Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Day Two of the Sidoti Year-End Conference. My name is Ashish, and I'm an analyst here at Sidoti. With me today, I have XBP Global Holdings. It trades under the ticker XBP. I'm happy to welcome David Shamis, VP Investor Relations and Corporate Finance. We have about 30 minutes today, including Q&A. If you have any questions, please submit them at the Q&A section at the bottom of your screen. With that, David, I will let you take over.
Great. Thank you. And good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining the XBP Global presentation. Since this is our first time presenting at this conference, I'll kick it off by giving a quick overview of the company before walking you through our presentation, and then finally opening it up to Q&A. We're a workflow automation company that recently completed a transformational acquisition. We're a technology and services partner in implementing and delivering outcomes through these workflows, which are usually mission-critical. We're a global company, and our team members are spread across 20 countries, serving more than 2,500 clients across industries and the public and private sectors. At the end of July, XBP Europe acquired its sister company, Exela Technologies BPA, to create XBP Global. This expanded our footprint to 20 countries and brought our pro forma revenue to approximately $900 million annually.
Additionally, following this transaction, the combined company now has a simplified capital structure and a balance sheet with no material near-term maturities, along with an expanded slate of new board members. I'll discuss some of our products and solutions in a little more detail throughout the presentation, but our core offerings are workflow automation and digital transformation solutions for over 2,500 clients, including some of the world's leading banks and healthcare providers and payers, along with many government agencies. These are generally sticky long-term contracts, and our top 25 clients have been with us on average for 15 years. Additionally, our client concentration is well-diversified, with no reliance on any single customer. Our largest client represents 7.5% of our revenue on a trailing 12-month basis. Our recent focus has been on large-scale AI-led deployments with massive amounts of data and high zero touch rates.
This represents a significant opportunity to expand our gross margins in a meaningful way. We did this successfully at XBP Europe and plan to use the same formula at XBP Global to increase margins, which will also drive cash flow growth. To summarize, we believe this is a really exciting story and a deep value opportunity for investors. Additionally, we haven't issued guidance yet, but plan to do so in the near future to help investors better understand and value our stock. With that, let's start on slide three. This slide covers some elements of the transaction that I just talked about. Effectively, the transaction equitized over $1 billion of debt, resulting in a restructured balance sheet and enhanced governance.
On a trailing 12-month basis and pro forma for the combination, the company has approximately $916 million of pro forma revenue and approximately $103 million of adjusted EBITDA. Our net debt to adjusted EBITDA sits at 3.37 x, which is below the Russell 2000 average of around 3.85 x, and we don't have material debt maturities until 2028. Another thing to note here is that the interest rates on this debt are not reflective of our current leverage and risk profile, so we plan to address that in the near term, which will be significantly accretive to cash flow. And one more thing I want to point out that isn't on this slide is that we recently announced a one-for-ten reverse stock split, which goes into effect tomorrow after market close.
We think this move should put us on the radar for more institutional investors and cure our Nasdaq non-compliance proactively, as we have until late March to become compliant. As I mentioned earlier, we have over 2,500 clients globally across multiple industries, including many Fortune 100 companies and public sector clients. We have a physical footprint in 20 countries and approximately 11,000 employees. About 85% of our revenue comes from the Americas, with about 15% from Europe. In terms of client concentration, we are not overly dependent on any single client, with our largest client contributing approximately 7.5% of our revenue. Top 10 clients represent approximately 34% of our revenue, and the top 50 round out to approximately 59%.
While we do have a strong concentration in healthcare and BFSI, which stands for Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance, we do serve various other industries as well, including the public sector vertical, which I'll talk about shortly. This slide covers some of the focus areas of the business. We have two reportable segments, which I'll cover on the next slide, but the solutions listed here feature across both. The public sector, which has been a recent area of focus for us, includes financial and information management solutions, digital transformation, intelligent document processing, and workflow modernization, among numerous other solutions. Our healthcare suite, which is another large segment for us, includes AI-driven solutions that seamlessly connect claims, payments, and entire revenue cycle ecosystems. This includes both payer and provider solutions like healthcare claims adjudication, coding and billing, member and network management, and accounts receivable.
