To the Bank of America 2025 Leveraged Finance Conference. I'm Ana Goshko. I cover technology and telecom on the research credit side, and we're thrilled to have Diebold Nixdorf with us this morning, and we have Octavio Marquez, the company's Chief Executive Officer, and Thomas Timko, the company's Chief Financial Officer, so Octavio and Tom, thank you so much.
My pleasure.
So, without further ado, I don't know if you'd like to make any opening comments, or we could jump right into Q&A.
So, Ana, why don't we just jump into Q&A? We're very excited to be here, and I was very happy hearing [Mr. Mahoney] say that over [$404] million get dispensed through Bank of America ATMs every week. So, we're very happy to hear that.
Okay, great. Maybe, yes, I think what's the Mark Twain quote? "The reports of my demise have been greatly exaggerated.
Interesting.
Yeah, we can talk about cash usage as part of our talk this morning. So, okay, so just in case we have anyone in the audience that's newer to the Diebold story or just needs a quick refresh, it'd be great if you could just use a minute or two to just give a brief summary of the business.
We have two business segments that we serve. One is financial services and banking, where we help automate transactions to our ATMs and teller cash recyclers, but more importantly, we're providing services and software to keep that ATM and branch infrastructure running. The other segment that we cover is retail, where we provide self-checkout solutions, point-of-sale solutions, and more importantly, the software to run that infrastructure, as well as the services to keep that running.
Okay, great. So, we'll go more in depth both on banking and retail and then talk about some financial and strategic topics. So, banking, I believe that's around 70% of revenue, low 70% of revenue. ATMs, could you just talk about your market position and your geographic presence?
We're a very global company. We're a company within the 20 countries. We have a direct presence of about a little bit over 60 of those. We have an installed base of ATMs globally for around 800,000 ATMs. That makes us the number one company globally, with approximately 33%-35% market share. That is our banking business. Again, some of the most leading financial institutions use our technology, whether it's the software or the services, or software on some of the largest ATM networks in the world, one of them being Bank of America, but also some other leading banks in the U.S., and as well as globally.
Okay, and then the revenue split between product, which is the hardware, but then services and software.
Yeah, so when you look at our business, this year, somewhere around $3.8 billion. $2.2 billion of that is services revenue. $1.6-$1.7 billion will be product revenue. So, the beauty of our business model is that this service revenue is recurring in nature. Of those $2.2 billion, approximately 70% plus of it is recurring. It's long-term contracts. The average life of an ATM or a self-checkout device, depending on the bank and the geography, but it's anywhere from five to seven years. And throughout that period, we have an ongoing service contract to maintain to update those devices, which provides great stability for the company, with very good visibility about our revenue or reads. Since $2.2 billion of our guarantee, almost guaranteed at the beginning of the year. The nice thing about the hardware business that we have is the attach rate for the services.
If you think about banking, it's somewhere between 90% and +95% . Every time we sell that piece of hardware, you get that annuity stream. Retail is a little bit less, but it's the same type of attachment rate.
Okay, and then so switching just for the intro to retail, so it's about 30-ish% of revenue, high 20% to 30%. And then the two main areas are point of sale and then the self-checkouts. So, I think your geographic mix is a little different than it is on the banking side. You should talk about that.
The nice thing about banking business is it has truly global business. The retail business, a little bit over $1 billion, we do over $900 million a year. So, we're the number one provider of point of sale technology, self-checkout in the European market, which is where we're from. But unfortunately, the European market is not the biggest retail market in the world. The biggest retail market in the world is the U.S. So, we were lucky enough that as Europe started adopting self-service in both grocers and fashion and the general merchandising, we were developing a new generation of self-checkout in point of sale. So, that's how we over the past, I would say, three years, we captured the number one position in the self-checkout space and point of sale space in Europe.
The good news for us is as we built this new technology, this new self-checkout technology, this new software technology, we're very linked to AI capabilities. That's what gave us that leading market position, the ability to recognize fresh produce at the self-checkout, the ability to do age verification when restricted products like alcohol, more importantly, the ability to prevent shrink or theft at the self-checkout and the point of sale, helped us really gain that number one position in Europe, and we were very fortunate that many of these large European retailers think of companies like[audio distortion ] , H&M, as they expand globally or as they have their global footprint, they would use our technology, so we were just following our [large European customers] as they expanded globally.
