74Software (74SW) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the 2025 Full Year Results Presentation of 74Software. And let me start off by making the usual disclaimer that today, we will be presenting some forward-looking results and guidance that is subject to risk and uncertainty, especially during this period of AI revolution. So I welcome you to look at the universal registration document filed on our website in the Investor Relations section where we cover the usual subjects. So let's go ahead and get started. Today, with Eric and Tobias, we'll cover the 2025 performance, highlight some key things and talk about the milestones as we're going through the journey we presented when we kicked off 74Software. But before we jump into the usual presentation, I want to say one quick word about the artificial intelligence activity we're seeing in the stock market and the drama and the share prices, et cetera. For 74Software, we believe we're in a very good position being at the core of enterprise's activities, which gives us really an opportunity as we see it in the AI positioning. And Eric Bierry will cover in more detail in his presentation why we believe this. But because of this belief, it is absolutely critical that myself and the management team also continues to progress on the path of improvement and growth that we talked about when we kicked off 74 Software. And I'm happy to say we've done that for '24 and '25 and the outlook as we roll into 2026 is on track. So we're quite stable in what we've projected in our outlook. And we will also look at how AI could impact and help us improve. But as I said, Eric will go through that further in this presentation. So let me come back to 2024 when we kicked off 74 Software. We had talked about an operating model that we'd be building for scale, accountability, efficiency and to allow both brands, Axway and SBS to really deliver the customer value and have that be their core focus while we build out the central organization. We call that corporate chapters and 1.5 years ago, when we kicked this off, we started organizing human resources, finance, legal, IT, et cetera, as more of shared service centers that are delivering the value and support for the operating brands. I'm happy to say that each of our corporate chapters has a defined leader organization structure. And as of today, we're in the process of defining the common structure for all the operating systems. We're investing in new software and technology that will help them do their job in a more efficient and effective way. And we will do this through 2026 with the hope as we roll into 2027, this is established and structural that when we welcome additional companies into the group, it will be a much more efficient and structured onboarding. With regards to the brands themselves, whether it's Axway or SBS, we have a clearly defined model with established general managers over each product line. And their job is really to get as close to the customer. And with this customer proximity, we want them to deliver very positive customer outcomes, and we're measuring that with the NPS score and other metrics to make sure that, that job is done. And it's our belief that if we do this very well, that will give us the best chance to overall success. And we're doing this to create value for all our stakeholders and to deliver on our purpose that we want to be a trusted independent enterprise software provider that sustainably grows enduring value for all 3 constituents, whether it's our employees, customers or shareholders. And I believe I've talked about before that we're tracking corporate metrics among each of those 3 constituents. And so we use a metric for the employees, which I'll cover in the next slide. We also have one for the customers, which Eric will cover in his slides. But for the shareholders, we're looking on building reliable, sustainable growth, whether it's in our organic revenue growth, our profitability or unlevered free cash flow to deliver that return our shareholders are expecting. And I'm really happy to say for 2025, we've delivered on all 3 of those, and you're going to see that in our presentations. So as we look at the employee metric, we use employee engagement score. This is a measurement that measures the effectiveness, the engagement of the employees and ensuring that the company and its strategy is delivered. And so in the tool and the process we use, we collect the employee feedback. And as long as we have greater than 60% of the employees engaged on our journey, we should give ourselves the best opportunity to achieve our goals. So many years ago, we started talking about this in Axway, and it's been a long progressive constant journey of improvement and hearing the employees' feedback and putting that into action, seeing the results, measuring it again over and over and over. So Axway a few years back crossed that 60% threshold. And now the mission of Axway is to continue to look for the improvements year after year to see if we could fix and address all the employees' concerns or feedback they have for us. And Axway clearly achieved that this year, up 2 points over last year. But the key point there is we never want to go below 60% again. SBS just started this journey. The first measurement, I believe, was in March of last year. And over the first 9 months or so of taking that feedback from the employees and putting in action some of the things that they heard, I'm happy to say that there's been an increase in 3 points this year. We collected the surveys again, and there was great participation from the employees, really sharing their voice and how we can make this company the best place to be. And it's our belief that as we're really a human capital business is, we have our employees engaged with the customers, that gives us the chance to deliver the value they expect. So I'm happy with the improvement on both of these metrics. And this overall operating model and activity that we've been doing and the team has been doing to improve and to push into what we needed to do over these last couple of years, we've seen it on both brands, both Axway and SBS. So Axway, as we talked about when we were doing the deal, their job now is to constantly deliver consistent profitable growth. And at the time, we talked about a 1% to 3% organic growth. And over the past couple of years, they've been beating that. And the margin, we had hit the 20%, which was always the target and wanted to see how we could get sustainably over 21%, and they've done that as well the last couple of years. And if you remember and have followed the story for a while, a key part of the journey in the subscriptions for Axway was to really start returning the cash flow to us, and it was going to increase faster than the operating profit. And we're clearly seeing that on the Axway side of the business. For SBS, it was turning from a software company within a service company to a pure software editor and to do the things necessary to create a software -- a pure software model within the group. And that's being done year after year, and the progress has been great. They've been able to do it with a nice growth between 3% and 5% with an improving focus on the product revenue and a defocus from the service revenues. And as they're doing this as well as challenging the investments made across the group, the margin should improve step by step over the years. And all this is on track and looks really good for the first 1.5 years. And as we're looking into 2026, the improvement will continue. And you see this then aggregated. You have the chapter build-outs and the brand delivering what they need to do for the last couple of years. And you're seeing this then, on an aggregate basis, come into our 74 Software overall financials. And so, our guidance that we published at the beginning of 2025 was all met. We were at the top end of the revenue guidance, right in line on the profitability guidance, and the free cash flow beat -- while that allowed us to deliver at the expected rate. So, with that, I want to hand it over to Eric Bierry. Eric?

