All right, great. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us here at the 2026 Wolfe Research FinTech Forum. My name is Paul Obrecht, and I'm on the FinTech team here at Wolfe. Today, I'm happy to be joined by Savneet Singh, CEO of PAR for a fireside chat here. Savneet, thanks for being here and joining us at the FinTech Forum again this year. To start, there may be some in the room who may be less familiar with the PAR story. Can you just give an overview of the company?
Sure. PAR provides a platform to run your restaurant or retail business. We sort of think of ourselves as the core platform, the core mission-critical systems to operate enterprise restaurants or convenience stores. That includes everything from point of sale and back office to loyalty and online ordering. In the restaurant space, we cover over 100,000 restaurants.
We're probably one of the largest providers there. We've got the largest loyalty solution, fast-growing point of sale, but the critical element that we provide is an integrated solution. Historically, the enterprise has been one of a best-of-breed, where you've got a bunch of different products trying to work together. Ours is an integrated solution that seems to really resonate with our customers. On the convenience store side, we are the largest provider of loyalty software and soon to be a lot more.
Great. Can we start higher level with where you see the restaurant industry from a tech perspective? Historically, we saw a very large share, especially in the enterprise segment, using legacy solutions, often on-prem, but there has been a continued shift towards cloud-based platforms over the years. Just curious what inning you see we're at from a modern platform adoption standpoint?
You know, I think AI actually changes that a lot. You know, historically, I would say it was at a very, gradual but accelerating pace in the enterprise. You know, five, six years ago, you still had CIOs questioning if the cloud was a safe place to go. You know, the pandemic, the push to digital has forced a lot of restaurant chains to start going into that digital adoption, with the crux being the point of sale. That really is a limiting factor of their ability to be digital. We're still really early. The vast majority of enterprise restaurants are on legacy solutions.
You know, in the enterprise, you know, I still think we're probably 80%-80+% are still on legacy solutions. We've got a long way to go in the enterprise, over there. Historically, I think restaurants have been a laggard because they're one of the few businesses that hadn't really been disrupted. You know, really up until the pandemic, the vast majority of QSR and fast casual chains didn't have a website or didn't have anything other than a marketing website.
They didn't have online ordering. You know, they really hadn't been disrupted, so the push to become digital really wasn't there. It wasn't like a shoe retailer or clothing retailer. They've been historically a laggard. I think what's interesting today, though, is, you know, I'd venture to guess that they might be earlier adopters of AI than they have been historically of other technologies, primarily because they are in this really challenging world where their businesses are becoming digital very rapidly.
Right.
Where, you know, most enterprise chains are anywhere from 5%-40% digital sales. They've got incredible pressure from the cost side, whether it's labor, whether it's food, whether it's real estate, and they have this real complexity of orders coming from all these different channels, whether it's from DoorDash, Uber Eats, their direct website, their mobile, their loyal, T+ , you know, TikTok. They're gonna need more and more technology to kinda handle this new world they're in. We're seeing, you know, quite rapid adoption of AI tools to help them simplify the job that they have today. Historically a laggard, so, you know, second inning, third inning.
Right.
AI, they might actually catch up because I think that they need it more than the traditional category.
Great. We'll certainly hit on AI to a great degree in a bit. I'd love to start with earnings. You reported fourth quarter results a few weeks ago, which were quite healthy with 15% year-over-year organic ARR growth, strong sequential ARR growth in the fourth quarter. You also saw the third consecutive quarter of non-GAAP net income profitability. Can you just touch on the key highlights of the quarter in your view, and as you move into 2026, where you're seeing the most momentum?
Yeah. I think the single biggest highlight is, you know, we added $17 million of ARR in the quarter, which is a really large amount for- for a company of our size, and I think beyond what most people expected. The growth engine's working. I think that's probably the biggest takeaway, which is the growth engine is really there. I think the second part that's very interesting is, in 2025, you know, 70%-80+% of our customers bought multiple products.
We've gone from a land and then try to expand over time to buying multi-products day one. That is a huge shift in our category, but also for us as a company where, you know, our ARPU's are gonna grow really nicely because you're landing on multiple products at the same time, really proving the thesis we've had for a long time, which is the integrated solution is really the winner, not a point solution.
