Banqup Group SA (BANQ) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our 2024 full year results webcast. I'm Alex Nicoll, Investor Relations at Unifiedpost. The presentation today by our CEO, Nicolas de Beco; and Koen De Brabander will last approximately 30 minutes, followed by Q&A session. [Operator Instructions] Before we begin the presentation, I would just like to draw your attention to the disclaimer on Slide 3, which sets out the legal framework under which this presentation has been prepared and must be considered, which I assume you have read. I will now hand you over to our CEO, Nicolas.

Thank you, Alex. Thank you. Welcome to our 2024 results. I'm glad and grateful to join you today. This is my first time as a CEO of Unifiedpost. This morning, I was mentioning it was 90 days in since I joined December 2. My CFO, Koen, reminded me it's 88 days. So that level of precision is expected in finance. I'm taking over -- I took over from Hans Leybaert. Hans has started Unifiedpost 25 years ago with a clear vision on the change and impact of digitization into invoicing and into the financial markets. That vision is becoming a reality as we come into '25 and significantly in '26. We will review, obviously, 2024 for Unifiedpost, which has been a year of change, changes that were committed by the team in April and I'll review and underline what has been achieved since the Capital Market Day of April 2024. But just to underline a couple of major changes. The first one, obviously, is a new leadership in place and the new Board member that joined the Board and will join the Board at the general assembly that will significantly improve the governance of the company. The second big event, obviously, has been done with the de-investments and the derisk of the balance sheet. Koen will go into details on the impact. But obviously, our net debt ratio and our enterprise value changed massively in 2024. Finally, 2025 is the major opportunity for us of growth, but it is also an opportunity to continue our improvements in our efficiency and continue the work that has been done in 2024. If we can go to the next slide, please. So I don't want to review the offer that we've described during the April 2024 Capital Market Day. But I try to simplify how we look at business in Unifiedpost today. There is 3 major area of revenue and positioning. The first one is Banqup. Banqup is our SaaS product. It is our true SaaS solution platform that have 4 components. If you remember the triangle, on the top of the triangle, there is the e-invoicing component. This is fairly self-explanatory. This is the base of the product where the invoice is created and exchange. When this invoice is exchange, the next step after is a way to pay or to receive payments. So payment facility that is part of the platform is a strong differentiator to the market. Our payments is fairly unique. Two massive differentiator to what you find on the market is our ability to remunerate the customer money in the accounts. And second is the factoring and the ability to use factoring on the large numbers of invoicing. The third component of the triangle is the e-reporting is often forgotten by other solutions on the market, but e-reporting is a key component to basically validate this invoice to the government portal. And that's obviously the goal of the invoicing. Finally, all that needs to be done in a trusted business network. The trust is what is created through the platform where we guarantee that the right person is receiving the invoice and receiving the payments. Banqup is truly our crown jewel. Our hidden jewel that we don't necessarily focus on often is eFaktura -- eFaktura World. This is a government dedicated platform that focus on providing support to the government into defining new law and working on compliance of model across the world. We have been doing it successfully in multiple regions. I'll take one example, which is Serbia that has been live in this solution. A few months ago, the finance minister mentioned that because of the e-invoicing mandates, they were able to generate EUR 2 billion of VAT -- additional VAT. So that reinforce the confidence we have with the European mandates that are taking place as it is a necessary need to get the control of that VAT in all different countries that we are covering. The eFaktura World also give us the ability to understand what the market is doing when the compliance is taking place. What's the acceleration of the market, where is the acceleration, when. And so when we do modernization of our future revenue, we have the data to prove the model. Finally is our printing and related solution. It is still a key component of our business as we're bringing this customer from the printing industry to the digital world. That will continue to be part of the overall offering. Obviously, as we transform ourselves into a true SaaS company, we will work quite a bit on SaaS KPI such as churn, AR, and so on, net renewal, et cetera. This is a component that will take place over the year, over 2025 and we will report a lot more into this SaaS KPI. Next slide, please. So let's review a couple of highlights. As I mentioned earlier, during the '24 April meeting, we review few strategic priorities. I am pleased to announce that we achieved all these priorities. This is not a screaming victory. It's far from it. We need to continue this improvement, but at least the direction has been set and delivered on. If I underline a few of them, the streamline to focus on core digital services, the core digital platform, which is Banqup, it's what's happening with the portfolio rationalization, which you've seen through divestment. We will continue in that direction. The goal for us is to be focused on Banqup that will become ultimately the SaaS product of Unifiedpost. The governance structure, I mentioned it, has been improved. Focusing on strategic partnership is the key go-to-market approach that we have. If I refer to the French market, for instance, today, with our relationship with ECMA under the product [ GeoFactio ], which is Banqup but named [ GeoFactio ], we have the ability to cover about 3 million companies. That's the value of strategic partnership. More to come on that during the year. I would love to report some new partnership. But in the next few weeks, we'll see additional press release. We continue our growth in subscription revenue, roughly 10%. Keep in mind, this subscription revenue will accelerate as we will reach the compliance date. This is fully driven by the compliance date. Finally, I think we made it clear, we're derisking the balance sheet significantly and reduced the net debt. Koen will go into details. I just want to add the last point, which is the first contribution of income from our payment solution on the client money. We've talked about it. It's not significant at this point, but it is the first contribution, meaning that what has been estimated and expected from the payment solution is happening and is currently happening in the market. So if we go to next slide. Let's review very quickly the results as Koen will go into details on these numbers. They are different from what you used to see, obviously, as we only report the continued operation. Again, Koen will go into what we call discontinue as it comes. Total revenue landed around EUR 84.3 million. Digital revenue, our true SaaS product came out at EUR 47.1 million. We improved our digital -- our digital services gross margin to 60%. And then our EBITDA still negative at EUR 9.2 million but increased by 17% during the year. Our net debt position is landing in 2024 at EUR 29.5 million. I will not be able to finish this presentation without congratulating the team on the commitment that has been done in 2024 on the ESG -- our ESG approach. We received for the first time the EcoVadis recognition as a committed company. And obviously, we will continue in 2025 in this direction. With that, I'm going to pass it on to Koen that will walk us into a more detailed approach of the financial. Thank you.

