Thank you, everybody, for joining us this afternoon here at the Morgan Stanley TMT Conference. Very excited to have Verra Mobility. David Roberts, President & CEO, and Craig Conti, CFO, are joining me here on stage. Before I get started with David and Craig, I do have to read a disclosure. Please see the Morgan Stanley Research Disclosure website at morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. If you have any questions, please reach out to us here at Morgan Stanley. Maybe we'll start with a little bit of a preamble, and I'll open it up to both of you, David and Craig. First of all, let me say great to have you here at our TMT Conference again.
Maybe can you give us and those that may be listening in, et cetera, an overview of the business segments of Verra, and in particular, what that mix and growth drivers look like and maybe how that mix is evolving in 2026.
Yeah, happy to do so, and thank you for having us again. Verra Mobility is a leader in smart transportation, and we effectively compete in two specific markets, one which we call urban mobility, which is working with cities around the globe to manage transportation, safety, and congestion. We also work with commercial fleets, providing access to giving them fleet management plus access to tolls, handling violations and titles and registrations. We also work with universities, where we're helping them around their parking challenges. That, that makes up the sort of the width of the business. If you were to look right now at our business, you would say that our Government Solutions business is where we are the number one provider of automated enforcement in North America, is having a real renaissance.
If you look, that business operates through the opening of legislation in specific states, and in those states, then cities have the option to choose to use an enforcement product or not. There's been a real sea change in that, in that sentiment, especially around what we call purpose-built enforcement, which are things like school zone speed, work zone speed, school bus stop arm. We've seen a real tailwind, and that has shown up as how we're talking about the business. If we look at the backlog of ARR revenue from last year, it was $63.
$64 million.
Yeah, $64 million from last year. Excuse me. When you talk about growth, I think the recognition that there's a lot of fatalities related to driving, this is a tool that is in the city's arsenal that they can use to help save lives. We're super excited about that. Our Commercial Services is where we're the number one provider of toll management solutions for rental car companies, alongside fleet management companies. The real drivers there really are connected to travel. The more travel, the more people are renting cars, the more the tolling happens to occur. There's also a couple other, what we call, secular tailwinds, one of which is the conversion to cashless lanes, which is where there used to be what you p eople may remember, we used to be able to throw a quarter in a basket, and the arm comes down.
That doesn't really happen anymore. When those lanes are cashless, that's a benefit to both our customers as well as to us. Right now, we have a slightly more conservative view on travel TSA numbers are gonna be moderate this year, we think, just with all the Lot going on in the world, obviously, and we think that's gonna be slightly more moderate. We have talked more about a mid-single-digit growth for that business. Businesses are in great place. We're really excited for what we're doing this year and feel like we're gonna exit the year really strong, accelerating into 2027.
Let's delve in a little bit to the commercial segment.
Sure.
you know, that you just touched on.
Yeah.
When you think about the key drivers of growth there, you mentioned increased shift to cashless tolls, new toll roads, international expansion, growth in travel generally.
Mm-hmm.
How should we generally rank order each of those or any other factors as growth drivers for the Commercial Segment?
Yeah, James, let's go through the growth rubric. We've talked about, excuse me, Commercial Services being a mid-single digit growth over the next two years. The way I like to decouple that growth and talk about the pieces are a third, a third, a third.
Okay.
The first third is travel demand, right? Verra Mobility is a net taker of that. People come to the airport, go through TSA, and they rent a car. The second third of that are what we call the secular tailwinds, which David just touched on a little bit. This is the increasing penetration of cashless roads in the United States. To give you kind of an idea of that, just less than three-quarters of the roads in the United States that are toll roads are fully cashless. The minute that road goes from a cash pay option to a cashless option, the uptake on our product goes up. That's a tailwind to us. Also, every year, we add new toll roads in the United States, right?
Mm-hmm.
That's the second third of a third, a third, a third. The final piece are what I say are standard growth initiatives. This is continuing to penetrate the fleet market, continuing with new commercial offerings with our RAC customers and growth in title and registration violations and in Europe. Again, really high level, that mid-single digit growth that we've talked about, a third, a third, a third, a third of it in travel, a third of it in secular tailwinds, and a third of it in growth initiatives.
