All right, so we're gonna kick it off today. Joining us, kicking us off today is CEO David Wilkinson of NCR Voyix, and we're also joined by CFO Brian Webb-Walsh. Guys, thank you for being with us today. We're really looking forward to the discussion.
Yeah, thanks, Will. Good morning.
So, look, maybe we'll just kick it off. There's obviously been a lot of major strategic announcements over the past year, and particularly recently. Could you talk a bit about just the strategic vision of the company, where things are headed, and, you know, where is your focus right now?
Yeah, a lot, a lot going on. So over the last 12 months, if we go back, it was, it was not even 12 months ago that we did the spin out of the ATM business and created NCR Atleos. So that was the beginning of the journey, and since then, we have been extremely busy, really looking at streamlining and focusing our company on what is our core, and that's the software and services business to support restaurant and retail. So to, to that end, we recently announced the, the deal with Veritas to sell Digital Banking for $2.45 billion. So we're excited about that.
We also, at the same time, talked about our hardware outsource design and manufacturing model that allows us a very innovative way to be able to provide complete solutions to our customers, but not have that heavy burden of being, of a hardware company, having that hardware supply chain, and then third, we talked about our cost structure. We've rightsized our cost structure in a couple different ways, but most recently to make sure that we could accommodate what we were doing as a new business model, as we became smaller with divesting of Digital Banking. So we're really excited about what that looks like. When we think about the pro forma of that company, of what we've become, we are going to show top line growth as we go into 2025 . We're gonna expand Adjusted EBITDA margins going into 2025 .
We're gonna look at free cash flow conversion now of 40%, which is up from what we were performing before, which gets us to levels that were the same cash dollar amount as we were doing when we had Digital Banking as part of the business. And that gives us a lot of optionality, options that we haven't had in the past. We can either return cash to our shareholders through something like a share repurchase if we want to. We can look at modest tuck-in M&A, you know, build versus buy, kind of decisions around what we're doing with M&A. But we've become really excited about the focus on growth and what this allows us to do in terms of decluttering our story and being very focused on retail and restaurants.
Sure, yeah, makes sense. And I guess on just any approvals necessary or any kind of procedural things that are left to clear on the Digital Banking sale?
Yeah, I mean, we've cleared the HSR process. It's complete, so that's a big one for us. We didn't anticipate any challenges, but that one's clear, so now there's some timing on financing. But other than that, everything's looking on track.
Got it. Okay, so you mentioned the hardware deal.
Yeah.
I wanted to get a little bit more into specifics, so can we, can we walk through that? How should we think about the partnership with Ennoconn and some of the moving pieces?
Yeah, Ennoconn has been a partner of ours for a long time, so we've gone through various stages of how we're moving our hardware to more of a this outsourced design and full manufacturing model, and this was just the next logical step for us. So Ennoconn, as I said, they were building point of sale and self-checkout for us in Europe for a really long time. They're part of the... They're a Foxconn investment company, and obviously, Foxconn has a lot of capabilities in terms of what they're doing with design and manufacturing of hardware. What it really allows us is, Ennoconn takes on full design, manufacturing, and warranty, and they take on the full supply chain for us on hardware.
What it allows us to do is continue to provide complete solutions for our customers that want to buy a bundled set of hardware, software, and services. We just don't take on that full liability of owning the entire supply chain. And effectively, what we'll turn this into is the ability to take net revenue accounting on hardware-
Yeah
... which is a big deal, and completely changes the financials of our company. So when we look at the pro forma going into 2025, we'll talk about $100 million of, give or take, of hardware revenue. That's really sales commission that flows through at 90% gross margins-
Mm-hmm
... for us, and it removes some of the volatility. If you look at our past performance over the beginning of the year, there's been a volatile story around revenue. Profitability, we, we've done exactly what we've said we're gonna do on profitability. It's really been revenue volatility associated with hardware.
Hardware.