Welcome to the audience from my side, and thank you, Nicolas, for your insightful overview following your 88-day deep dive into Unifiedpost. Normally, a new CEO receives 100 days to bring his message, but we know you are fast. Building on the key highlights of 2024, I would like to take a deeper look into our financial performance. It was an exciting year where we managed different moving parts of our business. These moving parts in our business were impacting significantly both our income statement and financial position. Let's have a look at these moving parts. We closed the year 2023 with approximately EUR 190 million in revenue. That's potentially a figure you'll remember, evenly split over our 2 business units, traditional Communication Services and Digital Services. The picture on the screen shows the different moving parts. We had first the project 21 Grams, which had been sold, but the project is not yet closed, is an ongoing and is still in our financials as an asset held for sale and shown as a discontinued operation. End of May, we closed the transaction where we sold the 2 print activities in Serbia called New Image. So that is still in our figures till end of May and is impacting income statement for 5 months results. Later on, end of June or 4th of July to be more precise, we divested Fitekin/ONEA and these figures are still included in our income statement for 6 months but are divested from the balance sheet. And last but not least, the main operation, the main transaction of this year we informed you about was the divestment of the identity business in the Netherlands, which had been closed on December 17 and where we have adjusted our income statement for the year '23 and '24 to show you comparable figures. It does mean that looking at our figures, our digital business is approximately half of the figure we have shown last year and also traditional communication services approximately half of what we have shown last year. The arrows shown in the box, yes, digital business is our growing business. Traditional communication services is our business that is -- that will step-by-step be divested or transformed, migrated into digital activities. I remember you that as announced in April last year, one of our primary objectives was to strengthen the company's financial position. And so we did by realizing these important divestments. On the next slide, I will highlight key financial figures. Note that the presented figures, unless otherwise indicated, are referring to the continued operations where we will build on for the year 2025. In simple words, it's our new starting point for 2025. Three comments I want to share with you on this slide. Focusing on the digital business, our subscription business and transaction business, the core of our future development was still growing, respectively, 8% and 9%. The decrease is only due to the volatile part of our license business, which I'll call here the lumpy part of our business. This lumpy part is project business such as license sales and is from its nature, volatile. The projects in the pipeline will come in '25 and mainly concerns eFaktura licenses in our governmental business. I refer to what Nicolas already explained in his introduction. Regarding the traditional communication service, the decline is partially linked to the migration activities into digital business, partially linked to declining print activities with some ended low-margin contracts and the divested activities in Serbia. A new business where we generate income from is client money. It is developed mainly since the second half of this year and was contributing EUR 700,000 to our results. This is a nice example of how we diversify our business activities. Thank you, Arthur, who is leading this product line. Great job. Our EBITDA from our continued operations, inclusive net result from client money improved with EUR 1.8 million and ended in a negative of EUR 9.2 million. It was still impacted with nonrecurring costs of at least EUR 700,000. Strengthening our financial position is realized seeing the important capital gains on our divestments amounting to EUR 114 million, which resulted in a profit of the year, including the discontinued activities of EUR 71.2 million. On the next slide, we will have a look into the heart of our future business engine. We zoom in, in the evolution of our digital service business across different segments. Our core e-Invoice business remained stable. However, when excluding Fitekin/ONEA and considering only the organic portion, we achieved a growth of 6%. The e-Payment segment, including income from client money, demonstrates strong growth of 27%. e-Reporting business, however, declined due to the lumpy character of this business. I referred to the license sales. Subscription revenue and transaction revenue continued to expand, growing at respectively 8% and 9%. Additionally, I comment significant management attention was allocated to divestments, which were essential for reshaping our business. While this temporary impacted direct sales focus, substantial groundwork was laid to position us for 2025. Referring to what Nicolas already said, we invested a lot of effort to prepare the year 2025 with concluding new partnerships. Starting up these means aligning people and this takes time. Furthermore, the real boost is expected to come together with the final go from regulatory body and the set deadlines for mandatory e-Invoicing. Next slide. Looking at the digital gross margin trend, we observed a peak in Q4 2023 that