Thanks, Patrick. So, let's have a look at highlights, especially on our two brands, and let's start with our Axway brand. I would like to deliver two key messages in regard to Axway. The first one is we did deliver a very, very strong 2025 inside the Axway brand, taking into account, I would say, our strength, meaning discipline in execution first and a deep trust from our customers. The proof is based upon a few I would say highlights. MFT first, with a double-digit ARR growth, which is very significant and being the first product line today of Axway. Second, also the expansion of B2B and also the API management, and also based upon volume expansion, which is significantly showing that our client are more and more adopting and leveraging our technology. And third, looking at bookings on what we call cloud on our side, meaning when we do operate for our clients our solution. So close to 30% of bookings means that, first, our clients are trusting us in the way to operate for them our solution, but this is also helping us increase our predictability for the future. The second message is we can say that inside Axway in 2025, we did shift already into the future. When I'm looking at Amplify Fusion, at Engage, at Workbench, looking at all the different first clients who are live, we see that we did already leverage our client capability to deliver AI. And this is really important because it has started already. It's not proof of concept. These are clients live, leveraging already our technology. So, these are the two key messages I would like to highlight on the Axway brand. Same exercise with the SBS brand. The two key messages are, the first one, a strong execution I would say according to the plan, and we were having a challenging plan looking at 2025. We see that especially in regard to the NPS score. SBS did reach a small record. It's still not part of the first [quartile] of the industry. But this is showing that the approach of our transformation into a product-centric, market-led strategy, and exactly what was explained by Patrick just before, is starting to show results and that perception from our client side is definitely there based upon the last NPS. The second part is that we are having very long-term contracts with our clients on the core part of their business. And even within what we call [foundational] products, meaning core banking and core lending, we were able to gain 17 new logos within 2025. So again, the market appetite for all our solutions and our ability to deliver that trust for banks mainly, we do have the proof, and it's very, very important. The second key message is we start to see the results of our investment, meaning that we are starting to have proof within our client base when we are delivering growth on our modular products. And I will be coming later on the next slide on what we call the incubation, but it was really important for us to have that first proof and to see our clients adopting the products we were building and leveraging our recent investments. As a transition, and you are already used to seeing our incubation ones, it's exactly where we are driving our strong investment at the moment. The first one is digital engagement, meaning our ability to bring a modern UI with open API and AI capabilities for engaging on top of the system of record for banks. Today, we can say that more than 10 banks have signed, three went live already in 2025, and with that and I will be coming back into that topic, with early adopters already on AI-augmented capabilities on top of that digital engagement platform. The second is the digital core, where we took the decision to progressively not rewrite a core banking platform because the expectations from banks in 2030 and later are not at all the same than the one banks were having 15 or 10 years ago. Meaning that we are redesigning what we could call an AI-native core banking platform. And we do it, I would say, by pieces to secure that we are delivering progressively proof to address our existing client base. So today, 25 clients are live on a multi-tenant cloud SaaS approach, especially for instant payments. And three of our clients have already signed for that digital core, with expected go-live in the second part of '27. You all know that starting and delivering on core banking is taking a lot of time. The third one is linked to Amplify Fusion, Amplify Engage and Workbench. Part of it, we can say that in 2025, we are moving at scale. When we see that we have more than 100 clients already engaged within Amplify Engage, today we can consider that we can move at scale. And this should be, I would say, disappearing from that slide for the future because it's entering into what we call at scale, meaning the performance zone in the way we are driving our business. Fusion, which is the key cornerstone for us where I said just before that we did shift already into the future, today it is more than 50 clients who did adopt. We are having strong ambition for this year. And we see the market appetite and traction definitely to move forward, and I will be coming back into this specific topic with the AI strategy. The last one is regulatory reporting. So, just as a reminder, the new IRF regulation in Europe, which has to be -- started in '27, meaning moving from aggregate to granular data reporting for Central Banks in Europe, has forced us, and has forced the market, and has forced our client to progressively change and anticipate to be able to deliver on all these expectations to banks. That's exactly what we did with a key decision to move into a multi-tenant SaaS public cloud strategy. And today, it is more than 400 SaaS services which have been sold. It is more than 160 which are live across over 70 banks. So today, like with the example of Amplify Engage, we move at scale, meaning that we are leaving that incubation zone, and we then start to follow KPIs which are linked to a mature product where we need to grow and, of course, when -- where we need to meet with discipline the profitability objective. Of course, I was already touching on the 38 as a NPS for SBS. But I would like just to pause one minute on the 55 of Axway. When we are looking at our industry, and especially within what we call the horizontal software capability industry, being above 