Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. My name is Chuck Nabhan. For those that don't know me, I cover the payments and fintech space at Stephens. Today we're pleased to have the team from NCR Voyix joining us today. We have CEO Jim Kelly and President of Restaurants Benny Tadele. Gentlemen, thank you for joining us. Appreciate the time.
Thanks for having us.
Terrific. So Voyix has been through a period of transformation, exiting legacy businesses, executing on hardware, outsourcing, transitioning, and repositioning the software platform. The story today is about profitable growth, recurring revenue expansion, and new innovation. So with that, Jim, you joined the company as an independent chair in 2023, served as executive chair for a period, and then stepped into the CEO role last February. Could you talk about some of the changes you've overseen in the organization and what's top of mind today from a strategic standpoint?
Sure. And thanks again for having us. I think coming in initially as the chair of the company went through, as you described, a transformation. It separated into two organizations. The ATM business was spun out as NCR Atleos, and then the parent company renamed to NCR Voyix, both keeping the legacy name that goes back 145 years and is pretty well known around the world. I think the first order of business was recognizing this was an $8 billion revenue company and shrinking it down to a smaller footprint. So as the parent company, we went through a number of restructuring efforts. It was when I stepped in as the executive chair that CEO was the former head of the retail division of the software business.
This was the first time he had been a CEO before and was asked to provide some guidance on how to navigate a big global organization given my background. The first order of business was also trying to, or second would be to restructure the balance sheet. Of the businesses that remained at the parent company, there was the software business, which is what we are today, and then there was a business which was digital banking. We sold the digital banking business last summer for $2.5 billion, which largely cleaned up the balance sheet and allowed us to have greater flexibility in terms of investment, but also clear focus on developing what the company is today, which is a platform company.
The analogy to a platform company is Netflix is a platform company, as are 12,000 other companies in the United States, where you watch a movie one night, the next night, because it seems what you like, you get recommendations that are corresponding. So for our customers, we're a B2B provider in retail and restaurant. Benny runs the restaurant business. You saw in our last earnings release, we just renewed our Chipotle Relationship for the next six years. It's an exclusive relationship. And then on the retail side, the company has been heavily invested in new architecture for our customer base. So our customer base is thousands of customers, but predominantly enterprise, 400 large enterprise businesses that have been running applications that have been in the market for over 20 years.
The company started in 19 modernizing that architecture, and we this year, or the end of this year, going into next year, will be launching to the retail industry at the NRF show in the Javits Center in the beginning of January, a new suite of products that cover the four major markets that we cover, which are restaurant, grocery, fuel, convenience. The fifth would be department store. Lots of transformation, as you described, all very pointed in the direction you also described, that positive growth on the top line and bottom line, which we expect to see in the coming years.
Great. And we're going to double-click on some of those products and initiatives throughout this conversation. But one of the initiatives to deepen relationships with your clients is the Voyix Commerce Platform, which is the foundation for your next-gen solution. Could you unpack what's different between the new platform and some of the legacy applications and why it's so important to the value proposition you bring to your clients?
Sure. Well, since Benny's up here, I'll let you take this one.
Okay.
There you go.
Yeah. You think about Jim gave the example of Netflix on what it means to be a platform and what we are accomplishing with the Voyix Commerce Platform. When you think about the old ways of buying movies, you go rent and buy a movie and you go home, the company has no visibility in what you did with that product. Then similarly in software, it's not just that is it on-premise or not, because you still have components that might run on-premise. The reality is how do we understand our customers are using the software and the product and the solutions they buy from us. A platform company has a continual view of the usage, the interest, the tendency, the needs of the customer. You're continually improving and building on what you have today. That's a platform company.