was driven by the sale of a license project. In 2024, the margin showed more stable growth with a weaker Q3. However, we successfully expanded our gross margin from 59% to 60% year-on-year. And it remains our clear ambition to continue this upward trajectory. This growth is achievable through additional subscription revenue and increased transaction volumes without reliance on one-off projects. A strong focus on the SaaS component of our business is the key evolution for 2025. From profitability perspective, the last 12 months EBITDA from continued operations improved by nearly EUR 2 million. This result reflects a decline in gross margin on the one hand, driven by the lumpy part of our business and lower volume in traditional communication services, a realized cost reduction of approximately EUR 6 million as previously announced. I will come back on the last one on the next slide. Looking ahead, we are confident that higher income from client money in 2025, driven by a higher amount of client money owned on behalf of our customers and full year impact rather than just half year performance, combined with growth in subscription revenue and transaction volumes will significantly improve EBITDA and push it above the breakeven point. Additionally, the successful realization of a single license project could further accelerate this. Market focus is crucial. Since 2023, group is more and more focusing on operational efficiency and cost management. It was set as a clear management objective for 2024. We continue to make significant steps in cost optimization. Our OpEx decreased by 8%, while cash outflows from operational costs dropped by 13%, focusing exclusively on continued operations. This improvement is driven by stricter cost control measures and a reduction in staff levels. The current cost level was still impacted by EUR 0.7 million one-off expenses. Further efficiencies can be unlocked through the ongoing consolidation of our geographical dispersed platforms onto our centralized BTX platform, streamlining operations and enhancing scalability. On the CapEx side, we have successfully reduced our investment by 3% from EUR 16.4 million to EUR 16 million. In the current CapEx allocation, I highlight the investment in both our e-Invoicing and e-Payment business. The expectation is that from now onwards, these levels of CapEx will decrease step-by-step unless important new features are required. The relative percentage of CapEx over digital service revenue is expected to substantially decrease. Attention now for this slide. I should change the color of my voice as the cash flow statement is presented accordance with IFRS requirements covering both continuing and discontinuing operations. Cash flow from operations was coming from a positive EBITDA of EUR 4.8 million, a positive inflow from working capital movement EUR 3.6 million and income taxes paid of EUR 1.8 million. Cash flow from investing activities was an outflow on CapEx amounting to EUR 16 million and an inflow from divesting activities of EUR 114.4 million. Cash flow from financing activities was a repayment of loans and leasings amounting to EUR 86.2 million, of which EUR 75 million principal amount to Francisco Partners and payment of interest amounting to EUR 23.5 million. Furthermore, we had cash outflows into our discontinued operations of EUR 8.6 million. Note, the big movement parts, as I was talking about at the start of my presentation, were really impacting more than the cash flow from operations, our cash position and net debt position. This is the perfect link for my next slide looking into our financial position. We can explain each line item, but only 3 figures on this slide regarding our financial position are of big relevance. One, declining the net financial debt position with EUR 72 million. And looking at detail of remaining balance, EUR 29.5 million, your question could be how to deal with the balance of Francisco Partners. We currently do not have any contractual obligation to pay off this balance, although as management, we are working on refinancing options. These options can be further supported by proceeds coming from the currently announced divestments and from new opportunities coming on our radar. Second, we improved our equity level back to a level of EUR 150 million. By the way, above market capitalization, something to think about. The combination of the first 2 elements is clear the proof that we managed to reshape our financial position and to prepare the company for its future. The noncurrent assets and that's my third point for this slide, were mainly decreasing due to the realized divestments. Note that last year, I mean, 2023, we were confronted with a one-off impairment of EUR 38 million. This year, based on detailed modeling, the company's future cash flow supports in full the carrying value of the different cash-generating units. So no further impairment was needed. I'm proud to say that derisking of our balance sheet is not only announced but is realized in 2024. Summarizing this insight in the financials of Unifiedpost, I do hope you remember the following key points. Digital subscription and transaction revenue have shown continued growth of 8% and 9% respectively. The gross margin in our digital business was growing. And simultaneously, the indirect cost structure is declining with and 8% and in cash spend with 13%. The derisk of our balance sheet is not only announced but is realized by the end of 2024. I thank you so far for your attention and give the floor back to Nicolas.