50% means that we are definitely in the top 20% within that industry. So staying at that level, even improving that level year over year, is showing what I said at the beginning: the trust from our clients, but also their perception that we do track the right expectations, the right insights to deliver more and more value for the long term for our clients. Let me jump now on AI. I think I want to repeat what Patrick was saying about the drama and the volatility within the stock market. But of course, the last 4, 5 weeks have been shaking our industry and forcing many people to ask maybe questions they were not asking themselves in the past. But AI, as I said, we did shift already within the AI landscape in 2025. We are still learning. We are still experimenting also many things. And I will be coming back on clear use case and clear benefits we are expecting within our portfolio and within our value proposition to the market. But let me start from where we do start and who we are. And I think our positioning is something very critical to [avoid] that we are putting all the different software player inside the same bucket because, of course, we are in a very unique position like some other vendors, meaning that we are operating in, I would say, highly regulated mission-critical environment. So, what does it mean? On one side, we are under regulation for banks, meaning that the deterministic approach and the trust in the ability to explain any decision is very critical. I would say that the cost of error in that system of record is really high for a bank and where it's very difficult to, I would say, drive the trust even for their clients and for their ecosystem. On the other side, on Axway, we are moving, securing, governing data, meaning that the product is not the data. We are not owning the data, but we are definitely giving the governance and giving the security that when our clients are moving this data, when tomorrow an agent will be accessing to this data, the one driving that control, the one driving that governance is us. And that, I would say, 2-legs positioning within that highly regulated environment where the determinism at the end as an outcome is very critical, is giving us a position where we are convinced that we have a role to play, and I'm going to come back into this at the next slide. But also, we are playing a game where the disruption on our core business is not going to come easily tomorrow, and it's definitely where we consider that our added value will make a difference to enable AI capabilities for our clients. So, why do we consider that we are in a unique position, and it's for us mainly an opportunity. We do see within our environment, and especially in 74 software, 3 kinds of AI. Let me start with the AI-driven. What does it mean AI-driven? Tomorrow, when there are exchange of data, and we are leveraging the data, we need to be able to secure and to govern that data. But tomorrow and very fast, there will be tons of agents, which will have to access to that data. And to do so, they will need to be authorized. They will need to be managed. They will need to be orchestrated, and something maybe people are forgetting at the moment. But also, we need to be able to anticipate what will be the cost of all of this agent manipulating all of this data. It's the strong core business positioning of Axway with Amplify Fusion. Amplify Fusion is delivering what we call that control plane. And that control plane is providing already that security, that governance, all the policies, the authorization, and the way to drive the cost control of AI, which is going to increase dramatically in the future. That's really the heart of Axway's strategy with AmplIify. On the other side, we see a second AI, which we call AI augmented. -- that AI augmented is definitely there to see how we can enhance, how we can, I would say, accelerate the usage of AI on top of the system of record we are operating today. So, it means that there are workflows which will be generated by AI, but the determinism and the explainability behind what will be happening around this agent will have to be at any point in time, justified. And it's our positioning in SBS to secure that explainability and that all the different data which are manipulated and existing in the system of record will be giving the right quality first, and it's very critical. But second, being accessible and tomorrow, with the support of Amplify, by the way, to be governed with the agents and to check that any data cannot be accessed without any policy, without any security coming -- especially coming from outside. I do repeat myself the [cost of error] in the 2 environments where 74 software is operating is massive. And we cannot take that risk. And it's definitely an opportunity for us first to secure that, that data in the system of record are well used and well augmented, and tomorrow be able to drive additional agent to bring additional value to our clients, but in a highly governed, secured, and orchestrated world, which is delivered by Amplify Fusion. There is a third AI, of course, which is what we call internal use of AI. I should admit that we see a lot of initiatives. We have deployed to all our engineering team since more than 1 year already AI capability for developers, AI capability for support, AI capability also in the product design, and in the product marketing. We do see today a better ability for us to accelerate our time to market. And our key, I would say, bet at the moment is how do we move faster to the market, how do we deliver faster with an improved quality. So it's the way today we are driving that internal use of AI. And of course, we are working at the moment on even moving into what we call AI SDLC for new developments where agents will be coding for us and where our deep industry knowledge is going to make a huge difference. to support that ability to develop by agent in the future. But I'm sure we will be coming into that. You see that each month, each quarter, this is moving so fast that there are things where we are still maybe suffering and testing today, and I'm sure that in 3 months, technology will go so fast that we will be able even to accelerate. That's what I wanted to share with you. And now let's move into the figures and to Tobias.