I think that's the second big takeaway from the year, not just the quarter. I think the third one that I tried to lead into was you know we launched our first AI products in the quarter, and we're really shocked how fast they sold. That doesn't ever happen in our category. These are our categories, year-long sales cycles.
That's why they're so durable. That's why there's such low churn. With AI, we sort of released our first product called Coach AI. We had roughly 1,000 stores adopt it, and almost all of those are daily active users now. It's kind of a you know really shocking. .insight to us, as my comments on the previous question was that there's a clear interest from the category to-
Right.
...to spend there. Maybe the last thing is I think we continue to expand, you know, our profitability and- We announced intention to take out, you know, $15 million of OpEx costs this year, leveraging AI. We're really kinda leaning in to sort of, you know, make sure we end on a lower cost base than we started.
Great. PAR shares on earnings underperformed. They're down quite a bit year to date. We understand some of it is related to these AI fears, which we'll touch on in a minute. More broadly, what would you say are the most underappreciated aspects of the PAR story today in the market?
I'd say there's probably two of these things. Obviously, the AI thing has been a huge, you know, drag or. I think, you know, I think it'll actually be our a great tailwind for us. Like, as I mentioned, you know, we serve a category that is not digitally native. When you go to a large restaurant chain that has 1,000 stores, their entire corporate team is maybe 100 people. Of that, maybe 10 people work in IT, and half of them are responsible for corporate IT and, you know, email.
The idea that they will take their most mission-critical tools, you know, vibe quote themselves and displace existing vendors, you know, I think it's just really hard to ever fathom that because that's just not the DNA they're in. It's just the risk of, you know, we're like the tax engine. We're like the payroll. I mean, these are, like, really sensitive systems that we, you know, I'd argue are not charging enough for.
I think that, you know, that sort of fear will become our biggest tailwind because we're one, I don't see them doing a lot of this themselves, and that's at least especially the narrative coming out of them. But two, we'll be able to provide a lot of this tooling for them as the most mission-critical product they have. I think that's really, really misunderstood and I think a really nice tailwind. I think the second part that's quite misunderstood is, you know, we think we'll have really strong durable growth.
You know, oftentimes in vertical markets you see a rapid deceleration. You know, we don't think that's gonna happen because our TAM is ironically expanding as we add these new products and as we sort of, you know, expand some of the verticals we serve. Like we announced our moving into pizza category. We announced, you know, moving into this entertainment category. I think that we'll be able to have, you know, durable growth for a longer period of time than, you know, maybe your average SaaS company.
The last one, which is I do think, you know, as we get to scale, we'll be able to sort of exceed most people's expectations on margin because we do have a culture that is very, very thrifty and keen on, you know. When we see something from an engineering perspective, it's how do we design it for scale? And so we spend that money up front, but so that when it scales, we can get the benefit of that over time.
Right. That makes a lot of sense. On the topic of AI risks, you certainly hit. I think they're twofold really in the market. One of them is the merchants bringing in-house, utilizing AI tools themselves. There is also the notion of AI-led software development allowing for new entrants to come to market sooner, reach feature parity, start to disrupt the incumbents. How do you perceive that risk, and how relevant should that be for investors?
You know, to me, I look at it as it is, the competitive risk is always high-
Right
...of a startup coming in. You know, we sort of view ourselves as that insurgent versus the incumbents, and so it's sort of critical. You know, I think it's. You know, the entire company needs to sort of rally behind this idea that we need to disrupt ourselves. Now, you know, whether it's by design or luck, we're also in a category that has not yet had that influx of point-of-sale vendors that use AI or other parts of the area.
Right.
You know, we haven't. One is I haven't observed it, but two, I think that it's just incumbent upon us to be the most competitive alternative to everything that exists. If we can do that ourselves, I think there's no reason to try to go to something that's new. Again, our products are just so mission-critical that. You know, I've said this to many people. You know, we use, I think ADP for payroll. I'm sure we could build a payroll system with AI today. We're not gonna do that because I don't wanna take the risk of the tax calculations and messing up people's pay for something that costs us, you know, a dollar or whatever-
Right
....a payroll. You know, I think that's, you know. Now, if we were building mobile apps, yeah, I'd be super nervous about that.
Yeah.
You know, I think we feel pretty good that if we go all in on sort of making our products AI native, then you know, we'll be a better factor. We have to do it, right?
Right.
I think that if you don't, that's when that risk really becomes a real risk.
