than $200 million annually over the next couple of years. It's definitely going to be a bigger and bigger part of the business.
That makes sense and come with considerably higher, I mean, gross margins, I presume, than payments as well.
Yeah, definitely higher gross margins, yes.
One thing people sometimes get concerned about with a point-of-sale company that has exposure, shall we say, to the hospitality or restaurant industry is just the natural high churn rates. What is Lightspeed's strategy for when a merchant naturally churns because they go bankrupt, unfortunately, as restaurants do, and then Lightspeed trying to win the next one that replaces them?
Yeah. So this is part of our focus. And we've always done well with our ICP, those customers transacting $500K and above. But we've had a mix of cohorts that were smaller GTV merchants, micro merchants that are probably well served by other SMB players that serve the mass market of SMB. When you focus on the higher GTV merchants and custom build your roadmap and your go-to-market motions for that, there are lower churn rates. It takes more to win the customer. We're investing a lot in outbound motions that more closely target those customers. But they're more established, and they will have naturally a churn rate that's closer to an enterprise churn rate than an SMB churn rate.
So as our mix becomes more and more ICP, because that's primarily who we are now targeting in this current strategy, we'll see merchants that have a naturally lower churn rate.
That makes sense, and have you experienced in Europe, maybe more for restaurants or I know you're prioritizing U.S. retail, but is there any sort of flywheel that you see? Because the quality of the product is very good. Restaurants are quite hyper-localized. They secure small SMB retail as well, but that word-of-mouth spreads, and you sort of see an increase in merchants coming towards you as well?
Absolutely. I mean, I think that that's why focusing on our two growth areas and focusing all our marketing in two areas and into the brands and into the verticals where we're strongest will, I think, support that word-of-mouth. I've been doing a lot of what we call Table Talks in key cities where I'll sit down with merchants in retail or hospitality and cover a topic. Like, for example, the last one we did with retail was how social media is driving a lot of brick-and-mortar traffic. And what we did in hospitality was a roundtable that we did in New York and hoping to do another one in Europe soon. And these kinds of events really allow us to invite a lot of different merchants that are using Lightspeed and also ones that are considering it because there is a ton of word-of-mouth in neighborhoods.
Folks that are about to open a restaurant will see what folks are using and if they're successful at it. So there's a tremendous amount of that. And if we can foster more community events because these businesses really don't, from what I understand in spending time with them, they don't have a lot of time to check out other businesses around them or create relationships and have those discussions. It can be sometimes a bit of a lonely experience as an entrepreneur if you're not networked. So we've been trying to create those networking experiences and actually just really generate really great word-of-mouth. The other thing that we're also doing is, we just published this year a State of Hospitality Data Report and a State of Retail Data Report. And we go into topics that are super top of mind with retailers and hospitality.
For example, the latest one in both retail and hospitality covered the new trends in tipping and some questions around staffing. And as we share some of the data, we really engender conversations with those business owners. And when they see it reflected in their own day-to-day, I think we become a really trusted partner in finding out some of this information on their behalf and then just really fostering those conversations in those communities.
Yeah, for sure. I mean, it's interesting that you mentioned that specifically for the retail social media sort of driving traffic, specifically in the U.S. It's done across multiple channels, offline, online, social media, TikTok S hop, and stuff like that. It's become quite big. How do you help your merchants do that? How do you support them in this sort of growing trend of disaggregation of retail, basically?
Yeah, I think things change rapidly, right? If you asked me five or 10 years ago, you'd say, or like five years ago, you'd say, "Okay, my online shop is driving traffic." Now I feel it's a lot of social media, people searching for things that they want or finding stores and really doing a vibe check with the store, understanding the aesthetic, understanding what's being stocked at the store. And that will drive them into the store, right? So that whole process almost in some cases skips over the store's e-commerce site, right? It goes directly from social to brick-and-mortar. And we're seeing the data shows that every generation really likes brick-and-mortar. They like going to the store, but they'll use social media to sort of vet whether it's worth their time to go to a store.
What we can do is we have integrations with Google, with Meta, and with TikTok. Over time, we'll be able to close that conversion. Because a lot of businesses, they don't have social media marketing teams, right? If we can help them with that process, and we can also eventually show them the conversion rate of, "Okay, I spent this money online, and now we've got a sale conversion in store." That's the loop we'd like to close with them. We're already doing it on the Google platform, and we're going to be working with Meta to also be able to do it there. Because small businesses have a lot of anxiety of like, "Okay, I'm putting all this money into social media marketing. What is the benefit? Is it really doing what I'm hoping it's doing? And how do I attribute it?
How do I attribute sales success to what I'm doing on social?" So that's where a partner like Lightspeed can come in, where we can close those loops and take something that's technically difficult to understand or requires a really sizable team, typically, and do that in sort of a one-stop shop solution where it helps them really understand those strategies in their business and optimize them over time.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It's definitely the way it seems retail is going in the U.S. Maybe Europe will catch up on that, even in hospitality and restaurants.
Hospitality as well, yeah.