Thank you, Eric. So in terms of figures, we had very strong results in 2025, which we're meeting or beating all of our guidance, as Patrick has already mentioned. Patrick has already mentioned that the revenue, the organic growth, and the margin. I'll come back to the detail a little bit later. What I wanted to add is in terms of unlevered free cash flow, we have beat our guidance quite significantly, and we have achieved about EUR 80 million of unlevered free cash flow. On a per share basis, that equates to EUR 2.75, which is more than double the highest ever achieved by Axway before the transaction or since the transaction. In terms of the profitability of all the lines, I think, have significantly grown, showing the positive operating leverage we have in the business with EPS up more than 40% and net profit as well compared to the pro forma 2024. The revenue growth -- total revenue growth was, of course, impacted by FX headwinds. We have U.S. dollar and British pound revenues. So, the FX impact was about minus EUR 8 million on the full year basis. Adjusting for that, the organic growth of Axway has been 4.6%, which is very strong also compared to the past, one of the best years. And in terms of SBS, it was plus 3%, and this is despite the reduction of 12% in the service revenue that I come back on the next slide, where we see the different revenue types contribution to the revenue growth. So maintenance revenues have gone down as expected, mainly on the Axway side as Axway is transforming maintenance revenues to subscriptions. SBS was more or less flat on that side. Customer-managed subscriptions have gone up very strongly by 17.5% coming from both businesses. Own managed subscriptions up 22%, again, supported by both businesses. Licenses have gone down by 5%, and that was a very strong drop in Axway in line with the strategy to only sell subscriptions in the future for almost all product lines. SBS has still grown licenses by 4%. But in the future, that will also-- is also expected to come down a little bit. And finally, services with a 9% drop on a consolidated basis coming exclusively from SBS, as Axway service revenues were more or less flat. So SBS dropped by 12%. And as I said before, that's in line with our strategy of moving to really a subscription-driven model where we have recurring revenues driving the revenue -- the overall revenue. So most points on this slide are already made. Just maybe to summarize, the product revenue is now at 81% of the total revenue, i.e., services down below 20%, 19% to be exact. On the SBS side, the services is now 26%, down from 30%. We expect this to continue this drop into 2026, and we'll see this come to somewhere between 20%, 25% where we feel it's probably right at the moment. The recurring revenue, and this is on the IFRS basis, recurring revenue is now 75% of our total revenue. as it doesn't include licenses and services. You will see more and more disclosure on ARR in the future from us. We have some more slides in the appendix, which go down to product line level and also revenue line level ARR, but we see ARR as being the best measure to track as it adequately reflects the progress we're making on an underlying basis. So we're trying to move more and more to ARR-based disclosures. If you look at the last 2 years, both at Axway as well as SBS, ARR has grown with a CAGR of 10% and it equates now to 90% of the product revenue on Axway, and 89% on the SBS side. So we continue to expect this to improve and to grow faster than product revenue. But of course, as we converge the 2 will align more closely into the future, but we're not there yet. In terms of margins, our margin on operating activity is up by 160 basis points to 15.2%. That is mainly driven by a significantly improved gross profit margin, which stands now at 67.3%. It is slightly offset by higher R&D costs and by higher sales and marketing costs. We also introduced a new measure called brand contribution, which is basically how we are tracking the success of the business of Axway and SBS, i.e., the brands. And the G&A will, in the future, not be allocated between those brands anymore. This is in line with the governance and the model that Patrick outlined in the beginning, where we have the accountability for the G&A costs on the corporate leaders whereas -- or the corporate chapter leaders, whereas the accountability for the brand contribution relies with our brand CEOs. The increase on R&D and sales and marketing, just I will comment on the next slide. But if we look at the Axway brand contribution and ROA, which we'll still disclose here on, so you can compare this to '24, but we'll stop disclosing that in the future as we stop allocating the G&A. The ROA has gone up to 21.6%. The driver behind that, again, here is gross margin as we had a lot of growth in the customer managed revenues, which come at a very high margin. On R&D, you can see an increase in spend. This is really related to what Eric was talking about in terms of the Fusion, the AI-related investments. And sales and marketing has grown on the back of the strong growth in revenues and the strong commercial activity that we had. SBS is well on track with the profitability improvement plan. SBS has improved the ROA by 3.3 percentage points year-on-year and therefore, is well on track on the 2028 improvement plan. The gross margin has benefited -- is also up here and has benefited from the shift towards product revenues and the decrease in service revenue and therefore, the contribution of higher-margin revenues has increased. On the R&D, R&D is slightly up. This is mainly due to increased amortization of capitalized R&D. So when we adjust for capitalization and amortization effect, you have the percentages in the bottom of the slide. The efficiency has increased slightly from 36.8% of revenue in '24 down to 36.3% in '25. This is, as you know, continues downwards and will trend lower over the next few years as some of these incubation on investments that Eric mentioned come to the end. In terms of cash flow, I've already mentioned the strong underlying unlevered free cash flow that we have achieved of CHF 80 million. The cash flow statement, just as a reminder, we did not do a pro forma cash flow statement in 2024 due to the carve-out and therefore, the only disclosure we've had previously was the 12 months of Axway plus 4 months of SBS cash flow. So what we're showing here is the comparison of Axway to Axway in '24 as well. Of course, the full consolidation for the full year of SBS has had significant improvement -- has meant a significant improvement in cash flow since we only consolidated the last 4 months of '24 of SBS and the last 4 months of the year are typically the weakest in terms of cash flow in SBS's business due to the seasonality of the free -- of the cash flow. If we look at Axway stand-alone, there is a significant improvement in net working capital, partly driven by the first-time introduction of a factoring program in 2025 that we have already disclosed in H1 so that benefited the group by about CHF 21 million, with most of that coming from the Axway side. However, even looking at the other operating cash flow, you can see a significant improvement on the Axway side as well of CHF 15 million. One word on the expected cash -- unlevered free cash flow going forward. We will not have this one-off effect from the introduction of the factoring in 2026. So you will see in Patrick's guidance later that this is not expected to grow, but expected to slightly drop for 2026. And I just wanted to mention that to explain the reason. So finally, what we've done with all of that cash generated is, of course, delever in line with the strategic capital allocation priorities. As you can see from this slide, we have reduced net debt by CHF 57 million in 2025, which equates to a reduction of 23%. So we're now below CHF 200 million net debt at CHF 193 million. Leverage ratio is down by 33% to 1.92x below the 2x target that we set ourselves as well. And with that, I'm giving back to Patrick.