This really helps take out that volatility, and we think that number will be kind of flattish as we go into next year. This has been a kind of a very strange year for hardware refreshes, and I wanna be clear that the reason the revenue was so volatile was refreshes, not. We're not losing customers. It's really just big customers aren't putting capital into replacing hardware-
Right
... in the store. So we just wanna remove that volatility from our business.
And I guess with that partnership, how does, how is the go-to-market around hardware impacted? And maybe could you walk through some of the efficiencies from separating out hardware sales?
Yeah, it's. That's really exciting for us because what it really allows us to change how we focus our sellers and how we focus our whole go-to-market model. I tell the teams internally that I think that while the Digital Banking business, $2.45 billion, is exciting, the hardware ODM model is more impactful to us as a culture. I would've told you NCR was a 140-year-old hardware company. We're not a hardware company anymore. So that's what we'll shift the go-to-market motion to be. We'll create a small, dedicated team that can handle the referrals from inside of our company for hardware.
Right.
We'll move all the other sellers to selling platform software, services, conversion, converting to the platform. We'll remove hardware from those compensation models and get them focused on adding new customers and connecting them, existing customers, to the platform.
I guess, what are kind of like the operational changes to the hardware business beyond the go-to-market?
Yeah, I mean, it's we effectively don't have a hardware business anymore. So we'll have a light team that manages Ennoconn, and we'll have a light team that does a little bit of spec building. There's, you know, as we believe there's a market requirement for something, a size of a screen or whatever, we'll pass that information on to Ennoconn, and they do all the design, build, manufacturing. So we will just have more of a vendor management and that light selling and configuration organization that will take the referrals internally.
Yep, got it. So I guess, moving away from Ennoconn, you also announced several cost actions. I think first in the aftermath of the split of the spin, and then also with earnings, with the announcement of the Digital Banking sale. So I guess, what are the optimizations that you've been able to make, and, you know, how do you think about other areas of, you know, optimizing going forward?
Sure. Brian?
Yeah. So, if we go back to the separation of Atleos, we announced a cost program, and that's been executed successfully. And that was really to offset the synergies related to standing up two public companies. And the last earnings call, in connection with the two strategic announcements, we announced an additional cost program, and it's really two pieces. One is an 800 reduction in employees, and that delivers about $75 million of savings, $20 million in reduced software CapEx, and the rest will help EBITDA with lower operating expenses. And that's largely been executed and built into our pro forma number of 430 that we gave for EBITDA for 2024.
The second part is a vendor program, where we're getting $30 million of savings, and that program, either the actions have been taken or will be taken by the end of the year, and again, those have been built into the pro forma view of the business. When I think about go-forward opportunities into next year, we're very focused on additional vendor reductions. That's still an opportunity for us, and then longer term, we have the ability to simplify processes, to remove duplicate IT systems, and to get operating leverage off our corporate cost as we grow, so with all the things we're working on and the things we still have to go, we're confident that EBITDA can grow faster than revenue as we go forward, and we can continue to improve margin.
Got it. That makes sense. You also put out a 2024 free cash flow target of $170 million. There have been several strategic actions. So how do you think about kind of the sources of firepower with the more kind of simplified business? Could you help us bridge some of the moving pieces there, and what 2025 could potentially look like, and in particular, maybe some of the working capital inventory dynamics around the hardware deal?
Yeah. So on free cash flow, we didn't give guidance for the balance of the year on the last call because of the timing of Digital Banking, when that closes, when we pay down the debt, and then there's some additional fees with the transactions and elevated severance related to the cost program. But what we did provide is what you're talking about, the $170 million pro forma view of free cash flow.
Right.
That basically says, if Digital Banking, if the cost actions and the debt pay down had all been done as of January 1st, what would our free cash flow look like? It removes the fees related to the transactions and the elevated severance. That's where David mentioned we get to $170 million of free cash flow, which is the same as we started the year with. We basically offset the free cash flow we're losing from Digital Banking with our cost program and with paying down debt. Then more importantly, the conversion has improved to 40%, which is a strong conversion. That's something that we think is the basis for next year. As David mentioned, you know, revenue grows, EBITDA grows faster, and then we get that 40% conversion.