So Voyix Commerce, in a nutshell, accomplished that. It's connectivity and connectedness to our customer's business like never before compared to a legacy product or an on-premise product. And you do this three ways. So one is it is a modern architecture. What does that mean? It means it is faster to develop, faster to deploy, faster to adopt. So there is modernity. One example could be in the old days when you build a loyalty application, you connect your loyalty application to your point of sale. That's work stream one. And then you have another work stream to connect your loyalty application to your kiosk, another one to connect to your e-commerce, another one to connect to your mobile, et cetera, et cetera. So it takes a long time to adopt new technology.
In the modern architecture of VCP, you connect once, it immediately gets activated across all of your channels because those channels are already connected to the platform. So that's one advantage, right? The architecture itself. The second one is the modern APIs means you as a customer, when you adopt our Voyix Commerce Platform, it's not just us innovating, but you can also innovate on top of that, building your own customer journey. Because one of the critical things in restaurant, all retail, you're trying to solve as a customer is how do I meet the higher standards every year, the higher standards of diners' expectations and shoppers' expectations? And how do you recognize them? How do you earn loyalty points? How do you go from selecting a product to paying the product all the way through? How do you deliver it, et cetera?
So it allows them to innovate around it easily. And then the last one is we have a pretty rich ecosystem around it. And that means there are certain partners that would integrate for that journey that customers are building. And because we are the quarterback, I call it the quarterback of the whole orchestration of the solution, we get to monetize the relationship between our third party and the customers as well because we participate in the architecture.
Got it. And Jim, you also previewed the new microservices offering at a recent show, and you're showcasing the full suite at NRF in January. Could you give us a preview of what you plan to present and talk a little about that offering as well as how it positioned you to win the Chipotle deal or retain?
Sure. So I don't want to get overly technical with the group because microservices was not something I understood a couple of years ago either. I think the advantage that we have is that the company is 145 years old. It's got a very rich culture, known around the world, but has been running applications that are very dated. And a customer base that's incredibly sticky. Our attrition over the two years that I've been there is 1% of revenue. In my experience, almost unprecedented at 1% because changing out the point of sale is very, very difficult. I think the market has been looking for us to modernize. We've been talking about it publicly.
If any of you are shareholders or have followed the company in the past, we've talked about the VCP for a number of quarters or a number of years going back to the two prior CEOs. But it was more of that's where we're heading, and I don't think it was as clear, as opposed to that's where we are. So we've now reached the point where we can bring products to market. And one of the ways we're doing it quicker than what probably I saw when I first started in February is through the use of AI. And we said this on our previous call. When I first got involved here, I thought AI was just more about companies that were all in on AI. But what we've come to learn is we have an amazing library.
We have acquired over 140 software applications over the years, 50 that are still in active use today around those four primary markets, maybe five markets, including department store. So it's not as though the applications are a problem. The problem is they don't have the attributes that Benny described because they were constructed 30 years ago. So think of anything that we own that was 30 years old. It's going to be completely different than we are today. Where AI has stepped in is AI together with our development resources are being able to modernize legacy applications at a pace that is measured in weeks and months, sometimes a single week. So in the next show that Chuck was mentioning regarding this is in Chicago last month, we showed three new products. We showed no legacy products.
It was the first time in the company's history it had never showed a legacy software application. Two of the products at my request were constructed in two weeks. And the basis of them are the legacy applications because they work great. They're running a number of places that you shop for food or eat at restaurants without naming them publicly, but you would know them all by name. So we know what the customers want. We know what they want because we've built it for them over the last 20 years. So we're able to modernize that in a format, as Benny described, that delivers a bunch of capabilities, mainly getting to know their customer and to modernize and to innovate at a speed that they've never seen before. So the show was very well received. A number of those customers have come back to see us in Atlanta.
The entire suite, that show was oriented predominantly for commercial fuel, fuel, and convenience store. The NRF show is going to be a broader array of customers and from multiple geographies around the world, and we cover just about all geographies as it stands today. So what we've done is modernized the core applications in our suite of solutions, which we'll be showing at the show. We'll be also providing some advanced reading material all around the VCP or Voyix Commerce Platform. Again, the ability to provide data information. Data is probably something that we'll see in years to come where we can monetize. At this stage, we're really just bringing the product to market to give the customers an opportunity to take advantage of capabilities, some of which are in market today.
