All right. Good morning, good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the Needham Conference. I'd like to welcome James Kelly, the CEO of NCR Voyix. James, thank you for joining us.
Thank you for having us.
We're gonna do a fireside chat.
Okay.
I have a few questions for you, then the audience can jump in as well at some point. Jim.
Are these fair questions?
What's that?
Are these fair questions?
I think so.
Okay.
Ran them by [S.J.], so hopefully.
[S.J.]
They've been approved.
Okay.
Just to get started, James , you've been at the CEO role for about one year now.
I think we're coming onto that point. We'd love to just hear, you know, what you've seen over the past 12 months in terms of the changes you've made, how you've had to reorganize the business to be able to, you know, address the market demand, and just maybe you could walk through some of your changes that you made.
Sure. I originally, when the company split from its ATM business in October 2023, I was the Chairman of the company. In May 2024, I stepped in as the Executive Chair to help the CEO at the time, David Wilkinson, divest some businesses that were no longer core to the company. While we had spun off the ATM business, there was still other remnants of a large conglomerate that needed to be divested, that was my kinda next focus. At the end of the year, the decision was made that I would step in as the CEO on a full-time basis, and I did that in February of last year. I think the earnings, the year-end earnings, re-release was at the time that I started.
My initial reason, you know, beyond the request of the board, my initial reason in stepping in was I saw a tremendous amount of potential, which I think you're starting to see by what we just described in our last earnings call, that we have an amazing list of customers, 400 very large enterprise businesses literally around the world. 60% of our business is here in the United States. The rest is everywhere else. We cover 18 languages and 35 countries where we support customers, and these are top-tier organizations in the retail and restaurant space. Retail would be grocery, convenience store, department stores, supply chain.
I think the work the company did early, say, 2018, 2019, to build a platform, so similar to what you would see as a Netflix platform, where you're able to get real-time response data, et cetera, that was the movement that the company initiated at that time. They just were unable to bring it to market across all the applications that we support today. Today we support over 50 applications. That's what's running today's commerce, our business across these different markets. You know, my interest was to see if we could advance that in a faster rate. There was also some additional cleanup. We just mentioned on our last earnings call the sale of our non-core banking, Japan-based banking business.
That was really a remnant of the ATM business that just never was divested when we spun off the ATM. I think the business has been cleaned up from the standpoint of divestitures. A lot of focus has been on internal infrastructure, cost management. One of the things I mentioned in the last call, that we've reduced head count by 20%, which is not uncommon when you think of a business that was $8 billion that is now $2 billion with the completion of the ODM outsourcing agreement. The head count had to align with the size of organization. The most significant part of the journey over the last year was our ability early on in June of last year to start leveraging AI.
If you think of AI in chat, et cetera, AI through Claude or Anthropic came out through Microsoft. We were able to use it through Copilot to be able to take our legacy applications that are running our customer sites today, together with our engineers, and be able to leverage our old applications and turn them into new applications onto our platform. That's what you saw in our first quarter, the $300 million that we talked about on the call of Remaining Contract Value. Our existing customers who are wanting to stay with the exact same applications, they just want them in a modern architecture. We're very, we're very much focused now on the sales cycle. The rest of the stuff in a turnaround I think has largely been done.
Now, with the modernization of all our applications that we're able to that we showed at NRF, we're able to be out in the marketplace, and that's what you're seeing today.
I think that's very helpful. Jim, would you say it was more of a product issue at NCR Voyix than a sales issue when you took the CEO role, or was it really a combination of both that you had to address?
Without question, the product was not ready. Getting the product ready, which started in the back half of last year, we showed it at the NACS Show in Chicago for convenience and fuel. Then at NRF, we showed 10 new products that the market had never seen. You know, that's what changes the direction of the company. That's why the company is gonna continue to be successful and continue to grow. I think the other part of the last two years was cleaning up the balance sheet, paying off a lot of debt. I think we've generated over $3 billion or close to $3 billion in proceeds. It's two and a half billion dollars net of tax that we've been able to pay off debt, invest in product, invest in infrastructure, and also return capital to investors through buybacks.
We'll have re- invested or returned approximately 10% of those net proceeds by the end of this year.
Jim, before we go into the products, would love to get your perspective on the state of the market, both on restaurants and retail, given the inflation concerns, given some of the geopolitical noise. I think the restaurant space has been in a state of flux where we've seen slower traffic, but strong same-store sales. A lot of moving parts within both those segments. How would you describe the demand climate overall for your products?
