On behalf of Stephens, I wanna thank the team from NCR Atleos for joining us today as well. Thank you, gentlemen.
Yeah, thank you, Chuck. Appreciate it.
Great. So, we have the CFO and the COO of the company here.
Thanks.
Stuart and Paul.
So, gentlemen, thanks again. It's been a very eventful two years leading up to where we are today. And for those that aren't familiar with the NCR Atleos story and the NCR story, they were spun off recently from NCR. The business is comprised of the legacy self-service banking assets, as well as the payments and network assets. The spin was completed on October 16th, so you are now trading as a standalone public company. So congrats on completing the spin. Could you just briefly recap the rationale behind it and the mechanics behind the transaction?
Yeah, maybe I'll go first, Stuart.
Yeah.
Paul Campbell, your CFO. I think when we were a conglomerate as NCR, we had five segments. I think the segments weren't very conducive to each other. We had a retail segment, we had digital banking, we had hospitality, we had payments and networks, and we had self-service banking. And I think the for analysts to cover us, very few analysts cover a business that covers all those segments. They tend to be a bit more focused. So we found we got a conglomerate valuation when we went to the market. We found when we talked to analysts, that they found our model very complex to build for them, and we felt we'd be more focused and more able to deliver as an independent company.
When we look at the business that spun off in Atleos, we're the self-service banking business and the network business, and these are two business that are they're very very linked to each other, and sometimes it's the self-service banking business can help bring in the network business, and network business can bring in the self-service banking business. So we feel that the market valuation of our company, when we're so specific, we get a clear message out there. We feel that the multiple we obtain will be better. We also feel that our results will be better because we're very focused when it comes to capital allocation and things, we're very focused on the ATM business.
Yeah.
Stuart, anything?
We'll drill-
Yeah
... into those areas. That's a great starting point. But just in terms of the businesses and markets you operate in, as well as those opportunities and just opportunity to create shareholder value as a standalone entity, could you touch on that as well as some of the 2027 financial targets you recently provided?
Yeah, I'll touch on the space and the market. So we're in roughly 140 countries, so broad geographic reach. We sell to banks and retailers. That's really the people where our products go to. And we really think of the market really as our retail network, so those are ATMs we own and operate inside a Walgreens or a Target or a CVS, really focused on high-end retail networks where we can build utility infrastructure that banks can take advantage of. And then, of course, our traditional business, we've been selling ATMs and branch infrastructure into banks for decades. So we have long-standing relationships with these guys. We deliver service there, and that's a great part of our business.
Those two are very complementary in that they leverage the same manufacturing assets, they leverage the same service assets, and they leverage the same platform around what it takes to own, operate, manage, put cash in, do software for. Everything we do for our own network of 80,000 ATMs are the same services we can now deliver into our banking customers. So really excited about that, dynamic leverage that we gain from the scale of owning that network. You want to talk about the 2027?
Yeah, so 2027 targets. Our plan to grow isn't around gaining significant market share. It isn't around there being more ATMs in the market, isn't about around there being more transactions done by cash. It's about us taking more of the share. So if you think of the network business Stuart talked about, it's more about putting more transactions through the existing install base. So we're targeting, we're getting more types of transactions and more subscribers to our Allpoint network to drive more users as well, driving the transactions we do. In self-service banking, it's more about taking... We've got an install base of around 600,000 units. It's taking more of those install base units and converting them to ATM as a service, so it's driving us to run the network for the banks.
We can do it cheaper than the banks, and we can do it at scale. We have 80,000 units of our own. We already run the network, so we can do that at scale. So when we move our growth platforms to doing more than what we've got today, we leverage scale, and we drive our margins up.
Got it. So you touched on a couple of areas of value creation. I wanna back up a couple of years. You mentioned Allpoint. That came through an acquisition called Cardtronics. Cardtronics also broadened your service offering in the ATM space as well. So could you maybe tell us about that acquisition? I think it's very relevant today because without it, you could argue that Atleos wouldn't have the go-to-market and value proposition to its customers that it has today.