We already have three in market, two in Europe and one here in the United States. And the feedback is extremely positive.
Thanks, Jim. So understanding that the transition isn't going to happen overnight, how should we think about the adoption within your customer base of some of the newer solutions, as well as the benefits to churn, as well as how it's going to translate into revenue growth over time?
Yeah. We're dealing with while we support the array of customers. So we have SME customers, just like the 7 million merchants here in the United States. We support a section of those mid-market as well. But really, the company is enterprise-focused, not holistically, but definitely drives probably 80% of the company's revenue is the enterprise space. So they're running old technology, which is frustrating because it takes us time to provide updates or enhancements that are asked for. They're starting to see, as I said, they saw at the show, a broader group of customers, if not most, if not all customers will see it at the Javits Center in January. Enterprise moves at a pace different than an SME, but I think there's significant pent-up demand to be able to modernize their infrastructure for the benefit of their organization.
So I expect to see some moderate uptake in new customers. New customers, depending on the structure of the agreements, will drive revenue even in advance of the installation. But then once it gets installed, we'll get the benefit of a higher margin business, recognizing that most of the customers, I mean, few of them are adding at any material pace. So most of the customers are only paying software maintenance license, and they have been doing that for many, many years. So you're talking about 20% of what was the historical rate that they paid for a one-time license for the software. So I think there'll be a significant change on the software component of our total revenue, which after ODM is implemented, it'll be roughly $2 billion. Software today represents about 25% of that number. I see that coming up quite significantly.
Is it going to come as a straight line up? No. I mean, it's going to like any company that's turning. It's going to show modest growth initially, and then it'll continue to accelerate. The analogy is a large ship. Once it starts to turn, the customer base has been with us for a very long period of time. Their expectations is that this product is coming. As I said, some of them have already seen it. I've had them in the office subsequent to our next show. And the feedback across the board has been extremely positive because they recognize for existing customers, they recognize they've seen this before, just modernized with other features. We've also showed it to new customers that we don't are not existing customers who likewise have adopted the product.
So I think we're going to be successful both with a refresh as well as expanding because the capabilities that Benny outlined of this application, both on the retail and restaurant side, is on the same VCP, is a first for our industry.
Jim, you had alluded to the benefits to your customer base of adopting some of the newer solutions. But at the same time, as we're all aware, we're dealing with an uncertain macro environment, in many cases, tepid, same store sales. How would you characterize spending sentiment heading into 2026? And how are your investors, how are your clients weighing the uncertain macro versus the benefits of newer technology investment?
Yeah, I think that's a I mean, I've had that question a number of times, and I think it's pretty logical given what I've seen in the public market comps as terms of their reporting and just knowing what it takes to run a business. But at the same time, my sense is the customers see the benefit from the product at a rate that exceeds the investment, the upfront investment cost. In many instances, we're not asking them to replace hardware. A lot of them are still riding hardware from the years of replacement during COVID. So this is more of a software and installation type of cost. Some of it, some savings that they're going to see is that we provide a tremendous amount of professional services. And I think that mix is going to change because more of the work, I mean, think of it this way.
We're really managing the store. I know this is not the greatest analogy, but think of the platform as your phone. Your phone is effectively a platform. You add features to it. Your features are apps that you drop down on the phone, but you don't manage your phone. Somebody else behind the scenes manages your phone. That's how the store works for us. We'll manage the store remotely. They'll pick down apps that they're looking to run. So they see that as a leap forward that will help grow their business. And yeah, there's always going to be transitory periods of time where the economies are going to be better and worse. But I haven't, and I'll let Benny answer on the restaurant side. I haven't seen customers say, "Yeah, I love this, but this isn't the year for it." I've seen them say, "I've got priorities.