Late last year in 2024, once we had a very solid presence in Europe, the number one position, and we were confident about that, we started investing in creating a good sales force for the U.S., not just following our European customers, but actually being very focused on winning new customers in the U.S. We've been doing that all throughout this year. We're very excited about where we are. The shrink solution is being tested at some of the largest grocers in the country. If you've been shopping at some of the fashion retailers, think of Uniqlo, H&M, you'll see that now. Self-checkout is moving away just from groceries where it started, and it's moving into fashion. It just flows into a market and automatically scans for shrink. We're very excited because retail provides a huge growth opportunity for us as we enter the U.S. market.
Fascinating. So, we have some follow-up questions, especially on the AI and kind of some tangible use cases that you started talking about. Let's just double back to the banking side and now to retail. So, overall, the growth outlook, I think obviously a key driver of growth is branch automation opportunities. So, the DN Series cash recyclers, I think you guys talk about that a lot. I think that is where you're generating a lot of growth. Can you talk about what differentiates that product?
Yeah, so just for the benefit of most people, when you think of ATMs, they seem like a very simple machine, and if you're talking to people, they really don't understand how they work. They put money in, and then money comes out on the other side. Those in the past were two different, if you want to think about it, two different markets in the ATM, so you might run out of cash to dispense, but you would have a lot of cash that was deposited. Recycling, as the name says, just basically that same cash that's coming in is the same cash that's coming out. That creates tremendous operational efficiencies for banks. When you think of a bank branch, a good part of the expense is getting money in and out of the branch or that whole cash cycle.
By using recycling, we can really differentiate. We reduce the cost of moving cash inside of a branch. We're taking cash to the branch, filling up the ATMs. This cost cannot be reduced with this recycling mechanism. We believe that it creates a very positive ROI for our customers. Our customers that have the core technology see roughly a 20% drop in the cost of cash management in the branch. Which, just to give you an example, if you have a branch in New York City, just having one of these big armored trucks get there and take cash in and take cash out probably costs somewhere between $500 plus every time they do it. You can imagine that quickly one of these machines can pay for itself.
We've expanded that technology also to do it inside the branch where the teller can also have a teller cash recycling. And this creates the ability to really turn your tellers in the branch into more sellers because you are automating a lot of the transactions, a lot of the handling of money is now done by machines. So, your teller personnel can now be a lot more productive and be more focused on servicing your customers rather than doing just transactions. Transactions can now be done at the ATM with the teller cash recycling. This creates great efficiency for banks.
Okay, and then in terms of the growth outlook on ATMs, so just a couple of questions to wrap together here, so where are we in the cycle of ATM refresh? And then with regard to the growth outlook, you already have high market share, but is the DN Series cash recyclers, is that allowing you to kind of increase or capture more market share?
I always have to be focused on the market. We believe that we have a very differentiated product. Product that is very unique in the market. We were pioneers in this recycling technology. Our product, the engine that runs the recycler, we call it [RM4]. It is the fourth generation recycler that we've built. We believe it's a very solid product. We are winning new customers globally, so we're very proud of that. As we look into the out years and probably this goes into our growth algorithm, the ATM market overall globally is a flat-ish market, probably up 1% one year, flat-ish another year. There's 2 million plus ATMs in the world. That's been the same for the past five years. We believe that that will be the same in the coming years. Every bank is moving to recycling.
So, traditionally, ATM with recycling can become a lot more efficient. So, we see that with recycling, we will continue to expand our market share position. And we've seen that in the U.S., particularly one of the biggest markets that we see, where we continue to gain, too. The other important part is that as we think of cash, cash has remained a very resilient part of the payments ecosystem. Roughly, globally, in these countries where 98% of payments are done in cash, as I've shown in the presentation, around 17%-18% of payments are done in cash in the U.S. And that has basically been the same for the past couple of years. Debit, credit, peer-to-peer, other forms of payment keep growing, but the amount of payments done in cash remains very stable.
Again, we see that with recycling some of the things that we're doing, we'll grow too. And then, as we look forward to this stable market, we believe that we can expect 1% to 2% growth just based on pricing. That's in line with global economic inflation, probably 1% to 2% in the outer years, and then we've developed what we call our branch automation solutions, which is basically the ATM plus the teller cash recycling plus our software and services that clearly create a better ecosystem for branch cash management. We believe that that can give us another 1% to 1.5% points of growth, and then a very interesting point. There's parts of the world where cash remains the prevalent payment method, and particularly in some of the Asian markets, like the emerging markets, Middle East markets, we launched a strategy called fit-for-purpose payments.