Then over time, there's opportunities to further improve the conversion as we keep CapEx kind of flattish and get revenue growth as EBITDA margins improve. You know, we think that the 40% is the new starting point.
Got it. So maybe pulling it all together, we just talked through kind of the pro forma cash flow generation. How are you thinking about capital allocation going forward, and then maybe separating out priorities of capital allocation, like near term versus kind of run rate.
Yeah. So what I would say is, if you look at the proceeds from Digital Banking, we said we expect to receive $2 billion net of taxes and fees, and then of that, $300 million will go to terminate our AR facility, and the rest will go to improve leverage. If you look at that, if you actually do the math from how we ended in Q2, our net leverage would improve to 1.6 turns. That gives us about $150 million of additional cash that we'll have as we close the divestiture. When we think about that $150 million and then future cash flow generation, our priorities are really to continue to invest in our platform and our products, maintaining that $135 million of CapEx that's embedded in free cash flow.
And then from there, we'll consider share repurchase, and we will consider tuck-in acquisitions that are more modest. And those tuck-in acquisitions, you know, there's nothing currently in the pipeline because we're focused on digesting what we just announced, so that's more likely into the future. But there'll be things that we can, you know, buy versus build ourselves, most likely connected to our commerce platform, where then we could sell it to our, to our customers that are on the platform. So that's how we're thinking about capital allocation.
Got it. And maybe just hit on some of the announcement recently on the, I think, the upsized tender offer.
Yeah. So that is all part of kind of the overall game plan. We had good participation in the tender. We decided to upsize it, but that's all tied to the math I just provided.
Yep.
And that still gives us opportunity to do something with the excess cash.
Perfect.
So we're happy with that execution.
Okay, maybe we can talk through some of the segments, getting a little bit deeper into the business. So, on the retail side, with the announced hardware deal, you kind of have the ability to, you know, maximize your focus on the software and services and the recurring part of the business. Could you kind of give an overview of just how you view that part of the business? There'll be a bigger spotlight on it going forward, and what are the priorities now, you know, as you move forward?
... Yeah, our priorities have remained consistent. So the two main priorities are connecting customers to the platform, both existing and adding new customers coming onto the platform. When you think about what the hardware, I'll say, ODM model allows us to do, is just take those same resources and get really focused. So as the market leader in point-of-sale software in that space, and as the self-checkout market leader, we feel like we're well positioned to continue to drive growth in that segment. On the self-checkout side, you know, self-checkout for us is largely a software solution. So when we think about self-checkout, while there's a piece of hardware that lands in the store, that you, as a consumer interact with, could change.
It could be your mobile device, it could be a kiosk, it could be the gigantic self-checkout that we know that has the belt and everything else, but we're less about the bent sheet metal and more about the software and the intellectual property, about how you interface with that. So the trend that we're seeing in retail is also one that our customers are looking to consolidate their spend, especially on the enterprise side, with fewer number of providers, and we're well positioned with our platform software and our service capability. We're really well positioned to take that to take on more for our retailers as they're focused on driving better margins and better guest experiences.
Yeah, that makes sense. Yep. Can you talk about just the progress that you've made in driving those platform conversions? or what does that backlog look like? What's the visibility, and what's sort of the timeline to making that transformation?
Yeah, we're making really good progress on the platform conversion. We don't talk about the backlog numbers publicly, but we do have a contracted backlog. We've done a couple of things internally with the focus organizationally. We've created a specific senior IT person that has a dedicated group that's only focused. Their sole focus in life is these platform conversions. Part of that's what saw the increase, the 70% increase in platform conversions year-on-year in the retail segment.
Mm-hmm.
So we're excited about the progress we're making. Customers are understanding the vision, the value that it unlocks to get connected to the platform, so they can start to consume more of the capabilities through the cloud services environment versus how we deployed in the past on-prem.
Can you just hit on what's sort of entailed by a platform conversion, and what does it look like from the customer side?