I have to do an SAP upgrade or I have to do something else." And so that has been in advance of actually seeing the product. But once they've started to see the product, cost is always, for all of us, cost always comes into play. But we try to outline the savings. So you don't need Microsoft for your application because it's a Linux-based. So you're saving cost, as an example. You're saving some labor cost to manage it in the store. And then there's all the benefits that we both described in terms of getting a closer touch to your customer. But let me let Benny just don't say anything different than what I said, if that's okay.
I think, yeah, nothing really different. What I would say is every customer that we've talked to for next year or the following years, the focus is on two things, which is underscoring what you were saying, which is, is there a benefit to cost savings? And then usually there is, or cost management, because A, we're either replacing another vendor at a much cheaper rate because we have economics of scale and the ability to give them a more efficient solution. Or the other one is to augment their costs. So you think about restaurants, your cost is either human labor or inventory, etc. And we have solutions that would allow you to actually have efficient staff planning, better forecasting, avoid food wastage.
One of the examples we gave on the earnings score was around the microservices solution you talked about, and everything around that to manage your food cost, which is one of the biggest cost lines in their P&L. So cost is definitely one line. But the other side is, how does this actually quantify? Help me quantify how does this help me accelerate revenue as well? So as long as the business case makes sense, so we call it a business impact model, which we have for our products, there's actually a lot of pent-up demand, like Jim said, I want to get there faster because it's imperative that I solve my cost problem and revenue problem at the same time. So I would actually say we're seeing the opposite as long as you can prove the business case.
Got it. That's super. Well, we'll keep the mic with you for a little bit.
Okay.
So we hear quite a bit about the competitive landscape in the restaurant POS space, as well as for providers of ancillary solutions. Can you talk about what you're seeing in the market, as well as how Voyix differentiates?
Yeah. So definitely, if you look at the RFP cycle, we feel that this is a super RFP cycle. You have a lot of restaurants looking for technologies, the next generation technologies. And to your point, again, back to my answer earlier, part of what's driving that is it's not sustainable to have an application that will cost you either to run, either to deploy, or the time to innovation is longer and so on. So restaurants are looking for the next generation. So there's definitely that. And when I look at in the competitive landscape, you have two buckets of competitors. You think about nascent startups that are really starting in the SME space, and they believe that the SME space success can actually equate to enterprise. Enterprise is a very, very, very different architectural need, customer support need, services support need, etc. And I see that not succeeding.
And you think about in that space, generally, people talk about the cloud, the cloud being the next generation. But in reality, what's happening is the cloud is failing, especially for enterprise customers that have larger states to manage because connectivity, internet connectivity wipes out your entire state, which happened a few weeks ago, as you've seen, was AWS as an example. So resiliency, non-functional requirement is not just about the feature functionality. And architecture is actually what really differentiates a robust enterprise solution. And in that space, we believe we are, especially with the new solution that we're rolling out that we talked about with Chipotle, is state of the art. And in some regards, some portions of it is actually a new entrant to the market that we haven't seen in the marketplace. Two things. One is the microservices architecture fully end-to-end.
And what it means that for those of you probably not in technology is when I make a change to a certain application within the restaurant, I'm able to change only the piece that I need, and then I can actually access that piece and do whatever I want without affecting anything else. So what that means is time to adopt is much faster, to test is faster, to implement, and etc., and including stability. And then the other side of the newness of the solution is the, we call it the edge infrastructure, which is the ability for us to give our restaurant customers and retail customers an infrastructure within the restaurant to run the NCR application, as well as any other third party they might have, in a way that is hybrid.