Yeah, I think so as we look at ATM as a Service, which is our... essentially, we walk into your bank, and you hand us the keys to your network, and we run everything soup to nuts, door to door. As NCR, before the Cardtronics acquisition, we would walk in, and you would and say: "We can operate all of this for you." And they would ask us: "How many do you operate today?" And we would say: "About 0."... Right, so that's a pretty challenging conversation. As Cardtronics, we owned and operated 80,000 machines, so it gave us that operator credibility. We know what it takes to keep a machine running every day. We know the importance of the availability of the device, and we know all of the things that a bank needs to do to operate it.
So it really gave us that credential, that's helped us accelerate our ATM as a service journey. We've got about 70 deals done now in the last 18 months. The pipeline is incredibly robust, and it's that credibility to walk in a bank that differentiates us from our competitors. None of our competitors own an ATM network.
Yep.
And that part of it gives us that end-to-end capability, so we can walk in with confidence that we can deliver. It's a trust-based relationship. The self-service devices in a bank are their most important assets from a 24/7 capability to deliver to their customers. They're generally ranked second behind digital banking assets in terms of a customer's reason for choosing a primary financial institution. So really getting that operator capability from Cardtronics and that base of ATMs that we can now offer as a Utility Banking Infrastructure to our bank partners has changed, really, our sales motion and how we talk to banks about retail distribution and what we do for them.
I think also, Stuart, it goes the other way as well, that with the self-service banking infrastructure, we do servicing in 60 countries.
Yep.
When we acquired Cardtronics, they did it in nine. So now with the scale that we've got in countries where it's cash-centric and economies, we've gone in, we've added Greece and Portugal in 2023. So we've now gone up, and we've still got.. We're looking at all the cash-based economies and looking if we can pull in the network business into areas where we're successful in this, in the self-service banking business.
Why would a bank look to outsource its ATM capabilities and consolidate vendors? I wanna touch on that because I think it's relevant because usage of cash, which is definitely a relevant topic, gets a fair bit of attention. But I think what's lost on a lot of investors is the value proposition of that ATM-as-a-service offering, as well as Allpoint. Because I think it really fits what's going on in the banking industry given the, you know, increased emphasis on efficiency and cost containment.
Yeah, I mean, you hit it right there. So the number 1 reason is to reduce costs. So nobody is signing an ATM-as-a-service deal unless we can reduce their total operating cost, right? So in our sales motion, a big part of that is helping financial institutions understand the cost of operating their current ATM fleet. Many of them, most of them, have been doing it for decades by themselves. They'll buy an ATM from us or somebody else and then run everything else themselves inside the four walls. So helping them understand their true costs, and we know what they are because we own and operate our own much larger fleet. We can sort of model for them, "These are the costs that it takes today," and in an outsourced engagement, we aim to reduce that by about 20%.
Mm-hmm.
And that's a meaningful number to a lot of financial institutions in terms of their costs. The banks are on the move. So when you talk about cash, we see a real sort of paradigm shift of large banks reducing branch footprints and small to mid-sized banks actively increasing branch footprints or moving. So I use PNC as a great example. They're a customer of ours, Pittsburgh bank. We're trying to get into Texas and other regions where they traditionally haven't had business, and they use our utility infrastructure in Allpoint. So that's the machines we have to be able to service those cardholders before they can build branches, right? They can't build fast enough.
They don't really wanna build branches, but they wanna make sure they can continue to service the lending business, the mortgage business, all of the businesses out there, and so they use our infrastructure to do that. They're also changing the complexity of the branch. If you live in New York, you've seen this. It's sort of moving around the country in different areas, where they're moving to a café or a concierge-style branch. So a traditional branch that we've all walked into for decades, two tellers, one ATM in the lobby, and one in the drive-up, right? Depending on where you are. Really eliminating no tellers, and they call them cashless branches, three self-service devices, so increasing the density of self-serve, and then one or two drive-ups, depending if they're in a mall or where they are.
And so that self-service density is also propelling our value proposition in terms of, if you have a kid like mine, who doesn't want to ever talk to anyone, and wants to do everything, you know, in a self-serve environment-
Yeah
... that generation really prefers to self-serve.
Got it. You touched on competition and your peers a little bit, but I wanna double-click on that topic because the ATM-as-a-service offering, particularly its breadth, is quite differentiated. So could you maybe talk about who you compete against specifically, and how your product set matches up with those peers?
