Boku, Inc. ($BOKU)

Hello, and welcome to the Boku 2025 Full Year Results. [Operator Instructions] I will now hand over to Stuart Neal, CEO.

All right. Good morning, everybody, and welcome. We are very excited this morning to talk to you about our full year 2025 financial results. I'm going to be handing over to Rob Whittick, our CFO, in a second, to go through the numbers in some detail. But if you'll bear with me a second, I just want to talk to you a little bit about where I think we're at as a sort of positioning as we go into the presentation. So the way I'd like to think about these results is in the context of what has been a multiyear transformational journey that I first talked to you about when I took over as CEO back in January 2024. And what I described at the time was how I'd inherited a business that had incredible assets, have built a portfolio of amazing global customers and actually really just needed to scale into its own ambitions. And that required a multiyear set of investments that I can now -- I'm now pleased to be able to tell you are starting to really bear fruit. As you'll see from the slide on the left-hand side, all of our leading indicators are showing us positive. We're adding more customers, which is driving more TPV via more monthly active users. And that is all being supported by the operational scaling that we've been talking about for a while, which means more infrastructure around banking and around licensing. And as we get into the presentation, I'll explain why I believe that infrastructure provides a significant moat to the business, particularly in the world where agentic is allegedly going to eat the world. We continue to deliver on some of these projects that are going to differentiate our proposition from the competition, and that includes sophisticated cross-border money movement capabilities. We've also kicked off in a sort of sense of wanting to be a continuously iterating and innovating organization. We established an innovation hub out of Singapore this year, which is going to continue to propel us into the future and make sure that our products include all of the latest cutting-edge technologies. Anyway, more about this a bit later. I'm delighted with our results and to take you through them in a bit more detail is our CFO, Rob Whittick. Rob, over to you.

