Been my banter for the past 15 minutes. My name is Dan Perlin. I head up the FinTech practice here at RBC, and I'm delighted to have Jim Kelly, who is the CEO of NCR Voyix. Jim is a long-tenured payments guy. Been in the business for, I don't know, 30 years?
Not that long.
Not quite that long.
Yeah.
A little while.
I'd have to be a little older.
Yeah.
25.
25 years.
Yeah.
Okay. This is a fantastic time for you to be taking over the company. What I wanted to start with at a very high level is you've been in the CEO role, I think, for a little over four months now. As you've been in that position and you're reflecting on things that are amazing, maybe at Voyix, or really good at Voyix, versus things that maybe need some attention. If you could just start with that balancing act, and then we'll just continue from there.
Sure. Just by the way—excuse me—just by the way, context, I was the Chairman when the company split in October 2023. I was asked by the board to step in as the Executive Chairman. We had a new CEO, David Wilkinson, who had been with the company, I think, 12 years, not previously been a CEO, and was appointed by the previous board to take on that responsibility. We had a lot going on last year in 2024. Beyond the spin, we had a couple of infrastructure issues to deal with. We had a fraud at the beginning of the year, sadly. Most importantly, we had two big components of the business to focus on. One, which was kind of a remnant of our ATM business. It was a digital banking business, which is now called Candescent.
It was the board's decision to divest that asset, which we did to Veritas. It was signed in June of last year. We closed in October of last year. The significance of that event was that we paid down—the sale proceeds were $2.5 billion. We paid down a significant part of the bonds that were outstanding. I think we took us north of four times leveraged down to under two times leveraged, somewhere between 1/2 to, say, 1/8 leveraged today. The second was to not exit the hardware business. We're still going to be in four primary businesses: hardware, software, services, and payments. The volatility of hardware sales—I could see this when I was at Evo. A lot of people stocked up on hardware during the slow time of 2021- 2022. I think the same thing happened at NCR.
From an investor standpoint, you see these rises and falls of revenue. We wanted to normalize that. There is an accounting structure called ODM, which we signed a deal with a company called Ennoconn, which is owned by Foxconn, with the expectation of that completing by the end of last year. That did not occur as of last year. It was a technology challenge, nothing more. In retrospect, given the tariffs this year, I think we were better positioned to manage that instead of managing it through a third party. We still have the same expectations that will get done by the end of the year, which is what we said on the second quarter call. What I have learned—I have now met with over 50 CEOs or CIOs across our core customer base.
While we have thousands of customers that we support, the largest group of them is roughly about 400 customers. That represents north of 70%-80% of the company's revenue. The positive—to answer your specific question—is we have a very long-standing, close relationship, supportive relationship with some of the biggest retail and restaurant customers across the globe. That was reaffirmed by the meetings that I had with them. Now, the flip side, I think if you look at the last four years of the company's history, five years, there was—I'm the third CEO, I guess, in the last three years.
Yeah.
Mike Hayford was there for, I think, five years or so. There was a sale process that went on in 2020, 2021, which never occurred, obviously. We had COVID to deal with, like everybody else. The company went through a spin. I think there's a number of customers whose commitments that we made were probably not met timely and still have not been met timely. I think that's on the negative side. We have some work to do on the legacy applications. The positive is that the company is now a platform company, which we talked about on the second quarter call. It's a platform company. There's over 16,000 of them in the U.S. today. If you think of a company like Netflix, you watch a movie tonight, it's an action movie. Tomorrow, it's going to propose other action movies for you.
It's the same concept: our ability to understand what our customers want. Now, we're B2B, but they ultimately are servicing their customers, whether it's restaurant or retail. Retail for us is grocery, fuel, and convenience predominantly. Whole Foods is an example. If we can provide the data of the customer set when they shop, what they like to buy, when they like to buy, it makes a better experience not just for their end user customer, but obviously for our customer in terms of providing real-time data, which today they don't get to see because most of the applications, if not all the applications they're using, are 10, 15, 20, 25 years old. On the negative side, yeah, we have some work to do on infrastructure, some investments in infrastructure. I think we've said that on the calls.
