Joining us today. My name's Dan Perlin. I head up the FinTech practice here at RBC, and I'm delighted to have NCR Voyix as our next speaker. From the company, I have Jim Kelly, who's the Chief Executive Officer. Jim's been, I would say, a good friend of mine in terms of support around this space for a very long time. So here you find yourself again.
I feel that way. Yes.
Yeah. Thank you so much for being here today.
I'd love it.
I appreciate your time. What I thought we would do for jumping-off purposes, there's been a lot of changes since you've taken over the reins of CEO.
All good.
They are all good, which is why I want to give you the opportunity to spend a few minutes and maybe just explain what Voyix is today since you've made so many of those changes.
Sure. Thank you. Thanks again for having us. I think as it relates to the changes, I was originally the chairman of the company when it split in October of 2023, largely through the investor base. I think the activist was what actually got me involved initially to help the CEO, who was a newly minted CEO, who had been with the company for, I think, 12 years before, to help kind of work with him on his journey to learning that role. The other part of my engagement, this would have been in 2024, was to help restructure the company. The company had just gone through a split. The ATM business was now a separate company called Atleos. We also had an asset that was not relevant to the ongoing business. It was digital banking.
We liquidated, sold that asset for $2.5 billion last summer, which was a big event because it cleaned up the balance sheet. Like any conglomerate that has been around for a number of years, unfortunately, it has accumulated a fair amount of debt. I would say now ours is trailing below two. I think it was 1.8 for the last quarter. With that in place, by the end of the year, actually, the board made a decision that I would step in as now the CEO. That went effective in February. I would say the first three or four months, my focus was to get to know the company better. The best way to get to know the company better is to go see customers and employees. I have now visited 80% of our offices.
We have 62 offices across the world, at least the regions, not the physical offices. I have met 80% of our employees, and I have met 80 of our customers in person. That has been really helpful to my education, how they feel, what they think we are doing well, what they think we could improve upon, and addressing some kind of latency issues that predated probably even the spin, but at least the last few years. As I look into 2026, we have a big show coming here in New York, the NRF, which is the second week of January. We will be bringing a whole suite of new products that look a lot like the old products.
With the help of our amazing development team and AI, we have been able to modernize, which we talked about once before. We've been able to modernize the technology that is still in place at all the places likely that you guys shop, either for grocery, convenience, fuel, or restaurants. We've been able to bring that forward. The first show that we've demonstrated this was in Chicago last month. I wasn't paying a ton of attention, unfortunately, to what was going to be in the show.
I asked, "What are we putting in the show?" It was kind of one new product and two old products. I said, "That's not going to work. We're going to need only new products." In the span of less than two weeks, we had engineered three new products, or we already had one, so two new products. The benefit of our experience, 30 years of experience in engineering around these products, coupled with the advancements of AI tools that help our developers modernize legacy applications. We have 50 applications that today run over $2 trillion of processing across the world. It's a big number, $2 trillion. In the U.S. alone, it's $1.4 trillion. We have a very stable, long-term customer base. The company is 145 years old. The customer base attrition is less than 1% or 1%. It's steady. They have a deep trust in the company. What they've been looking for is a modernization of the technology that they're currently using. The company's been on this journey for long before I got here. It started probably back in 2018 or 2019, two CEOs ago or three CEOs ago.
I think the challenge that I saw by the summer was the speed at which we could take old to new because they're not looking to change the way you run a grocery store, a convenience store, or a gas station or a restaurant. They're just looking for it to be modern, to be able to have greater connection to their customers, just like your iPhone gives you immediate answers to what you're asking for now with ChatGPT in particular, and write your papers with it. We are taking those tools together with our existing technology, our relationships with our customers, our deep history, supporting these customers. I think the best reflection of that is what we announced on our last earnings call, a relationship that we've been with, I think, since they started 25 years ago.
We renewed Chipotle, which has over 4,000 locations across the US and international, in a brand new architecture, which we've already been running for years on our retail side. This will be the first time that we bring microservices technology to the restaurant space. Very excited. We worked super hard to finish that just before the earnings call with the help of Chipotle. They put some pressure on their team. We did not put it into the script originally because it was not done until 7:00 A.M.
Yeah. It was.