Thank you, Stuart. Good morning, everyone. As Stuart has already said, 2025 was a very strong year for Boku. We reported full year revenue of $128.8 million, growth of 30% year-on-year and tracking well ahead of our medium-term guidance that we set out in March last year. At the same time, we delivered adjusted EBITDA of $41.3 million at an EBITDA margin above 30%. And to put this into context, consensus at the start of 2025 for revenue was $112 million and $36 million for adjusted EBITDA. So obviously, we're delighted with the outcomes we've delivered right across the business in 2025. Let me start with the headline metrics for the year, and then I'll go into more detail on what's driving these numbers. As you can see, we've continued to grow our payment volume while maintaining a broadly stable take rate. This translated into 30% revenue growth and 36% adjusted EBITDA growth. At the same time, our adjusted EBITDA margin rose to just over 32%. The business continues to convert profits into cash, ending the year with over $100 million of our own cash after the share buybacks that we completed in the year. Looking in more detail at the key operational metrics supporting this performance. We continue to see strong growth in both payment volume and active users during the year. Total payment volume increased by 27% year-on-year and MAUs for the month of December 2025 increased by 31% against those in December 2024. Operational momentum was particularly strong for our newer LPMs, where we saw Digital Wallets and A2A delivered TPV growth of 53% and MAU growth of 43%. As we explained at our recent CME, payment connections are the cornerstone of our revenue engine. Each time we connect a merchant to an LPM, we unlock the potential for more users, more payment volume, which generates a long-term recurring revenue opportunity that typically scales over a 4- to 5-year period as merchant consumer numbers grow. During the year, we delivered 132 new payment connections for both new and existing merchants. And importantly, revenue per connection increased as we continue to focus on improving the performance of every connection in our portfolio. At the same time, our Bundling products saw a rise in popularity as merchant demand for promotional offers as a means of consumer acquisition increased. Finally, our take rate remained broadly stable. Breaking that down, the take rate was boosted by the effect of launch phase pricing on a single Digital Wallet in the first half, together with higher-margin products such as currency conversion. These impacts -- or these positive impacts were partially offset by Bundling revenues, which have a lower take rate. As we explained at our CME, we do expect that future revenue growth will be driven by continued volume expansion with take rates expected to trend down over time. This strong operational performance has driven a record 30% growth in revenue, which has contributed to a doubling of revenue from full year 2022. And this growth has increasingly diversified our revenues across merchants and products. During the year, we onboarded new merchants and also progressed negotiation for merchant partnerships that we expect to launch in 2026, both of which will continue to diversify our merchant revenue streams. We also saw an increasing proportion of our revenues coming from non-DCB products. Digital Wallets and A2A schemes grew at 67% year-on-year and now represent 34% of total revenues. This performance was driven by cumulative growth from our existing connections at the start of the year, new connections delivered in the year and an increasing adoption of the additional products, such as currency conversion and cross-border money movement. We've also seen significant growth in Bundling with revenues up 71% year-on-year and now contributing to 11% of our total revenues. This growth was increased, driven by increased merchant demand and the application of Bundling beyond the DCB use cases historically. Together, these 2 products represent 45% of total revenue, up from 35% in 2024 and up from 27% in full year '23. At the same time, DCB remains a popular product, both for new and existing merchants, and it grew at 9% year-on-year. Looking ahead, we do expect this diversification to continue as we expand merchant acquisition by our global go-to-market and channel partnership strategies, deepening product adoption from new and existing merchants and finally, as we open new geographies for our merchants to expand into. Turning to adjusted EBITDA, which increased year-on-year by 36% or $11 million to $41.3 million, resulting in an adjusted EBITDA margin of just over 32%. As we explained in September, we're now including currency conversion costs within adjusted EBITDA for the first time, which was approximately $2.4 million for the full year. Excluding these costs, our adjusted EBITDA margin would have been 34%. We maintained our adjusted EBITDA margin above 30% while continuing to make targeted investments during the year, including the development of go-to-market and channel partnership strategies, expansion of our payment license footprint in key markets such as Brazil, India and the U.K. to support A2A growth. As Stuart has mentioned, the launch of an innovation hub in Singapore to develop currency conversion, cross-border and other new payment capabilities and the continuing strengthening of our internal infrastructure and capabilities, which include transformation initiatives around straight-through processing and data and AI capabilities to support scalability and operational efficiency. The $11 million increase in adjusted EBITDA was the primary driver of the $12.7 million rise in operating profit for the year. The largest items contributing to the difference between adjusted EBITDA of $41.3 million and operating profit of $18.9 million are share-based payment expenses and depreciation and amortization charges. The latter includes amortization of $6.2 million related to capitalized expenditure on internally developed software, which is amortized over 3 years. We continue to turn profits into cash. In 2025, we generated free cash flow of $31.1 million, representing a conversion rate of approximately 75%. This is after adjustments, as you can see, for our own working capital movements, whilst excluding the working capital movements related to merchant and issuer balances and also capitalized investments in software development directed toward long-term economic value creation. More broadly on working capital, it's worth noting that the nature of our business means that we do benefit from negative working capital. As you can see from the slide on the right-hand side, this free cash flow is the main contributor to our own cash increases year-on-year. Looking in more detail at our year-end cash position, group cash, which includes merchant and issuer balances has increased by 39% year-on-year. And as previously signaled, we continue to expect group cash balances to reduce over time as we accelerate settlement times to merchants. We consider the own cash metric to be a fairer representation of our true cash position as it excludes issuer and merchant balances. This balance has increased by 28% to $103 million at the year-end. And as I said earlier, this is after $12.3 million of cash was used on share buybacks during the year. These shares are held in treasury and used to meet obligations related to staff share schemes and warrants as needed. The overall strong cash position, coupled with our debt-free balance sheet gives us meaningful financial strength and flexibility. Turning to capital allocation. Our investment will continue to be disciplined and focused on the areas that will generate measurable returns while supporting future growth. We remain very pleased with our organic growth to date, and this will continue to be our largest area of focus in terms of investment. In terms of capital returns, we will continue to use share buybacks where appropriate and have announced a further share buyback of 4 million shares this morning. At the same time, as we mentioned at the CME, we will consider disciplined acquisitions over the medium term where these support and enhance our organic growth strategy. In summary, we've made very strong progress during 2025 and remain confident in delivering our medium-term guidance issued in March last year. To reiterate that guidance, while annual growth rates may vary, we expect organic revenue growth exceeding 20% on a compound annual growth rate basis over the medium term. And we also expect an adjusted EBITDA margin exceeding 30% with progressive accretion from 2026 as we benefit from operational leverage generated by our ongoing investments. And with that, I will hand back to Stuart.