Let's talk about a couple of things there. First, fleets. My impression is you guys already have very good representation among the car rental companies.
Mm-hmm.
as it is. Just kinda where do you have footprint there, and then what kind of incremental fleets should we be thinking about, if any, beyond car rental?
We work with all the three major providers here in the U.S., plus a few of the others. When you think about additional fleets, think of what we call the FMC business. FMC business is large corporations that have many vehicles under their purview, and they use a third party to both procure and manage many of the services associated with that.
Okay.
We redistribute our products, which includes toll management, includes violation management. When the owner of the vehicle and the driver of the vehicle are not the same, that creates some friction.
Yeah
solve through our technology. For FMCs, we solve tolling, we solve violations. We also do title and registration. Just think of license plate stickers and the registration in the glove box. When those cars are moving around, that actually becomes a relatively complicated thing, and we provide solutions for our customers there.
Got it. Got it. Then international.
Mm-hmm.
Can we get an update on Europe? What has to happen from your perspective for cashless tolling to scale meaningfully across the continent or additional countries there? How do you think about the time horizon for that opportunity?
To be really clear, our initial estimate and time horizon when we bought the business over there, we were off. We thought it was gonna happen a little sooner than it did, to be very clear.
Right. Right.
T o be transparent. Look, it really comes down to two countries that provide the vast majority of tolling, which would be Italy as well as France. Both of them are predominantly barrier-based.
Mm-hmm.
And what that really means to us is that as a driver of a vehicle, in particular a rental car vehicle, you can still pull over and put your credit card in and pay, or your debit card, and the barrier's gonna go up. It's not as efficient, it's not as quick, but as they convert to cashless tolls where there is no more option, then you would automatically opt into the program. We have started to see both in Italy, in and around Milan, and then in and around Paris, more conversion to cashless. The question is not will they go cashless? Of course, they will because it's significantly more cost-effective for them. It's a better experience for the people on the toll roads.
Right.
It's just at what pace. It's very difficult to say. We have continued to expand in other countries. Our rental car partners are really happy that we're helping them in the countries that we are. We still really like the business, but we would say that there should be an acceleration here probably in the next two to four years.
Got it. Yeah, and I mean to that point, it's like I've started to see some of the cashless tolling mechanisms be put in place, like near the Paris airport...
Mm-hmm
et cetera.
Right.
you know, how are you positioned because with the, with the rental car fleet in Europe, because that's the other part of it? My impression is a bit more fragmented in that market versus here.
Yeah.
So.
They are more independent. There's not like a, for most of the fleets there, it's not like a central office in London says, "Everybody do this." Really, it's the country manager.
Okay.
I'm not even sure that's the appropriate title, but that's how I think about it.
Right. Right.
Is they're making a decision based upon what's happening. We've had to, you know, go and call on them and reference our relationships here in the United States. So we've got pilots going with all of the major brands, just in different countries, not all in the same country.
Right. Right. Right. Right. Right.
They all have shown an interest, and we're still solving a meaningful problem for them, and they realize the problem only gets bigger.
Back on the U.S. and Commercial Services, one of the key questions we often get from investors is customer concentration risk within the segment.
Mm-hmm.
How should investors think about the cadence of RAC renewals and competitive dynamics for those programs?
Yeah, I mean, look, I think historically our business has been the number one provider of solutions to rental car companies around tolling, really since the inception of the industry. We've got long-dated relationships with these customers. They relative to the cadence, they do, we're in a discussion now with Avis Budget Group, and we have both Hertz and Enterprise would renew next year. That's very common. There tend to be three to five years just depending on the moment of time...
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
that we renew the contract. We've got a, you know, I think what you would say is a pretty impeccable track record of continuing to serve these customers, and we wouldn't imagine doing that. As it relates to customer concentration, we recognize that that's a thing. When you look at the three rental car companies plus New York City, we have customer concentration. We have, the best way to solve that is through really thoughtful M&A. We haven't found one that have met our price threshold over the last several years. We're just gonna continue to grow outside. We continue to diversify with other customer types, and we'll settle that over time.