c which digitizes and routes physical mail, Human Capital Transformation, which is an entire HR solution suite, Finance and Accounting Transformation, and Enterprise Information Management. Our bills and payments suite includes mission-critical services such as check clearing and digitization, ERP and treasury data integration, payment processing, as well as an exchange for bills and payments. This slide covers our reportable segments. The first is Applied Workflow Automation, which contributes about 90% of revenues. This segment covers many of the services I spoke about, with revenue stemming from payment processing, data capture, analysis, decisioning, distribution, and data transformation. The Applied Workflow Automation segment includes bills and payments, healthcare industry solutions, on-site enterprise solutions, integrated communications, and the enterprise legal management business units, which serve banks, payers, providers, and utilities, as well as federal, regional, and local governments.
The technology segment contributes about 10% of revenues, but 30% of our gross profit, since the gross margin in this segment tends to be in the range of 55%-65%. This segment includes the sale of recurring and perpetual software licenses, software maintenance, and professional services, as well as hardware solutions and maintenance. This slide is meant to highlight the scale of some of our workflows, as well as the various sectors that we touch. Some examples to point out here: we process around 1.5 billion payment transactions annually and handle nearly all check payment transactions in the U.K. and Ireland. On the legal administration side, we disperse roughly $2 billion in funds annually on behalf of class action settlements. In healthcare, we manage over one million providers, process tens of millions of claims annually, and support over 440 million patient touchpoint engagements.
We're proud to be endorsed by leading analyst firms like Gartner and PEAK Matrix, and Forrester and NelsonHall for our solutions across intelligent automation, healthcare, and finance and accounting. We have some great technology, and we think these accolades validate the value we deliver to our clients. Now, let's talk about our AI strategy and capabilities. I'm sure most companies at this conference are talking about AI in some form or another, but for us, it's a core part of the business. Our vision is to integrate AI into nearly every aspect of the company and our solutions, with the goal of enhancing customer experiences, improving efficiency and productivity, and empowering our workforce and our customers with tools that eliminate repetitive tasks and free up resources for value-add work like creative problem-solving and relationship management.
This includes not just Generative AI and machine learning, but increasingly Agentic AI, which is a key focus for us. I'd also like to mention that these tools are proprietary and that we offer a hybrid model with a mix of on-premises and cloud infrastructure. Like I mentioned, these AI deployments are already in production and are driving significant margin improvement across the board for us. And again, these deployments are highly scalable and capable of handling large quantities and types of data. So what exactly is Agentic AI, and how is it different from Generative AI? Generative AI, or GenAI, is what most of you are probably familiar with and use daily, including ChatGPT and Gemini. It's great for answering prompts, taking notes, and even creating content like images and videos.
Agentic AI takes this a step further and is proactive, with much higher autonomy and the ability to make independent decisions and break down more complex tasks with limited human supervision. The outcome is much more transformative and leads to better efficiency, productivity, and customer experience by automating more tasks, delivering more useful interactions, and freeing up humans for more value-added work. Let's walk through a few case studies of how we're applying this for our customers. The first one is HMPO, which is the U.K. government authority that, among other things, handles records relating to birth certificates, marriage certificates, and death certificates for U.K. residents. We've talked about this in the past, but for those of you new to our story, I think it's important to highlight.
The U.K. government's ultimate goal was to be able to digitize all birth, marriage, and death certificates, and for these records to be available to all citizens in the U.K. By way of background, HMPO was unable to find a suitable vendor for this project after three awards that never successfully ramped before we were awarded this contract in 2023. This is a $40 million multi-year contract for us, which we won purely on our solution, not price. XBP is digitizing all birth certificates, death certificates, and marriage certificates across the U.K., going back nearly 200 years to 1837. As you can imagine, this is extremely complex given the variety of text, including cursives, and the deteriorating condition of some of the paper documents.
Our intelligent document processing, or IDP tool, analyzes handwritten names and signatures of people on those records, and we're able to do that with a 70% zero-touch rate. This means that 70% of the work is done with zero human interaction. The only human involvement is exception processing, which is mainly done offshore. We're able to extract the data and classify it into the right fields, and we're achieving this with over 99% accuracy. The next case study is the Veterans Health Administration, which is the largest integrated health network in the U.S. The VA is driving the largest expansion of healthcare and benefits in generations, but their complex scanning setup had frequent breakdowns and high maintenance costs, leading to inefficiencies. Our solution can scan any document in just 0.3 seconds, with AI features like auto rotation, blank page removal, auto indexing, and auto color detection.