Thanks, Rob. So we're extremely pleased with our results for last year. I would say, and I say continuously internally, we are pleased but never satisfied. And let me just take you through a few slides to explain why we're not satisfied just yet. You would have seen this slide before at the CME, but I thought it was worth just going back to it for a second. And why are we here and why are we feeling confident that we are in the right space and why this opportunity is significant. We're playing into a market that is in the middle of a structural shift. The global payments ecosystem is moving towards local payment methods to the extent that an $11 trillion market is going to be 60% dominated by local payment methods by 2028. That's a compelling tailwind that we're playing into, and it's largely driven by consumers. But what I think has been more profound and what I wanted to draw attention to even since we presented this at the CME is this move towards payment system sovereignty. It's a bit of a tongue twister, I know. But you would have seen in the news recently, even here in Europe, where everyone has a huge amount of payments choice that there is a lot of talk around the ECB about Europe owning its own payment system. The U.K. is in a similar place where actually the ownership of the payment rails is becoming increasingly important for central banks and governors to maintain control over the economies. And so we're not only playing into a consumer-driven long-term structural tailwind, but actually things have accelerated and heightened around this geopolitical agenda. We also get asked quite a bit around what is it that Boku actually does for its customers and how are we adding value? So I thought it was worth just double-clicking a little bit into the role that we play for our merchants. And what are our merchants asking us to solve for them. Even this day and age with some of the mega clients that we work with, the focus is still very much on helping them to grow. How are they going to extend their businesses either by acquiring more subscribers and growing their consumer base or launching into new geographies and driving their business through greater geographic expansion. The issue with that is geographic expansion is expensive, and it's also very complicated. Countries have regulations. They have different currencies. They have different tax systems. And so our merchants are really looking for us to partner them and help them accelerate their growth in all of those regards. So as I sit here today, we have created a platform that connects our merchants to billions of individual consumer accounts across numerous countries, and that is giving our merchants access to be able to target a much bigger population of consumers. We do that through just a connection and offering payment choice for the merchant, but we also do it explicitly through our Bundling programs. Bundling is an extremely efficient way for merchants to target significant captured populations of consumers that they can offer their subscription services to in one hit. That's millions of consumers that they can target. And then beyond all of that, once they've launched in a market, how do they monetize effectively? How do they make sure that they can be as light as possible in their footprint and that all of that in-country infrastructure and heavy lifting is done by their partner, i.e., Boku. So a lot of our investments over the last couple of years have been around how do we scale the business and expand supporting our merchants with their growth ambitions and how do we take away some of that in-country heavy lifting for them. What will this mean for Boku's strategy going forward? Well, of course, a lot of our growth comes from continuing to partner with our existing merchant set. We have -- and I've said this a number of times, we have a merchant portfolio to die for, and we still have a huge number of opportunities to be able to help our merchants to grow, and that is continuing to be a core part of our growth strategy. But of course, we have signified and we have managed to achieve within 2025's numbers, a slight diversification of our revenues, and that comes in a number of places. That comes from adding more merchants to our portfolio. And what I can say to you, whilst I have no specific names to launch, we're starting to now see early signs that our direct sales investments that we've been making and talking to you about for the last year are really starting to show some green shoots. So more on that later in the year. We're also working towards our first channel partnership deal. And again, I will be back to talk to you about that a bit later in the year. But what I'm seeing from the market is our push towards diversifying our revenues by extending our reach into a bigger merchant population is really starting to bear fruit. So pretty exciting times. We will only be able to achieve that though if we can scale the business. And we have been doing a lot of work behind the scenes, the unglamorous work, if you like, to be able to create a scalable platform. Remember, just 3 or 4 years ago, we were a Direct Carrier Billing specialist. And we are now a multifaceted global local payment methods business. And we've done that and enabled that by starting to build the foundational work in our back office and our treasury and money movement capabilities that have not only made us more efficient, but are now starting to unlock new commercial opportunities. And then finally, building the platform of the future. That's really all about how we continue to innovate. The Singapore hub is just one way in which we are starting to take some of the resources in the business and focus on solving future problems. And that might be how we utilize things like stablecoin to our advantage. We're already experimenting with how we use digital assets to make sure our own money works as hard as it can. And then it will move towards how do we use stablecoin to be able to settle money faster to our merchants and then who knows from there. So very exciting times, and we lean into these things with a huge amount of excitement and optimism. So how would I summarize the Boku investment case? Look, I think it's really simple. We are absolutely in the right place at the right time. The world of local payment methods is still growing rapidly and all of our key merchants and all of the prospective merchants we talk to have local payment methods as a key part of their own expansion strategies. By and large, we've already built the network. Of course, we're still adding and innovating around it, but we have over 200 payment methods already connected. Those are deep API integrations into payment methods. That is an extensive network of banking infrastructure and a growing network of FX and money movement capabilities that will differentiate us in the market. We're still at the foothills. I firmly believe we are just getting going with this business. And some of the things that we've been working on for the last 2 years will really start to land this year and give folks a better idea of what is truly possible for the company, but I think we're just getting going. And so the headroom for growth is significant. And as you would have heard from Rob, we're financially strong. We have cash in the bank to be able to invest and propel that growth into the future. So some takeaways. It's been a stellar year. 2025 was a stellar year for growth on our financial basis. We are right in the sweet spot of what is a growing and exciting space. And I think I want to differentiate us from people that have been in card acquiring for the last 20 years. What we are doing is very, very different. We are pioneering in many ways, allowing our merchants to connect to all of these brand-new mobile native payment methods. We've continued to diversify. Rewind a few years, we were a 90-plus percent Direct Carrier Billing business. And now we're driving almost half of our revenues from non-DCB payment methods, and that's super exciting. We absolutely will continue to invest. We are excited and we see significant opportunity to leverage new technologies. That includes digital currencies. That includes agentic commerce, where I think we will be a net beneficiary. That includes the ability to extend and grow this business efficiently and effectively without having to triple or quadruple our headcount. So we're leaning into data and AI, and we're leaning into digital commerce. So -- and I just want to go back to our midterm guidance. Back in last year, we guided the market to a 3-year Rule of 50 projection as a minimum. So we're reiterating now, and we think that is something that we absolutely stand behind, and we're super excited about what's coming. So look, thank you for being patient, and thanks for your interest in Boku as always. And I guess now we would like to open it up for some questions from the line.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question is a raised hand and comes from Hannes Leitner from Jefferies.