On the positive side, our attrition is 1% of revenue. I can say that again. Last quarter, 1% of revenue. I've never heard of that before. We have long-standing, very important customers. When you think about what we do, all the revenue that these customers collect comes through our point of sale. We are a critical factor in how these companies operate. We are getting closer and closer with them relative to technology. Investments that Mike's made and people before Mike and David in platform, which is something we've been talking about regularly, and I think we were more transparent this last call. We now have a Chief Product Officer, Nick East, who's been with the company for a number of years, that our focus on delivering next-generation solutions will continue to bind those relationships, I think, for the foreseeable future.
Yeah. That's fantastic. Before I want to delve into a lot of those topics.
I try to cover everything.
I was going to say that was great.
I got eight minutes on this.
Before we do that, one of the things we're trying to run through the vein of this conference, given the timing of it in the quarter, is just what are you seeing in terms of May trends? How did that compare? Are there any hesitation on spending from clients given some of the uncertainties that have been in the backdrop? More importantly, just what do you see in terms of the May trend on the consumer?
I would start with tariffs because that's one of the things that we, I think, went into the penalty box undeservingly in the very early stages. Our stock dropped pretty significantly because I think the expectation was tariffs were going to be a problem to us. We've seen less than $2 million of total tariff impact, which we've absorbed within our financials. This can change any day, as we well know. Right now, tariff does not represent an issue to us. I didn't actually see a slowdown even with tariffs as in the height of that six weeks or so ago in terms of customer spend. I think the opposite. What I have seen is the customers are very excited about what we have to bring to market.
I have not seen any slowdown in the customer's demand for service, product, newer solutions than what we're offering today. We are pushing really hard to get the product to market as on plan by the beginning of next year.
Yep. And in terms of what you see from the volume trends, maybe more specific in restaurants, but even in retail for that matter, nothing noticeable?
Yeah, most substantially, most of our revenue is on a subscription-type basis. So it's not affected in the payment space. When 2009 hit, our volumes dropped materially. It's the first time I've ever seen volumes start to go negative. We're not seeing that. Today, our payments volume is relatively small, so I can't tell exactly how much payments have moved over the last six months or so. But in terms of the core spend or revenue for the company, it's been positive and negative. It's been steady. It needs to be growing in one direction instead of declining in the other. It has not declined. As I said, revenue has been stable, consistent through the first quarter, and I haven't seen anything change since then.
Great. I want to step back here and go back to the messaging that you had in kind of your opening remarks. Enterprise is like your sweet spot, right? I mean, you talk about.
It is the company.
It is the company. I think there's a view that that is maybe not the case.
Yeah, I don't know why.
I don't know either, but we get it all the time as well. There is a lot of competition. The question that I have is, because Enterprise has been so strong for you guys, or is a big part of the company, what wasn't going right under the prior administration, so to speak, relative to kind of the changes that you're making now?
When you're talking about prior.
I mean, I'm not talking about governmental. I'm talking about David and the team prior. Because I feel like they were going down a path of SME a little more than maybe what I'm hearing from you.
I mean, David was there for 12 years, and he ran the retail side of it. I mean, retail has mid-market. On the restaurant side, we do have the SME. We acquired Aloha product many years ago. They had a dealer network. Many of those dealers, companies like Mercury and Shift4 and others have acquired those dealers or at least worked with those dealers over the time period. We do have an SME market. I met with our dealer network, our dealer executive team a couple of months ago. Yes, the SME market is very competitive. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of point-of-sale software companies that are in that space. I have heard the terminology that we are a donor space for some of our competition. I am sure you have heard the same thing.
I have.
Yes. I think you have to also understand how the competition prices. It's a very ISO-priced, lower giveaway, the point of sale and software to get payments. That's not a strategy that we've adopted at the company. I believe that the products and services that we sell have value, and payments has value. If you price payments to offset giving other stuff away for free, in the end, that comes back to bite you. When the contract renews or over time as the statements increase, I think customers, like any consumer, customers get frustrated with it and look for options. We've heard that from feedback at conferences, et cetera. You should think of this as an enterprise-first mid-market. Mid-market are hundreds of locations like we signed Ziggy's Coffee and Yogurtland on Aloha Cloud. I mean, those are two and 300, 400 location establishments.