We're digitizing records of veterans, with some of these records also including paper in deteriorating conditions and microfiche. Plus, we need to be able to comply with strict data protection standards and mandates like the Freedom of Information Act, which means redacting certain information from these records, and our AI is able to handle this. In addition to the VA and HMPO, we're serving many other government agencies in a meaningful way, and we believe there's a lot of potential for us to be a key partner for additional use cases. Now let's talk about how automation is affecting our own company. As you can see on this slide, we've seen a steady decrease in our headcount, which is largely driven by these automation efforts, which are requiring less FTEs for our AI-powered workflows.
Our headcount fluctuates in part due to revenue changes as more processing volumes generally require more employees. However, we're seeing a reduced need for employee backfills. This translates to the chart on the right, which shows our revenue per employee ranking near the top of our peer set at over $80,000. This significantly exceeds the average of approximately $57,000 for this peer group shown here, many of which are much larger companies in terms of market cap and revenue. We've consistently improved this ratio over time and anticipate further gains. Here we show some recent financial trends. The key takeaway from the chart on the left is the stabilization of our revenues and upward trajectory of our gross margins. But let's talk about the revenue declines first.
Look, we provide mission-critical services to our clients, and before the acquisition, Exela BPA's debt burden and financial position, and ultimately its Chapter 11 process, was a huge headwind from a revenue perspective, as a number of clients were essentially forced to diversify a portion of their services away from us. Since the restructuring and the acquisition, which again just took place in the third quarter, our teams have been having proactive talks with new and existing clients who are genuinely receptive to our story. We're investing in our salesforce, and in general, we feel good about our ability to win back a lot of this business and add new business as well.
Now, from a gross margin perspective, if any of you followed XBP Europe pre-acquisition, you might recall that we increased our overall gross margin from around 20% in the second quarter of 2024 to roughly 30% in the second quarter of 2025. This was largely achieved through automation coupled with winning certain large-scale contracts. We believe we have the opportunity today to apply that same formula across the combined company by driving revenue growth coupled with our operating leverage. A lot of the data processing and digitization I talked about earlier are core services that we should be able to replicate, and which should drive our gross margin above the 22% we saw last quarter. On the right side of the slide, we highlight our Adjusted EBITDA trends. We reported nearly $25 million of Adjusted EBITDA in the third quarter.
This represented an increase of 7.4% year-over-year and 22% sequentially, and this growth was largely driven by the higher gross margins I talked about. Over the last few months, we've secured multiple strategic wins across the U.S. and Europe. The first is Saarland in Germany. This is a multi-year contract with high volume scope similar to HMPO and should drive meaningful recurring revenue. Additionally, this win builds upon our momentum as a partner of record for digital mail and document modernization, further strengthening our position in Europe. We think this can lead to further follow-on contracts in the region. The next is Uppsala in Sweden. This strategic engagement, announced a few weeks ago, also builds on our public sector presence in Europe and is a multi-year contract to provide document scanning services for medical records and HR documents.
We'll be managing complex, non-standard documents with very strict SLA requirements. And we believe this can open doors to further expansion in the Nordic region. Both of these wins are digital transformation engagements that give us real momentum in Europe and add high-value recurring revenue to our pipeline that we're really excited about. And to my prior point on the last slide, we would expect these to be margin accretives. The next is for the New York City Department of Finance for parking violation payment processing. We're also excited to partner with a major insurance company for re-mail processing, which uses state-of-the-art technology to identify and correct erroneous addresses and intelligently reroute mail. Our announcement with Iron Oak Energy, which commences next month, represents a new vertical for us and one that has strong demand for modernization. So we're excited to see where this leads.
Finally, this morning, we announced a new multi-year contract with BG-Phoenics, a leading IT service provider for statutory accident insurance in Germany's public sector. This is a five-year agreement and will be a full-service provider for incoming mail processing, including the digitization of up to 148 million pages over the contract duration. This deal has an estimated value of up to EUR 21.5 million. While these wins validate our strategy, we think we're just getting started, and we're really optimistic as we head into 2026. With that, we can open it up for questio ns.