Stuart and Rob, I got 2 questions. The first one is on Bundling. Thanks for breaking that out. It's always better to have more disclosure. Maybe you can just talk about the stickiness of the product. You showed on the slides that it's a little bit of a promotion tool. And so how much of a recurring element is there? Then maybe you can also talk about the take rate or the associated TPV and maybe a TPV split across the 3 different buckets? The second question is looking at the Middle Eastern situation geopolitically, I remember you won some DCB contracts in Iraq a couple of years back. So maybe you can just talk about the general exposure and what you see on the ground? And maybe just like lastly, a clarification. You announced today an additional $4 million buyback on top of the completed one? Or you just wanted to reiterate that you have bought that back?

Thanks, Hannes. Okay. Let's take these in turn. On the Bundling, the way to think about Bundling is that we deliberately spend time with our merchants figuring out with them how they are intending to grow. And then as part of that, we will find suitable supply partners. So whether that's a mobile carrier or a cable TV company or a bank, whatever it might look like for somebody that's sitting on a captive population of millions of consumers. And so what we run is concurrent programs. And those programs will have different partnerships and within those partnerships will be different offers and discounts. So you might see, for example, and I'm making this up, you might see a subscription offer that is being offered by Vodafone to its millions of consumers, creates stickiness for Vodafone, creates more subscribers for the streaming company. And that promotional offer might last 6 months, it might last a year. It really depends on the specifics. The key to the Bundling proposition is to run multiple of these things concurrently across multiple merchants. And the beauty of it is this war that's raging around subscribers as more streaming services come to market, we've seen an unbundling of digital subscriptions, and now we're seeing a slight rebundling of those things. That is going to be an increasingly competitive space. And the great news for us is we're sitting right in the middle of it. I don't know if you want to talk to the economics piece.