Right. Speaking to those AI opportunities, you launched PAR AI in September, the intelligence layer embedded across the entire product suite, and the first product was Coach AI, which you talked about being utilized by 1,000 stores. It sounds like daily usage is quite high. Can you just touch on the early traction a bit more that you're seeing with that product and how operators are really engaging with it?
Coach AI is now coming on its second version, but you know, the first version was very much, you know, like ChatGPT for the enterprise product. How do I query into my data what's happening? How do I, you know, sort of you know, what were everything from daily sales, so what was the margin on this promotion to, you know, how's my labor schedule looking? You can say, "Hey, where should I focus my time today?
Right.
If you have multiple stores on it. Really valuable in the sense of helping you streamline. Where historically, you know, most restaurants would have, you know, a singular person who's sort of like, "Hey, can you run the report to figure out did this day part schedule work, or did this promotion work, or did this labor schedule work well?" However that may be. Now when you can just query it and it was a pretty powerful kind of like first use case.
The second version is more on the predictive side, where it's actually prompting you and saying, "Hey, you know, this labor, you know, schedule is really not working for you. Like you should look at this." Or, you know, "Stop ordering coffee over here because, you know, it's gonna be a heat wave" or whatever. This next part I think will actually make it even stickier because then you're going in not just to figure out what you're gonna prompt it yourself, but also get the, that.
Version three, which, you know, hopefully come out by the end of this year, will be, you know, press this button to actually change labor schedule or change the inventory ordering or change, you know, the, something in the supply chain. It's been really neat. The other part that I think is interesting is it also really lowers the bar for you to be an expert in this. Where historically you'd have to really understand the tooling, you know, run all these reports, build, you know, push it into whatever BI tool you're using. You know, now you don't. Anyone can do it.
Right.
Like, literally, somebody without a college education can go in there and, you know, be as sophisticated about the details of the restaurant. Than somebody that's been there for 20 years.
Right.
I think that's gonna be neat to sort of get more people to sort of understand the data too.
How are you making your existing customers aware of this AI offering? Then I'd also ask how you're monetizing it. I think you've seen some competitors in the space roll out AI products, and it's really a focus on adoption first, where they wanna push it out and have all their merchants adopted it before then going through the monetization efforts. Just curious what your perspective is there.
Yeah. You know, our Coach AI product was available first to our back office customers, which we've got, you know, only 13,000. That's why the thousand number was really exciting. We'll expand it to more and more as we add more data to go further and further across all of our products. We charge between $40 and $90 a month.
We've been testing pricing. We do charge. Our philosophy was, you know, we obviously gave it to our beta users for free to start testing it, giving us insights, how do we adjust it, what it looks like. But we've, you know, we're charging for it. You know, our push has always been to our product team, which is, you gotta make it good enough so they wanna pay for it.
I think that eventually every software company will have that sort of chat layer and so that I don't think you charge for that. I think you charge for the predictive nature of it, the action items. We'll probably go to a SaaS fee. We did look with it early on with a number of customers on a transaction basis. In our category, just not gonna fly. We've gone with a, you know, a SaaS fee.
Beyond Coach AI, where do you see opportunities to increasingly embed AI across your offerings, whether in restaurant but also retail?
In retail, we launched our first product, I think last week, which is called Drive AI. It's really a tool that sits on top of your loyalty system, but really your entire customer engagement to sort of help you understand all the opportunities you have to optimize margin that day, that week. It's incredibly powerful. It is the most powerful tool we have today, where it will literally pull in all your loyalty data, your register data, and sort of give you the insights you have for that day.
As an example, you know, it might actually flag you and say, "Hey, stop running this promotion." Like, you've kind of exhausted the- the inventory, exhausted the margin that we need to get from it or the margin loss we did to bring in something else. It layers in your tobacco data, your alcohol data. You know, we just started selling it. We expect, you know, hopefully similar adoption on that side.
The way I like to think about it is that the power of having that on the customer engagement side is that you as a you know CIO or CEO can now go into that system and say, "Hey, you know, create me a marketing campaign for you know X and figure out the perfect amount of segments to send it to," and so on and so forth. What that does is it removes an incredible amount of work from the brand. One is-
It'll figure out, here are the 50 segments of customers we're gonna send this out to. We're not gonna send it out to everybody, or we're not gonna send it out to three generic people. We're gonna set three generic segments. We're gonna go to incredibly targeted, you know, you're a 25-year-old male, this demographic data. Like you're getting it. You're a 30-year-old, you're not getting it, whatever it is.