We've sold, you know, prior to last year, largely the sales that the company completed were really just break fixes or small enhancements, compliance. That was largely what was being sold. It was not really selling the legacy products. Unless it was an add location, like many of our customers add location on the restaurant side, but you're just adding more of what you already have. Now what we have is a whole new suite of solutions. We don't sell the legacy products at all any longer. I would say the demand You know, one thing you didn't ask was AI, because.
I was gonna get to it later, but let's talk about it.
I figured you were gonna get that at some point.
Yeah.
Like AI is somehow adversely affecting our business. I can't say for forever, I have not had a single customer, and I've seen over 120 customers personally, CEOs and CIOs. I've had no one say to us that we see AI is going to somehow adversely affect your business. It's completely the opposite. If that were the case, that's one of the reasons that we disclosed the Remaining Contract Value, that we've sold over 22 of these applications in the last, you know, predominantly the last, the fourth quarter and the first quarter of the fourth quarter of last year and the first quarter of this year. I mean, they go all of last year, most of it in the fourth quarter. That is not a conversation piece that we're having.
As we said in the script, what we see is where can AI enhance your applications? Where are things that we can modernize even more? 'Cause if you think of what we've done, we've literally taken the current applications that are running, our retail and restaurant customers, and we've put them into an architecture. It's the same capabilities. It's just in a modern architecture, which enables them to move faster, more agile, et cetera. Now AI is an add-on to that capability to be able to give them features and functionality that they don't currently have that we can build in a much quicker time period than we have would've been able to in the past. Yes, the product is an important piece. The cleaning up of the company's infrastructure was an important piece.
I think AI will play an important piece as an additive to our customer base solution as opposed to a threat against it.
Jim, in terms of AI, do you see it more as an ARPU driver, or will it also maybe help you win additional deals, so does it really drive the overall business beyond just the price aspect?
We have there's a show, the NRA show, the Restaurant and Wine.
Right
coming up, I think it's next week. I think it's next week or this weekend in Chicago. Four of the add-ons to our application, our Aloha Next application, are all AI-based.
which have all been developed, relatively recently. Yes, it can add the overall value to what we're selling. One of the nice components of this application is, depending on the sophistication of our customer base, that we're allowing them to build their own apps right onto the platform. We can build it, or they can build it, or they can have somebody else build it. In that case, we're basically charging a toll to use the platform as opposed to the full value of the application. I think in most cases, even with enterprise customers, unless you're the kind of the extra large size, I think in most cases it'll add value to what we'll be able to sell in the future.
You have the platform, it's kinda like the iPhone, and you keep adding more features to it because it's there. It's a new feature that you'd like to add, and so you add, and it seems like a small amount, but you keep adding and adding and adding. I think that's where you're gonna continue to see growth. Not the initial sale, but everything else that the customer is now gonna be able to take advantage of. It's really oriented to revenue generating as opposed to cost savings.
In your experience, have any restaurants or retailers come to you and said, "We're gonna do this on our own," or are they literally relying on you to be able to innovate around AI and incorporate those features into their solutions?
Yeah. Several customers that we've talked specifically around AI have actually asked us to help them learn how to use their legacy applications to modernize them. That's really all Claude is doing, is it's reading your old applications and putting them into a new architecture or application than it was previously. It's not I don't think it's overly difficult. I mean, we figured it out pretty quickly. I think it's always helpful to have somebody explain the pitfalls of making mistakes, because it's just like using chat if you're writing a letter. It's gonna sometimes say things that you didn't mean to say, and then you have to edit and edit. Your prompting piece of the development cycle is still the same.
You have to have engineers, at least at this stage of these, AI tools. You have to have somebody who knows what the application's supposed to do. That's one of the advantages we have. We have a long history. It's a 140-year-old company. We've got people that are average tenure 25, 30 years, that these are some of the people who were originally the developers of the original architecture, that they're now getting a chance to modernize.
Jim, on the product, you showcased your commerce, retail platform at NRF, as you mentioned.
Did you see it?
Yes, I was there.
Did you like it?
First time. I did.
Yes. Were you surprised?
Pleasantly surprised.
Yeah. Now we're gonna turn this around. I'll ask you questions about it.
There you go.
Okay.
That might be a little challenging for me. I guess the question is, what has been the uptake from the clients so far? What's been the response rate? You know, what kind of impact does it have on the overall growth over time? How do you sort of quantify that?