Yeah, on the customer side, the. There, there's a couple things that happen when we convert somebody to the platform. First of all, it's usually, now there's a capability that a customer needs. So, like Sainsbury's, as an example, they wanted to do more with their Nectar loyalty program. They wanted to provide real-time dynamic pricing through the point of sale with their Nectar loyalty. So what our connections to the platform allows is better access to data, and through APIs, they can link to their Nectar program and do the dynamic pricing. So that's a good example of a kind of the pull strategy, where the retailer has a real need. We have three paths to the platform. We can revitalize, where we'll take your legacy point-of-sale application and connect it to the platform.
We can do an extended scale, where we'll take our Edge technology, which is a very unique way that we deploy software in store, or we'll just do a leapfrog, where we take you to the next-generation software. So we have three paths to the platform, and when we do that, the effective relationship with our customers, they re-up the commitment to NCR Voyix. They would sign a new services agreement that is a SaaS agreement, so we can snap new capabilities under that contract.
Right. And then I guess that sales process, maybe after the platform conversion, what does that look like, and how do you think about kind of up-sell motion over time?
Yeah, now we've got our team, they'll be 100% focused on the incremental sales. They're not gonna worry about the hardware, they're gonna be focused on software and services. It's more of a discussion of whatever new capabilities customers want. So if it's things like self-checkout, if it's better loyalty, if it's better pricing and promotion, better access to inventory data at the point of sale, it could be out-of-store ordering and fulfillment. Those kind of capabilities now become service capabilities that are delivered through the platform, not a legacy point-to-point integration or a customization of code, and that would have been in the old world.
Got it. Just because I know it comes up a lot with investors, but just the trends in self-checkout, and, you know, how do you, how do you kind of think about the macro trends going forward? Self-checkout getting more or less prevalent, and how do you kind of tie that to some of the headlines you see around shrinkage in the industry?
Yeah. Yeah, I think there's a self-checkout as a thing. You have to expand the definition of what you call self-checkout. So self-checkout to me is really all about you, as a consumer, having choice in how you check out, and then it creates a lot of options for our retail clients around how they staff stores and what they do with labor. So because of the labor crisis and the demand of consumers, the need for self-checkout is as strong as it ever was. Now, what that looks like could take on different forms. As I described, it could be computer vision checkout, it could be RFID checkout, it could be you as a consumer using a mobile device or an in-aisle scanning device.
So those are all forms that we believe our software will enable our clients to take more routes to get better experiences for their guests and the customers in the store. As it relates to shrink, you know, I think, you know, that it's obviously a problem within retail. We have solutions through our software, through AI and computer vision, that allow you to do some interesting things to monitor what's happening in the store. There's a lot of store policy things, too, that have to be changed in order to change the way shrink dynamics work. But we're also attacking shrink, not on just the checkout vector, but across the entire store, and monitoring more that's happening in the store to help our retailers combat shrink.
Right. Makes sense. Maybe we can touch on competitive dynamics. I mean, seems like many of your competitors, particularly, are more hardware-led. Can you talk about the differentiation the business can go to market with today?
Yeah, they are. And what we have now as a focused software and services company allows us to really hone in on the key outcomes that our retailers are trying to get. Like I described earlier, the challenges they're facing are labor challenges, they're facing margin compression, and they have an increasingly complex IT environment to go deliver against efficiency and scale as they go attack those two problems. So they need a scale company like NCR Voyix that has both platform software and service capabilities, and that's where we find that we're differentiating the most, is that full service, that complete solution-
Right
... and the ability to scale with some of our larger enterprise clients that allow us to differentiate.
Got it. One of the things you've talked about over time has been kind of expanding beyond the sort of big box retail footprint into areas like convenience, pharmacy. You know, when you think about that process, kind of, what else do you need to offer to win in verticals like specialty retail, and kind of where are you today in that?
Yeah, so our business today, we've talked about 70% of our business in retail is grocery or big box retail, and then we have another 15-20% or so that's convenience and fuel, and we think that's an expanding market, and the rest is the specialty retail side of things. So we definitely have growth opportunity within specialty retail as we start to turn our attention for some of our sellers to going to acquire net new customers. In the past, we've been more focused on converting our existing customers. Now we're turning our attention to adding new customers as well. So we'll do that through the specialty retail space as well. Payments, that's an area where we can offer payments in a payments led.