Back on, some of these renewals, how do you think about like the risk of insourcing from those customers and managing that? Or what are the things that you typically need to do either from a product or capability or even pricing standpoint?
Yeah
to make sure you keep that business?
Yeah. I don't think of insourcing as much of an issue as I would. We have competitors. We have competitors in the fleet management companies that we go up against. I would say that's probably a more likely.
Right
to manage against from our standpoint. 'Cause what we do is very complex.
Yeah. Yeah.
It sounds quite easy on the face of it, tolling is highly. There's 54 different toll authorities. They all have different types of standards, and there's not one place to plug in. You have to set up accounts with all of them. There's a lot of complexity there. We rely on our commitment to our customers and the ability to do what we do. We also need to, I think your last point is, continue to invest in the platform. How do we make it faster and easier? How do we make this a more seamless experience for the renter? How do we optimize the experience for both our customer and their customer?
Got it. Let's turn to government. This is where, there have certainly been a bunch of headlines, in terms of creating incremental opportunity as well as business that Verra has won over the last one to two years. To that point, you recently finalized a new five years contract with New York City Department of Transportation, and that began on January 1st, 2026. As part of that contract, you're going to be managing and expanding the city's automated enforcement camera programs. Can you talk about that rollout timing, timeline, the phasing of revenue, in particular equipment versus services, and what success should look like over the 1st 12 to 18 months?
Great question. I mean, the way I think about this is the majority of the expansion will be installed in 2026, with the remainder in 2027.
Okay.
As we start talking about that and we're on the quarterly cadence with investors, we're gonna let you know how we're going on that. If you look back to our last earnings call, going a little slower at the beginning of the year because of weather in New York. We can't say Conti.
Yeah, yeah.
We expect to be on sides with our 2026 expectation. We know how to do this. We've done this for a long time. A little bit on the New York City contract, I wanna make sure that we talk about here. The first thing is how does the new contract stack up against the old contract? You know, I think that's really important. There's a couple things I wanna make sure are clear. When we think about this from a margin dollars or an EBITDA dollars perspective, a couple things I wanna think about moving between the two. The first is we add EBITDA dollars into the contract because obviously we're expanding, right? There's a 1,000-plus cameras that we're putting in. That's number one.
That's EBITDA $ in versus the old contract.
Mm-hmm.
The second thing is there's some scope in the contract that we used to do, you know, at cost that now we do at margin. That's more dollars into the contract.
Mm. Mm.
The third thing is there's new use cases, such as speed on green, that we're going to do in the new contract that we hadn't done in the old contract. More margin dollars into the contract.
Right. Right, right.
The next piece is the price rationalization. That's EBITDA dollars out of the contract.
Right.
I've got one more item to cover on this bridge, but if I snap the bridge right there, old contract versus the new contract, roughly flat to slightly accretive.
Mm-hmm.
The next piece that comes in that takes the EBITDA margin dollars down is the investment in the minority and women-owned businesses.
Right.
That's about $22 million-$24 million a year, right? That's how to think about the old contract versus the new contract. The other piece of this that I wanna make sure is really clear, though. If you think about this from a margin % standpoint, the new contract is still materially accretive to the rest of the GS business.
Mm-hmm.
As we get a lot of questions on these, sometimes they come from different angles. I wanna make sure.
Right, right.
to lay that all out upfront.
Let's talk about that part of that initiative around minority and women-owned businesses. Just, you know, you made it clear just now, Craig, that that brings down EBITDA dollars a bit, et cetera. A little background on those programs, what does that entail? Maybe most importantly for most investors, how long or how recurring is that investment?
Yeah. The way to think about it is this was actually one of the number one scoring criteria for the RFP for the contract, was the use of, as a % of the total contract value, the use of minority and women-owned businesses. The city looks at this as an opportunity to create local jobs because it's a big and important program.
Mm-hmm.
