Joining us today, I'm Matt Summerville with D.A. Davidson, the Covering Analyst for NCR Voyix. With me for a fireside chat today is Jim Kelly, the company's President and CEO. I thought I'd first kick it off with just asking Jim to tell us a little bit about your background. What drew you to Voyix as a Board member, originally in October of 2023 at the time of separation, and now what's led you into your role as CEO?
Okay. Good morning. Thank you for joining as well. By way of background, most recently I ran a public company, which I took public in 2018, started it in 2010 called EVO Payments, and sold it in 2022. Before that, I was the President, at one point the COO and CFO of a company called Global Payments, which went public in 2001 with a market cap of $400 million. When I left, it was $6 billion, and then I think as people have followed Global Payments, at one point it was a $60 billion company. Before that, I spent 10 years at a workout firm called Alvarez & Marsal, so I left there as a partner, started as its first associate. There were six of us when I joined, and before that I was an accountant.
Over the course of that, I think the combination of all those experiences really helped inform how to successfully break down, understand a company, and then also lead a company. I think in the context of NCR in particular, I mean, this is a company that was for sale in, what, 2020, 2021? Mike tried to sell the company to Veritas, and I think Apollo that failed. You know, COVID, they were in the midst of COVID, which obviously impacted a lot of companies, or all companies. They went through a split. The Global Payments experience that I went through was actually a split as well. There was a company called National Data Corporation that was separated into two organizations, and Global Payments was the one that I ended up joining. Just the experience, that was two years, very complicated.
It's kind of like getting a divorce because the organization's getting separated into two pieces. I mention all that because, you know, for the last four years, NCR has gone through a lot of change, and, you know, last year again we went through a lot of change. The change in the end, even though it was initiated by an activist, Glenn Welling, with Engaged, who had been on the board, I don't know, for a number of years, I think that was a pivotal moment for the organization. It needed to separate. The idea of being a conglomerate, maybe that was exciting years ago, but for people like Matt and others that follow companies, what were we? Were we a hardware company? Were we a software company? Were we a service company? It was hard to get coverage, therefore it's hard to get investments in the organization.
I think the separation was a very good decision, but at the same time, those four or five years were, and I wasn't part of it, but just watching it plus my experience was a huge distraction, and I think to some extent adversely impacted our customers. While our revenue attrition's 1%, as I said last quarter, it's not that the customers are leaving. I think it's the level of satisfaction, which we're heavily focused on today since I've joined in the CEO role, and I'll cover the history of getting from chairman to this in a second.
I've met with over 50 CEOs and CIOs, all separate, either a CIO or I've met the CIO and the CEO, but over 50 companies in the last, say, 120 days to send that exact message that the customer matters first and foremost to me and to the rest of the organization. Some of the distractions that they unfortunately were a byproduct of, of the things that I just described, those are in the past. Last year we restructured the balance sheet. We sold one of the remaining divisions, which was called Digital Banking, which is now called Candescent. We sold it to Veritas for $2.5 billion, paid off a substantial amount of the debt. Last year, I think we ended the year at a $1.5 billion or $1.6 billion. We bought back some shares last year as well.
We spent $125 million, a little into this year, as somewhat of a return back to shareholders because most of that cash went to debt holders, but I wanted to also recognize those who've been long-term holders of the company. The strategy going forward is more investment in the company, return the company to growth, bring out our new products, which I think you're going to ask about. How I ended up on the board, as I said, my last company was sold in 2022. I had knee replacement surgery, so I wasn't planning to work for a while. That's not a lot of fun for those who haven't gone through it. Keep your knees healthy.
An investor who knew the people at Engaged had suggested that they talk to me initially about being the CEO, but I was still closing my transaction, and then asked if I would join the Board, which I agreed to do in October. The Board asked if I would step in as the Executive Chair in May because we were doing two big transactions, that one and we were also outsourcing our hardware manufacturing under an ODM model to Ennoconn, which is owned by Foxconn. I stepped into that role, and then I think by the end of the year, the CEO that the previous Board had appointed, it was the first time he had been a CEO. That was one of the reasons they asked for me to get more hands-on.