Okay. Thank you, Koen. Very clear. And congratulations to the team to have been able to derisk this balance sheet. It's a difficult exercise and has been executed in 2024. So let me give you a little bit of framework on how we're going to set up our target for '25. First and foremost, if there is one thing to remember, 2025 is the execution year. This is the time we need to execute. Everything is in place. The market with major dates coming to us, specifically September 2025 with the Belgium mandate, September 2026 in France as well. This gives us the compelling reason to be quite ambitious with what will happen this year. Second aspect is our strategy around partnership. Our focus to partnership is key to the success of Unifiedpost. We need advocate in the market to grow. This is a question of cost of acquisition where while we want to address the totality of the market, we need to be cautious of the cost of acquiring this customer. Through partners, through trusted adviser, this is the best way we're looking at it. Again, I don't want to repeat the example of our French market with ECMA, but it is definitely the way to look at it with 3 million company that will be reached through this market. The third piece is obviously our product with our Banqup solution, not only it's a strong and unique product, it is a product that is ready today. It means e-Invoicing cannot be delayed by vendors that are not ready. We are ready today to address the market today. The fourth piece is the organization. I've not mentioned it earlier today, but the core and the value of Unifiedpost is its people. If there is 200 people in the world that knows e-Invoicing, half of them are here. We have strong, strong organization. We have a strong team. We will continue, obviously, to streamline costs. We will continue to organize ourselves in the most efficient way. We will continue to look at divestments that are not core to our strategy. But overall, we should feel comfortable with the people we have. The fifth piece is important. It's brand. Unifiedpost has acquired quite a bit of businesses over the years, different names of products across the organization. And we need to make a choice. So I've decided with the team to change the name of Unifiedpost this year to our product Banqup. That will take time during 2025. But ultimately, next year, when we meet, there will be the Banqup annual results of 2025. Finally, I cannot end up a call without reminding everyone of full commitment to sustainability and ESG is a core component of any type of KPIs given to the company. Next slide. For the guidance, we have decided to put 2 guidance this year. One and foremost is to maintain our guidance that we've given over '24, which is our cash flow to be positive at the end of 2025. Secondly, we are giving a guidance of plus 25% of revenue growth on subscription. That will be phased out during the year. It won't happen on day 1, but it will end up the year at plus 25%. That's a commitment that the team have to the market and to you, our shareholders. With that, I believe we finished this presentation and we'll open the floor to questions. Thank you.