Sure. I said before, before we acquired Cardtronics, we were, we couldn't walk into a bank with confidence and say: "We can take everything you do and do it ourselves," because we didn't do most of it, right? We sold great hardware. We sold. We had great software, great people running around fixing them, when they happened, but we didn't know anything else or do anything else. Our competitors, Diebold, you know, everybody knows Diebold. They've had, they've had their challenges. Brinks have a bunch of guys in trucks running around delivering money to ATMs every day and would like to do other things at the ATM and potentially try to manage them on their behalf.
Fiserv and FIS, great relationships with banks, provide all their core infrastructure, also like to sell other anything they can sell to a bank. Those are primarily our competitors. Euronet, across the pond-
Yep
... very strong competitor, also an operator, so they've got a mentality closer to ours. What differentiates us really is that we are a manufacturer, right? Our hardware is less than 20% of our revenue, but we can manufacture that asset for serviceability, and so we can drive efficiency into the service channel. The service channel is our largest revenue line item, delivering service, and that's where we, as we migrate to ATM as a service, that revenue climbs. We own all of that stack from top to bottom. So, our competitors, more often than not, almost all the time, have to stitch together and subcontract out specific services in the stack. The only thing we don't do is deliver cash.
Mm-hmm.
Right? So we partner with Brinks and Loomis and Armaguard and all of those guys to deliver the cash, but we do everything else. When a Brinks wins a deal, they have to buy an ATM from somebody, quite often us.
Yeah.
Right? They have to get service from somebody and parts from somebody, quite often us, Euronet the same. Those are great customers of ours and great partners of ours, who we see, now trying to compete with us.
Got it. What are some of the KPIs investors could look at to gauge the progress of the ATM as a service initiative? As it progresses, what will the revenue composition look like between hardware, software, services versus today?
Yeah, so I think the KPIs we're looking at initially is gonna be the recurring revenue mix.
Yeah.
So you've seen that's gone from, if we go back a few years, it was less than 50%. In the quarter we just published, it was 72% of our revenue was recurring. So that's really showing we're moving up the, the value chain there on the recurring revenue piece. Hardware is now less than 20%. We expect that to be less than 10% when we get to 2027. What we'll see is that more of our revenue will collapse into the ATM as a Service. So even if it was a- when it was an upfront hardware sale, that'll become part of the ATM as a Service line, and you'll see those lines will be cannibalized as we get to a single offering, which is ATM as a Service.
Got it.
So that'll be a significant mix as you go forward. You asked about KPIs. So initially, we're, we're looking at recurring revenue mix and the number of ATM as a service units. Once that gets to scale, we'll start looking at an ARPU measure, too. Because the scale is so small, it's currently around 18,000 out of a 600,000 base, is too small for an ARPU. I think it could move in ways that'd be different than our results. So I think just the absolute volume, the trend on that, and then the, the recurring revenue mix. On the, on the self-service banking, on the network piece, the KPIs we're looking at is, we're looking at the ARPU, the average revenue per unit, and we're showing the number of units. We're not proposing that the number of units should grow.
We're trying to maximize the amount of revenue in the existing base to maximize profit. So we want the ARPU to grow steadily and consistently on a quarterly basis, and the number of units is just to help calculate the math on the revenue-
Got it.
But not necessarily trying to grow that metric.
What are the underlying assumptions around industry ATMs outstanding associated with that $120,000, $120,000 target?
Jim?
So if you look at RBR, I think they call themselves RBT now, after some acquisitions, they're really, you know. They essentially espouse that the number of ATMs is probably flat to 1% going, you know, over the course of the period. We see that very clearly in most of our markets. Some of our markets are down a little bit, some of our markets are up a little bit. In the U.S., as I said, we see large banks closing branches, while small and medium-sized banks are growing branches. And so our actual footprint has stayed fairly consistent through all of that change.
Got it. I think that's important, just to put a finer point on that. The revenue growth is coming from the ARPU uplift, so you're essentially targeting mid-single-digit growth in an environment where ATMs outstanding are flat to down. Is that a fair way to characterize it?
Yeah. Absolutely.