Yes. The take rate, as we mentioned earlier, the take rate for Bundling is 55 basis points. So that is at the lower end of our spectrum of take rates. So that does -- we are conscious of that, but it's good business nonetheless. And we don't disclose the TPV take rates, Hannes, because for Bundling, it's a derivation. And to your last point, yes, we did a buyback earlier in the year, $11.5 million, and we have just launched this morning another $4 million that we will execute over the coming days and weeks.

Just on the Middle Eastern point, obviously shocking what's going on over there. I think from our businesses point of view, and we saw this for obviously different reasons during the COVID lockdown, in current society, what we see is the last thing that people tend to let go of is their digital streaming subscription. So when things get difficult and people are stuck at home, relying on this for entertainment is increasingly important. And so it tends to act, at least what we've seen so far is it tends to act in a sort of counterintuitive way. As times get tough, people tend to rely on these services more. So we don't see a material drop in our traffic over that period. So -- but obviously, it's something we're watching. Thanks for the questions, Hannes.

Our next question comes from Mahir Bidani of UBS.

Rob and Stuart, so a couple of questions. Are you currently benefiting from AI subscription-related revenue in your existing merchant base, for example, like Gemini, Copilot, for example? Is that something you're seeing right now? And then the second question is around the operating margin accretion. Could you just talk a bit more about the building blocks behind that? You mentioned operating leverage in the business, but is that potentially partly driven by currency conversion revenues? Is that because you expect new merchants to be accretive? Just kind of like -- I guess, what drives the accretion there?

Yes. Great questions, Mahir. Let me take the AI one and then Rob can take the op margin one. The short answer is no to the AI question. The caveat is watch this space. It's certainly a sector that we think plays well to our strengths. It's a sector that is growing fast. A lot of these companies are growing at a rate where the organization can't necessarily keep up. They're new companies compared to some of our other merchants. And therefore, companies who are looking to expand and grow rapidly and globally is absolutely Boku's sweet spot. So watch this space is all I would say on that. Rob?

Yes. Just on operating margin, Mahir. I guess both aspects, revenue growth clearly helps us. We will -- as we talked earlier, we will see continued diversification and continued volume growth. And then against that also costs. We're investing -- we have invested in a lot of capability including specifically to mention data and AI. AI, particularly, we want to look at all aspects or one angle of AIs look at all aspects of our cost base and see whether we could use agentic in terms of doing roles versus people or in addition to people. So we do see opportunities both in revenues and cost, Mahir, to create the operational leverage that we talk to.

Our next question comes from Damindu Jayaweera from Peel Hunt.

Well done on a good set of results. Probably you haven't seen the share price yet. You'll be pleasantly surprised. Would you -- could you talk to -- I got 3 questions. So could you talk to how in a world where agentic AI takes over shopping and we have a lot more of those highly regulated user not present transactions, which I think is magic of your transactions. Will users still gravitate towards lower cost offered by the A2A rails? Or do you think e-wallets with their better user experience will potentially experience a greater take-up? I'm just trying to figure out what the tension between the two is in a world with agentic AI. Second question I want to ask is, if you look at the consensus forecast out there for FY '26 and FY '27, your cost base is expected to continue to rise. Could you remind us where those incremental costs will go to perhaps in broad brush terms? And then the last one, to the extent you can, any color you want to give about go-live pipeline over the next 12 to 18 months on existing and new customers without naming names, obviously?