Thank you, Nicolas. Okay. I see we do have a few questions. So Koen, I will start the first one with you from Michael. How much of the revenue -- the EUR 80 million revenue in sales in FY '24 is from activities that are no longer part of the group today?

Alex, you had good question. I have shown the table with the moving parts of our business. So we have presented here the continued business. But it's right. The 2 divestments, Fitekin/ONEA, which happened in June, that's part of our digital business was still included for 6 months and it represents approximately EUR 1.7 million of revenues. And then the traditional communication services is a bit out of my head, but the print activity of the Serbian entity was still included for 5 months and that represents approximately EUR 500,000.

Thank you. And Nicolas, maybe one for you from [ Jacob ]. Can you comment on your -- on the regulatory readiness in Belgium?

We are ready. We are fully ready to address the market. It's actually incredible to see the activity, the sales activity today, where we see a huge increase on pipeline. The activity of the sales team went from 5 meetings a week to 25. So the market is also asking for guidance from the specialist, Unifiedpost. We also work quite a bit with partners as trusted adviser to support the questions. A lot of question is asked by the market on what's going to happen? How are we doing it? What will be the impact? And our team, a specialist of the e-Invoicing is the best to answer this question. So I'm feeling absolutely confident about the Belgium market. I'm actually quite excited to see the acceleration that will take place in September. I made a tiny mistake, the mandate is the January '26, but the acceleration of the market will happen in September '25.

Thank you. Another one from [ Karl ], which is kind of linked to that is how do you plan to increase subscriptions in FY 2025? Is 25% realistic?

Yes, it is. Like again, I'm going to repeat myself. We have 1.2 million companies in Belgium that needs to be ready for the e-Invoicing mandate. I'm going to repeat the number so everyone can grasp it is 1.2 million companies. That is the reality of the market. And that needs to be -- have a solution in place by January 1, 2026. As everyone in Europe, we're always last minute. So the growth will definitely be visible in the third part or the last part of the year. That's point number one is on the compliance. Second piece is obviously one of the component that is important to understand is we have already an existing amount of customers, customers that are not using our payment solution, payment solution that is coming also with a subscription. With a few tests that we run in the Netherlands, we are confident to see that upselling amount of subscription going up this year.

Thank you. Koen, one for you. What is the repayment schedule for the outstanding loan principal balance of '25?

Yes. Also a good question. Earlier, we announced that we had ambitions to repay the principal amount of Francisco Partners in full before end of Q1. We did a big step end of December. We repaid EUR 75 million principal amount from the EUR 100 million outstanding. The next part is, of course, is a bit linked on the divestment activities of the group and linked to the divestment of 21 Grams. We will have some delay in that project. That is mainly -- there were 3 main 3 closing conditions and one is still pending. It's the approval from the Swedish anticompetition authority. That process takes longer than expected and we are currently in a Phase 2. So we are waiting that one. But the repayment of Francisco Partners loan is clearly our commitment, our engagement. And yes, we can do that based on proceeds coming from the different divestments that have been announced.

Thank you, Koen. And that question was actually from [ Anna ], and we've got another one from Anna. Last question, you report a negative EBITDA of EUR 9.2 million, although in your cash flow, you report an operating cash flow of EUR 6.6 million. Can you just explain that, please?

Yes. That's the complexity a bit of the figures as they are presented and I changed at some point in time the color of my voice. I said it clearly. The EUR 6.6 million was referring to the results from discontinued and continued operations together. So in the discontinued operations, we have 21 Grams, we have Fitekin/ONEA, we have Identity Business. So the EBITDA from continued operations, minus EUR 9.2 million, which was on different slides, you should add up EUR 14 million of EBITDA from the discontinued activities or approximately EUR 14 million. So then you will end up in EUR 4.8 million EBITDA that we controlled over the past year because these transactions happened, well, 21 Grams is still ongoing, as said. Identity Business, well, happened only 18th of December, so that all these activities were realized under our control. So that is a big difference. And then, yes, of course, we have movement parts in working capital and we have income taxes paid of EUR 1.7 million. So the link between the minus EUR 9.2 million and the plus EUR 6.6 million is mainly driven by the EBITDA from our discontinued activities.

Thank you, Koen. That concludes the questions on the web chat. If you do have any further questions, please do reach out to me after this. But for now, thank you, everyone, for joining. That concludes the webcast and have a great rest of the week.

Thank you.

Thank you.