Right.
Like, that is all done through AI to figure out who the perfect people to send that campaign to. It actually builds the campaign. It's like, you know, what are the colors? What makes sure it sticks to the brand ethos? Is it an SMS? Is it a push to an app? Is it an email? It automates all that. It actually allows you to run that campaign. Do all the reporting and then dynamically change it over time. It is a really, really powerful tool. We'll also, you know, charge SaaS for that as well.
Right.
That's kind of what is coming out next.
On the topic of retail, while historically more focused on the restaurant TAM, PAR has continued to see traction there, notably in C-stores and fuel retailers. Can you touch on the success you're seeing here and how over the years you've expanded your product offerings to drive greater merchant adoption?
Yeah. You know, we got pulled into retail, four or five years ago. You know, what we sort of observed was that retailers were really encroaching upon the territory of restaurants. The fastest-growing segment of convenience stores for the last four years has been prepared foods. So not your bag of chips, but actually real food. That growth was leading them to wanting to have the same digital tools that restaurants had to compete with restaurants.
Our loyalty solution started to get pulled into these larger brands because they wanted to create loyalty engagement on the food side. When we saw that really take off, we realized that we needed a more focused effort, and so we made an acquisition there that's since grown really nicely. I think the major lessons we've learned from that category are that C-stores are really healthy businesses. You know, they are businesses that are, you know, in many parts family-owned or family-controlled or influenced. They take very, very long-term bets. They are, you know, if restaurants were in inning two or three, they're like walking out of the dugout.
Right.
They're really starting because they take their time, they measure twice. As a result, what we've realized is we have way more influence on our retail customers than we do on our restaurant customers because we're actually their first true digital partner. I suspect every other vendor is still running off a server in the back of the store.
We've created tremendous ROI to our brands. You can sort of see some of that stuff on our website, but you can even see it, you know, when we launch a brand, you can see it in the earnings calls. They start talking about us and, you know, that doesn't really happen in our other categories where we're getting shout-outs by the CFOs as regularly. Our margins are higher because we charge roughly double for retail than we do in restaurants. It's a higher margin business. I think one of the things we like about it is since it's earlier in that digitization phase, we can actually bring in AI potentially faster because you're not replacing a bunch of stuff.
Right.
Competing with a bunch of other modern vendors. You know, you're really going and sort of saying, "Hey, let us become that new platform." It's been a really nice growth area for our business and I think also kind of hedges us to the degree that convenience stores become restaurants.
Right. That's really helpful. Let's briefly hit on your 2026 guidance where you're calling for just to sustain mid-teens organic ARR growth, and you've also noted seeing a step change in operational efficiency during the year. What's giving you confidence in achieving this, and are there any key puts and takes in your outlook that investors should be aware of?
You know, the major difference this year from last year was, you know, a lot more of our business is baked or booked than in normal years. That was because we had a really, really strong bookings year last year. We you know we had record bookings in most of our products. That allowed us to have a lot of visibility into what will and can get rolled out in 2026. That's why we felt pretty confident in sort of hitting our mid-teens guidance.
You know what I said on the call is that includes almost nothing for these AI products that are coming out, which clearly we're excited and seeing what we can drive there. It includes nothing from any new large signing. These are, you know, our guidance very much depends on the customers we've signed already.
We're not depending on signing a new customer to hear our guidance or you know some magic whale. It's stuff that's right in front of us, and so we feel really comfortable about it. We think it's also, you know, a really positive sign. I suspect we'll be one of the very few companies that, you know, is targeting not to have decelerating growth in-
Yeah.
In this environment. You know, on the OpEx side, that's the easy side, right? Because you're taking out costs, so you control that fully. You know, we mentioned on the call we wanna take out $15 million, and you know, we're gonna keep charging. Hopefully we hit that and go well beyond that over time. As you know, we ourselves become more and more AI native, we'll, you know, figure out what we can pull out.
Speaking of key wins, one of PAR's notable recent wins was Papa Johns, which is transitioning from its legacy on-prem systems to PAR's POS and ops solutions. What were the key factors driving this win, and what made PAR really stand out to Papa Johns?