Yeah. That definitely helps restaurants up a lot. I guess for Lightspeed, is there any aggregating of the data between all your different merchants that you could? You mentioned actually the benchmarking tool before that you could do to help? Yeah.
Benchmark and Trends, we're using predictive AI. We're using AI that helps you classify as well as a generative to really take some of that data that we do have because we have so much data across retail and hospitality and leverage it for the benefit of the business by letting them do comparisons. I mean, all the data is anonymized. We're not giving out the names of the businesses that you're comparing to. But you can understand at your restaurant whether the steak that you have priced is priced competitively in your neighborhood. Or maybe there are items that are trending in your area that you don't have on your menu. Maybe there's a new cocktail that everybody's going crazy for. Maybe there's peak hours or staffing changes you can make through those comparisons. That's where I think we can leverage AI.
We can also leverage all the amount of data we have to give our businesses that competitive advantage. Small businesses need every competitive advantage that we can give them. They have a lot of financial pressure from inflation and challenges with staffing, and so that's, as well as supply chain issues, so we need to be able to democratize all those technology advantages and make it simple enough because a business owner has to wear so many more hats than they used to 10 years ago and definitely 20 years ago. You've got to be a genius on social. You've got to be a multi-channel manager. Your in-store channels and in-restaurant channels and your online channels. You've got to be great at managing inventory. There's so many things you have to be good at right now to make a business successful.
So the technology has to be able to help them. And that's what we do is democratize that technology so that it's accessible.
Yeah, and it's sort of great for Lightspeed as well because as you guys get bigger, way more merchants, you have more data, which you give to the merchant, and it's just this nice network effect where it becomes very difficult for another competitor to sort of come in.
And then on the NuORDER side, we talked about the supply side earlier. We are able to because once a brand sells to department stores plus all their independent retail stores, they don't really have a lens into what happens with that merchandise. Does it get discounted? Does it sell out right away? We can offer, is there stock still sitting in stores? We can offer them data so that they can optimize their production, right? So I think Lightspeed's got some, as sort of the key player in the middle of all of this. Plus, we've got all the payments data we can triangulate and the merchant cash advance data. We can help all of the different players be more efficient on the supply side with production and on the merchant side with how they're ordering and how they're doing their marketing.
Yeah. And is there any verticals with NuORDER that you guys are actually at scale and doing pretty well? And when you have that sort of two-sided network between the brands and the merchants?
Yeah. For us, for businesses that are doing multi-brand apparel, we have a lot of the high-end apparel brands. Those are the kinds of brands that are selling it to Macy's and Saks and Nordstrom. We have a good concentration. A lot of the boutiques that order from those brands can do a lot of their workflows on NuORDER. It's just an incomparable workflow. I think that all those brands are benefiting too because, as I just mentioned, they're getting back data from us on what's succeeding at the store level.
Yeah. That makes sense. Going into something a little bit more boring, but more to do with sort of stock analysis. Lightspeed is obviously free cash flow positive now. You guys have no debt. $600 million of cash on the balance sheet. I guess going forward, you've announced buybacks, but is that what we should expect more going forward in terms of capital allocation?
Yeah. We have what's called an NCIB in place for about $140 million. And we can do that every year. We can have another NCIB. This is a TSX rule. Of that $140 million, we've done about $40 million. And so that's something that we consult with our board on when we want to do additional buybacks. Yeah, we have $600 million of cash, as you mentioned. We're leveraging some of it for the capital business. But yeah, there is definitely appetite to do more buybacks.
100%. And I guess looking forward, when you see the competitors set up both in U.S. retail, European hospitality, NuORDER , more software that you can cross-sell, the flagship product, Lightspeed Payments, obviously a lot of positive things. Which would you say you're sort of most excited about? And that maybe the investor base is a little bit not as well educated on.
Yeah, so we just recently announced our growth focus in North America Retail and EMEA Hospitality. We've had really, really great investor reception to that because they see competitors. For example, in North America restaurant, there's competitors like very focused competitors like Toast. We've got a winning position in Europe. It doesn't make much sense for us to go up against, go into an area where the unit economics are poor, and so I think having a focus of where we have a right to win is, I think, really exciting because it will change the financial profile of Lightspeed. And the flagships are so strong there, so the product velocity as a product guy, that's where I'm extremely, extremely excited of how quickly we can move on those products and how much we can ship on a quarterly basis.
So that whole product market fit, that right to win is extremely exciting to me. I'm really excited about what's happening in payments and financial services and capital. NuORDER, of course, is a great asset when it comes to building out that competitive moat on retail. But we have a large and growing top line, the best products we've ever had, adjusted even at positive operations and a really strong balance sheet. So it's a really exciting place to be, a strong position, and really excited for the future.
Yeah. Totally agree with that. I think that's a great place to maybe end as well. Thank you, everyone, for watching. Thank you very much, Dax, for joining. Again, as I said at the start, if there's any further questions, do please reach out. My email is dominic.ball@redburnatlantic.com. But I hope everyone has a good day. Thank you very much.
Thanks, Dominic.