Yes. Miguel, who runs our restaurant space, was up all night along with a whole bunch of other people. That is the relationship with the customers. Even though there is a reputation where we did not always do the right thing or maybe were not the best provider, that has changed significantly. I think this is, as I said to the employees during our town hall—we do a town hall right after the earnings calls—that this is a culture of winning now as opposed to the culture that I think maybe got away from that over the last few years. I am excited about the future.
I have seen customers react at the KNX show. I had a very large fuel provider and one of the biggest commercial fuel providers coming in to see us because of what they saw in the show. Got them so excited that the top guy came in to take a look at an even advanced version of what they had seen in the show. Things are moving fast at the company. We're optimistic about this is going to translate into earnings growth and revenue growth, all the things that investors and we are very interested in.
Yeah. That's a great start. You mentioned Chipotle. I think one of the things that.
I've heard of them.
Yeah. I know. I know.
Do you eat there?
Periodically.
You do?
Yeah. My son's eating there.
You should eat there a lot.
Yeah, I know.
I think that's what he asked me to do, is make sure all our investors are eating at Chipotle.
Yeah. The saying in my household is when we're on the road or whatever we're doing and you can't really find a place to eat, it's always just eat Chipotle.
There you go.
That's the saying in the first place.
It's pre-advertising for that.
It's on the transcript. Exactly. My kids recognize that statement. It's legitimate. The purpose I bring that up is oftentimes for new investors who are introduced to Voyix, they don't understand the enterprise versus SMB dynamics at your company relative to the overall industry that they may be looking at.
Sometimes the analyst community doesn't either.
I've heard that. I've heard that statement. It would be helpful if you could tease out the importance of that.
Sure. I've been in the payments space. I ran two public companies over the last 25 years. That's how we know each other, Global Payments. I was the president. The last one was Evo Payments. Both of those organizations focused on SME. Seven million merchants in the United States. It's a big pie. Enterprise is difficult to break into. It's a different dynamic. NCR started as a hardware company, went through a variety of different businesses. As it pertains to software, bought these 140 software applications over the years. There's 50, as I mentioned earlier. Of those 50, they were predominantly enterprise-focused to begin with. We're in the enterprise space because we bought into companies or bought companies that supported enterprise, the two largest of the acquisitions. One was called Retalix, and one was called Radiant. On the Radiant side, Radiant is the restaurant.
That's Aloha that you all know as Aloha in the marketplace. They were kind of the entire spectrum. They were SME. They had dealers. That's where the dealership model really got started. They had enterprise because Aloha plays all the way through the entire spectrum. We do have SME. There is an SME focus still today, but it's nothing like what I would have experienced in my last two companies or some of the other names that I won't name here that are pretty predominant in that space that are public. We're on the enterprise side. Enterprise side are companies like Publix, a Whole Foods, a Casey's, a Pilot, a Love's. These are very big organizations, Sainsbury's internationally, Hungry Jack's in Australia. It's a different experience supporting companies of that size. The technology has to be different.
In particular, beyond the technology, it's the service side. We have 15,000 employees that work at the company. 8,000 of them are on the services side. If you're an SME-focused software company in restaurant or retail and you want to move up into the enterprise space, not only do you have to change your technology to be able to support across a network of 4,000 or 10,000, or we support today over a million lanes in grocery. It's the services side, people in the field who are attending to additional technology needs of these customers. Because while many of them have very advanced technology organizations, they're not necessarily point-of-sale experts.
They need the point-of-sale experts to be able to make sure if they want to innovate, if they want to make changes, just to support upgrades for our legacy applications, which will change with our new technology. The differentiator, and I said this in my first earnings call, which was the February 1 of last year, services is where we really differentiate against our competitors. Because in the end, our products, our software, our products are sitting in Google. They're unique to us. We know the features that our customers want. The technology is not the only way that you support. You support with people. I don't see that changing anytime soon.
Yeah. It's a huge differentiator. I mean, we have this battle all the time with clients in terms of just communicating that. The other thing I want to make sure we touch on is the Voyix Commerce Platform. I mean, this is, in many instances, kind of the central technology from which many new clients will come on board. Existing clients will be transitioned over to. It would also be helpful to kind of explain what exactly the commerce platform does, how it benefits you as an organization, but more importantly, how it's helping your clients.