I think the Board, not me per se, but the Board more broadly made the decision that a lot needed to get done at the company in a very compressed period of time and felt that a change was better for the future of the company. I, maybe my wife wasn't as happy about it, but I stepped into the role as CEO. You know, I personally believe this is a great company. I haven't seen many companies in my years of workout or the two companies that I ran that had the position with the marquee list of customers that we support. We're very fortunate to have this group of customers, and I think the investments that go back several CEOs ago to turn the company into what we now refer to as a platform company, they thought of it as a cloud company.
The evolution of being cloud processing has germinated to the point that we are on the cusp of launching one new product, our Cloud Solution to essentially support all our existing customer base and be able to access other segments of the market.
Very helpful. Thanks, Jim. I want to dive right into the payments side of the business. Can you compare and contrast NCR's historical payment strategy and perhaps how your success with EVO informed your desire to pivot towards partnering with Worldpay almost immediately after taking the CEO role?
Okay. Those 25 years between Global Payments and EVO, that was a payments experience, payments processing. The credit card put in the machine and validating it's not lost or stolen, you have credit, and then the transaction of taking that electronic transaction and turning it into cash, the consumer gets charged on their bank statement or their credit card statement, the merchant gets paid, and the guy in the middle, which is called the merchant acquirer, makes their fees. That was the business I've been in for the last 25 years on a global basis, effectively every continent that's got any decent GDP that I've worked on. The first time I came to NCR as the chairman, there's a little store in our building. It's where we demo some products, and employees can go in. This is a marché, the food court, where they can buy things.
It's all on our system, checkout. We were doing a demo of the products for the new Board Members, and up on the screen, there were numbers telling like the U.S. national debt. It was going really, really fast. I asked David, who was the CEO at the time, what is that? He said, that's the volume. That's the estimated volume of what goes through the systems, all our point of sales globally. Volume is the value of what you buy at a store. That's the terminology used in the payments space. The company has $1.3 trillion of volume that goes through a point of sale. My last company, EVO, in total had $150 billion in annual volume. $150 billion versus $1.3 trillion. We were a $700 million revenue company making $450 million when we sold the organization.
Immediately I thought, why are we not accessing at that level? Because today the company only accesses $400 million of the $1.3 trillion. The reason is when the company purchased, Mike purchased a payments company called Jetpay in 2020, I believe it was, small, small company. It was not geared to deal with the behemoths that we support, Fuel, Grocery, you know, Whole Foods, Circle K. These are giant global organizations in some respect, and this little engine just was incapable of providing that service. Very quickly, right after that, and this was well before I was even the CEO, we divested the component of Jetpay that is that authorization piece, putting your card in the machine, the box at the point of sale. The expectation was we will go find somebody else to rent as opposed to own.
It's much better to own, but owning and building was just not in the cards. It would have been way complicated. It would have taken, it would have been a huge distraction. As I just said a minute ago, last year was a big year of restructuring the company. We just didn't have the bandwidth to do it. I guess by the time I became the Executive Chair, I started down the path of talking to all the major players, people that, the CEOs that I've known in each of those companies, one of which is not running the Social Security Administration, Frank, from Fiserv. Charles and I have known each other a long time. I talked to him. Charles is, that company was owned 51% by, or they owned 51%, they owned 49% by FIS.
It was a private company thinking about going public. They were just recently announced to be sold to Global Payments. You know, what I offered him is we have $1.3 trillion of volume that we can put through your platform. You know, from their standpoint, they saw that as a good commercial deal. It's a business that they're in, which is they don't sell directly all the time. They sell through relationships. You can call them partnerships. They're not legal partnerships, but commercial relationships. They have all the capacity and capability that our customer base needs. In some instances, probably 15%-20% of our customers are using them as an acquirer. It seemed to be a good marriage between the two.
Now that company is going to become part of Global Payments, which obviously was the company I was the president of for 10 years. It is the right direction because now we can access the $1.3 trillion. This is what we're doing. We started it two months ago, right after this got announced. We have a team of people who came from EVO, so people with experience in payments, and they are actively sitting with our customers through our sales organization or directly teaching them about the capabilities that we have, not just the relationship with Worldpay, but we have embedded capabilities that the company has not taken advantage of. In some instances, given it away for free when it's actual value that we're providing to the customers that competitors are charging for. We just haven't done that to date.