Thank you, Tobias. I'll make a few closing remarks. So first, Tobias covered the cash generation in the business. We've been very pleased to delever as planned, below 2x EBITDA. And we had messaged when we had come together and did the deal in 2024 that it was not our intention in the plan to propose a dividend for fiscal year 2025. And as we didn't have any M&A activities and our focus was really on the deleveraging of the business, we are going to look at this unique opportunity right now to do some share buybacks to top up our LTI plans that we had paused because if you remember, we usually have this sequence of opening up and buying back shares to cover our LTI plans. We had paused that to focus on deleveraging. We'll go back and pick up the shares that we didn't buy in the prior period and also the current year. So we have announced up to 800,000 shares will go into the market and be buying over the coming months until we have some M&A that we could spend on. Looking at the forecast for 2026 and guidance, we're really pleased when we had talked about doing the deal in 2024, we want to be very conservative on the top line revenue as I went through and make sure we focus on the business coming together, doing the right things for our customers and that we believed and I've always believed that if you're doing the right things inside the business and for our customers, that will come back to you in revenue. And so we gave guidance to kick off the deal throughout the 2028 period of a 2% to 4% average organic growth. We -- with what we're seeing in the business the last couple of years and as we look into '26 budget and '27, what we see in already pipeline or renewals, we're going to lift that guidance up slightly to 3% to 5% range for 2026, but also as we go into 2028. Our margin on operating activities will be between 15% and 17%, and we'll work hard to get hopefully to the upper end of that guidance. And as Tobias has already covered, the free cash -- the unlevered free cash flow as a percentage of revenue will be around 10%, but we'll look to continually improve that to where we get just a few points below the margin on operating activities. So with that, I'll do a quick wrap-up. For 2025 and as we roll into 2026, we will continue with the disciplined execution on delivering the plan we've committed to as we brought these companies together. The teams are doing fantastic work along with that plan, and we're getting the results, and we're seeing the metrics that we track internally across the board continuing to improve. Very pleased to see the big jump in the SBS Net Promoter Score, which is a key part of our strategy being -- having that customer proximity. Axway, as Eric had covered as well on the Net Promoter Score is sitting at 55 and continuing to be in their top group within the industry they operate in. We also are pleased to see the improvement in the employee engagement score as well as I covered earlier. And as Eric went through in detail in his presentation, we see AI opportunistically. And so we're going to look to attack the market on both sides, either to grow revenue or to defend revenue, but we really see it as a good opportunity for the group. And so with that, Alicia, could you go ahead and open up the lines for Q&A?