So I talked about how cloud is cloud-only solutions are in today's age failing because when you don't have connectivity, when you have a problem in the cloud, huge revenue loss. Inside the restaurant only, challenging to run because you have to show up in the restaurant to maintain it, to run. It's a huge cost. So how do you run your restaurants like your digital channel? Meaning you can remotely manage it. You have all the benefits of cloud, but it runs in a hybrid model where you can have the uptime, the resiliency, etc., of owning the applications and the security, but at the same time have the ability to run it like a cloud application. So our edge infrastructure, huge differentiator. We believe in the competitive landscape. We actually believe we don't have anyone that competes directly, even though some claim.
So open architecture, easier to run, to implement, faster to innovate. And the edge infrastructure, we believe, is quite differentiating for us.
Got it. All right. Well, let's talk about payments. It's a huge opportunity for Voyix. Over a trillion in volume flowing through your network, but only a fraction of which is monetized today. You announced the WorldPay partnership earlier in the year. How does that partnership and the Voyix Connect gateway allow you to start going after that opportunity?
So the company did try. Historically, it was hardware company and then software. Did not really adopt payments until, I think, '19 with Mike, bought a company called JetPay. JetPay was a small ISO in the United States, based in Texas. Was just not scaled to support enterprise companies that we've just been talking about. It was an SME-focused organization. Would wonder why they bought that, but nonetheless, they did buy it. After I joined as the chair, we sold the authorization part. So that's where you stick your card in at the point of sale, and it validates that it's not lost or stolen, and it's within credit limits. We sold that to Global Payments, and I had a two-year transitional agreement. So at the end of two years, which was the end of October, we had to move our merchants somewhere.
And at the time, we didn't have a somewhere to move them. So Global didn't have to move off of them, but they were choosing to move off that application as well. So we are just at the beginning of being able to sell that payments capability to a grocer or to fuel. One of the things we announced during Next is that we just signed up with two leading commercial fuel companies, Comdata, Corpay, and WEX, which has a host of different brands. We support today 18,000 gas stations at the point of sale for software, but we don't extend all the way to the pumps. The pumps are managed and paid through another acquirer, nothing to do with us, at least today.
So now we not only have the ability to continue to provide innovation at the point of sale along the lines that we just have been talking about, but we can access 17 billion transactions that cover our 18,000 gas stations. So why has it happened already? I don't know. It takes time, but we just are at the beginning of the journey. And the reason I described it, and we put out the press releases, is there's a lot of, I mean, I think there's some questions about the company and the company's performance in the past, but the company is actually, we sit in a great spot. We have a brand new architecture, as we've been describing the VCP. Payments, we touch in the U.S. alone, $1.4 trillion. I run two payments companies. Together, it didn't add up to $1.4 trillion. Trillion is a big number.
Globally, we're over $2 trillion, if you include all our other markets, which we're going to pursue at some point. But it's a journey. It's going to take time. Again, you're dealing with enterprise customers. So if they acquire the new application, we have a gateway that sits between the point of sale that we developed, so our point of sale, and the actual terminal for the processor. We do that to make it easier for customers to be able to pick whatever processor they want. So if you do business with us, you can pick Elavon, First Data, Global Payments. We'll support them all. We have to manage them all. We've got 170 people that support that. But my view was, why are we doing that? Why don't we go acquire for ourselves?
At the time, like I said, we didn't have the capabilities, but now we do domestically, and we're going to continue to roll that out internationally. How we acquire those customers are going to evolve over time. What does it mean economically? Now, you take the transactions alone. I think the transactions are something close to, in the U.S., $30 billion transactions a year, $17 billion in fuel and $12 billion in kind of retail. You can put any number you'd like against that. It's a meaningful impact to the company. On the SME side, we sign 100% of our customers for payments today. It's really not an option. It's kind of like Toast and others out there. They offer that as a solution. The difference is, other than the authorization with Worldpay, the rest of the infrastructure is inside our company.
So the backend system, chargebacks, the rest of how we run payments, we are a software company that has a payments business inside it. Other than Global Payments is a payments company that bought software companies. We did the opposite. The only piece that we're missing is the authorization piece. And at some point, we may decide to take that in-house ourselves.