Thank you so much, David, for doing the presentation. We really appreciate it. I would like to remind everybody in the audience, if you have any questions, please submit them at the Q&A section at the bottom of your screen. Yeah, I will start off with a few of my questions regarding the acquisitions that you've just done, the XBP Global. Can you tell us where the core strategic focus is going to be now that the acquisition with Exela Technologies has closed, and what is the company's operations going to be under the Unified Global brand?
Yeah, look, it's a good question. I think the key focus for us is to hit the ground running, right? XBP Europe acquired its sibling company. So essentially, the integration is pretty seamless. There were already a lot of shared services between the companies. The focus for us, like I talked about a bit, is going to be winning back some of the lost business, the business that was lost through the disruption of Exela BPA's restructuring. That's number one.
I think it's also applying some of these technologies and really being aggressive from a sales perspective. We're investing in our salesforce and aligning the company to be able to push revenue growth. That's number one focus for us. Right. Yeah. And just if you can give us any color on how you're aligning your regional businesses to drive global sales and delivery efficiency. Yeah, I think we're trying to automate as much as possible to drive margins, number one. But from a sales perspective, we have a lot of the pieces in place right now. There's still some areas of focus for investment and hiring some right people for some of the right roles. But generally, we have the pieces in place. We have the BU set up. I think the focus is there, and we're already seeing a lot of success.
Right. What are the biggest integration challenges you've seen until now? And what are the milestones that you're internally looking at, or what should the investors be looking at in the next 12 months -18 months when it comes to this integration?
Look, we haven't really discussed any synergies. And again, since the companies were already related, the integration is substantially completed for the most part. I would say that's behind us. Really, the biggest component was adjusting the capital structure of the company, right? And that's behind us now. We don't have a huge debt burden anymore. We have $350 million of net debt, which I think positions us pretty well, right? I don't think we're at a position right now where customers need to worry about whether we're going to be around. That's not really a concern at this point.
I think for us, the focus, like I mentioned earlier, is going to be on potentially refinancing some of that debt to better align with where we think our risk and leverage profile sits today because our interest rates are well ahead of where they should be. So we think there's a huge opportunity there. So that's the biggest piece for us was the capital structure. But from an integration perspective, we're pretty much in good shape right now.
Right. And so you just mentioned that you're going to be planning on refinancing the debt. How much do you think you can save annually based on the refinancing alone?
Yeah, look, we have interest rates that are in the low to mid-teens right now, which reflects it comes out to around $55 million a year in interest expense. If you just look at where spreads are in the market, we think we can achieve substantially lower interest rates. We're talking tens of millions of dollars a year in interest savings potentially.
Right. And you just mentioned all the new recent contracts that you've won. How much is the revenue contribution going to be? And is this more of an offsetting normal attrition, or should we expect revenues to begin growing? And when expect revenue to inflect year-over-year?
That's a good question. Look, like I showed, our quarterly revenues, they have been declining, but those declines are largely stabilizing. And we do think that we are seeing troughing revenues at this point. In terms of the new contracts, there is the BG-Phoenics deal, which we announced today. That's a total contract value of up to EUR 21.5 million , which is pretty meaningful for us.
We're talking about a revenue base of around $900 million. It's over five years, so it's not going to all hit at once, and these things take time to ramp. But stacking that with the Saarland deal, with the Uppsala deal, with some of the other deals we announced, we think we're seeing a really solid momentum there to inflect revenues positive as we look over the next couple of years.
Right. And what portion of revenue is currently reinvested into R&D, especially around Gen AI? And how do you prioritize technology investment against immediate operational needs?
We're spending around our related party expenses around $10 million right now, which is a lot of that tech investment. It's very high on our priority list because, like I said, it's a huge focus for us. We want to be able to differentiate ourselves and differentiate our offering. We're competing out there with a lot of large public companies in addition to regional and local players. So investing in those capabilities is a huge focus for us. And that fuels the automation, which again will funnel itself into margin growth, cash flow growth, and everything else that I talked about.