Yep. Maybe they understood this when they were constructing it back in 2018 or 2019. It is interesting. It never actually came up in the early board meetings that we were transforming to become a platform company. There are over 12,000 platform companies in the US today. All of you use them in your lives every day. Think of Netflix. You watch a movie tonight, tomorrow, another movie that looks a lot like that movie is what is the recommendation. Our applications today, as I said, they are 30 years old or 20 years old. These are referred to as a monolithic application. One big program sits inside a point of sale sitting at either a restaurant or a retail location. To make a change, it takes a bit of a village. If you make one little change in a program, it could adversely affect somewhere else within that program. That architecture is beyond dated. I did this when I was in college back in the early 1980s.
You were in college in the early 1980s. Okay.
I'm sorry. I'm 63. Yeah. I'm dating myself. There needed to be a movement. In our industry, we've not seen this movement. Other industries have embraced technology: the grocer, convenience store, fuel, and even restaurant. Restaurant went very quickly to cloud. One of the challenges of cloud is if you don't have internet connectivity, guess what? Your restaurant doesn't operate. The Voyix Commerce Platform, as it's been coined before I joined here, is a new architecture in a number of ways. One, it is cloud-oriented, but it is also capable of running in a store without the cloud. That is what we refer to as the edge technology. Edge at the edge of the store or the edge of the restaurant.
Our technology enables that store to continue to run irrespective of whether the cloud is connected or not connected. Now, we've actually started a process to have two clouds because not one cloud works all the time, as I've come to learn. The technology of the VCP, which is Linux-based, so you don't need Microsoft or third-party applications that you have to upgrade periodically. It's very light to make changes. It's based in some technology that's referred to as microservices. Instead of one big program, it's a series of little paragraphs that all work together. You can take one down and change some aspect of it while the rest of the program is still working at the point of sale. You're not taking down a store. You're not taking down a lane. You're able to innovate. I'll give you an illustration.
Back to that KNX show, as I mentioned, the programs that we show or the applications that we showed were constructed in less than three weeks. Actually, one of them was constructed in less than a week. One of the programs was it's a fuel show. It was a gas station pump that was sitting there. It was connected to this new microservices technology. Convenience stores are moving, and you see this in grocery as well. They're moving more toward providing food services inside the convenience store to draw you in from the gas pump to go in and to buy something. What's the easiest way to do that is put the menu on a new gas pump. That's what we did. We put pizza and Coke and all the good stuff, chips on the menu on the pump.
While you're sitting there, you could say, "I want a pizza." Inside the store, your name would show up on one of those screens that would bump down as it gets prepared. When you walk in, you could pay for it while you were buying your gas. You walk in, pick up your pizza, and off you go. It's more revenue for the convenience store. It's convenience to you. That was constructed in one week. Didn't exist before. We asked for it to be put together. It was put together because it was based on microservices. We could push in the technology to combine what we refer to as kitchen as opposed to restaurant. We refer to that product as kitchen.
That's in microservices, the point of sales microservices. We blend those two together. We believe we're the only one out there doing that clearly on the restaurant side. Between the technology of the cloud, the edge, and the in-store performance, this company is transitioning from also just a transition, but transition from being a sales-oriented company to be a product company. Because in the end, it's the product that sells. You can sell, sell, sell. If your product doesn't back it up, then your customer is not going to stay with you.
100%. Let's frame that a little bit. You and I have talked in the past.
No, I was just looking at the time.
Yeah. We have talked in the past about what that opportunity might look like. Some of the things you have said are.
Are there numbers now?
Some numbers.
Yeah, yeah.
Some numbers. Four hundred enterprise clients that make up a pretty large percentage.
80%.
80%. Framing that opportunity, maybe where software and services represents today within that base and where that might go to the extent that your existing book gets converted, maybe even new clients as well.
We actually just signed, we didn't mention this, but on the last call, because we wanted to cover Chipotle predominantly.
Yeah.
We just signed the largest grocer in a country in Europe. We'll talk about it on our next earnings call.
Okay.
On the new EX. That's the internal code name, but EX application. In terms of order magnitude, just to set the stage, the company, if you take out hardware, which we anticipate that will happen by the end of the first quarter, starting at the beginning of the first quarter, this is the ODM thing we've been talking about for a while. I won't go into that.