Yeah, and that's a combination of our existing footprint of machines that we own and operate in Walgreens and whatnot. We are Allpoint network transactions. If you look at, we just published the third quarter, transactions on the Allpoint network were up 12% year-over-year, and that's really that bank migration. Roughly 80% of cash transactions today still happen in branches, and we partner with our banks to move those transactions over to our retail network. So that utility banking infrastructure really absorbing off of the branch, that's the growth that we're seeing and we continue to expect to see.
Got it. Okay, just moving to financials. So you just filed Q3 results. Could you walk us through some of the highlights and takeaways, as well as any read-throughs we could glean heading into Q4?
Yeah, Chuck, it was a pretty messy quarter. You know, a lot of the heavy lift on the spin happened in Q3. So you think of the context, it's a 140-year-old company.
Yep.
We had 200 legal entities around the world that we split in between the two entities. We created 36 new legal entities crossing 72 countries, so it was messy. You could see, if you look at our GAAP results, our tax rate is, like, 167%. So there's a lot of transactions that happened on a GAAP basis that were messy. If you go to our non-GAAP measures, though, it's a really fantastic quarter. You saw self-service banking grew 4%, and the network grew 7%. That's on the higher end of our growth projections of... We're seeing self-service bank as kind of 1%-3%, and networks is in the, you know, around the 7%, so really good quarter there.
Most all of it coming from recurring revenue, revenue up—recurring revenue up to nearly 72% from, you know, we're, we're thinking about 68% this year, so really good progress. And if you look at profit, self-service banking up from a very tough compare last year because of all the supply chain issues-
Yep
... but up 23%, and then the network, despite headwind from interest, up 14%. So really, I would say that operationally, a fantastic quarter, despite all the distractions from the spin.
Got it. Can you talk about the recurring revenue headwind from the ATM as a Service, transition?
No, the recurring revenue will have a tailwind from that, because you'll take revenues that were one-time, like hardware and installation services.
Or revenue rather, I guess, as you switch to license-
Oh, so the total revenue headwind. Yeah, the... You're going to take revenue from hardware and transaction services that would naturally happen upfront.
Yep.
And then you'll take that, and you'll bundle it into the ATMs-as-a-Service, and you'll take it ratably over 7 years. So we are expecting about $100 million headwind in this, in 2024 for the impact of that transaction. But what you do is you take. That's not just a case of taking that revenue and spreading it out through the next 7 years. When we go ATMs-as-a-Service, we get 2.5x the total revenue stack that we normally get. So it's going to take us about 2 years of headwind, and then it becomes a tailwind. We'll see in self-service banking a kind of 1%-3% growth in the early years, but that'll compound as you get to 2026 and 2027.
Mm-hmm
-once the tailwind of the 2.5x-
Yeah
Recurring revenue flow. And that, and that helps with our recurring revenue as well. You're taking... That, that's what drives hardware down from 20% of our total, down to less than 10. When you've got, when you've got a 90% recurring revenue business, your predictability is amazing.
Got it. I want to spend some time talking about the capital structure and, and debt, then we can move on to capital allocation from there. Just as a starting point, could you give us a snapshot of what the capital structure looks like today, post-spin, as well as, what you're targeting for leverage over the next few years?
Yeah. We took on about $2.9 billion of debt at rates we don't love.
Yeah.
So, you know, we were hoping for different rates than we got. But, you know, we got the debt secured, we spun. That was the primary objective. So because of the price of that debt, the near-term goal is to bring the debt down. So we're at a leverage of about 3.7 as we spin, and then we're going to try and get down to 3 as quickly as we can.
Got it.
About $3.9 billion. It's split between Term Loan A, Term Loan B, and about $1.3 billion in bonds.
Okay. Can you talk about the free cash flow generation capabilities of the business and how we should think about conversion going forward?
Yeah. We're expecting this to be a bit capital-intensive in this business because of the hardware assets. We're working on mechanisms to finance the hardware assets off.
Yep.
But if you take away the growth CapEx in 2027, I think we published a bridge of the growth, the CapEx. We're going to have from EBITDA to the normal free cash flow, excluding the growth CapEx, is about a 60% conversion, which is great.
Yep.