Huge win for us for a number of reasons. One, it'll probably be our second-largest restaurant customer on the software side. You know, the main reason was it's a new TAM. We don't sell into pizza. We've never really operated custom-built point-of-sale systems. Papa Johns has their custom, own custom-built point-of-sale system. Does Domino's, so do most of these brands. They haven't really had an alternative because they couldn't go to an off-the-shelf system because it wasn't built for pizza. It's big for us because it kind of opens up this TAM and you know, we saw very quickly that as soon as we launched that, we got a bunch of inbounds.
That's why it's just a really kind of exciting thing for us and price point's strong, and it'll be a multi-product customer as well. You know, as far as why they picked us, you know, it was, I think two core reasons they picked us. First and foremost is Papa Johns wants to be an innovative brand. You know, their CIO, Kevin Vasconi, was the CIO behind Domino's big turnaround, you know, a decade plus ago. He's, you know, on stage with Google all over the place. He's really sort of a visionary guy. I think that he was very much aligned to our product roadmap and our vision.
I think that was really important because somebody who's sort of, you know, got a legendary career in our category for being a visionary, like, he or she is not going to partner with somebody that can't keep up with their dreams, because in the end we'll be the stumbling block if we can't get to where he wants to get to. I think that alignment on the vision was there. The second part was, in our enterprise category, I honestly don't think they thought anyone else could get to the requirements they had.
Because none of us have pizza, they're really taking a leap of faith that we can build all the functionality in time for them to go out to market? They were willing to bet on us and a lot of that came from references. They called our largest customers and sort of said, "Hey, when we deliver, do we deliver in Q4 or do we deliver in Q5?" I think they got a lot of confidence that we'd deliver on time. I think that's why they picked us. That's why they, you know, we got a very fair price and, you know, you can see on their earnings calls and their public calls, they're very complimentary to us and just like we are to them because, we're gonna hopefully help them really change the way that things are run.
Right. For an enterprise win of this size, what does the implementation timeline typically look like?
It's very brand dependent. This one will probably kick off, you know, in a small part Q4, but really it's a 2027 event.
Got it.
It's a longer start time because we're building it out. This is more of a when we signed Burger King, we started installing stores three or four months right after, so it was pretty fast. This is a little bit longer lead time because we're building the functionality before we launch. Generally, once you sign a brand, you know, you can get going in a few months, but you do roll out, you know, roughly, sort of medium-sized chains within a year, super large chains in two years.
Right. Can you provide some color on the incremental opportunities you see with this partnership over time? I believe on the earnings call you called out international as a potential.
Yeah. We're hopeful to sort of win some of the international markets. Hopefully one or two other additional products that we sell. Sort of, you know, looking at it as this real, this sort of platform approach as opposed to going in as here's a bunch of random products. What's powerful about it is every time we sell them an additional product, they will actually get functionality they could not get elsewhere. I'm making this up, but, you know, they bought our back office software alongside point of sale in this deal.
They could have bought someone else's back office software, but the functionality they get by having it under one roof is really unique. It's the simple stuff like, well, it's single sign-on, so that's kind of nice because they don't have to go to two systems, but it's also, you know, the same database, the same reporting in these two different systems. It helps unify a lot of that workflow. That's kind of our plan. Similar to what we, you know, do at every other brand. You know, here we're hoping for a rapid adoption.
Great. That's helpful. Love to hit on competition. Obviously, been a hot topic for the restaurant POS space for years.
Years, yeah.
At this point, I'd say. We're increasingly seeing many Fintechs invest in the space. I'd say more so in the SMB mid-market portion of the TAM, but you do see some meaningfully trying to go upmarket. Just curious what your latest views are on the competitive environment and if anything in the last year, call it, has changed materially in your view.
It's really hard to go SMB up.
Yeah.
You know, the needs of an SMB restaurant are just radically different than enterprise. You know, like, you know, I always think about it, if you ran your local, you know, Italian restaurant, you're the Chef, you're the CEO, you're the CTO, you're the CIO, you're the Head of Security Compliance. You know, like, you are, it is. By definition, it's gotta be a simple to use plug and play kind of model because you don't have an IT team, you don't have a compliance team, you don't have a CFO generally.
Versus you're selling to the enterprise, you know, the robustness of the product is totally different because you've got compliance in there, you've got CFOs, Office of CFO in there, you've got ops, you've got marketing, you've got everybody in there. The products are just so different. To go from SMB to enterprise, you kind of need almost like an entirely new product team culture 'cause enterprise sales cycles are a year.