[audio distortion], I'll give you an example in India. India, the largest bank in India, the State Bank of India, has 70,000 ATMs. They have 7,000 ATMs every year. We really weren't participating in that market because the same product that we sell in the U.S. or in Europe or in other parts really didn't fit the market requirements. So, we set up a manufacturing facility in India, the country of manufacturing, and now we're able to address that market. So, our fit-for-purpose products for Asia, Middle East, I think will allow us to really be more at another point of growth because we believe that the long-term algorithm for our banking business should be growing in the mid-single digits.
Okay. That's great. You've crammed a lot of my questions. That was great. So, teller cash recyclers, what's new and differentiated because you've really started to talk about the opportunity there?
So, if you think of, when you think of a good place for any bank, the majority of the cost is in the people, in the facility, and then people are going to technology and other things. But when you think of how do I change really the branch experience? How do I make the people at the branch more productive? How can they be focused on selling products, on serving customers rather than doing transactions? At an ATM, you can probably do now 90+% of any transaction that you need. But you still have a lot of small, medium businesses that touch your branch. So, by automating the touch point of the teller with the teller cash recycler, you can really make the process for all those deposits, all those withdrawals, really more automated. Your tellers don't have to touch cash.
It allows you to really change the performance of the branch where before you would have a vault where you would keep cash, move it to the teller, process that in banking. You're probably spending and earning from your vault. I think that by putting common technology at the teller, common technology at the ATM, and the software that controls that infrastructure, we can move the cash from one device to another and once again make the branch more efficient. People don't have to count money to put into the ATM. People don't have to put money into the ATM, all sits in cassettes. Then into the teller, into the teller line, the ATM, really creating a cash flows ecosystem where all the cash in the branches are accounted for. Then you can become a lot more efficient.
Okay, great. So, switch to retail. So, it was a good introduction when you talked about your position in Europe and the strategic push more into the U.S. So, you raised your AI-driven solutions. So, if you could just give us another use case of where you've rolled this out, and in particular, its effectiveness in improving shrinkage, which I think has been a real Achilles heel for retail, particularly in the U.S. recently.
It's pretty electronic. It's always very happy highlighting the use cases that we have seen. I think it is, we think, a very differentiated aspect to our own product. It's got the ability to, when you're at the self-checkout, it's got 27 algorithms to avoid fraud. On your way home from this conference, try to think of five, and if you get more than five, you should probably check yourself in somewhere because it's very hard to do. Not only does it enable texting at the checkout, but it also enables it, we can work with the closed-circuit TV systems within the supermarket that track you from the minute that you walk in. Obviously, there are regulations and privacy laws that you have to worry about and comply with. But it also not to hide, right?
If you're using things in a running basket, but elsewhere, it can sense that. And then when you pick out, it kind of just stalls the transaction, right? Someone can come along and say, "Oh, you didn't scan this. Let me help you," etc. So, we are seeing a reduction in shrink of 70%. And that's been sort of field tested now multiple times. And that average is very consistent across a lot of different usage. But it's not just about the AI piece too. It's also about we have consulting services, and we can help you configure your store in such a way that just makes it a more secure environment, not only for your product, but for your employees as well.
Okay, and then, so it seems like you might be early inning on this in terms of the rollout, but where are you in getting traction on the rollout within your existing customers?
So, I can tell you that in Europe, we've had consistent customers who have been very successful deployments. For a long distance, they transmitted simply with [audio distortion], where again we have 70% shrink reduction plus great employee productivity. So, we're very excited about that. We're rolling it out in various groceries in the U.K. And particularly in the U.S., we are right now, and I don't remember the data better than me, but 10 proof of concepts going on with large grocers in the U.S., where we're testing this in some of the drug stores, getting ready to pilot it in other stores. We're excited that by, hopefully, by end of the year, we'll have our first points in the U.S. with some of the more well-known brands here in America.
Okay. And then, is this what you're leading with as you kind of push more into North America?