[Operator Instructions] First question is from Erik Karlsson, CapeView Capital.

I wanted to ask on the free cash flow guidance for the year. Does it include or exclude restructuring outflows? So -- and how big might those restructuring outflows be?

Erik, it's unlevered free cash flow guidance. So it is before restructuring costs and before interest costs. We had EUR 12 million of restructuring and other operating -- sorry, other income and expenses in 2025, and we expect a slightly higher number for 2026.

Okay. So EUR 12 million restructuring outflows or slightly higher for 2026?

Correct.

Hello?

Yes, we heard you.

Yes, correct.

Okay. Great. And maybe you can give us a sense of interest costs. What would you expect for 2026 as it's looking right now, if we exclude further acquisitions, et cetera?

Yes. As we delever further, if we don't deploy capital elsewhere, it should go down. We're also doing a refinancing transaction as we speak. So I don't have the visibility yet on that. But just from the deleveraging, it should come down.

Next question is from Wolfgang Specht, Berenberg.

Two additional ones from my end. First, on, let's say, the sources of revenue growth. You mentioned the adding of new logos and, let's say, volume growth at individual products. Can you give us an idea how you see the, let's say, the combination in the years to come? Will it largely be volume growth or price increases? Or do you also have a part for upselling or adding new customer logos? And then on the unlevered free cash flow margin, we understand that there should be a step down given the contribution from factoring during 2025. But nevertheless, the [10] look a little bit low. Is it probably just a cautiousness because you have some moving parts you cannot foreseen at this point of time? Or do you really believe that the margin is going to drop that far?

Eric, do you want to cover the revenue question?

Yes. So there will be a mix of cross-sell and upsell. On the Axway side, this is mainly going to be driven by upsell based upon the volume, but mainly based upon the acceleration of the adoption of Fusion and Fusion on top of the existing product line. So this will be generating a large part of the growth. On the SBS side, this will be mainly driven by cross-sell. Even when we have 17 new logos, this is not dramatically changing the revenue profile. So meaning that the cross-sell where we do progressively deliver the new product on top of the existing foundation we are having with a very long-term contract is driving the major part of the growth.

And maybe I'll add one thing on top of that. As we're launching some new products into the market, almost the majority of these products, especially Fusion, but other products we're launching as well, digital engagement and others, they are SaaS or often SaaS contracts. And so the revenue will come overtime, but we'll be giving metrics in our presentation to track the number of new customers and ARR is a beautiful model to also show, and that's why we're moving more in that direction, the ARR will continue to grow, giving guidance of how that's layering up for the revenue for the future. Maybe on the free cash flow question, Tobias?

Yes. So if you look at the free cash flow or the unlevered free cash flow achieved in 2025, and if you were to exclude the EUR 20-plus million from the introduction of the factoring program, you will still see the underlying growth in operating in cash flow from '25 to '26. So '26 is actually higher than '25, excluding that EUR 25 million. So it is gradually increasing, as Patrick was saying, we expect cash conversion to become something like 80%, 85% of our operating profit by 2028. But in order to get there, we need to see the margin improvement come through. We need to see the net working capital normalize and so forth. As we are -- as we have grown revenues on customer managed in Axway quite strongly in '25 and are expecting to continue to grow those, we will see some drag on net working capital from that due to the IFRS 15 recognition of the upfront revenue.

And Tobias, I think you covered this in the July presentation that the treasury team did a really nice job to step into the market and do the factoring so that we could get our ratios and our debt down to have a lower overall interest costs. And so we use that as a tool to manage our interest expense. And now that the tool is no longer needed, they'll be backing off it a bit. And so that's why we chose to do that earlier and accelerate some of the cash into 2025.

Understood, thanks a lot.

And maybe aligned with that before we take another call question, we have a question on the chat, which is asking, what is the total amount of the deconsolidating factoring at the end of 2025, Tobias?

The number is $21.3 million to be exact.

Okay. succinct answer. So Alicia, do we have any other questions from the line?

Next question is from Edward James of Cantor Fitzgerald.

I've got 3, if I may. Firstly, on guidance, would you mind just unpacking the increased sales growth guidance between product and product revenue growth and the kind of implied decline in services and when we should see the decline in services flatten out? And then the second question on guidance is with growth guidance lifted slightly, does this bring the higher end of the margin guidance more into play given the potential positive mix effect? And I've got a third one, but I'll wait for the moment.

Go ahead and ask it, and we'll hit them one, two, three.

Okay. And then the last one was just on sales cycles and decision-making by the clients, if there's been much change in that since the kind of AI whirlwind has struck us over the last few months?

Okay. Let me take the growth one first and then I'll ask Tobias and Eric to help. So on the growth guidance of 3% to 5%, we're lifting up the guidance, and we see a little higher targeted growth overall organically. But as Eric, I think, mentioned during his presentation, we're selectively choosing to increase the R&D, which wasn't planned at the start of this journey so that it could really invest behind the AI activity and the [AI] gateway inside the Fusion product line. So we're eating up some of that revenue growth, but we're trying to respect and stick to the plan of the margin and the cash generation when we launch this. So we will occasionally make slight shifts like that as we see market changes, and we have to react to that. So we should stick on the guidance for the margin that we launched over the plan through 2028. But then for the next question.