Yes, we'll sign individual steakhouses, et cetera. Those generally are at Aloha v19, which is not a cloud-based application. It has cloud application connectivity, but it's not a cloud-based one. And t hen Voyix Next is integrated to all the payment processors in the U.S. It also offers functionality: point-to-point encryption, tokenization, Google Pay, Apple Pay. There's a host of capabilities. It's not just a conduit. It's a conduit that's adding value. For whatever reason, in the past, we either didn't charge for it or didn't charge appropriately for it. When you look at third parties that do this as a living, they charge for that capability. Some of it is, look, we're offering the service. We're not recouping value for it.
The second is, if you're a customer, and I have this going on right now, I will not say the names, where there's two intermediaries between us, the point of sale, intermediary one, two, and then the payment processor. When something breaks or somebody's behind trying to coordinate three disparate companies, it's very difficult. It's frustrating to the customer. Who do you think the customer calls at the end? He calls us. My view is, we'll just make it easier for you. That's why I actually reached out to Chuck originally and said, "Look, you're well paid. You have not only domestic, but you have international capabilities. We're interested in those capabilities." I talked to the other guys as well. Now it's going to be Karen's business. Karen and I have talked about this as well.
We're not looking to be in the acquiring business. That's not our focus. Our focus right now is the software piece. We want to be able to offer the capabilities that our customers demand. Because as I said, all the revenue that comes from these customers comes through a point of sale. That revenue only has value to the extent that they can process a credit card. If there's ever a disruption in that cycle, then it's painful for them.
Yep. What kind of time frame are we thinking in terms of?
We mean or you?
The universal we outside. Let's say it this way.
Okay.
What should investors expect from these potential opportunities over the course of the next couple of years? Will it be in 2025 numbers? Should we be thinking more of a 2026 story?
I think you already said. Again, the reason we're using Worldpay is they already earn fuel and grocery in a big way. We're not competing against them. Whatever customers they have, they have. I'm not trying to take them. I know what percentage of our business they have because I can see it on our system. That transaction is supposed to be done by the end of the summer. Then we can start selling. Now, recognize those are no payments. Grocery and fuel are very, very thin margins. I'm not expecting some overnight success. I think you'll start to see it in the numbers probably by the very end of this year or going into 2026. Once we do, we already have had wins, but they're not big enough to talk about. We do $400 million today.
The statistics on new customers, which is actually back to one of your first questions, one of the negatives I've seen is we've not pursued new customers at the rate we are pursuing now. We've been somewhat complacent, big company, conglomerate, lots of big customers, plenty to do. Do not push to go do something else. That's not my philosophy. My philosophy is always grow because customers are going to leave you or they're going to get merged into somebody else. My sense is going into next year, we'll be able to see it. The moment I see it in a material way, it'll continue to snowball. The bigger play, I'm not minimizing payments, is the software launch. Launching as a platform company. We have no interest to be a payments company holistically.
It's one of the commitments I made to Worldpay is we're not out just selling payments. We're not looking to become a competitor to theirs. We're only a competitor to the extent that these are our customers at the point of sale, whether it's hardware, software, or services. If we're supporting a customer and they want payments, and we have some customers like that today, then we're going to support them as a fourth branch of the organization.
Yep. And timing on the switch, as you call it? I'm not going to use Gateway anymore.
The switch is up and going. What we're doing is moving that to all the rest of the region. We effectively have four regions. We have Latin America, U.S. and Canada, Europe, and then Japan, and Europe, Asia, and then Japan. Each of those have earlier versions of what we have in the U.S. I expect to launch, actually talking to Diego, I don't know, tomorrow or the next day, he runs Latin America. I think he's in the earliest shape to get it up and running. Darren is talking to Worldpay about getting Europe set up. We're going to do this in parallel. Our number one focus is to drive the software and services business.