Over the last week, or the week before last, the last week was earnings week. The week before last, we had six customers in. I know that's a record, but we had six customers in. We built a new customer experience center just to be able to showcase these applications. We've done over 200 demos.
We probably have two dozen labs with our existing base of customers and new customers as well. As we said in the call, the $300 million in sales, 13 backlog or Remaining Contract Value, 13% represent new customers. I think as the word gets out, we're gonna see continued demand. I would say demand is very high. I think our greatest challenge will be managing the demand, because once people see it, they're gonna want it, and that's what we're seeing.
Two questions on retail. You obviously had a nice strong quarter on the retail side.
We'll go into restaurants next.
For a change. Yes, we did.
There you go. How do you look at the market opportunity as a whole? Is it really more about replacing the homegrown solutions, or upgrading your legacy solutions to your modern solution? You know, what is ultimately the demand driver on the retail side? Is it new logos? Like, what's gonna be the fuel behind the growth?
I think in the early stages, I got this question earlier this morning. I think the early stages, it's easier to sell to somebody who already has it, because I have exactly what they have, and I can give them exactly what they have today, plus add AI to it. For new customers, we have over 44,000 features that we have built over the last 30 years. In that library, like an app store, we likely have every feature that you would ultimately be interested in. I mean, I think a true test of a company is its ability to add new customers. One of the challenges NCR has had is it kind of stayed stuck with its customer base. Our customer base doesn't attrit. It's very difficult to change your point of sale.
Our attrition rate is at 1% of revenue, so it's like, in my experience, it's almost unheard of. I think a true test of our success is that 13%, getting new customers, growing the pie. Who are we taking that away from? We're taking away from our competition on the retail restaurant side, or we're taking away from those who years ago either didn't have or didn't like what was available in the marketplace, so they built it themselves. Building and maintaining a point of sale in your grocery store chain-
If you're a department store chain or any other, or restaurant, those are completely different worlds. The talent that you're going to be able to hire to support that, you're going to have to pay up because you're competing against companies like us, and this is all we do now. We're out of everything else that we do. We're just a software services, payments, and hardware as really as a supporting player as opposed to a primary driver.
In terms of the market dynamics in the U.S. and internationally, like, what are the differences that you see? I'm sure there are different players internationally that are competing with you, but beyond that, are there underlying drivers that determine, you know, how you grow internationally versus in the U.S. on retail?
I've seen, so I've now seen, as I said, over 120 customers around the world. I've seen the same level of interest 'cause they're all similar in they're somewhat in the same boat. They're all running old applications. You know, the example I give them is, "Do you drive a 30-year-old car?" Unless you're into antique cars, you're not driving an old 30-year-old car.
Right.
If you were, you'd be getting it fixed a lot, that's the problem with these applications. They've been touched by hundreds of people. They've had lots of branches that have been added to them, lots of compliance changes, it's getting increasingly complicated. To some extent, it's almost as though the customers are waiting for the next new thing. I think we are years late of when they probably would have preferred to have it. At the same time, I'm not sure we could have done it any faster without AI. AI is such an amazing tool for us to be able to leverage, that, you know, we're fortunate it showed up when it did, I think the customers are reacting to it. In every market I've been in, I've had similar reactions that, they're looking to modernize their infrastructure.
Great. Maybe shifting over to restaurants. As you mentioned, I think you're gonna have a, you know, upgraded Aloha offering.
Aloha Next
launched at NRA.
Yeah. It took a long time to go with that name.
Right. What should we expect in terms of the offering? Like, what are some of the new features and functionality that you're looking to layer in, and how do you view that market, you know, impact by Aloha?
Well, candidly, it's just to get it to market.
Yeah
what we had previously that was started under regimes ago was called Aloha Cloud.
It was really, initially done to chase the SME market because you know of other names in the SME market, and Aloha had a leadership position, you know, back in the early, you know, 2010, 2015, that time period, and then gave way to newer competition, cloud competition. That was the answer to it. I think NCR took the idea, "Well, we'll just move that upscale to the enterprise space." That proved much more difficult.
Yeah
than it sounded at least when it was first conceived. We pivoted away from that as a solution for enterprise. Aloha Next, which is a replica, functionality-wise of what is in the Aloha application. Then, yes, we're layering on not just AI tools, which you're gonna see if you go over to, if you see the show at, in Chicago next week. Other functionality, I think places that we're probably, we as a company still need to focus on is above store. We've tended to partner with third parties, and, you know, third parties are great until they're not parties anymore.