If you take in the $300 million that we have in growth CapEx, it brings it down to $30 million. But we'll find ways to finance off that $300 million of growth CapEx. The other thing is that almost all of that $300 million of growth CapEx is relating to future revenue streams. There's not much in period revenue from that. So we're going to, we're going to work our way through our model. Given the price of the debt that we've got, we're going to look to try and find ways to minimize the amount of capital outlay that we've got to do.
Got it. What does that CapEx look like as a percentage of revenue or sales?
It's about 8%-
Got it.
... in 2027.
Got it. Okay. So upon reaching... Well, you've talked about instituting a dividend.
Yep
... in the near term. We could touch on that, but, just looking further ahead, upon reaching your leverage targets, could you talk about your capital allocation priorities over the medium to long term?
Yeah. So the dividend's important. I think we want to appeal to multiple investors that like that. They need to have a dividend in their portfolio. It's, it's not material to, from a cash flow perspective. We're talking about 35% to start with, of our free cash flow, and then we'll look once we get further out and get the leverage down, we'll make decisions about the capital allocation then. Near term, it's basically debt. We've got no plans for any material M&A. We've got no imminent plans for stock buybacks. Obviously, that depends what happens with stock, but the near term, first two years, it's really a modest but meaningful dividend, and then pay down debt, and then when we get to end of 2025 into 2026, we can look at what's the best way to allocate our capital.
So is there any M&A out there that's important? Is it right for stock buybacks for us, or is it right, maybe we put more into dividend?
Got it. So you announced an investor update call for December 5th. What could we expect you to cover on that call?
Yeah, so we'll definitely go deeper into the results. So we published a 10-Q, mainly the statutory information we had to provide. We were... It was quite a messy close for us, so we just made it to the 10-Q. So we didn't really publish much in terms of the non-GAAP stuff-
Right
... and that was really time-based, that we, we just got there no more. So we're going to publish more of our KPIs along with the investor day deck. We're going to get a bit more detail on what happened in results, some key wins, some key market things. Also, as we've been going through the spin, we want to be very transparent with investors, and we, we kind of did investors day. We had a lot of meetings like this. We had a lot of feedback, and then we published another 8-K with an updated deck that clarified a lot of the questions that we did, and we're going to do the same. We're going to look at the questions we've had since the last 8-K and augment the deck with information we've been asked for, but haven't provided yet.
Yep.
Then we'll put that into the deck and go through it with, on the call.
Well, this may be touching on a few of those topics, but, could you maybe talk about, some of the separation-related costs as well as dis-synergies, we should expect out of the business going forward? Not sure what you've disclosed already, but I think from a modeling perspective, that would be helpful for investors.
Yeah. So for the separation cost, the one-time cost, we're working through that now. So it's... We had a lot of expensive advisors who enjoy charging us a lot of money, a lot of expensive banker fees, so we're working through that now. So if I think through go forward, that we disclosed, I think in the 8-K, $45 million-$50 million of dis-synergies. We'll look at—but we said we'd resolve them in year one with cost out in other areas of the business. As we're looking to those, we're looking to avoid adding a lot of those. So we're seeing opportunity. I think the $45 million-$50 million we disclosed earlier would be on the high side, and that's an ongoing cost for the dis-synergies.
... Are there efficiencies to be gained, or are you able to offset some of those incremental costs through optimization initiatives, whether it's on the manufacturing side, or on the service side, or on the back office side?
Yeah, absolutely. All, all of the above. So we, we have an, like a GE process—a GE equivalent process of going through, looking at cost reductions, looking programmatically at where we can save costs on the... And that's been in place on the services side and the manufacturing side for some time. We're looking to augment that, but also, Stuart's recently kicked off a process. We're doing that across all of our business now. So in Stuart's COO organization, we've got... What's the team called? Oh, an unnamed team.
Separate team.
An unnamed or to-be-named team. But we're looking at costs across the board. So even from a finance perspective, my team are pulling initiatives together to reduce the finance cost. So every function has a goal to reduce cost next year, and we're gonna work those through. I think there's a lot of opportunity in our cost structure. You know, our previous mother company maybe wasn't as cost-centric as we could have been. You know, we've-
Got it.
Costs we could work through.
I'll ask one more question, and, and open it up to, to the audience. But, in terms of your relationship with Voyix going forward, are there any commercial agreements, or, can you maybe talk about that relationship going forward?