Okay. Let's talk about that because the big part of the strategy for the past several years has been to pivot the business to more of a SaaS-based model, right? Away from license upfront and hardware. That's just continuing today. Maybe just bring us up to this point in time. Where does the organization stand in terms of that transition?
This is what I outlined in the comments on our second or first quarter call. We are in pilot, not at pilot, but we're in pilot with both grocery and fuel domestically and internationally. I mean, convenience kind of just goes with grocery on the restaurant side. The retail side, there's less of a change. We're continuing to roll out the point of sale aspect of Aloha Cloud v19 is in market. There's going to continue to be upgrades and enhancements to both of them. What will be coming out this year is Menu Manager, Smart Manager, and Kitchen for Aloha products, which are bespoke. Different than others, these will work with their cloud-based, Linux-based, platform-based. These are enabled to run with anybody's application. It doesn't just have to run with our point of sale. It can run with third parties as well.
I would say these pilots go well. We'll continue to pilot more and more customers. We'll start rolling out across their base. I was with one of our customers out in the northwest or west last month. I think he's halfway through a deployment of one of the earlier versions of our cloud solution. Look, software is tough. There's always challenges. We're trying to create different than the past. We sold 20% of an application. We built out the other 80%. We customized the heck out of everything. We now know what people want. We're trying to normalize that so that when we come out with a product, it's 80%-90% complete. The customization is more on the margin than the core.
That is what the team is working on right now, to make it easier for them to stand it up, easier for us to roll it out, less friction than in the past. We are optimistic of the future.
That's awesome.
Thanks.
A 1% attrition rate is pretty astounding across a lot of industries.
It was 2% last quarter.
Oh, is that okay?
I was going to say, I thought it was actually 82%, but I was going to run with 1%.
No, no, it was 2% for year-end. I think I said 2% last year. This quarter, you're right. It was 1%.
1%.
All right. So the question is, you have this level of attrition that is incredibly low, but the level of investments maybe in the product previously were not at par. So I'm trying to make sense of how.
How many applications do you think we have on the retail side? You know I was going to ask questions.
2,500?
No.
I have no idea.
We have 25 software applications.
I thought you were going to throw out a crazy statistic at me.
25. We're keeping 25 point of sales running for the retail side. Actually, it's 50 overall, but 25 of the core ones. Then for Aloha, there are 19 versions of Aloha. There's probably four or five that are still. We have a lot of tech debt, as they would describe it. The platform is single. We're moving from a lot to one. One will do the same better than all the others did individually. Those are 25 years old. They were bought over a series of years that transformed the company from a hardware to a software organization. Now we're transitioning from there to being a platform company. A platform company is a Google and Azure cloud that provides the real-time data that they're all looking for.
It's just, I think the company maybe should have started a lot earlier because the market has moved in this direction faster. I think at the level of enterprise, I'm not seeing a lot of companies that have the capabilities that we are launching to the market. This isn't, as they call it, slideware. These are live with real, very large international organizations running them today in pilot in their stores.
Got it. All right. We got about a minute left. I wanted to ask just on capital allocation. Always an important topic, but what's interesting about this one, you announced a $200 million buyback. That in and of itself is significant. There is a nuance to it, which allows you to buy back your preferreds.
Yes.
Is there something we should be aware of that makes it unique? I mean, I thought it was a bit of a nuance.
We spent $125 million after we sold Veritas for $2.5 billion. I thought it was appropriate that we returned something to shareholders. So we did. I forget the exact number of shares we bought, but we spent $100 million initially and then $25 million in the first quarter-ish. I do not think the original one, I cannot remember whether this was an authorization that preceded me, whether it included the preferred or not.
I think it did.
Yeah. I don't recall if it did or not. We wanted to make sure it was clear this time. We effectively canceled that one and put in a new one. We aren't laser-focused on the preferred versus the common. Right now, most of the investment's going into the company. I wanted that to be out there since we kind of retired the past one.
Yeah. The preferred's been around for a while, so.
Yes. It has been a while.
Okay. Great. We're out of time. Jim, thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate it. Always a pleasure. Great to see you.
Thank you.
Thank you.