Just like we're moving out of one-time software licenses like the old Microsoft and moved to 365, we're doing the exact same thing. We're moving from a one-time license model to a subscription model because we're providing a different type of value to the customers. Why would a customer want to do business with us, one of our customers who's already with us for a point of sale? Why would they want to do business with us for payments? It's very simple, and I've already seen many of these examples. I saw it in my past life, but I've seen it already since I've joined. You have three components to getting a transaction done. You have the point of sale, which is ours. You generally have something in the middle, a switch, and there's third parties that do this. We have one of those as well.
In the U.S. alone, it does $800 billion of volume. You have the point of sale. I mean, you have the processor. If you put multiple parties in the middle and there is an issue, and we have seen this as well with one of our big customers, somebody at the processor makes a change, firmware is updated. If I do not know that at the point of sale, the next transaction they try to run, it fails. These are not little companies. These are giant companies. This is the only way they make their income, through their point of sale. Our view is you put your entire trust in us to run your point of sale, which runs effectively your entire company for the grocery, fuel, convenience, and restaurants that we support predominantly.
We have the rest of the chain now that we can support what you need. On the restaurant side, for the last, I don't know, three or four years since Jetpay has been there, our attach rate of new customers we sign up on the restaurant, now these are more mid-market or SME. They're not the large enterprise for the reasons I mentioned, but our attach rate is like 95%. I think it's been as high as 99%. The only difference is we have some dealers in there that sometimes have their own payment solution. I think it's the best for the customers. We're not charging more. We're just displacing a competitor who would be in the middle.
It enables the customer to have one relationship to provide the entire spectrum because they're already relying on us to manage the most important piece, which is the point of sale.
Very helpful. Just as a couple of follow-ups, how rapidly do you think you can scale this business for Voyix? How should we think about the TAM? I know you referenced $1.3 trillion in volume, but ultimately what does that translate into as far as TAM? How do you convince customers that are using?
TAM for us, you're saying?
Yes, TAM for us.
Not just TAM in the whole world.
Correct.
Yeah.
TAM for you guys. How do you convince customers that are using a different payment product to come over to this platform?
Okay. I think some of that I just addressed. They're coming to us because they're frustrated with the middle. I can't say the names of the customers, but I know one who's a very big customer right now, super frustrated because each one of the organizations in the middle, they have their own kind of cycles. Their cycle versus the customer's cycle versus our cycle, you got to line it all up. It's kind of a pain in the rear to make all that stuff happen. With us, we now offer the entire spectrum. Where in the past we haven't. On the restaurant side, as I just mentioned, our attach rate has been effectively 100%. Customers want ease of implementation. They don't want to have to call and coordinate because otherwise it puts them in the middle.
They have to get us on the phone. They have to get the other party on the phone, and we have to work together. The reason we connected, we created what used to be called Connected Payments. It is now called Voyix Connect to take some of that aggravation out of the mix. They did this in 2014. They created this platform. This platform processes, as I said, $800 billion today. It is most of our U.S. customers. We have similar platforms in other markets. It enabled the customer in the past to say, "Oh, I want to be with Global," or, "I want to be with First Data," or, "I want to be with Elavon." This could just switch to them directly. It was designed to make it easy for the customer because in 2014, NCR did not think about being in the payment space.
They were happy to downstream that to somebody else. They were kind of late to the party. Now we're, you know, 2025, we have the capability like most software companies domestically and now internationally that control payments as one throat to choke for the customer to rely on us to be able to offer that solution. Again, I mean, some of it's economic. We have to be competitive on price. Regardless, we're not actually activating, we're not collecting any of that value today. Just to give you an order of magnitude, what does $1.3 trillion mean or $800 billion? In the U.S. alone, that's over 12 billion transactions a year, excuse me. That means 12 billion people are running a transaction through one of our point of sales in the United States each year.
You could just add a penny or two pennies to that. That's like real money, isn't it?
For sure.
Yeah.
I appreciate that. Maybe let's pivot a second and talk about.
Can I just one other thing?
Sure.