Yeah, so obviously, you have to work with a lot of people you don't like. We think these are people we work with that we like, so we're neighbors now in the building. We have commercial agreements to help to resell each other's solutions, so we are in many more countries than they are. So in those countries where they're not present, and we have the capabilities to support them, we'll resell some of their products for them. We have some TSAs around supporting their solutions and vice versa, in different regions where we have more coverage. You know, and a really easy example is we had a shared field service footprint, and we're now in the process of separating that field service footprint.
We have TSAs to make sure that in a small city where maybe there were two folks that service both the self-checkout and the ATM, that until we have sort of added more folks to that city, so that we have ATM people and self-service, sort of self-checkout people, that we cover each other. So, very cordial relationship, at least at this point.
Yeah, so we're friendly with them, but the... We are arm's length. Everything we do is dealt with. We're bound by contract.
Mm-hmm.
So it's a contractual relationship, so they were part of the family. Now they are a partner on a contractual basis.
Good. Well, they said they like you guys earlier, so that's good.
I didn't quite say that, but you know.
All right, at this point, I'm just gonna open it up to questions. I have a few more if there's nothing in the audience, but if anybody has anything.
Just a quick question. Just on the 9/30 balance sheet that's in the 10-Q, are there any material changes between that and the actual spin date?
Yeah, there'll be a lot, because the 9:30 balance in the-
In terms of the debt balance. I'm sorry, just really loud.
Yeah, because the debt in the queue was only the debt we took on. So when we closed the debt, we took the debt into escrow. So I think we've probably got $2.1 billion on the balance sheet, which we took to escrow. We didn't take the Term Loan A into escrow, so it'll go from roughly $2.1 billion- $2.9 billion.
Got it. Okay, thank you. It didn't show up any place else in the balance sheet? Doesn't know any sort of change in the balance-
No, there may be some notes that talk about the debt, but in the balance sheet, it should just be $2.1.
The second question, when you talk about the synergies of the $45 million-$50 million of synergies, is that net against the TSA, any sort of TSA or sort of future Voyix revenue? Do you think Voyix revenue will be a mean or contributor?
No, so that is net. That's the net dis-synergy. I wouldn't classify the Voyix revenue as a dis-synergy.
Okay.
We're gonna report the... All the dis-synergy is gonna sit in our payments and network, sorry, our payment, our network business and our self-service banking business and corporate. All the relationship with Voyix is gonna be in a, in a segment called Other. You'll probably see in our Q, it's there, it's there today.
Got it.
So all that will be—there'll be two pieces in the Other. There's some historical Voyix revenues aligning to our legal entities that's gonna wind down, and then the relationship, we, we actually manufacture for them as well. So their self-checkouts built in India is done by us, so that'll be in the other segment. We—that's roughly about $200 million of revenue per year—
Mm-hmm
... in the Other segment, but it's only a pass-through margin, so 5% or 6%.
Okay.
So we, we'll always talk to our segment results. We're not gonna use that in any way to show growth. It's to us, that's just kind of-
But if I look at the Q3-
There's nothing in for Q3, because we were a combined company, so that would be intercompany in Q3. So there's nothing yet, but starting in Q4, starting the seventeenth of October, anything we do for them would be a revenue transaction.
Your brother company got the Digital Insight assets? So same customer base, but is it a different buyer, or is it-
Yeah, when we, when we bought Digital Insight, you know, we sort of had an assumption that we, we would leverage our sales cycle, we would be selling to banks, they sell to banks. You know, really, we ended up separating almost entirely. We've been separate for several years now in terms of they have a completely different sales team, a completely different development team, a completely different product team, and we found that the people in the bank were completely different. So in the banking space, we were traditionally selling to the head of the retail bank, and they were selling to the head of digital. And those guys were so far apart that we were, you know, we very infrequently were able to leverage the, "Hey, you're buying this from us, please buy this from us," those relationships.
So, their capital intensity in terms of their almost an entire SaaS software product, so the amount of money that they need to invest and the type of investor that they attract is what we felt was much different than we're sort of a value-based, you know, steady Eddie, show some great growth in the out years as we mature ATM as a Service. They're more of a growthy software stock.