There's a big mid-market in that specialty retail segment that we think we can go attack, that is attractive. In the grocery, big box, convenience, and fuel, those are consolidating industries, and we're well positioned with the largest names in the world in those verticals. So that positions us well as we start to see consolidation in those industries.
Yeah. And just lastly, on retail, you know, I traveled internationally, and I saw a lot of NCR self-checkout or just regular checkout everywhere. So how do you think about the international footprint, and-
Yeah
... and how do you think about growth kind of within and outside the U.S.?
Yeah. So we have, when you look at our footprint globally, there are 12 countries that, for us, when we think about global, it's really multinational, 12 countries, and then we'll support our clients as they expand internationally through another 20 or so countries. So we think that's a differentiator. A lot of the brands in the enterprise space want to go multinational.
Yeah.
For us, our strategy now is to in the 12 markets that we serve really well, we're gonna go grow share and go win net new customers, and then we'll continue to follow these big multinational branded retailers through how they want to deploy. We have that model. We have a scalable delivery model that allows us to follow them where they go.
Yeah, makes sense. All right, maybe we can switch over to the restaurant side of the house. Maybe we can kick it off on strategy. How has the focus in that business shifted over time, and, you know, what is the shift towards a more recurring revenue model entailed for how do you go to market?
It's similar to what I described on the retail side, and that's what excites us about the focus that we have now as a company. We've become really focused on platform and platform conversion, so that will be a similar story, connecting our existing customers to the platform and adding net new customers to the platform. There's probably a bigger bifurcation in the marketplace for restaurant than there is in retail. There's the... I'll call it the SMB, and I'll break SMB into a couple different categories as well. But there's the enterprise side and then SMB. So we're well positioned on the enterprise side, very complex requirements. Big brands, they value the same things that we just described around scale, platform tech, services, consolidation of spend with fewer providers, so we are positioned really well there.
In that SMB space, there's the single site, I need simple, out-of-the-box functionality, and we compete there, but that's a very highly competitive market. We lead with payments in that space and, you know, we can win customers in that space, but that's not our core focus and where we differentiate. When we get into what I'll call the mid-market part of SMB, so you get five sites or ten sites, up to almost, you know, fifty, sixty sites, you become really complex.
Mm-hmm.
And you are now looking for something more than just out of the box. I'm gonna set it all up myself. I need help, and I need support, and I need a full service offering. And that's where we're finding we're seeing traction and where we're truly differentiating and where we see when we win, why we win, is the ability to have a full service offering in that segment.
I think in enterprise specifically, there's kind of perception that's not a very high growth space, but I've heard you say before, you're partnered with a lot of the higher growth names within that vertical.
Yeah.
How do you think about your positioning within enterprise?
Yeah, I mean, we're well positioned in enterprise. We have a strong market share. That you know, there'll never be a true monopoly in that enterprise space, so there'll always be other providers in and around that segment. But we, you know, we have really good share. Our customers are growing, and we have the ability to grow with them. And as I described earlier, as they're looking to create new capabilities, we're gonna provide new capabilities through the cloud. Either they need better online ordering, they have to consolidate online ordering. They need better data, so they can market directly to their customers. They need better data, so they know how their promotions are performing. So those are all the reasons why they want to move to the platform, and then we can provide, again, full service capabilities.
As they want to expand and open new physical restaurants, we can be there to help support them, install them, turn them up, turn them over to their operators, and then operate and help them operate the tech in the stores end to end.
Is the platform conversion process in restaurants, is that different? Is it easier or harder than it is in retail?
It's very similar. In some cases, I would say it can be a little easier just because of the size and scale of a, like, as a grocery store deployment and some of the customizations that have been done in retail, but it's a very similar process. We can take your existing point of sale and connect it to the platform, or we can go right to next-gen that's natively connected to the platform.