I would tell you in North America, we have a very, when you think of self-checkout, we were able to win the number one position in Europe very quickly in terms of something called self-checkout because we built a modular product and a modular model software architecture. So, when you think of the U.S., we started rolling out self-checkout probably 25 years ago. And at that time, it was a very tightly coupled solution. To use somebody's software, you needed to use that same company's software. And today, in the modern world, it seems almost absurd that you would be locked into a supplier bundled hardware and software. But 25 years ago, it was something on your phone bank position. Today, every large grocer, every large cashier in the world is trying to get into those two things. And our products are more that way.
Our software can run any self-checkout from any other supplier and work within a DN software. One of the beauties of this product is that as people look to decouple these things, we can start winning with our modular hardware, modular software. Then we can add the component that our AI solution can run both on our hardware because it's really not tied to any particular technology. Those are, I would say, the three things: the open modular architecture and hardware and software, and the ability to put AI across these technologies.
Okay, great. Let's shift to some financial topics. So, for 2025 guidance, I think you've said you're tracking to the high end of guidance. So, that's low single-digit % revenue growth. EBITDA close to $490 million, which is up $30 million to $40 million a year, 6% to 8%.
There you go.
Yep. And free cash flow close to $210 million. So, that's a big improvement over 2024. So, what has driven you to the high end of your growth outlook, the margin improvement, and the strong free cash flow conversion?
Let me start with free cash flow so I'm not getting my back up. Free cash flow is some of the biggest attribute that people expect from us. The ability to generate it. So, when we hosted Investor Day in New York earlier this year, we said over the next three years, we would expect to be able to generate cumulative free cash flow of $800 million. To put that in perspective, our market cap is $2.4 billion as of opening this morning. So, that's a third of our market cap that we're able to generate in free cash flow. Take that, look at perhaps where our stock price is trading today, and you will believe what we believe that our stock is underappreciated and undervalued. So, that kind of brings us to capital allocation frameworks, and that's the share buyback.
In February of last year, we announced a $100 million share buyback as well. We wrapped that up in October and came out during our third quarter earnings release and announced that we're going to double that and buy back upwards of $200 million, something that we would hope to be able to complete in a similar timeframe, right? We built in flexibility. When you think about the ability to generate cash over time, this year, we're going to likely nearly double, if not double, free cash flow and to be able to continue to grow. Think about even in 2027, somewhere between $550 million and $600 million, right? Which is what we said, the 60% conversion rate into free cash flow. And our CapEx requirement, less than 1.5 times, right? Very light CapEx environment. We're not very acquisitive.
We do have a pipeline, but they're all sort of strategic, very service-based, right? The consolidation within regions. So, our mantra for an acquisition, and we've successfully completed one last quarter, is it's going to be small. So, think under $30-ish million. The multiple of revenue, that's how I talk about it in service, one times, and that's got to be immediately accretive, right? So, those are great. We put it into a core and we're able to grow it. We've been completing very successful one last quarter for about $15 million on the East Coast. Not only does it service our machines, it serves other machines, so it's an environment for growth for us. But we feel that's one of the tenets, but nothing too big.
At the end of the day, we're very committed as a management team to giving back our free cash flow, if not the vast, or if not all the vast majority of it, to shareholders for now in the form of a shareholder buyback. Revenue growth, that mid-single digits is where we expect to land in 2027. How do we get there? It's a combination of our banking or brand foundation solutions, right? That Octavio talked about, that fit for purpose. That's a very big opportunity for us. If you think about a retail business, we're roughly, it's a $1-billion business. $900 million of it is in Europe. A few million is in the rest of the world. The rest of the world is greenfield to us. Now, as Octavio alluded to, we do have very entrenched customers.
But we went out and hired a sales team, particularly in North America, and we focused on 40 accounts. 40 accounts where we know that those machines are coming to end of life or there's going to be a software upgrade. Both of those opportunities bring on what I would refer to as a competitive RFP opportunity for us. And we feel right now with the modularity and the flexibility that that offers with or without our software, right? We always like it with the software, particularly with this AI component and what that can lead to. We think we have a very compelling proposition for customers. So, more to come on that. To Octavio's point, right? We have multiple proof of concepts. We have many test pilots that are ongoing as well. I mean, this is a new technology. It's a document, right? So, it is seeing the results.