So, if I could get away from financials for a bit, I wanted to talk about the demand environment for ATMs, and specifically, where we are in the ATM refresh cycle, and how investors should think about the lifespan of ATMs, as well as the growing complexity of ATMs, and how that sort of lends itself for demand for, you know, more complex software and service solutions.
Sure. So, most banks refresh their ATMs on a sort of 5-7-year cycle. That's a combination of both technology change over that time, so as you mentioned, you know, we can do more complex transactions, we can do video teller, we can do tap, you know, we can interface with a mobile device directly. So technology change drives some of that. Useful life of the machine drives some of that, much like a motor vehicle.
Yep.
Right? And so the refresh cycle is typically 5-7 years. We had a very large refresh cycle in 2018, 2019 around the Windows 7-
Mm-hmm
... Intel chip sort of thing, and so most banks refreshed right there. It was a kind of a big peak for ATM manufacturers, and it's always challenging as a manufacturer in any business to scale up and scale back down around a peak, right? So we're now sort of 5 or 6 years from that refresh cycle. We're starting the next refresh cycle, but there isn't a cliff like there was in 2018 and 2019. That's much better for us because we can more predictably manufacture our devices and more predictably have those conversations. So we're in the—we think, you know, the next 3 or 4 years is kind of the next refresh cycle from the Windows 7 migration.
And those are our best opportunities for an ATM as-a-service conversation is when a bank is refreshing their estate, right? They're gonna do something, and now we have an opportunity to talk about their current cost structure. We can have a conversation different from any of our competitors, where if you have 100 ATMs, 7 years ago, I walked in and sold you 100 ATMs. Now, I'm gonna talk to you and say, "Maybe you need 70 ATMs, and join the Allpoint network and start pushing some of those cash transactions that are low value and expensive for you on a branch out to my retail network. I've got brand names.
You can tell your customers they can go to any Walgreens and have the exact same safe, secure, well-lit environment transaction, and you don't need to come into the branch." So if you're the Bank of Georgia Tech, and you have 20 branches, and you join Allpoint, you have global coverage now in terms of where your customers work and play. You can move into other geographies. You can service your students when they're at their summer home, which may not be in Georgia Tech. So that proposition is a different selling motion for us, and that refresh cycle coming along really helps us engage in those conversations.
Got it, and that's a good segue, because I did wanna touch on Allpoint a little bit. My understanding is the bulk of the growth comes from adding new institutions to the Allpoint network, which adds new transactions onto a single machine, but is there potential for location growth within Allpoint as well?
Yeah, I mean, right now, we're within, Allpoint ATM is within 5 miles of 85% of the U.S. population. So we feel pretty good about our footprint. We have some holes here and there that we might like to cover, but, we don't see—you know, doubling the network is not one of our ambitions. Having financial institutions join is important, so as we—So you know, we have about 1,100 financial institutions in there. There's about 4,000 in the U.S. So we've got a large sort of addressable market of gaining more transaction sets, but more importantly, partnering with banks and neobanks to actively promote the network and drive their customers in there. I'll give you a for example.
One of our great partners on the issuing side is Chime, one of the largest neobanks in the U.S. or the largest neobank in the U.S. They have no physical infrastructure, right? So we are their physical infrastructure. Their demographic lines up very well with Circle K, who is one of our great retail partners. And so we've, you know, so they naturally already are able to use those Circle K machines because they're part of the Allpoint network, but what we did was put them together and have them start cross-promoting each other. So, we have Chime pay us to put their brand on Circle K machines. So now Chime has, you know, what looks like physical infrastructure. You go to a Circle K machine, it'll look like a Chime ATM, right?
Circle K is cross-promoting, uh, Chime by—if you're a Chime cardholder, and you use that ATM, you'll get a coupon at the bottom of your receipt for a free coffee or a donut or whatever. So they're actively promoting each other's products, driving more Chime cardholders into the store. That's great for Chime. They have a good service footprint. They get that brand name recognition, and they can say, "Go to any Circle K." They don't have to say, "Go to the Bob's store on 20th Street," right? And for Circle K, every door swing is important to them as EVs sort of change the nature of a fuel distributor's sort of next ten years, right? They're really focused on getting people inside that location.