Maybe if I can add on the you asked the contribution from product growth and service growth. So in '26, we see services reducing further. As I said, in '25, the reduction was 9% for the group. We see a slower reduction. So something minus 4% to minus 6% maybe. And then the product revenue growth will be at the upper end of the 3% to 5% just you can do the math, but we're talking something around 5%. The reduction of services is currently expected to stop at the end of '26 and then services to start growing again maybe in line with revenues. But that's what's currently anticipated.

And there's a question on sales cycles that you may want to hit, Eric?

Yes. Globally, we do not see a major shift in this big player, I would say, purchasing life cycle. Some of them did ask to even accelerate to enable Fusion on top of important renewal, but we are [not] talking about 1,000 clients, but this is a first sign we have seen in the last 3, 4 months. For the rest, we do not see a major shift for taking decision. But of course, each month, each quarter, we need to be very focused and follow our clients. But no specific change at the moment.

Next question is from Derric Marcon, Bernstein.

Four, if I may. The first one on pipeline. Can you hear me well?

Fine.

Yes. Okay. The first one on pipeline, can we discuss the pipeline a bit? Any metrics that you could share with us would be helpful. year-over-year growth, coverage, anything that would be meaningful by brand between SBS and Axway. The second question is about the pricing model that you will use with your AI product. How do you see things? There are a lot of debates in the market in the industry yet. How do you plan to monetize this innovation? My third question is on so annual recurring revenue metric is good. But if we say that you will increasingly sell your products in cloud, with cloud, let's say, does it mean that you don't capture in the annual recurring revenue metric, the ramp-up of contracts because when you deploy a cloud solution, you don't get the 100% of the users at the beginning of the contract. And often, you have a kind of ramp-up timing that will make the revenue bigger at the end of the contract than at the beginning of the contract. So how do you see things here and the moving parts? And how we will be able to measure that because you don't give any metrics on billings or things like that or [FPO] or I haven't seen any. And my last question is on the EBIT margin. I was wondering how do you reconcile the fact that you are, let's say, more bullish on top line growth and you said that you will invest but at the same time, if you look to the low end of the range -- of the guidance range for EBIT margin, you are targeting an EBIT margin below 2025 and 2026. So I was wondering what would be the assumption to be there, i.e., low end of the revenue growth guidance and a decline in margin year-over-year. Thank you.

I'll take the first one on the pipeline, then hand the next one over to Eric. So on the pipeline, as you know, we've never disclosed pipeline metrics, but have always talked about having somewhere above 2 and closer to 3x coverage for the bookings that we expect to do in our pipeline. And it's one of the things we've talked about quite a lot, and I've talked to other CEOs about as well, and nobody is seeing a decline in their pipeline in our industry. So the health of the pipeline remains strong at this time with AI uncertainty, and we're actually seeing demand quite strong as well. So, as we rolled into the 2026 budget cycle, we always go and do a deep pipeline review of what we have now. We look at the renewals, and there was enough there that we're showing a really strong Q1 as we come out of the gate, which was great. Q2 had a decent comparable. So, that will be hard to meet again, but the first half should be really strong, and the early pipeline is there to do the full year. So we are not seeing any erosion in the pipeline from the market dynamics we're hearing. In fact, it's quite strong, and we have the 2.5 to 3x coverage that we've always been targeting. So that's been a very positive metric for the future…

Patrick, in terms of quality, if you were to compare the quality of the pipeline at the beginning of 2026 versus a year ago, would you say that it's similar, it's the same, or you see big differences?

We see one difference, a major one. The AI acceleration or all the noise is increasing the demand for modernizing on one side, the system of record, because the quality of the data is going to make or not the AI strategy of our client's success. So that part, we see the quality improving in the pipeline because where it was trying to modernize a piece of it, now they know that they don't have any other choice, they need to have the quality of data, accessible. So, meaning AI-ready before becoming agent-ready. On the second side of it, and that's what I said with some early renewal with upsell on Axway side, the ability to leverage that AI capability, if it's not governed, especially within the landscape where we do operate, is very critical. So, all the -- what we can say, players on our client base, considered as early AI adopter did I would say, accelerate their demand in terms of quality of their demand to have access to govern what we call the control plane to govern all these AI initiatives. So we see that quality, I would say improving, linked to that. For all the other, I would say, a traditional pipeline, we do not see a major shift compared to the pipeline 1 year ago, just to add to this. To come back to the other question on the monetizing strategy on all of this, there are a lot of debates, not only in the market. We are having a lot of debate because early adopters are usually not the good candidates to set a monetization strategy. And the early adopters are managed by use case. When we are moving at scale, and it's an example already with Amplify Fusion, moving at scale, the use cases are giving the proof, but you do not monetize the at scale the use case, if I'm summarizing. So we are convinced at the moment that accessing to the platform, Amplify Fusion on one side or accessing to the data platform on the SBS product is a subscription fee, such like we are, for example, upgrading a product, and it's a major upgrade because we are adding AI-ready capability, if I'm talking about SBS, and we are adding a control plane for AI capability inside Amplify. So we consider that it's a subscription for additional capability. Then we need to be very cautious on the consumption. So we have set metrics to secure that they are different levels of subscription, especially when we operate to avoid that it's going to cost us a lot more than what we were expecting. So we are still tracking at the moment, but we set a really threshold first to test the market; and second, to secure that it's very beneficial for us so far. As that AI platform on one side and the Amplify Fusion platform is first accessing with the additional subscription to the service. And then we can upsell use case on top of it. Personally, I'm not convinced that this will be the major part of our additional revenue because our client, they know us in delivering platform, and they don't know us, and many of them will expect to deliver their own use case, leveraging our technology.