All right. Let's -- should we do a sandwich? I'll do the first one and the last one, the middle one. The agentic point is a fantastic point. And I'm not sure that -- I'm not sure the two are in conflict, Damindu. I think the move -- I mean, this is at least my perspective on it. The agentic move at least in the early stages, I think, will be very disruptive to discovery and search behaviors. So do I -- if I'm looking to make a purchase, do I do my own search engine work, or do I put it into an agentic model and get it to do the work for me. I think that shift will happen and will be relatively profound at the consumer end. How consumers then choose to pay for the goods and how that agentic model connects to the payment rails, I think is really yet to be determined. And I think this -- why is the shift to A2A happening? It's happening because the technology has kind of caught up with the banking infrastructure. And so as we said in the presentation, things that are now mobile centric and mobile driven means that people can access their bank accounts and make payments through mobile capabilities that weren't previously possible. And therefore, the concept of a wallet as an intermediary product that can be topped up and used to make purchases, I guess, is increasingly ambiguous in terms of what is true A2A and what is Wallet. So I think those 2 things will converge. I think the connection to agentic is a tenuous because I think agentic still has to connect to the underlying rails. You still have to be able to authenticate, hey, is this really Rob or is this some agent that's trying to steal Rob's money and buy stuff online? I think that is deliberately -- deliberately includes friction for a very good reason, which is we need to keep the bad actors out. We need to be able to authenticate who the right parties are in the financial flow and that is why our licensing and our infrastructure and that last mile into the payment methods is what is our moat around the business. So we're excited about agentic commerce. I think we will be net winners. I think the shift from Wallets to A2A is actually a separate point, and it's happening because the banking infrastructure is catching up with the fintechs a little bit. And that whole world is being blurred anyway. Do you want to just talk about our cost base?

Yes, yes. So a variety of areas, Damindu. Clearly, growth is important. So investment in -- continue to invest in the go-to-market strategy. We will need to invest in the channel partnership. There is different dynamics there, particularly around compliance. So we'll need to invest there. We are and will look to go to new geographic markets. So we will need to invest to go into those markets. Part of that will be expanding the payment license footprint for new markets. We will continue to invest in the innovation hub. We do want the folks there in that hub to find new capabilities. So we will support them. We have talked about straight through processing historically, and we'll continue to invest in that because it is fundamental in terms of continued and growing operational leverage that we straight through process. And short term, we will make some small investments in AI capability such that we can leverage AI over time to improve the operational leverage. So a variety of areas, Damindu, mainly growth and operational -- continued buildout of operational leverage.

On the pipeline, it's always a tricky one for us because I appreciate that we make your jobs a little bit harder because we do not have a huge amount of news flow. We have been talking about a few initiatives over the last couple of years. The first one being this desire to go back to selling, selling the assets that we've created to a whole new cohort of merchants. And that was a little bit slow to stand up last year, but we are now up and running, and we're starting to see our first set of inbound opportunities come in. I would expect those to start landing and going live in the second half of the year. I don't think it's material in our numbers this year, but what it will do is prove the size of the market opportunity that we've been talking about. I would also expect to have some news for you around our first meaningful global channel partnership deal. Again, I don't want to be hostage to fortune on this, but I'm quite excited about the number of parties that have come to us to talk about accessing Boku's network and for us to be the last mile into the LPMs for some -- from large global payment companies. On the existing merchant front, I mean, we continue to run programs that go well into 2027 for most of our existing merchants. So there's still a lot of opportunity there to grow those accounts. We also have, as we've spoken about before, latent licensing capabilities in Brazil and India that we would expect to start to monetize at some point this year. There's stuff coming on that front as well. I think it's one of those, Damindu, where the opportunities are just vast. And as and when we can tell you about specific timings and specific names, then we will do so. But we're incredibly excited about what's coming.

Thank you for delivering on what you promised back in 2024.

Our next question comes from Tantan (sic) [ Tintin ] Stormont of Deutsche Numis.

I'm glad I've been promoted to French. It's Tintin from Deutsche Numis. Just a quick one -- 2 quick ones. On the predictability and visibility of Bundling, if you may. Obviously, you've seen some stellar growth in 2025. So anything you can say around that? And then Rob, when you talked about the revenue per connection and obviously, connections maturing kind of in that like year 5 type stuff. I'd be interested to know what's the range of -- what's the spread of revenue per connection kind of within the business to give us a sense of when a connection goes live, do you already have a predetermined sense of where it can get to? Or does it continually kind of surprise you to some extent as to where it can get to?

Shall I do the Bundling one? I'll give you a few minutes to think about that answer. Thank you, Tintin. Yes, so we have pretty good visibility of Bundling. They tend to be ongoing programs. So we will have a dedicated team working with a specific merchant, and that merchant might be running 30 or 40 different Bundling campaigns across a whole raft of geographies. And so it is a little bit like DCB, in that it's about selling once to the merchant, getting them to understand the concept and why bundling might be a more efficient way of consumer acquisition than, say, above-the-line advertising, for example. And so really, it's about bringing -- so extending the Bundling campaigns that we have with our existing Bundling clients and then adding to that. So I would say any of the sort of new breed of subscription services would benefit from a Bundling campaign with Boku. And so that is what we're focusing on. And the ones that we have live already have been running for a number of years now. And so -- and they're still seeing the growth that you're witnessing. I think the world of Bundling is only just really getting going, and there's a lot more to come. Rob, maturity of our connections.