SMB sales cycles can be two weeks. It's really different. As a result, we haven't seen major changes in the competitive landscape, really ever. The big established players that have huge market share, you know, continue to sort of have aggressive marketing pushes. You know, generally their goal is to retain, not to sort of grow net new logos. We love fishing in that pond because similar to, I think, the Papa Johns experience, you know, if you wanna be a digital brand and you wanna be innovative, which is probably almost everybody, I think you wanna go with the sort of company that's growing that can give you this unique functionality.
Right.
You know, from the SMB side, you know, I think, you'll always have Toast. They're super well run, have a great product SMB market, will probably win, you know, one or two, you know, mid-enterprise like logos every year. I just think it's gonna be very hard for that to really get to scale, and I always kinda wonder like what's the ROI with so many people and so much time on the category. Then we don't really see a lot of other you know, people come from down there upwards. You know, we don't see Block at all. We don't really see Shift4. We don't see, you know, Clover. It is a relatively small group of core competitors.
Right. Right. That makes a lot of sense. Let's hit on restaurant trends. Just curious what the latest trends you're seeing in the restaurant industry are thus far in the first quarter, and are you noticing any shifts in consumer spending or dining patterns?
Yeah. It's changed a lot. Last year was, you know, probably the worst year for restaurants since the pandemic, but really since the great financial crisis. It was a really painful year for the entire category. What made it unique was that normally in a challenging economic year for restaurants, the QSR category does really well. In 2025 it did not do well.
In fact, the full-service dining chains took share from the quick service chains, and a lot of that was this pricing dynamic where, you know, you could go to Chili's and pay roughly the same amount as going into your favorite fast food restaurant and getting a meal. The full service guys came back and stole share. You saw, you know, particularly from the public companies, a lot of pressure on traffic. You know, traffic was down for most chains last year. Which is just a crazy thing to think about. By the end of the year, we did see things start to stabilize. A lot of that was this push to value. Almost every QSR brand went back to their roots of being value-oriented.
Right.
That started to sort of win some of that share back. We saw a stabilization, and we had a really strong holiday season in the United States in Q4, which helped. I think, you know, obviously, when people go out shopping, they go eating, so I think that helped. Then, you know, early in this year, you know, you're seeing, you know, obviously Cava had really awesome results, but you're seeing some good traction in the larger chains. You are seeing stabilization. I'm seeing stabilization. I'm not yet comfortable saying it's like coming back.
Right.
Ironically, it's like the perfect market to be a vendor. Because they've got cost pressures and revenue pressures, and so, you know, we had our best bookings year ever last year by a decent amount. I hate saying it, but, you know, pandemic definitely helped sales.
Right. Speaking of cost pressures, there are certainly rising costs of hardware components for the POS-
Yeah.
....providers themselves. Particularly memory chips have increasingly been discussed in recent weeks. Can you share any details on these dynamics that you're seeing, and how is PAR really trying to mitigate some of these risks?
You know, memory is a small portion, but it is a portion of our hardware costs. We sell point-of-sale terminals that are basically computers that are far more robust than your average computer. We've done a bunch of stuff. You know, the first problem last year was tariffs before memory chips. You know, we've now been able to, on most of our customers, get waivers to push that, most of that cost through. Not everybody, but most of them.
On the memory side, we've front-loaded some purchasing, so that's sort of the first mitigation step. We pulled forward roughly $2 million of inventory to make sure to avoid any supply shocks. Then we've worked on reconfiguring our board so that we can use different suppliers, different forms of memory, but also less memory. You know, one of the unique things about our product, point-of-sale product, is you can launch it on existing hardware.
Right.
You know, our for a customer that might be scared of there's a little bit of a price increase, you're able to sort of say, "Well, we'll just run it on your existing hardware. We don't need it." For example, You know, a lot of Burger King stores you'll see us running on a device that has a logo of a different company on it.
Right.
You know, in the end, memory is not a huge portion of the bill of lading, so it's not like it's, you know, our customers are seeing 50% spikes or anything like that. You know, we've kind of budgeted for it. We talked about it on our call that, you know, we'll lose some gross margin to it. I don't expect it to be dramatic for us just because we've brought in a lot, and it is not a huge portion of the bill for our customers.