It's a, think of it's a, you do this or you don't even get a bid.
Right.
you're definitely not gonna win it.
Right.
What we look at is, hey, this is part of doing business in a city like New York. It's the largest automated enforcement program in the world. It won't go down. It'll probably just be at the same percentage for the rest of it. As we think about performance for the rest of the business, we can look for other areas of continuous improvement. We are required to use Think of it as almost a fixed percentage of the total contract against minority women-owned businesses.
Got it. That's New York. I mean, maybe Craig, I'd go back as. David, if you have a something to add here is be great. You know, I think for a lot of people, they took notice of this program and the RFP and then the contract, et cetera, but maybe got a little bit offsides on the profitability of it.
Mm-hmm.
Is that just because, like, this component wasn't taken into account or there are some other things around, just the accounting and the way that the program will operate that, you know, that you've heard from other investors may have been confusing?
Yeah. I think the one thing that I heard was the bifurcation between is it an accretive margin percent contract versus what does that mean for margin dollars contract?
Right, right.
That was the piece that I think may have gotten lost in the mix a little bit.
Okay
we clarified that on the earnings call.
Yeah, for sure.
I think we're clear now. The other thing I would add about New York to what David said, and he's 100% right, obviously, but is the minority and women-owned business isn't 100% of the cost of the contract.
Right.
When we think about, and we've talked about this at length, how we take our Government Solutions margin from the low 20s%, where we expect it this year, up to the mid-to-high 20s% by 2028 with potential to grow from there.
Okay.
How do we do that? The majority of that is the Mosaic project, which
Okay
I think we'll probably talk about here today. Maybe David can tell you a little bit about it. It's when we think about that and you think about that increase in margin over time for Government Solutions, that's the primary driver.
Right. Right.
Okay.
Let's take advantage of this moment to talk about Mosaic.
Mm-hmm
W hy does that matter and how should we expect that to drive profitability and margins?
Yeah. Mosaic is really our investment in an updated architecture and platform. The current platform that we've used.
Mm
is one that's been around in the business before I joined, and I've been at the company 12 years. It's a, it's an older technology architecture, a technology stack, so the cost of ownership of that is significantly higher than modern technology. Our Mosaic, which is not a brand name, that's just our project name for the-
Right. Okay.
... for the product, is effectively, you know, cloud-based, service-oriented architecture that's much more modular and flexible. We would imagine three things effectively happening. One is the software licensing cost of supporting the older program will go down because we won't need it anymore. Two, the number of people required to support the new platform and or onboard new customers goes down because it's much easier and more standard.
Mm-hmm.
Three, just the total cost of ownership of OpEx to host and support that is significantly lower. Those are the three things that will, as we deploy that over the next six to eight months, that's where the, a majority of the cost savings will come over time.
Got it. You've also consistently highlighted significant TAM expansion.
Mm-hmm
potential from legislation, and so just recap for us which states or programs do you expect are most likely to convert to meaningful revenue in the next 12 to 24 months? How are you expecting that those economics will compare to your legacy programs?
I would say the one that we're the most excited is here in California. California, while it had had legislation for red-light cameras for years, it was actually pretty poor legislation, was not effective at deterring anything.
Mm.
We've recently been able to support movements to rectify that legislation for red-light, but also open up pilot programs for school zone speed. There were six cities identified, five have done an RFP and we won all five.
Okay. Wow.
When you look at, the opportunity here in California, it's the biggest one, by far.
Right
T hat the state is pretty nascent in its adoption of speed enforcement. If that goes statewide, that increases the TAM by another $150 million. We've had a great track record here. We're excited to win. I would say that the economics of that would be very, very similar to other programs in aggregate across the rest of the country.
That's right.
What's the composition and timing for these programs? You mentioned, you know, maybe in expanding the TAM by up to $150 million here in California. Yeah, that would There's some things that have to happen there. TAM for us is an output of legislation.
Okay.