Okay.
$2 billion of revenue, somewhere in that range, two to one. Of that, 75% of it represents what I said earlier, which is people, people doing things, hardware maintenance, software maintenance, professional services, people in the field that are the 8,000 taking customer service calls. All that stuff represents 75% of our revenue. The other 25% of the revenue is predominantly software license, one-time software licenses, where we still have that. It represents software maintenance. There's some payments in there. Okay?
Yep.
The component that and the customer base, as I said, has been here for a long time. The revenue is largely flat because it's somewhat designed to be flat. We don't escalate prices on renewals historically. We do now, but for whatever reason, that was not part of the menu. As you look as we sell this new product, one of the rules of thumb is 3X-4X software maintenance as the cost to the market for this VCP-based applications. What's the justification behind that? There's two components to it. One is the cost takeout. Just like your iPhones, you don't manage your iPhone. Somebody manages your iPhone for you. You just use your iPhone. That's the same analogy a customer would have with us. They're not managing the store any longer. There's nothing sitting at the store that they have to do. We all do it remotely into the store. Not to say there's not somebody there.
It's not the same investment that they would have to make today, tomorrow. That's one. The licensings for third-party operating systems, that's gone because we've got that covered. It's a Linux-based product, as I said. Then there's all the revenue enhancements. The speed to be able to bring out new functionality is greatly enhanced. That's more of the revenue side of the analysis. We're giving both the cost takeout side and also the revenue enhancement opportunity that's provided. We've already sold 15 of these, pre-sold them. We have a good idea of where this is heading. We're not trying to be the top of the market, but this is something the market hasn't seen before. On the restaurant side, for Miguel and his team and Benny, this is brand new. We just announced it last week.
Was it last week? Forget what week I'm in. I'm expecting, and I think we're already getting a lot of feedback. We had a number of large chains that have already talked to us. Some have come to see it already. I'm very optimistic. It's not going to be like payments where I can raise five basis points and the price goes up. The revenue goes up immediately. It's not that model. It's like a big ship. Once it starts to turn and once the mood moves in a different direction, I think you're going to see the composition of our revenue be less oriented to the people side and more to the software side.
The last component would be around payments. As I said, we touch $1.4 trillion payments in the United States alone. Just to order magnitude, I had to go check this out myself, totally across the world, it is $2 trillion, which would represent 10% of the U.S. economy. It is a big number. You compare that against any of the processors. The last company I ran, we sold for $4.5 billion to Global Payments, and it only had $150 billion of volume. $1.4 trillion is as big as anybody in the payment space because you look at the enterprise customers that we are supporting today. As we sell the new product in, and even for the old one, but I would rather focus it on the new one, payments is going to come along with the offer. We have an end-to-end payments company inside the organization.
It was bought in 2018 or 2019 by the two CEOs ago. It's a company called JetPay. We made some changes. We bought some things to augment what was originally acquired. While we're always going to be a software company and services company, we also now have the ability to be a payments company. To put that order in magnitude, $1.4 trillion in spend through our point of sale, not payments today, but just the point of sale, the register, that represents 17 billion transactions. Put any number you want against. I mean, these are pennies, fractions of a penny, or more depending on what industry it is. That is a whole new vertical opportunity for us that I could throw out numbers, but then somebody would hold me to them. I won't throw out numbers, but you can do your own math. You can be smart.
Yeah. The point of that is all the volume that's just going through your system that has been going through your system that has been completely unmonetized for some reason. And now.
Just let other people do it.
Yeah. Now it's going to be monetized.
It is actually not a price increase to our customers. Right. Somebody else is going to lose the revenue. Because we're going to provide that service to them. In the end, I've heard some people say, "Oh, well, I like to keep things separate." Separate is a problem because anytime there is an issue, somebody's going to call us anyway. Like, why isn't this processing? I've seen that multiple times for companies that don't currently use us. I've talked to enough customers. They want the convenience of one throat to choke.
When there's an issue, they want to be able to call somebody who can fix the problem right away. We're already experienced in the industry. We have today a system that switches to any processor of choice for our current customers that touches $800 billion alone. On the fuel side, as we announced during KNX, we're now connected to Corpay, Comdata, and WEX, or connecting. We're in the process of certification. That represents another $500 billion. That's where you get the $1.3 trillion-$1.4 trillion between fuel, 18,000 gas stations that we support today.