Right
or partners. Yes, there's a number of product enhancements that our product team are looking at to fill out what we offer to our customers.
Got it. Jim, on the call, you guys did call out some weakness in the SMB space.
We did? Who said that? Was that Benny?
I mean, is that something that you're seeing sort of confined to certain ends of the market or is it more just broad-based?
Yeah, yeah.
What is driving that?
Yeah, at one point NCR had 50,000, 60,000.
Right
SME customers and didn't invest in the marketplace in a material way. Somebody else did, and the one in particular, takes a very payments-oriented approach.
Right.
NCR was not in the payment space until I got here. Well, I guess when Mike was here, but in a very limited way. I think the reality of trying to be in a market 'Cause when you think about the SME space, that's probably the one of the most innovative spaces, even though it doesn't have the capabilities of enterprise. It went cloud very early. It's very it's easier to build an SME capability than it is to build an enterprise space. You see more entrants in that market. It's a bigger market. There's, you know, in the United States, there's 7 million merchants.
alone. It's a big TAM to be able to go after. I think the other challenge is to be good at everything is also difficult, and NCR really was an enterprise-focused organization that happened to buy a business that was also in the SME space, and they tried to play to all levels. If your product for the SME space is not keeping up with the competition, where enterprise didn't have the same level of competition, then you lose. I think to some extent we were losing for quite a long period of time.
As we said in the script, you know, we have all the capabilities that we're building for, you know, the likes of a Chipotle or somebody like that, those capabilities are gonna be available for SME because they're all on our cloud running on the same technology with Edge in the store. If the cloud goes down, we don't have outages. All the challenges others have experienced, we have resolved. It's just we're only just relaunching that product. Part of the NRA is to show the market, SME as well as enterprise, what's coming to what's coming to market for them. Do I think we're gonna be the major player in the SME space in the U.S.? I don't know. We'll see where it ultimately goes.
Yeah.
We have some ideas around it, but it is not reflective of a problem with the company.
I think it's reflective of just having a 30-year-old product that you're selling into the market for a long period of time.
It does sound like going from defense mode to offense mode.
Yeah
when it comes to restaurants for you.
Yeah, once we call it a restaurant in a box. It installs in 10 minutes. There's a video that we'll put out at some point to be able to show people how easy it is. You know, we'll price it appropriately for the services that we're providing, for the product that we're providing, and for the payment space, as opposed to giving some away trying to get another component of it. I think you're looking for a market-based pricing across the board.
Jim, as you look ahead in restaurants, and I cover a lot of your peers, so I'm just curious, you know, when you think of the opportunity for growth, is it going to come mostly from SME or enterprise? Is it more fast casual dining? Just trying to parse out the market.
You mean on the restaurant side?
Yes.
Yeah, it's gonna-
Where do you see the most growth?
I think the growth is gonna be. Well, part of it is the modernization of the application itself is gonna have growth because we're not selling it at the same price of a 30-year-old application. That's part of it. You have the installation and all the other costs to go along with getting it set up. As you were asking earlier, the feature set that we'll be continuing to innovate and sell, we have a very big product team that's very capable and is focused on bringing new products to market. They just didn't have the platform to build them to in the past. Now they'll have the platform to be able to build them to. Enterprise is, I don't know the exact percent, but it's in the 80% range.
of what the company represents. Yes, that's gonna continue to be our core focus. It doesn't mean we're abandoning the SME. As I said, as I sat down, I was with one of our dealers here in the tri-state area, and I went to see one of their customers yesterday. You know, every size business is important to us. It's just we can't be the best in everything. Yes, we're gonna remain focused on SME. That's my background. At the same time, we're gonna ensure that our enterprise customers are taken care of.
Related, given your pedigree in payments-
Yes
for those who know you obviously have spent a long time in the payments world.
Yeah.
When it comes to SME, I'm assuming that the opportunity is to bundle payments with the software.
Yes
You'll do to monetize the opportunity. Is that fair?
Yeah. Same for mid-market and for enterprise.
Enterprise too?
Yeah.
Usually we think of enterprise as sort of working out their own deals with the large acquirers versus working with their software partners.
Yeah. We're here to change that thinking. 'cause if you think about if you add somebody, if there's a third-party processor, which is what we have today, and then there's our point of sale, then there's typically somebody in the middle.
It's a lot of coordination that has to go on, and if any one of those things falls apart, who gets the first phone call? It's me.
Right.