Got it. And if you can just tell us what the average length of each contract is and what is the renewal rate across your customers?
Yeah, we haven't disclosed our average contracts, and it really varies from case to case. As you can see just from the recent announcements we've had, they're all really unique in their own way. But in general, I think investors should think about it as two year - to five-year contracts. In general, these are multi-year.
Given the structure of these, a lot of them are based off of processing volumes, which takes time to ramp, right? So you don't see the full value on day one. It takes a bit of time. Once you start to ramp it, like with HMPO, it took a little bit of time until we hit the full ramp of that project. But I would think about it as one to two quarters potentially. But in terms of the overall length of contracts, we're talking multi-year in general.
Got it. And we have a follow-up question from the audience about the related party expense. Is $10 million expense the best deal for the company? Can this technology be sourced for less money away or?
Yeah. So this is an ordinary course review, right? We review to make sure it's at market, and everything is done at arm's length, essentially.
Got it. And how is your global delivery footprint structured? Is it onshore, nearshore, offshore? If you can just give us any color on the mix. Yeah, it's really a mix of all three. Like I talked about with HMPO, all of the human work, those exceptions, those are handled offshore. Depending on the type of contract, the sensitivity of the data, there's a lot of laws and mandates around where certain work needs to be handled. So we have the capabilities to do all three. Got it. And with the recent multi-year contracts, how are they shaping your pipeline and expected revenue stability?
Yeah, look, it's just adding to our pipeline. And we don't really think about it as one-off contracts. We think about these as stacking win after win. With each public sector deal we announce in Europe, for example, we think that there's potential to cross-sell other agencies within those regions, other countries within Europe. I think it showcases and highlights our capabilities, which is value-add to a lot of these agencies, and I'll talk about Europe specifically for a minute. Within Europe, there's a huge push for data modernization and digitization called Digital Decade 2030, where the European Union is investing heavily into adapting more cloud technologies, adapting more AI.
I think we're really well positioned here, as you can see with these wins, right? With HMPO, nobody else was able to fulfill this contract, right? They had three failed attempts until we stepped in, and we're doing it now with over 99% success. We're excited to replicate that for all these other agencies, and look, we can do that in the U.S. too and other countries. It's not limited to just Europe.
Right. And if you can just speak a little bit about your competitive landscape and what gives XBP a defensible edge, that'd be nice.
Yeah. Like I mentioned, we're competing with lots of companies. We don't really have necessarily a pure play because we do so many things. There's a bit of overlap with a lot of companies. That's large public guys who many investors have probably heard of and regional and local players. And look, we're differentiating ourselves. We're not the biggest out there. And I think that gives us the ability to be nimble. We have really good technology. We've had success with deals like HMPO, which is a good example of our capabilities. And we think that really helps us to stand out.
I think public sector specifically, it's a big opportunity for us, and we're able to build those relationships and prove our capabilities, which should lead to follow-on deals, we think. Right. And I would just like to end by asking if you can sum up the value proposition for investors who might be looking to invest in the company. Yeah. Great question. Look, I think if you look at our stock, I'll lay it out this way. We have a market cap of around $50 million -$60 million, net debt of $350 million, and EBITDA of, call it $100 million, round numbers, which values us at around four times enterprise value to adjusted EBITDA. You look at a lot of the public peers in our space, and they're trading anywhere between 8x and 16 times. We think there's a number of reasons for that. We're generally overlooked.
We don't have equity coverage yet. We just completed this transformational deal, and we've only reported one quarter of pro forma results. We think there's a lot of catalysts for us, right? I think potentially getting research coverage down the road, providing guidance, which will help investors better understand our financials, speaking at conferences such as this one, right? We're trying to be more proactive, more transparent. We think there's a huge value opportunity here. The market's treating us like we're a distressed company, and the reality is that we're not. We have a much cleaner capital structure and balance sheet, improved governance, and all of those things. So we think for investors who look at us, there's a huge opportunity. So we're happy to take any follow-on questions from any investors who want to reach out.
Great. Thank you so much. And with that, we're at time, but I would like to thank you very much for sharing your story with us. And I'd also like to thank everybody in the audience for listening and spending your time with us today. Thank you. Thanks.