Yep. So maybe we can hit on some of the competitive dynamics. Restaurants is, you know, as you mentioned, a very competitive space. There's several competitors that have been seeing a lot of traction, both upmarket and particularly in the downmarket space.
Mm-hmm.
Could you talk about how you think about the competitive dynamics and your ability to differentiate the restaurant offering?
Yeah, I. Our offer, as I was talking about earlier, is truly differentiated by the holistic nature of what we do. So the ability to have a platform that operates at scale with reliability, and then wrap that with services. We continue to hear that that is really our differentiation point, is providing that complete offering. Again, in the small end of space, it's really about simplicity, ease of use, and then being able to provide support to those clients as well. And so we'll continue to focus on creating an easier process for us to onboard new customers with our shift and focus to growing new customers, specifically in that mid-market space.
We'll continue to focus on making it easier for our clients to deploy, manage, and get aggregated data across multiple sites as they expand.
Can you talk about how the go-to-market is structured between the enterprise and the small business part of the business?
Yeah. Enterprise, we're heavy direct. We have direct sellers that cover the biggest clients that we have, both on retail and restaurant. Mid-market, we're also heavy direct, where we're supporting those customers, and we wanna go after it. On the single site, SMB side, it's a combination of kinda web leads and marketing-generated leads, and we have a partner model-
Reseller
... that we
Yeah.
Yeah, reseller model that we use in that space.
Yeah, got it. That makes sense. So maybe let's talk a little bit more about the differentiation of the business. One piece that comes up is the focus on services. So how do you think about the services part of the restaurant business, and how it fits into the broader competitive mode?
Yeah, we've seen success. In the restaurant side, we call it wall-to-wall services, where we provide complete support capabilities for everything inside the restaurant, all the tech that runs inside the restaurant.
Mm-hmm.
What we found is that we're uniquely positioned to do that, and part of why we can move to that hardware ODM model as well is we support more non-NCR hardware than NCR hardware already inside of the restaurants, even inside of our retailers. We feel like this is just an extension of our model. We've got a great customer support infrastructure that takes the first call from the restaurant, and then we can remotely resolve the majority of it, so we have a lot of intellectual property around how to fix things before you have to physically go on site or encumber the restaurant operator to fix something inside of their store. We have a very unique advanced exchange and depot model for hardware.
And then, if need be, as a last resort, we have a fleet of technicians that can go on site and fix things on site. So that end-to-end, that breadth of service experience, is where and how we differentiate. That's not easily replicated by a lot of our competitors. I mean, it's pretty capital intensive. You likely wouldn't replicate that service capability if you were just starting a software company, but we have that capability. So we get a lot of operating leverage out of it, and so that we use it to our advantage.
Jumping around a little bit, but I'm just recalling a discussion we had about this aspect of the retail business and, you know, the ability to just, one, put trucks on pavement if you need to.
Yep
... to get people in the store to fix things when they break, but increasingly doing things with more automation. Could you, could you talk a little bit about that?
Yeah. The teams work really hard at automation in the services space. So that for us, again, our services story is a platform story. So if we can get you connected to the platform, meaning the hardware and the software is connected, I have a lot of visibility to what's happening inside of that store or that restaurant. I can get real-time telemetry of the hardware. I understand the volumes that are passing through the hardware. I can inform the remote staff of what needs to happen. If you're connected to our edge, I can do a lot more manageability of software deployment and rollbacks remotely.
So there's a lot of work that's being done within the platform to get customers connected that allow us to do remote resolve, which not only creates a better model for our customers. All they really care about is uptime of the tech in the store. As you get more tech in the store, and as there's not a person standing there, the tech becomes the associate in the store, and it has to be available for you to transact, and so that allows. That creates opportunities. We're also leveraging AI and other capabilities with remote process automation with the teams around, you know, how do we better diagnose problems? How do we predict when problems are gonna happen?
If we have a technician on site, we can do a little bit more work while they're on site with the customer, so that they don't have a problem in the future.
Yep. Makes sense. Okay, back to restaurants. The monetization story, I think, has been in focus.
Mm-hmm.