We're not trying to become a payments company. Just because I'm 25 years in this, that has nothing to do with it. I also have a software background. The company's greatness is around supporting our customers for software. Because I've heard this now in the market, "Oh, Jim's there. So we're going to become a payments company." We will not sell payments to anybody other than our customers. We're not knocking on doors. We're not creating a sales organization to compete for payments. We're just trying to provide the best quality service to our customers and make it as easy as possible for them. That's simply all we're doing.
One of the other sort of, at least I considered to be somewhat meaningful strategic shifts you've made. You know, I think when David kind of launched Voyix as a standalone CEO at the time, his main sort of strategy rlved around mining the existing customer base for incremental wallet.
Yes.
You have said, "That's important. We need to go get new customers. We haven't been going to get new customers." Talk a little bit about how you have pivoted the sales organization, how you are running the business today to kind of go down both of those paths at the same time.
Yeah. Before I, I might have even heard that from David when I first met David at a lunch, but I did hear that from one of our Board Members as that was the company's philosophy over the last five years. We have enough customers. We have these big customers. There is lots that you can sell to them. We do not need new customers. I thought that was the most ridiculous thing I ever heard. We always need new customers. Customers go out of business. They get, they merge. They do not like you. They leave. We have, I do not know, 25 new BDEs, I think they are called, outselling to new customers. One of the challenges we have is to launch the new product. As the new products come out, I think it will make it more effective for them to sell.
We're already having wins, not specifically on the software side, but on the hardware side and the services side. We just signed a fairly sizable, very sizable account that I think will grow and eventually we're believing into a software relationship as well. Yes, my mandate is go get new business. One of the things we haven't done, we've been very complacent in just being in the enterprise space, which is terrific. We don't have a ton of competition at enterprise. We all have competition, but it's much different than the SME market. The new products that are coming out, the platform products have the capability of being downshifted into the middle market. I think there's a tremendous amount of opportunity. You see some of that on the restaurant side. We signed Ziggi's Coffee and Yogurtland with our new Aloha Cloud solution.
There is a mid-market that is, there's 7 million merchants to pick on in the U.S., 7 million merchants in the United States. We've been focused on the very top quadrant. I mean, it's a quadrant. It's an eyedropper of customers relative to 7 million. While we cover the spectrum on the restaurant side, we really focus predominantly on the enterprise space, but we're moving much more aggressively into the mid-market. You'll see that as we launch the new products into next year. Take care of existing customers. Going to roll out the new products to them. Existing customers are super important to us. We don't want to lose anybody. At the same time, we need to grow. Growth is not going to just come through enterprise customers. It's going to come through new relationships in the mid-market as well and the SME.
Just to take that a step further, can you give maybe a little more granular detail around kind of the next generation platform that I believe you said is launching early next year, if I'm not mistaken, and how you feel that will differentiate yourself competitively at both the enterprise level and the SME side of the business, side of the market?
The best I can tell, the company's acquired 50 software applications over, I don't know, 30 years or so. I don't know. You would know better. You've covered it for a longer time. There's 25 that are really active today. On the restaurant side, there's the one you everybody knows called Aloha. And then on the retail side, the three major categories I just mentioned under an acquisition called Retalix. And there's a variety of flavors inside that structure. I think this was a buy market share already in the hardware business, buy out the software component of the hardware business. I'm guessing that was the strategy. The challenge is we have a lot of tech debt. We have 25 legacy applications that are running today around the world. I live in the Southeast. I shop at a supermarket called Publix.
They're running an application that's over 20 years old. It works, but it doesn't have what ultimately people want, which is what we described in our last, on our first quarter call, the idea of a platform company. What is a platform company? I don't know if you've heard that terminology before. It was somewhat new to me, but we are all living it today. Think of Netflix. I'm sure everybody's heard of or seen Netflix before. Let's say you watch a movie last night. Let's say it's a drama. Tomorrow you're going to get proposed other dramas to watch because it knows what you like. That's what our customers, not we're B2B, so we're not B2C, but that's what our B2B customers want.
They want that information to know how you shop at a supermarket or how you go to a gas station because they have competition for your dollars every single day. Today, we can't provide that information easily because we have legacy on-prem applications like your PCs or have an operating system sitting inside them. If you go to Publix, the 17,200 point of sales at Publix have an operating system sitting inside that PC. More recently, David and others have been able to, we refer to it as attached to our Cloud, to be able to extract data. It is not the same as actually being on the application. These are DOS or Microsoft or might even be DOS-based old applications.