That means you've got to get legislators on board to, and I know people would be surprised, but not only you can always get legislators to agree on things. I know that's shocking to people. But, it's a combination of getting them to agree on the problem and the opportunity. It's. Given that these pilots only started this year or in the, in the last year rather, I would say it's another two or three years. You know, the fact that we won all five, that the programs are gonna be launched successfully, we feel really good about California. Spend a lot of time here.
Got it. What about Florida? Florida seemed to be moving pretty quickly, especially on school zone.
Yep.
I know there are pilots there. Where are we at from a legislation perspective in that?
Yeah, outside of New York, Florida's the largest red light customer for us. They have launched school zone speed. They have been sort of a little bit of one foot on the gas and one on the brake. They've opened up some, they pulled some back. That is an area where we've had significantly higher levels of competition. Our competitors are not generally nationwide. They tend to exist in pockets of the country.
Right. Right. Right.
We'll have a competitor in the southeast that doesn't compete in the northeast, and we sort of don't really have much competitive competition out here in the west. We won a few, they won a few. That one's been a little bit slower. I think one of the nice things is we rolled out school zone speed in Florida two years ago. You know, we probably made some missteps along the way, just like anybody would, and we really learned from that, and we turned that into continuous improvement. So far in California, where we're doing the exact same thing we did in Florida, we're five for five.
Right. Right.
We feel like we really have put ourselves in a real pole position to be winning here going forward.
Those issues in Florida, were those product or offering related, or was it engagement with decision-making?
Yeah
bodies related?
I would say, probably not recognizing that smaller, you know, that ultimately this comes down to some level of influence, with your customers or the sort of constituents around the customers.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
You know, our competitors were very fast, and they probably offered things at prices that we weren't quite used to at that time.
Okay.
We had to sort of pivot and adjust accordingly.
What about other states?
Mm-hmm
that should be on the radar, even if we don't quite have, at least pilot programs funded, et cetera?
I mean, we've got Work Zone that's rolling out in New York. I think that's an area to watch. We've got other Work Zone programs. School Bus is one of our fastest growing products.
Yeah.
That's continued to open up. It's, you know, a couple of years ago, it was only in five states, it's now in 13. I would say that's another one that we're really excited about as well.
Got it. Got it. Got it. You mentioned competition and obviously, you know, we tend to think about you as the leading provider in the markets where you compete.
Yep.
Maybe give an update on the competitive environment.
Sure.
Any changes in your business line that we should be aware of, whether it's new entrants or some of these regional incumbents trying to expand footprint or making incremental investment to improve product, et cetera?
Yeah. Where I would say is leadership. When you're in the leadership position, you attract competitors because people wanna be where you are.
Right.
In the automated enforcement side, what I would just say is, again, we compete with smaller local companies that, you know, have some resources deployed in a certain area of country. They tend to focus in and around that area. I would not say that they have launched products that were materially different or a new offering per se.
Okay.
Although some of them have had some really good products. I don't wanna be.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
don't, I don't wanna be dismissive. It's probably just more, hey, they said, we're gonna focus right here. We're, you know, we're rolling out the largest program in the world in New York City. We're opening up TAM. We may have been less focused on certain pockets. As we have pivoted, we've really redeployed our resources into these regions to say kinda just, "Hey, you're gonna own that area of the country and compete against XYZ." We started to see our win rate continue to go up. Our win rate last year was, like, 70% on RFPs.
Yeah, no, impressive.
I think we really pivoted the business against some of the competitive responses that we've seen in the market over the last couple years.
Got it. Let's talk about, you know, I can't believe we've made it, whatever, to almost 25 minutes without speaking directly about AI.
Yeah.
How are you thinking about the key risks and opportunities in AI-enabled government tech and urban mobility, especially given you have a partnership with Hayden AI? What are you seeing in terms of adoption? How is that changing the competitive environment? Where's the market headed?
Yeah. I would say, so on the... I'll call it on the outside of the company. On our products, we use AI today, and the camera use machine learning technology. We use that to process out false positives so that we're not running all of that video across the network. It's very expensive to run that video across the network. We're able to eliminate that at the roadside. The camera does that on its own.