Right. Got it. That makes sense. I'd love to go back to the notion of cross-selling. Sounds like there's certainly momentum there in the business right now. You noted during earnings that most new deals are now multi-product. What's driving this momentum and this shift of, to your point, initially being a land and expand model and now landing with a larger base of work being done already?
I think it's the thesis being right in the sense that if you want to run a restaurant in today's world, you need a more integrated set of products to make it work. The idea that you could have a really nice unified experience for your customers with having a different vendor for your loyalty app, a different vendor for your online ordering app, a different vendor for your mobile app, you know, like, it's just hard to make all that stuff work together.
As restaurants, you know, so rapidly became digital, you know, again, we really do forget that, you know, you did not have an app for any of the restaurants you liked until just a few years ago. You know, it just stretched their needs. The idea of having your data in one place is very, very powerful. The date-- The idea of having one system across the different parts of your tech stack allow you to actually be more innovative. I think it's just this consolidation of data, the consolidation of systems and vendors, because, like I said, these are really small tech teams. They went from managing five vendors to five years later managing 15 or 20. That's really tough.
Right.
I think that those are the core points and the functionality that you can have by having that stuff under one roof is really powerful.
Right. Can we discuss what the international opportunity looks like for PAR? I know you've continued to internationalize core parts of the platform over the years, so just curious where you see the runway there?
Yeah. Internationally, you know, it's market by market. You know, we've got a good business in Australia that's growing. We serve, you know, Starbucks out there, Wingstop out there, and a number of fast-growing chains in Australia. You'll, you know, over time, so yes, plant our flag, additional markets, Canada, others, English-speaking languages and then non-English.
The goal, you know, I think has been to become the partner for the big U.S. brands to move out there. You know, as they expand their opportunities, we wanna sort of be their partner everywhere because, again, having your data in one place in this world of AI is really powerful. But equally important is that these brands have suffered under, like, very disjointed technology outside the United States.
You know, if you go to the head of international for most restaurant chains, they'll literally tell you that they're losing a meaningful amount of royalties because of old point-of-sale systems not reconciling, you know, taxation issues. I mean, it's kinda nuts. I think we're going market by market. Our second growth has been, you know, we operate a product called Punchh, which does McDonald's loyalty in 68 or 69 different countries. We continue to grow them. Last quarter, we launched with Japan as an example. We've got that lever too on the loyalty side.
Great. I'd like to open up to anyone in the audience who may have a question. I have one more, though. On the topic of capital allocation, I think we can end there. I'm just curious if you can provide your framework for 2026. I know the board recently authorized a $100 million share repurchase program. Also curious what the bar looks like for M&A this year, and if you are open to M&A, what are any key areas you'd be looking to grow into inorganically?
Yeah. On the M&A question, I think, you know, we're probably not gonna do anything with where our stock price is today.
Right.
I think it's hard to get something done. Also I think nobody wants to sell their business now either.
Yeah.
You know, I don't think, I hope we're not missing out on anything, but I don't see a lot of founders. You know, rushing for the exits of high quality products.
Right.
A lot of the junk will get out there and sell. You know, from a capital allocation perspective, you know, we're focused on first core operations. Like I said, you know, we feel really excited. I mean, we feel really excited. You know, the internal versus external is really interesting. I mean, it's like internally, we've never felt like we've had a better business. We've never felt like we want more business. You know, our sales teams never want more business. We've never had more sales, more salespeople, this many salespeople hit quota.
You know, we'll be more profitable, you know, this year. I think the goal is to fund internal operations and then, you know, continue to sort of look at our options. I think before we ever repurchase shares, we've got converts that are due in 18-20 months, so we'll look at addressing that. But the idea of the repurchase was, you know, we do expect to generate meaningful cash flow as we get to the end of this year, next year, and we wanna make sure that we have that as a tool.
We are, you know, constantly looking at all, at what's the best return on investors' capital. You know, I think, you know, today it's the internal business will be the best return that we have given how much demand we're seeing and also just this AI change. Again, being able to sell your products in a three-month sales cycle versus the year cycle is really like, it is an enlightening thing for us.
Great. I think that's a good note to end it on. Thanks so much, Savneet.
Thanks.
Appreciate it. Up next, we'll have a 15-minute break and then private equity VC panel in about.