This is a Linux-based cloud running in Google here and in Europe that allows real-time reporting, a variety of capabilities, all those ones that I just described as an example of Netflix that the customers are really demanding. They're just, I think they're very disappointed. It's taken us as long as it has to get here. I think they've been working on this project, best I can tell, maybe 2017, 2018. We've spent over $1 billion building these capabilities. And this has been, I mean, maybe I initiated a push earlier than I don't know what David would have otherwise done. But we're framing to the marketplace what we're building, what kind of company we are. There's 16,000 companies that would qualify themselves as a platform company.
We retained a firm called Prophet and a guy by the name of Ted Moser who wrote a book called Winning Through Platforms. Ted has been working with us for the last, I don't know, five months in helping us learn how to effectively launch the product. One of the first things I did was promote someone who we bought a company from in 2019. His name is Nick East. He's based in Bath, England. He was the founder of the company. The product is called Edge. It's an integral portion of how the platform actually works effectively. I promoted him to be the Head of Product because in the past, the company did not have a product lead. It was a very siloed organization. It had an ATM business, a Digital Banking business, a L ittle Payments business, and this Software business.
Inside Software, it's not just software. It's software, hardware, services, and different flavors of services. Not a lot of great coordination. Now, with all the other noise gone, we're just a software company with effectively one product because the product itself are the applications that are going to sit on the cloud. Think of your iPhone. I think everybody here, most people, it doesn't matter if it's iPhone or Android. Each of our phones have a different set of apps that are sitting on it based on our personal needs, what we like to see, what we need to access. Think of that as a corollary to what we're doing. We're going to have a platform like your iPhone.
We're going to build apps on there to meet the needs of a grocer and all the features that a grocer needs or to meet the needs of fuel and all the needs of fuel. Instead of having to go out to one of the locations and actually work physically on them or do it in our lab and send it to them and then having to have it tested, it's all going to be just like on our phone. It's all going to be remote. That is where we're heading as an organization. I'm just not saying we're doing it now because I'm here and we're going to start it. It started before I got here. All I'm saying is we're now coming to market. NRF is in January on the retail side.
On the restaurant side, it's not as dramatic of a shift because we've already launched Aloha Cloud a while ago. We have other aspects of Aloha Cloud that are on the platform that will get launched this year. That is where we're heading. That was the thrust of the conversation that we had during the first quarter call.
Very helpful. Let's maybe spend a minute talking about the ODM. Some people may not be familiar with what an outsourced design manufacturing business model is. So maybe talk about the way Voyix had historically approached hardware, what the go-forward approach is, and what could go wrong in this type of pivot for the company.
Nothing. How many people here are accountants? Not a lot of them. One of the challenges of being in the Hardware business is that it's not recurring. Unless you're a store company that opens a store every single day that has to buy hardware every single day, you tend to buy it when you need it. You try to hold on to it as long as possible, and then you replace it when you have to. As Matt mentioned earlier, we kind of have a finite number of customers of size. It's not like we're adding hundreds of thousands of new customers on the enterprise side. It would be impossible. The enterprise customers are going to buy when they need to buy. I wasn't here during COVID, but I can tell you from my experience at EVO, there were a lot of hardware buys.
As businesses slowed down during 2021, 2022, people looked for something to do, and they upgraded their estate. I think that's one of the reasons. It's not an excuse, but I think that's one of the reasons that Voyix has seen the last two years of very episodic and mostly down purchases on hardware because I think if we went back and looked at 2021, 2022, 2023, because we're not losing customers. They bought a bunch of stuff. They just didn't need to replace it. Unfortunately, because there are a lot of machines that drive the market from day- to- day, if not every day, as we go up and down based on purchases, the revenue associated with hardware is close to $1 billion and we're close to a $3 billion company all in, $2 billion is Software and services.