So, funny story about [ATM machine]. We actually had them speaking on yesterday. When we went to go take out sort of the demos, right, and told them that we would install the real final product, they absolutely refused. They said, "We don't want to go out of our store for one minute, less one day, less one week." Because it works, right? So, we're adamant about that. So, obviously, we were able to work with them. I just bring that up as a proof point, right? When the retailers make that investment, it's a big investment. And the return is there, right? If you think about the bigger retailers, shrink is 1%-2% revenue. So, if you're able to meet 70%, as we've demonstrated now time and time again, that's a really good ROI and a very compelling position.
So, we think all those factors help us get to mid-single digit growth. Pricing entitlement 1%-2% a year, I would say too. And then the rest comes from these strategic initiatives.
Okay, and then the EBITDA margin, so I think the 2027 target is 15%.
15%.
Your 12% area currently. So, is that mix with higher software attached, or is it just good old cost cutting?
It's a combination of both, right? Think about our service business, which is approximately $2.3 billion on a $4 billion company over the time we're in 2027. The margins that we have today, and this is what we said in our third quarter earnings call, we're going to be flat this year at 26%. We see a pathway to be able to grow our service margins. I would say 50 basis points a year for the foreseeable future, the next couple of years, certainly over that planned time. What we were able to do this year because our product margins were so high last quarter is that we pulled in some necessary investments. Think about a consolidation of our spare parts depots.
We're rolling out a software technology that not only helps route our field technicians, of which there are 14,000 globally, so a really big asset for us. It can service both banking and retail and just really looked at that footprint as well and began to shrink it, so we feel that we have line of sight to be able to grow 50 plus basis points each year. Product margins, we've seen a complete transformation under Octavio's leadership. We're going from 13% margin about three years ago to last quarter 20%, and we still expect to be able to go and grow product margins 25 to 50 basis points a year. Maybe not next year because this year we did have two airplanes and greater geographical mix, but those opportunities exist because from services and products, 100% of us need.
We run huge supply chains a year, and they lead to not only safety improvements, better quality, and better profitability, and a heck of a lot more flexibility than this company has ever had in the manufacturing line.
Okay, and because this is a credit conference, can you talk about your leverage target and in particular credit rating profile if you have a target there?
So, your credit rating, if you're not familiar with the brokerage community, we're at a third line with both S&P and Moody's, recently upgraded by S&P. Look, our goal is to get closer to investment grade. I'm not sure we're there, right? And starting where we were, we've actually sort of shortened that gap by about 50%. So, more work to do, but we feel very encouraged. And if we continue to do what we said we're going to do, we'll meet our cash flow targets. By the way, this year, and if you look across our industry, this is a real challenge. We have positive free cash flow in every single quarter. Doesn't seem like a very big deal, but it is because none of our competitors can do it. And we did, right?
So, first quarter. Think about, people, 120% of our free cash flow was generated in the month of December because that's when we would get our dedicated service margins. We didn't grow anything to the business. We just really began to focus much more disciplined on DSO, right? So, think about DSO is about $10 million or so a day. This quarter, if you or third quarter, if you compare it to last year, nine days of DSO improvement. We got at least another nine days, right? If not more opportunity. VIO. Think about that in $5-$7 million of free cash flow for every single day, 11 days of improvement, right? So, we're very focused on having the install schedule, manufacturing to that install schedule with the factory and the lean components in there. We have ultimate flexibility.
So, if things push and we get a retail order in, we have flexible lines no more than a retool, sort of old school manufacturing. We're just able to capitalize on those opportunities more efficiently.
Okay, great. So, with about a minute left, I'd like to offer you an ability to just wrap up. Is there anything we didn't touch on or?
One of the key things is this is a simple DS conference. So, in order to leverage profile, we always want to get that improvement. 1.2 and 1.7, today we're at 1.6. We have $950 million of improvement approximately that we will be refinancing sometime in the fourth quarter of this year. So, we believe we can do much better than the way that we got to be as the company is clearly improving operationally. So, we're very excited about the future. To wrap it up, I would just say we have a very simple business model. We build great technology, great hardware, great software products that then create a very sticky service annuity for many, many years now. So, it's a simple business model that, as Tom alluded, the benefit of that simple business model is that it can generate tremendous amounts of cash when it's running correctly.
So, once again, that's why we're excited about our company, and we believe that we're in the early stages of what is the new deal breakthrough. So, thank you very much.
Great. Octavio and Tom, thank you so much.
Thank you so much for.