A false positive would be something that normally would have triggered the camera, and then you send it.
It was a violation that wasn't a violation.
Right. Exactly.
Exactly. We're trying to eliminate those as much as we can. Otherwise, a person, that gets more expensive. You're pulling video.
Right. Right.
we've been doing that for a couple years now. Look, I think what's happening is the cameras are getting significantly smarter at the roadside, but the back-end system, i.e., Mosaic, is really gonna be using AI to be predictive. How do you allow for our cities to make better decisions around safety based upon the data that you're gathering, not just from an enforcement camera, but from other data points that are sitting in and around the intersections that they operate? Inside the company, we've had some successful, what I would call, sort of small pilots. We ran 30 pilots of AI in the company. This is anything from how do we do RFP responses to how we think about HR services, like, everything.
We were just trying to find some grit under the tire of the promise of AI. You know, obviously, I think AI clearly has a fair amount of press right now. In practicality and reality, we're just trying to find use cases that actually result in dollars to the business.
Right. Right, right
versus just deploying technology. We've got several that we've deployed. This year, we've got a couple more. I would say that over time that you would. Obviously, there was a story of a company laying off, I think, half of its workforce at one time related to AI. That's not gonna be happening in Verra Mobility. What I think we can do is how do we thoughtfully and considerately deploy AI in the pockets that are that it has the highest value so we can redeploy resources to growth. That's something that we're very keen on doing, and we've got a lot of resources tied up against that right now.
Got it. Let's shift to parking. You know.
Yep
small-
Yep
decent part of the business for Verra, but one where there's probably a lot of opportunity.
Mm-hmm.
You mentioned universities as one of the areas.
Yeah.
You know, what are the complexities of university and maybe municipal parking generally, that the T2
Mm-hmm
part of the business addresses, and how would you describe demand, versus the biggest opportunities?
Yeah. The thing about a university is, When we bought the business, you're like, "How, how hard can it be?" Well, I have two kids at school right now. Every semester, they gotta get a new permit for a new lot.
Mm-hmm.
The rules are different. Those lots don't ever stay the same. You can park there on Tuesday, but you can't park there on Wednesday. You get a ticket for it. You've got visitors coming in for football games, and then you've got faculty and advisors and all these things. There's a fair amount of real-time complexity, generally in constrained spaces, that universities have to deal with. One of the larger universities that we deal with is the Texas A&M University, and you would be shocked at the number of challenges that they have. They have, like, a 20-person parking department just in the university.
Hmm.
What our software does is it acts as a partner to them in an ERP to help them manage that. We now are able to deploy most of the sort of parker-facing technology via mobile and very quick payment apps. We're helping them make decisions on where to place access controls for security purposes as well as for revenue generation. That business has, I think, Those are gonna be very real and durable challenges that will be there for many years to come.
How should we think about growth?
Yeah
of the parking segment and how big can it be?
Yeah. Look, I think right now, we'd had a year or two where churn was a real problem in the business.
Okay.
We lost some customers, and I think the company has done a really nice job to settle that. The growth rate's gonna be more muted, it's gonna be low mid-single digits for this year and probably next. What I think is important in that business is the continued move to transaction-based revenue versus just the hardware that we sell, either the pay station or the access controls and/or just the software. Moving more to that recurring revenue is the real goal because that's gonna lift the margins up as well. They're doing a really good job, I think, of both updating the product and also updating their sort of go-to-market commercial motion to do that as well.
Got it. Last few minutes.
Yeah
wanna chat capital allocation and some of the financials. What are your capital allocation priorities today? You guys have always done a lot around organic investment, but also M&A and even buybacks.
Yeah.
You know, talk us through where the priority is and what we should expect the balance sheet to look like in the next one to two years, et cetera.
Yeah. I'll do the first, and you can talk about the balance sheet.
Yeah, perfect.