The rest of it is Hardware. We have some big customers. When those big customers buy, we show a lot of revenue. When customers do not buy or if we have a lap over year- over- year, there is a lot of explanation we have to do in the scripts as to what happened and why did that happen. I cannot project, and customers are just not going to buy hardware every single day. There is an accounting structure. It is similar to 606, where you kind of, you are able to net down something that your 606 is actually different, but it is the idea of netting down something that previously was grossed up. ODM, as Matt just said, outsourced design manufacturing. We made a decision.
We, myself, David, the Board at the time made a decision that the direction of the company is what I just described as a platform company. Do I really care if they buy our hardware? They can buy other hardware as well if that's in their best interest because our focus is all around the platform that I just described to you. It doesn't diminish the value of hardware. Every one of our customers needs hardware to be able to run the software. We're just not mandating it has to come from us. In the years past, that was the mandate, and it wouldn't run on anybody else's hardware. You had to use their hardware. It was kind of because their history was hardware company. It was hardware first, software second. Now we're inverting that.
Last year, while I was very busy getting the sale of Digital Banking done, there was another group that was working on ODM. The plan, and we communicated an expectation last year we would be done by December. I think that's what the market expected. We even in the third quarter went out with numbers of pro forma what we would look like without it. The challenge was, and actually there's something positive that this isn't a spin, but I think it's positive, that the partner, which is Foxconn, through its Taiwanese company, Ennoconn, which has been a great partner, has been with us for a long time. It's not as though we're picking somebody new. They already have the infrastructure. We're an Oracle company. They're an SAP company.
The ability for their SAP company or infrastructure to be able to manage the complexities of our warehouses and warehouse distribution just in time, all that stuff, they tried to build it in-house. It just did not work in time. What we said publicly is absolutely true. I pulled the plug at the very end of last year. We could have maybe moved a piece of the business, but I thought that was a bad decision to separate because we have some customers that are global. We were not going to have one coming from them and one coming from us. We just pulled back because in the end, what is most important to us is our customers and the ability to be able to meet their needs. We just were not ready. We called a timeout.
They went off and bought a third-party application that's specifically designed to do what our manufacturing facility required in terms of picking and putting new items back onto the shelf. That is in UAT as we speak. It should be done testing by the end of July, and then we'll start piloting. I'm still now, I'm probably a little bit more optimistic that we're going to hit the end of the year. I want to hit the end of the year. The spin on this was, thank God it did not happen because this year has been very complicated. Everybody's familiar with tariffs. The way we manage tariffs, it has cost us, which means our customers cost nothing. It has cost us less than $2 million of an expense hit because we were able to effectively manage either suppliers where we bought.
Moving a lot of our stuff is assembled in Mexico, and we have some protection relative to tariffs there. If that had been, if we had accomplished this last year and that had happened, I'm not sure how they would have managed through the process. In the end, I think we'll come to a happy ending at the end of this year. I think we'll be able to finish off the migration and have them successfully get started by the end of the year. There was some thought about doing it in the fourth quarter. I don't know. We haven't really made a decision yet whether we would kind of pollute the fourth quarter with kind of half- in and half- out. We're trying to do it as of January 1st. We'll let you know as we get through the testing.
Appreciate that. We just have about five or six minutes left, but I want to talk about change and pivoting has been a bit of a theme of this conversation. Below maybe the C-level ranks, there have been some changes that have taken place, some folks you have elevated into different roles. Maybe talk about some of the other change that has been afoot within the executive leadership team at Voyix and maybe even a rung below that. How has the organization been responding to yet another wave of change afoot at the Company?
We've been talking to people at the Company. Yeah, I think anybody who takes on a responsibility like mine, you try to do what I do what I think is best for the company. And I have a long experience running companies back to my early 30s. So there were some members of the team. I think it was just time to make a change. David was one of them. That was the board's decision. At the executive level, we didn't have a product person. We're a product company. We didn't have somebody leading the product organization. We had two different people within who are sales leaders who were running product. It made zero sense to me. That's why we moved Nick into that position. That has been a game changer across the Board.
I think that has been extremely well received, not just from employees, but every customer that he's interacted with with me has been very positive. We had a Head of Marketing. I mean, she did a very good job, but at the same time, we're not a B2C company, so I didn't need a Head of Marketing. So that person exited. And the person who previously ran the retail side, I just thought it was time to make a change there. We brought in somebody new from my background who is now running the retail organization. We reorganized the structure of the reorganization to be into four quadrants. The company tried to run everything from Atlanta. Having run global companies for 25 years, that's a stupid idea. You need to decentralize as much as you can.