And let me do a bridge to hand it over to Tobias on the ARR. And I want to emphasize, there's been a lot of -- lot of questioning and a lot of activity in the software space during this period about user-based pricing. So when we're looking at the AI gateway that we're developing, and how we're looking at Axway really pushes into the transaction flows or API calls or data going back and forth across the trails, and SBS often does it on the number of clients and the number of accounts managed, et cetera. And this is estimated at the start of the contract and materialized into something more of a fixed price. And so we get the incremental, if they exceed that capacity, we'll go back and do a next contract, which is what Eric was talking about in the upsell. So we're hoping they use our MFT system or Fusion with AI more than they're contracted to because it's an upsell opportunity, but you'll see that flow into ARR quite structured as more of a defined contract value. And then the usage when they exceed it, we go back and recontract to a fixed amount because the customers that both companies have want to have a constant budget and expectation for the year. And that's been a critical part of both businesses. And so even as we go into the cloud with both customers, when we get the environment live, and they're using it, is when we start taking the revenue, but the ARR is going to be quite fixed because we scope it at the beginning of the contract. But I don't know if you want to add anything else to that or go to the EBITDA question.

Yes. I just wanted to remind you also of the different methodologies we use for ARR calculation between Axway and SBS. As Axway has a very quick time from signature to revenue, it's a forward-looking measure and takes into account all the signed contracts at the minimum contract commitments, right? So if there was a ramp-up period included, but we know that the minimum goes up to a certain level, that would already be reflected in the ARR -- in Axway's ARR. On the SBS side, as the time to revenue is many times more than a year or 2, we don't take the forward-looking approach, but we take the MRR times 12 approach, and therefore, we would only include what has already been built. And therefore, yes, if we were in a ramp-up period, you might actually understate the ARR a little bit through that, but that's not -- I don't think that's a major number for any of the businesses. On the second point on the EBIT guidance, I mean, the first answer probably is, yes, it is being conservative in the current uncertain environment. We don't know what's going to happen to inflation and things like that. We also know from our model that sales and marketing expenses might be higher if we have certain revenue growth profiles and so on. But yes, the most -- the simplest answer, it's a conservative low end of the guidance range.

Can I add another one?

Sure.

Just to understand the impact of the cloud on your revenue guidance, is there any metric that you could share with us about the flexibility you kept? Because, i.e., if there are more sales geared to cloud, i.e., it's a headwind on your revenue growth. Is it taking into account in the range that you gave us? And the follow-up on this is, do you believe that with the buzz around AI or the buzz coming from AI products and the willingness of customers to accelerate at least some, cloud will become a no-brainer for all customers that are willing to go in this direction, because they will not do compute and anything related to AI on-premise?

I [laughed] a bit Derric because I was here listening to a report the other day, talking about the AI movement may actually move activity back on-premise so that the customer could keep all their LLMs and the data within their control and not exposing it back and forth to the cloud. So I think the market is still a bit uncertain around where cloud fits in with the AI perfectly, especially for the larger regulated activities that we deal with. As far as cloud is within the guidance, why don't you cover that, Tobias?

Yes. So the way we do our planning and budgeting is obviously using an assumption on what's cloud, what's on-prem. It really only affects the Axway side of the business because there, we give customers a choice on the same product to either go cloud or on-prem. But we have seen a very stable share of cloud as a total -- as a percentage of the total bookings, and that has been mentioned by Eric, I think, around 30%. So that's what we assume for our planning. We don't model in a significant shift in that. On the SBS side, as we typically offer default SaaS, and on-prem is not really offered to the customers, we don't have the same sort of assumption that we need to embed in the planning… And some products, of course, are only available in on-prem, still like the African product, as I think you know, but others are offered exclusively SaaS. So we don't give the 50-50 option to the customer typically.

Gentlemen, we have no more questions registered from the conference call.

Okay. And as we've run a bit over our scheduled time, I'll go ahead and wrap it up. And thank you all for joining and connecting with us for the 2025 full-year results. We look forward to coming back to you in July with the half-year results and more updates. And for some of you, we'll see you on our road shows over the next coming days. So thank you all for joining us, and have a good rest of the day.