That's great. And if we could touch on the cost structure of Allpoint as well, and how the addition of transactions is really lends itself to the leverageability of that business.
Sure. Yeah, so if you think, Allpoint is largely a sunk cost almost, right? So we've got those machines sitting there, on a scale-based network, so every transaction adds a little more revenue than the transaction before it because our cost to deliver it, it reduces based on the scale of operating that network. And so it's a huge leverage play. You'll see, we, I think I said we had 12% year-over-year growth, and we continue to see that sort of, I'll say, warming to utility infrastructures by the banks, right? Being more comfortable sending their cardholders to do, everyday transactions at locations that may not be their branches. We think of ourselves as sort of Switzerland.
You're not sending your customer to another bank's branch or another bank's ATM, where they're gonna get an ad on the screen to get $600 to move their checking account.
Mm-hmm.
You know, we give them sort of a safe space inside that location to do utility banking, where they're not gonna be cross-promoted by somebody else.
Got it... Any other questions in the audience?
Just going back to the ATM as a Service strategy, I think you said you have 18,000 units now.
Yep.
As you, you know, target that 120,000 user count, what are some of the clients or banks that you're targeting that are some of those low-hanging fruit that you go in and maybe sell the strategy? And then who are some of those clients that may take some time to adopt and agree to adopt ATM as a Service?
Yeah, I mean, so to be very clear, we don't expect any of the big guys to adopt ATM as a Service, right? They already have scale-based networks, and so in our model, we don't anticipate Wells or Bank of America or JP ever moving, right? Our, everybody below them is sort of our target. We originally propositioned that this, this, this product would be great in the CFI credit union space, and that's proven to be true, but we've seen great traction above that. So we signed Santander in the U.K., 1,400 units. That's going. We're actually rolling it out as we speak. 50 units will get converted today, tomorrow, every day, until we're done.
And when they see that work, you know, they're actively looking at every other country they operate in and seeing how they can leverage that model with us, right? And so, global institutions are great, great customers for us because their scale is not like a Bank of America. They're more like 1,500 here, 1,500 here, 1,500 here, so our model works very well for them. Low-hanging fruit is basically everyone we get to have a conversation with. ATM as a service has sort of become a thing in the market now, so our competitors are all using that term, that vernacular. Their, we don't believe their offering is nearly as competitive of ours, but, that also helps. You know, it's a thing now, right? It's not just the Atleos thing. It's something everybody's doing.
Much like the conversion to SaaS that happened over the last 10 or 15 years when people started talking about selling things, that was a subscription that people never bought before, and everyone, "Well, no one's ever gonna do that," and now it's the only thing we do, right? We believe that the market will slowly move, but we're very conservative on our projections, right? Out of 600,000 machines, we say over the plan period, we'll get 120,000 of them. So roughly, you know, 20% will migrate in that period.
Got it. So, just sort of as a closing question, I know you and your team have been on the road quite a bit over the past couple of months and had a number of conversations with the investment community. Based on those conversations, what do you think are the most misunderstood aspects of the Atleos business?
Well, Paul and I were part of the conglomerate. So, you know, we were certainly misunderstood as a conglomerate.
Right.
In our business, it's really, you know, the death of cash and the death of ATMs, right? Most of the folks in this room probably are not heavy cash users, but in most of our regions, we have a ton of cash-preferred folks. In the U.S., certainly large underbanked, unbanked population that is part of the base. The importance of ATMs and the self-service devices is not necessarily linked to that cash proposition. It's linked more to banks migrating how they do services. They don't want you at the teller cashing a check, asking for cash anymore. In fact, they're going to teller-less branches in many cases, right? And so that puts more dependency on that self-service device in both increasing its capability set, right, and increasing its reliability because it's now the only access point to deliver those services.
I think those are the two things that are sort of most misunderstood in terms of, yes, there is still a healthy and vibrant cash ecosystem, and yes, ATMs are still important.
Got it. Well, gentlemen, I really appreciate you joining us today, and on behalf of Stephens, on behalf of Stephens, I wanna thank everybody in the audience and everybody that's listening online. Thank you very much.
Thanks, Jeff.
Thanks for having us.
Yep.