Got it. Okay. Well, switching gears to financials, and then I'm going to open it up to questions. Just double-clicking on the software and services revenue base. There's a number of moving pieces, such as the one-time revenue transition, that are masking the true growth potential of the business. And there's also a number of levers, as we've discussed, the payment strategy, the platform strategy that could provide an uplift. So my question is, how should investors think about the medium to long-term growth potential of the business, and how, when, we're going to get there?
Is it long-term forecasting you're looking at me to do?
Yeah. Yep. It's a 28 target.
I don't think we don't do targets. We just do historicals. Look, I think I've given you enough numbers. You can do math pretty easily in terms of the opportunity. There's an uplift on the software side. Now, we're talking again about 400 customers that represent 80% of our revenue. Today, our revenue at $2 billion, 75% of that represents people doing stuff: hardware maintenance, software maintenance, professional services. That structure is going to shift. The 25% is largely software maintenance, software one-time licenses today, and some payments revenue sits in the 25%. So 25%, half a billion dollars, all what I just described, the other 75% services, the 8,000 people that support the company. And as Benny, just to come off topic a second, but as Benny was talking about the enterprise space, that is a differentiator. I mean, we could all have software.
We all sell our software as the best. But we have 8,000 people that make it work in the field. That's very difficult for somebody to replace. So what do I expect to happen? I expect that 25% of the revenue today, the half a billion dollars, to go up significantly as we start rotating customers into our new applications, whether they're new customers, which we are signing new customers on the platform, as well as rotating our existing customers for all the reasons that we just described. I think payments, payments done right, i.e., as we sign up each of these existing customers or new customers to provide the new VCP applications, they're going to want to take payments for us. Why? Because I've already met with a number. I've already met with 82 of our 400 customers in person.
And when we talk about payments, today, it's our point of sale software. It's an intermediary. Sometimes it's ours. In some instances, it's somebody else. And then there's a payments company. So there's a lot of mouths to feed, but there's also a lot of hops for data to move. And when any one of those don't work, then nothing works. And if nothing works, then no one's getting paid, in particular our customer. So the closer they can—and in the end, when there's a problem, who do they call? They call us anyway. They just assume the issue is our issue because we emanate, we start the transaction. And so I have high expectations that all future customers and new customers will take a very strong look at us to be the end-to-end solution because payments—I mean, I've been in payments for 25 years.
It's one of the reasons I got out of payments—is the payments world and the software world have really blended together. A lot of companies who are in the software space say they're a payments company, but they're not. They're a software company, and they're an ISO for somebody else. But that's not what we are. We are an end-to-end solution for payments. It's a much different experience because when something goes wrong, I just pick up the phone and call somebody to yell at them because I'm getting yelled at by a customer. But if it's a third party, I have to call First Data or Global Payments or Worldpay or somebody else if I've outsourced that. I've represented to a customer, "I'm in charge," but I'm really not in charge. I'm just a leaf on the stream of some other organization.
So I've been, whether I was at Global or EVO or any of the companies I've been involved with, I believe controlling your experiences for your customer is the best way to keep your customers forever or at least for a long time. And our customers, I think the average age—I mean, I have customers that go back 40 years, 25 years, 30 years. So we have a rich history, rich culture. Yeah, the company's been beat up a lot over the years, has gone through a lot of changes. But the most recent change, the separation of the organization because Tim and his organization has done very well on the ATM side. The other business that we spun off to a private equity firm likewise is now in control of its destiny as opposed to buried within this $8 billion organization. And for the first time, software is hard.
I think everybody knows that. Our software business and the people that lead, like Benny and his colleague Darren, they have the ability to exceed the mediocre expectations from the past.
That's super.
That wasn't a number, but it was creative enough.
No, that's super helpful. Great context.
I made it up on the fly.