I actually wanted to go there because the Corpay and WEX announcements, I think, were completely underappreciated.
Totally.
Because those are huge, huge fueling opportunities. Maybe can you just, you outlined it with the $500 billion, but a little bit more about how you fit into that equation with them from the fleet fueling side of the equation because it is pretty material, I think.
It is very material. Yeah. Yes. Commercial fuel, these are the big trucks that we see drive around delivering stuff. They have to fill up too. They take showers because they sometimes live in these trucks for weeks on end. They need to buy stuff. They're not driving around with their own credit card. They're not using their personal cash to fill up the truck like you and I do when we fill up our cars. There are fleet companies that provide to the fleets that own these trucks to the drivers. They give them a card, and that card is used as they go around the United States to be able to deliver whatever products they're delivering. NCR has provided the point of sale for these industries. Love's, Pilot, Casey's, Circle K. These are all our customers.
We have just enabled somebody else to actually get the value associated with those transactions from a payment standpoint because NCR was just a software company. Not that I'm minimizing software, but that's the way they saw it. The newer entrants into software in the last, I don't know, 20 years have seen the merging of payments and software. They immediately jump into it either as an ISO, or generally that's how they do it. Since we already were in the industry in terms of providing the technology that enables these things to happen, it just seemed to me, especially given my background, it was a logical segue.
To go out to our 18,000 gas stations and say, "Hey, we'll provide the forecourt where you and I get our gas, but I can't do the other stuff because I don't have relationships with those companies." To be able to be in the payment space, you have to have connectivity to Visa, MasterCard, Discover, Amex, China Union Pay, all the traditional cards that you and I see, or most of you and I see. On the commercial fuel side, it's not something we would see because we're not in the commercial fuel business. I happen to know the CEOs of those two companies, and it just seemed like a logical extension since we're getting into payments anyway. It was $500 billion. It's 17 billion transactions. It was kind of silly for us to just leave it there. It's not even just the economics.
Trust me, I'm as economically oriented as anybody. It's also convenience for our customers because they have to then get somebody else to make, and then we have to hook it up. That's the other piece. It's not a free ride for us. They'll come in with sometimes it's a competitor and want us to do business with a competitor. Burger King doing business with McDonald's probably isn't going to work very well. It's just an easier experience for them. It's obviously a great economic opportunity for us. We were a conglomerate. We were an $8 billion company. There were a lot of things that the CEOs of this company had to focus on. Commercial fuel definitely did not get on the top 10 list. We're a smaller company now. We're holistically focused on software-first services, and payments is just a natural extension. I think this is a I know this is a huge financial opportunity.
Yeah. We've got a little over a minute here. There's two things, I guess, I want to cover. One is just broadly the competitive environment. We talked there's enterprise versus S&B. Just what are you seeing in that market? Has anything changed in the past, call it six to nine months since you've been in the seat?
There's only one thing that comes to mind. In a competitive process, I think we won a customer back called Chipotle.
Okay. So that was easy.
Yeah. I mean, yeah. There's competition everywhere. People are going to say whatever they want to say. It's amazing what I hear. I mean, somewhat defend. Look, we have home court advantage. I think in the past, we probably did not appreciate that and treat it as important as it is. We are, as a company, have completely changed that mentality. I have seen almost a quarter of the 400 customers before my first year is out. By next year, I will have seen at least 50%. Miguel and his colleagues on the retail side, the same thing. We are engaging with our customers, and they are seeing a different attitude.
In terms of, you know, I think that is the best example of how they are starting to feel about us. I think that is a bit of, like I said, winning, of a culture of winning. We do not take any of this for granted. There is competition all the time. There are some scars from our behavior in the past. We have to work really hard to make sure that we hold those together. At the same time, this platform is so, I think, attractive that we're going to start winning customers away from others. We're going to target them as much as we have been targeted in the past.
That's awesome. There is no doubt there has been an enormous amount of transition at the organization since you have taken over. We have been around it while it was NCR and then the split. It is super exciting to see where this is going. Thank you so much for your time.
Thanks for covering us.
Yeah, you bet. Thank you.