We can't decentralize the entire company because they've already consolidated a bunch of the back office costs in Serbia. The piece that touches the customer, we can decentralize. We have a Latin American Head. I promoted somebody to run Latin America whose legacy, Diego, he's done a fantastic job. It's actually one of our best operating units. Unfortunately, it's the smallest unit, but it runs extremely well. The U.S. is the largest, roughly 60%. I removed the person that was running that division and promoted our Head of Product for that. Previously Head of Product into running that group. He's done a fantastic job. His name is Tom Poirot. We've just hired a new person for Europe and Asia who starts like any day now. Came out of Cisco. Actually had a relationship with Tom previously. We're excited about him joining.
We moved somebody from the U.S. to run the Japanese-based business, which is our third largest market. His ancestry is Japan. He speaks Japanese. We need to infuse, this is when a company is 145 years old. There is a lot of longevity in our employee base. Sometimes we have to make changes to have different ideas of how we are going to operate as an organization. The company is moving at a faster pace. You can probably tell by what you have heard from me today, but I have heard it from customers who say to me that they have not seen this pace in the past. I do not think it is just me. I think it is the focus that we have as an organization because we are no longer a big conglomerate. We know what our mission is. We have been very clear.
I've had town hall at the end of every earnings call, so for a year. We're very clear with the organization, very transparent. My sense is, I mean, I don't think you'd expect me to say anything else, but my sense is that we're making progress on a rapid basis.
Very good. Maybe just one more to kind of close out here, Jim. Can you talk about balance sheet priorities? You mentioned post the D igital Banking transaction, the balance sheet's in probably the best shape. It realistically probably is the best shape it's been in the last 20 years or so. What are your priorities? I know you mentioned a little bit around repurchases. What are you thinking from an M&A standpoint? As you've kind of cleaned up the company to a degree, you have what looks like a pretty cohesive retail and restaurant platform. You're building out a payment business. Is there potential strategic optionality for the company at some point down the road?
Okay. I'm not sure I know the last question, but I'll get the other ones real quick. The buybacks, it's not my nature to do buybacks. I think at some point they make sense. Like I said, we sold something for a lot of money, and I think it was appropriate to do some of that. We just did an authorization for another $200 million. We have got a preferred out there that at some point I'd like to either retire or convert. I just wanted to have the authorization. We basically had used all the prior authorization. We will do it as it makes sense. I think in this year and into next year, it's all about investing in the product, getting it to market. We do have some infrastructure issues.
We run on four accounting systems because in the company split, it never finished the job of converting from an on-prem Oracle to a Cloud Oracle. There is going to be some money that you're going to hear about. I think we've talked about it publicly, about investing in the company. Not a lot of investments. I didn't want to do it last year because I wanted to see how we finished up the year. I am only more optimistic being in this job now 110 days about the future and what's available. The people at the company are desperately looking to return this company to a growth strategy. We are number one. We are number one because we bought a lot of software companies. We need to start acting like number one.
In terms of strategic, the last two companies I worked at, EVO, we bought 46 companies around the world, and Global is probably 25. M&A is not something I'm afraid of. That is not really the right answer for this company. The right answer for NCR Voyix is execution on its plan, the things that I've just described to you today. Could there be M&A? Yeah, I think that's super low on the list of things that we're going to spend time and money on. Strategic options. I sold my last company. If somebody is willing to pay the value for the company, I'm happy to listen to anybody. That is not why I joined the Company. I joined the Company to try to put it back on the right track, work with the team.
A lot of those were my former employees at EVO that have come out around the payment side. NCR has a great deep bench of experience, culture, etc. My feeling, especially as a Board Member, and at the time I was the Chairman, that's part of our job. We could have run a search and tried to find somebody to replace it. I already had been there for a year. I mean, I'm not going to be there for 10 years, but I wanted to see this Company achieve what I believe it can, which is substantially better than what you see today from a performance standpoint with our customers and definitely on the financial side.
Very good. We'll leave it there. Thanks, Jim.
Okay. Thank you.
Appreciate it.