I think the I mean, our philosophy on this has not changed since going public, which is the first thing we wanna do is invest in our businesses. This year we talked recently in earnings where we're gonna be increasing our R&D and spend around autonomous vehicles as we think of what are the solutions that we wanna be providing in and around that area as we look to cities and fleets and some of the challenges they're facing. So we're upping the ante there a bit. Part two is growth. As you mentioned earlier, we do have customer concentration. We'd like to diversify our revenue sources thoughtfully and considerately over time. And you can do that through M&A. We haven't done a deal in a while because-
Yeah
we also have a lot of financial discipline. As I've said, we've chased a lot of deals, but we've said no on price, and candidly, so did everybody else. Perhaps this new market will reset the expectations of what price would be. Third, you know, since going public, we bought $650 million worth of shares. We did $130 million in the quarter, in Q4.
Right.
Because of the cash flow generation of our company, we're able to sort of recalibrate against those top three...
Yeah
sort of regularly. It's not something we set and then revisit two years later. We can do that almost every six months. You can talk about where we'll be on the balance sheet.
Yeah, real quick. I mean, look, at the end of last year, we did another debt refi, brought down our borrowing cost. The consolidated interest rate for the company is now under 6%, which if I were to think of that would be the case two years ago, would have thought it was crazy, right?
Right.
I think it's wonderful. That also will tell you that maybe it's not as much It's a higher bar to lean into paying down our debt at this point. We ended the quarter at around 2.3 times net levered. If you run out my guide to the end of the year, it'll get you to two times. We've said consistently for quite some time now that we think the level flight path for leverage for the company is three times.
Mm-hmm.
We are more than happy to run it lower than that. We will not artificially get to that 3x to see that 3x.
Right.
I think that's a good gating item to say would, for the right acquisition or the right combination of capital allocation, could we pop above that, come back to that, and kinda stay at that level? That should be, you know, what you're thinking of as that long-term level loaded ceiling. Again, if you run my guide out to the end of the year, you're gonna get to a 2x net levered business.
Got it. Let's finish up there on the, on the guide and potential swing factors. You know, look, we've got the 2026 guidance, we've got renewed NYC programs.
Right.
With that in mind, what are the key swing factors, whether it be NYC rollout pace, some costs, associated with, minority and women-owned businesses.
Correct
C ommercial volumes, new program awards. Where should we be anticipating biggest potential variance in both upside or downside risks?
Yeah, I think, you know, for Verra Mobility for time and memorial, it does travel. It does follow travel demand.
Right. Right.
Right? To the degree that we have modeled in, to be clear, what we have and why.
Mm-hmm.
We have 1% growth in for this year. Here's exactly why. That's where we exited the fourth quarter.
Yep.
As of this morning, we're at about a point and a half, so it's kind of, you know, at least for the first time.
Slightly better.
S lightly better, but we're well within the rounds of saying 1% did.
Right. Right. Right. Right.
To the degree that it's higher or lower than that's always one piece to look at. I think on the Government Solutions side, one may be short-term, one may be slightly more medium or long- term. The short-term one are the installs in New York City. Like, we're confident we can do that in 2026.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
I don't love having to go out and at the end of the fourth quarter and saying, "Well, I can't put in cameras if it's not above 32." That is what it is.
or whatever.
It's the truth.
Right. Right. Right.
I don't love having to go through that complexity, so we'll watch that. You know, I think the second thing is we've talked about getting the margins in our GS business. We've not just talked, we've committed to getting those margins back up to a significantly higher level than they are today. The largest path to do that is continue to execute on Mosaic, which we're doing in the background, and that's gonna start showing up in the prints in 2027.
Got it. Got it. Last thing for you, David, priorities this year as you kinda work through and look beyond just this year from a horizon perspective?
Yeah. Look, this is all about resetting the base of the business, but also it comes down to growth. What are our new growth vectors? We're investing in innovation. We're investing in product management. We're investing in autonomous. Really the priority is to leave the year with a clear-eyed view of where we're gonna play in those markets and go put some capital behind them.
Love it. David, Craig, thank you very much for joining us today.
Thanks for having us.
Appreciate it.
Always good to be here. Appreciate it.
Yeah. Good to see you.
Thank you.
Yeah, yeah. It was great. Good to see you. Thank you.