Yes, yes. I think we started to talk to this a little bit at the CME. It's one of the areas, it's a good example of where we've invested. We've -- over the last 12 months or so, we've built a model for every connection. So I can look at every single connection that we've is live or is going to go live and see what we think the projection by month is over the first 2 years. We do -- if I was honest, Tintin, we are slightly prudent to start with because it's not obvious upfront quite what the volumes might be. If something is hugely appealing, then we would expect it to grow relatively quickly over the first 2 or 3 years, but it might be that happens or it doesn't happen. So we -- as I say, we model it very clearly, what would be the variables, clearly, volumes and volume discounts, take rates that are agreed contractually, the market that we're in, the currency that we're in. So to give you a range, Tintin, would be a bit tricky. It would be a very wide range and therefore, probably meaningless. But as I said at the CME, we do model it all out, so we can see it matures over 4 to 5 years. After that, it will grow largely in line with merchant price rises. So yes, we continue to see or calculate more and more detail around the revenue per connection. So that becomes more transparent, but the breadth of revenue per connection is wide. So it would be misleading to give you specific numbers, Tintin.

Just in terms of the connections that you expect to go live this year versus the number of connections that went live last year, would you expect that to be -- last year to be kind of a working run rate? Or do you think that there's more momentum this year? There'll be more?

I think one of the things that we're now starting to look at more closely, Tintin, is it's the quality, not necessarily the quantity of connections. And so if you split the strategy out, we're still adding more markets where it aligns with our merchants road map. So clearly, we are ready and license and ready to go in Brazil. We are ready to go and license in India, and we need to monetize those connections. And at the moment, they are not monetized. But as a separate principle, we're looking to deepen the penetration into our existing connections. And so recruiting merchants to take advantage of the 200-plus connections that we already have is a key part of our strategy going forward. And we think that's the most efficient way to drive our revenues is sweat the existing assets. So really, it's going to be less about purely a numbers game of planting flags. We could go and do 20, 30 more countries in sub-Saharan Africa, it's not going to move the needle for the company. But if we load 10, 20, 30 more merchants on to our Asian and European connections, it really will. So it's -- I would say going forward, it's less about purely about the number of connections we have.

That's one of the big advantages, Tintin, of having all the connections modeled out. We know what we expect, even if it's prudent, we can watch all the connections, make sure they're all delivering. And if the connection is not delivering, we can take appropriate action. So the detail that we've built and model really helps us to focus on the economic value of each connection to us and to the merchant.

Our next question comes from Tom Like of Canaccord Genuity.

Three for me, if that's okay. Just the first one on new merchant acquisition. You said you've had some inbound and watch this space on H2. Just to better understand the mechanics at play here. How often do these merchants typically put out RFPs for LPMs? Are they country-by-country basis? Or is there typically a master global agreement across all markets? And then 2 slightly longer-term questions in terms of direction of travel of the business. I think agentic Commerce got called out earlier. What are you seeing in the actual coal face? Etsy called out a 15x increase in the last earnings call, but it's still sub 1% of traffic. So it's pretty small beer. Interested to hear your thoughts as opposed to reading the white papers that say it's going to be e-commerce. And then third and finally, you mentioned the buzzword of stablecoins and digital assets. Where you're able to, can you provide an example where it's currently being utilized or potential application in your product pipeline?