Sounds good to me. All right. So final question, turning to margins. You've been very vocal in your commitment to driving efficiency across the business. Could you talk about some of the initiatives you have in place and how that translates into—again, how that translates into financials and cash flow?
Yeah. It was a good question. When we sold the digital banking business, I remember when I first joined as the chair, I asked the management team to disaggregate the P&L so I could see what the company looked like. And it was very clear that the company was not sustainable without the digital banking business. It represented $250 million of EBITDA. Think about it this way. We're an $8 billion company. So the amount of people that you needed to run an $8 billion company is completely different than the number of people at the corporate level, in particular for a $2 billion company. Because the ATM business, as any spinoff, they took what they needed. And they didn't take 50% of what we had, even though they represented 50% of the company. They took what needed to be a separate public company in the ATM business.
And when we sold the digital banking business, it was the same thing. They didn't take something more than what they needed. They took the people dedicated specifically to what they do, but not the overhead that supported what they did as a business. So we've gone through pretty significant headcount reductions since I've been involved, well over 2,000 people, which was just trying to right-size what the company should look like. And if you take hardware out, we're north of 20% as a margin. I don't think that's an end point. I think that's a starting point. I think the other piece of this is the efficiency of the organization. The company bought a lot of businesses over the years. I wouldn't say they did a fabulous job integrating those businesses. We have four general ledgers. We have seven instances of Salesforce and 14 billing systems.
So we have some cleanup that we still have to do. It's not insurmountable. It's just a distraction. And so over time, we're going to continue to be more efficient because that's what the market demands. That's what the competitors demand because the competitors want pricing in the market, and we have to be able to meet demands of the market. I think the one piece, those are all kind of traditional. That's what you do when you restructure organizations. I think the one piece that's different for us and for everybody these days is the impact of AI, and in particular around a company that's a software business. Because we have this library of 50 applications out there, we already know what people want, people that are existing customers.
But when you look at our market share in the U.K., in particular, in grocery, we're 80% of the market share in the U.K. market. So we have a pretty good idea of what it takes to run a grocery store. One of our product lines out of the 50, it's called StoreLine. So you would know it is Publix or Whole Foods or a variety of other ones. That alone has over 566 individual features that the company's built over the last 20 years. We have all that intellectual capital in the company. So as we go out to the market, we can not only replicate what the market and competitors have today, but we can do it at a rate that the company has never done before because of the benefit of AI.
AI has moved the ball materially, which is going to have an impact to the infrastructure of the company as well, just like it has with plenty of other organizations that have stated this publicly.
Got it.
So margins should go up.
Sounds good. All right. I'm going to open it up to the audience. Any questions?
Yeah. So digital insight, I think, 10, 11 years or so.
2014.
Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about just the decision process of why to upgrade that business? Because kind of long-term outlook or what you guys evaluated that, why that was a risk to go?
Yeah. I would say a couple of things. One, it was mine. I mean, it was the board ultimately, but it was me as the chair who was pushing to do that. It was originally acquired in 2014 from Thoma Bravo for, I think, a billion something, six or eight. And it was bought for ATMs. But the companies, I believe I wasn't there at the time, but the company's leverage wouldn't support it spinning off with the ATM business. And so it was left with what was the NCR minus the ATM business. It didn't fit at all to what we do. I mean, it's banking on your phone. And personally, I don't believe conglomerates—there aren't that many that are left—but conglomerates such as we were, there was no synergy between the two organizations.
And I think to some extent, being inside NCR didn't help the success of that business. It allowed two competitors to get birthed into the marketplace that are public companies. And I think it's going to do extremely well as an independent owned by a leading private equity firm run by a guy who used to work for me. It just didn't fit. It would have been something else that we would have had to pay attention to and invest in. And the company's invested, rough guess, close to a billion dollars over the last five or six years building this platform. And to me, that's where the opportunity is for the organization as opposed to just because it made $250 million to hold onto it. I think the second piece, which is not well understood, I wasn't even well understood by me.