Yes. We have end-to-end processing capabilities for companies of all sizes. We announced a relationship with WEX and with Corpay. We'll soon announce another one that's coming up. We can do commercial fuel, forecourt fuel, retail restaurant. We have all the capabilities. It's just, you know, this was not a company that thought of payments. If you look at some of the smaller SME type who have relationships with processors, we're just gonna do it all in-house as opposed to using third parties.
Is there a big investment required to be able to?
It's already been made. Mike made most of it when he bought JetPay.
Okay
years ago. We've fine-tuned components of it. No, we probably have 300 people that are payments people. Some come from my background, some come from Global, some come from EVO, and then some are there through JetPay or other, you know, First Data. We have a number of people that have come in. The CIO is ex First Data payments. He's brought a number of great First Data people in as well.
That's a lot of potential [GPV].
It's a massive potential [GPV].
Right.
When I first started, I thought, "Well, we'll go ahead and switch out the base." We discovered AI and how fast we could modernize. The pivot now is not to replicate the past.
Not leave the past and then try to connect payments to it. The plan is, what we're doing, the strategy is sell the new product and payments will come with it. If I can offer you a competitive price or a better price end to end, so you just have one relationship that handles everything, why wouldn't that be a compelling answer for you?
Sure.
Especially if I can save you money. If I save you money as a customer, it's all upside to me.
Right.
'Cause this is not a cloud application. These are on-prem. I get the same financial benefit that a First Data or anybody else would get at Global Payments.
Right. Oh, in terms of timeline, when do we start to see the impact of the payments monetization opportunity?
You asked this, I didn't answer this question, but you asked this before, when are we gonna see the benefits? Of the $300 million, we're already seeing the benefits. One of the reasons you saw the growth that we reported for the first quarter is some of that $300 million was sold last year has leaked into the earnings. Think of those are five-year contracts generally.
Five years going into the top, and then a piece of that five year is coming out the bottom, and it's coming into this year, it's gonna come into next year, and it grows over time. It's not one size across. It's not a number divided by five. It ramps in as we ramp out the old and ramp in the new point of sales. As that goes in, payments will attach at that point, as opposed to trying to retrofit the legacy as the new ones start to roll on production line, and some have. I think we have 500 lanes, 100 customers that's rolled in. Those are not all in the U.S. The payments discussion is the U.S., which is the largest piece of it. We'll start talking about it.
There's already some payments that are notable. We don't disclose it. It's not that big yet, but it's grown. It's grown pretty significantly over last year.
One of the other levers you've talked about in the past, Jim, when you started especially, was pricing.
Yeah.
I didn't ask you about that. Where are we in terms of the pricing initiative being able to impact the model?
It's in the numbers too. Yeah. All this stuff, it's one of the reasons it was 4% instead of down 2%.
Right.
As contracts mature in the past, they were episodically adjusted for CPI or just general raises. That's now been corrected. As those contracts mature every three years, generally for SME restaurants, five years for enterprise restaurants, and five years for retail, as that goes through a year, then, we adjust the prices according to the contract.
Maybe turning to hardware briefly, I think the ODM agreement goes into effect.
A lot of questions.
You know, I have to fill the 40 minutes, you know? The ODM agreement.
Yes
Goes into effect, now.
Yeah, April first.
Right. What was the sort of thought process behind that? You know, I think maybe the timing was good given some of the issues called out by some of your peers in terms of hardware costs.
I saw that.
Rising, right?
Yeah. It's what happens when you step away for free. You gotta be careful.
Right.
Everything's not a straight line. Early in 2024, as we were looking at the changes that needed to made at the company, the company had grown as a hardware company. That's how it started at 140 years ago. It's very much in the mindset of our sales organization. I mean hardware sales is a lot easier sale than a software sale. It's, it's physical as opposed to virtual. There's a lot of questions and implementation. A lot of, a lot goes behind a software sale, whereas hardware sale is easier. I think the organization as a result of that, coupled with the fact that the software was very old, we really weren't selling a lot of software. We were selling refreshes on hardware.
When hardware refreshes, what happens? The revenue goes up. We don't get a lot of margin on the, on the hardware, it looks good to the machines. When we report and we say we're growing at 10% or 20%, it is somewhat misleading because if we have a finite number of customers, they're not growing all that much. Once you refresh, you're not gonna come back for five years or seven years to refresh. I think that was hard to describe us as a software company when everybody was very focused on hardware. That decision was made, 2023, 2024, end of 2023, 2024. The company had already been, for the last 15 years, been getting out of hardware manufacturing anyway. It was more of the design and the dynamics of delivering it.