You know, I think we... You know, we hear competitors talking about, you know, the tenth, the 20th, the 30th module in the restaurant store. How do you think about just ARPUs within the different locations and opportunities to provide more services over time?
Yeah, we continue. Again, it's the platform story of once we get you connected to the platform, we can do cross-selling and upselling, and the similar story, where we're adding new modules or new capabilities to our customers. Payments is a big one for us. We're. You know, we talk about payment sites. You know, adding new payment sites. We're continuing to see payment site growth. That's specifically in the restaurant space.
Yep.
Mostly in the mid-market and the SMB. You know, what we're finding is that once we get you connected to the platform, we do see an uplift in ARPU immediately upon connection, because we're adding the first set of capabilities. Then over time, we see a pretty big uplift, you know, three to four X uplift in terms of ARPU, as we continue to cross-sell and upsell. Payments, we issued some case studies in our earnings release in our Investor Day.
Mm-hmm
... and in some of the earnings releases. Like an example, a single-site restaurant in Jacksonville, Prati, was the example we used. It was a $4,000 ARPU before we added payments, and it jumps to $19,000 ARPU. So there's some examples of where payments is a big lift. Then on top of that, we do online ordering, loyalty, a lot of back-office functionality, kitchen. So there are other add-on capabilities that we can cross-sell as we get them connected.
Yeah, that makes sense. Maybe to dwell on payments a little bit-
Mm-hmm.
I mean, I think people are sometimes surprised that, you know, providers like NCR or some of your competitors can stand up a payments processor and compete on rate for what the customer-
Right
... can ultimately get. And I think it just speaks to just, like, the amount of volume that you can quickly amass going over your rails. So, can you talk about that, the competitiveness on your payment structure versus what these customers could get if they went out and procured it themselves?
Yeah, the real value of our payment offering, and whether we're doing the processing in-house or we're partnering, 'cause we'll do a little bit of both, the real value is in we start the transaction on the point of sale, and then we will route that through our gateway. So we have a payment gateway on both the retail and restaurant side that we'll route those payments through, and then out to the land of processing, whether it's our own processing or third parties.
That end-to-end value chain to our customers, and simplifying that again, so that they don't have to become a payment integrator, but they can just have a complete integrated payment solution that has compliance, that has faster time to market for new payment opportunities, that's unified across the channel that the customer might order, whether it's online or in the restaurant or in the store, is the real value. You know, again, you're right, the bits on a per transaction are always gonna be... You know, that's a fairly known model.
Mm-hmm.
So you're not really gonna compete on that. We don't really. We're not gonna compete on rate, pure rates. Where we compete is offering that end-to-end value.
Got it. Got about a minute left. You know, David, I think you, you've been at the helm of the company while there's a lot of change going on internally. So just how do you think about kind of managing a giant organization, maintaining the culture, kind of shaping the organization for a much kind of, like, leaner and faster-moving company?
It's been a lot of fun in terms of getting us focused on what is our core. So the retail and restaurant business, we have a lot of people inside, whether they're developing software, or technicians that are driving around in trucks, or the corporate finance teams or HR, that understand our industries, and we know how to help retail and restaurants, and that's another differentiator that we have. I think the company... The people inside of the company are excited about this new focus, the focus on software and services, what we're doing around hardware ODM, getting rid of some of the confusing bits around ATMs or what we're doing around Digital Banking. So the team sees that focus. They're also really excited about what we described in the pro forma business model.
When we look at being a $2.15 billion software and services company, that gets back to top-line growth, that's growing EBITDA, Adjusted EBITDA margins at a faster rate than top line, converting the cash flow that Brian described, that gives us options for either returning cash to shareholders or making other decisions for us to help grow the company. Getting leverage down to something that's very manageable, and being a recurring revenue that's approaching 80%, that's an exciting company to be a part of.
Sure.
When we talk about the journey that we've been on as a company for a long time, getting us to a software and services recurring revenue business, people wanna be part of a winning team, and that's what they're seeing.
Great. Well, I think with that, we're out of time, but thank you so much for joining us today.
Perfect. Thanks, Will.