Even on the delivery side, we weren't doing the delivery. We outsourced it to a third party. I think this was a natural evolution beyond our selfish interest to try to make it easier for you to understand the company, is to focus on the software piece. We already had a very, a great partner in Ennoconn.
which is owned or partially owned by Foxconn. So far, you know, there's always It's a new relationship. We actually, in this regard, we started it in January 12th, I think was the first time we began the migration to them. We finished it by the end of March, as we said, and then we went live as of April 1st. I mean, I don't think it's without small bumps, but none of that are getting to me. I think it's gone well. Our sales are doing well on the hardware side and, I don't have any blowback, at least not yet.
Great. Good to hear. Turning to the numbers briefly, you guided to flattish revenue this year mid-single-digit EBITDA growth.
Nice to see that expansion on the margin front. You know, I don't know if you can answer this, but what does a steady state model look like for a company like NCR Voyix once you have everything sort of lined up with your, you know, all the products out there and some of these initiatives that you've talked about.
Yeah
Implemented.
If you look again at the $300 million. If $300 million goes into the top, call it $20 million, $30 million, $40 million is gonna come out the bottom. Next year, if it's, if it's $500 million or $700 million or when it is those numbers, more of it's gonna leak in. A bigger percentage of the business is gonna become subscription. There's gonna be other revenue because that's just a software piece, payments would be added to it, you know, maybe not 100%, but at least in the majority. You'd have payments added, you have services, you know, the delivery of either new hardware in the case the hardware is sold or just the rollout of the new locations. It's not just $300 million.
$300 million is kinda the core, and then it's everything that goes around the $300 million. As those numbers continue to move up, yeah, you're gonna see revenue start instead of us guiding on a flat revenue.
We could be guiding on a mid-single, high single, double digit. That's my expectation. The bottom line, because this is software, it's leverageable, then my expectation is whatever's on the top line is gonna be faster on the bottom line. You can see it right now. We're growing.
Right
Nothing at the top, and we're growing at 5% on the bottom. Last year, because the bottom grew at such a high rate, that was a function of getting out of the ATM business. We still had transitional services.
Yeah.
That we were providing to them. Getting out of the Digital Banking business, we're providing transitional services. We'd get revenue from them for providing the service 'cause it wasn't just over exactly a cost. Once that all ended and we took cost out associated with it, then eventually your bottom line's only gonna grow as fast as your top line can grow. We're still benefiting somewhat from cost takeouts, but we're starting to benefit from because last year we were down on rev, software and services, small amount. This year, a flat expectation is, you know, a first step. We're just starting to sell the product. It's not fully installed.
Right.
Anywhere at this point in time. While we're not a startup, this is a start over in terms of selling the product.
Maybe a final question from me before I open it up. In terms of the balance sheet, cash flow.
Yeah.
Just capital allocation, how are you thinking about priorities?
Well, I think we've done a really good job cleaning up the balance sheet.
Yep.
Our leverage has hovered around two over the last year. The only reason it's come up a little bit is we've been trying to return capital to shareholders. That's been the predominant use other than investing in the business. CapEx still remains fairly high. I think that'll moderate over time, you know, into next year, not this year, largely because AI. The modernization effort that we're going through will be largely done.
by the end of this year. At that point it's really just people adding specific features or AI work. The team that's working on this is much smaller than the team that's supporting 50 applications as opposed to a team that's just supporting a one platform. While it's got different capabilities, once they're set on the platform, you can resell them much easier than trying to redo them over and over for different customers. I don't, you know, I think as growth returns to the company, you know, maybe we're less, you know, less focused on. We're probably more focused on where else would we invest. Today we're really investing in those who are our shareholders beyond our infrastructure and product.
Is M&A on the table where you might look to fill some capabilities?
Yeah, I know my background-
Gaps?
Is buying companies.
Right.
There was a reason to do that, 'cause we were growing internationally, and that was the best, easiest way and the fastest way to grow, and the return on those investments were super high. I think where we find gaps, it's like any make versus buy.
If we feel like there's a good price for some software is a good price these days. If we find something that could be additive to us, given our ability to use AI to get it onto the platform in an expeditious manner, then I think that's a possibility. I don't have any near-term expectations, meaning this year, on any kind of material buys in that regard.
Okay. With that, I'll wrap my questions. Any questions from the audience before we fully wrap it up? Jim, you covered a lot of ground.
Well, you had a lot of good questions.
Thank you so much. Appreciate it.
Thank you very much.