Yes. Okay. On the new merchant stuff, I think -- I mean, it varies. By definition, we are the next cohort of merchants we are attracting are a little bit smaller than the mega merchants that we have. It doesn't mean they're small companies by any stretch. But they may not have existing routes into LPMs. So there's an education piece that needs to go on. So it may be us approaching them and creating a market as much as them realizing they need LPMs and putting an RFP out. So it does really depend on the specific merchant, what region they're in and what their specific goals are. It depends what sort of level maturity they're at with cards, et cetera, et cetera. So there are a number of variables, and we're trying to be a little bit more targeted in our outbound because we think there is a sweet spot around people that are looking to expand rapidly cross-border because we think that's where we can solve real problems for those types of merchants. On agentic, look, we're not seeing vast amounts of inbound demands from our existing customers. I think we are pretty well placed in the agentic world, just as we were when consumption of games and digital content moved from being online or on the social platforms on desktops into being consolidated on the app stores. Boku was incredibly good at adapting ourselves, building a slick tokenized checkout that connected app stores to mobile phone companies, for example, for DCB. For me, the same principle applies here. We will be the last mile that takes the request for a payment and makes that payment happen, either through our integrations or through our collections and money movement capabilities. So we see agentic from a revenue side of things as being an opportunity. And similarly, we see it, as Rob has already alluded to, on the operational side as a way of us to be able to infinitely scale this business without infinitely scaling our cost base. And so we're leaning into AI on both fronts. And then finally, on the buzzword bingo on stablecoin. Look, at the moment, we are actively using digital assets, not strictly stablecoin to be able to move our money. And that's a way of us being more efficient as we can with our own cash balances. We are also exploring through our partnership with an organization called Ubyx, how we would play as an acquirer of stablecoin in a world where stablecoin acts as a kind of clearing house. And we're also talking to our merchants about as and when they would be ready and willing to look at stablecoin as a way of receiving settlement funds. So at the moment, we do an entirely fiat-based system where we're collecting local currency, and we're converting that to another fiat currency for settlement. We would still be able to collect the local fiat currency and convert that into a stablecoin. What I would say on stablecoin is at some point, there needs to be an off-ramp from the consumer to the stablecoin. And so there will always be an opportunity for Boku to continue to play the role that we're playing, which is collecting in one currency and settling in another. It just might mean it goes from fiat to digital or digital to digital, either/or there is going to be an exchange that takes place. I hope that answers the question, Tom.

Yes. No, very clear. And Rob, I'll get your question next time.

Our next question comes from Harold Evans of the Singer Capital Markets.

Similar way of asking Tintin's question, if that's okay. But maybe on Digital Wallets, do you look at it at all from sort of growth from new versus existing? So I'm just sort of trying to unpack if you do look at it from existing, you talked about those revenue per connection increasing. You talked about 4- to 5-year sort of ramp-up period, just in terms of trying to provide the market any more visibility about what you are growing with -- the rate at which you're growing from existing customers and therefore, the extent to which we can get sort of visibility looking ahead? And then just on the new customer and don't want to sort of be negative at all, but just sort of trying to unpick it felt like at the update, you had a very strong pipeline and it's taking a little bit longer to convert. So what, if anything, is the bottleneck or do you really are looking to address to sort of enhance new customer acquisition as you outlined at your CMD? And then just one follow-up, small one on share count and capital allocation at the end, please.

So in terms of the first part of the question, Harry, something I was trying to draw out on at CME, we have built quite a complex revenue cube that allows us to see the performance of each connection since 2019, 2020. So what we do there is, as we said, as you heard, we model each connection out. So I know, for example, for 2025, I'll be able to see for the connections that existed at the start of the year, how they performed through the year and how that performance contrasted with what we expected based on historic performance. And then clearly, new connections because we can see it month by month, the new connections we can identify, and we will know what the revenue generated is from the new connections. And then we, of course, we'd have projections around things that we know are coming down the pipe. So we do break it out for internal reporting very clearly. But one of the -- I can't remember the slide number, Harry, but one of the slides in the CME, 2 of the slides sort of broke it out. I would confess we blow the line slightly, so you couldn't get your ruler on to it. But that gives you a sense of the annual cohort of connections and how each one has grown over time. So we did want to give you that sense. Hopefully, that is helpful.

Just on the new customers piece. Look, I think it wasn't so much that the opportunity wasn't what we thought it was, Harry. It's very much the opposite. I think it was more as we figured out ourselves what needed to get done, it was a bit more to it than we had originally planned. And so it's just taken a little bit longer to get the right leadership in place, to get the right operational infrastructure in place to think through simple things that Boku hasn't had to think about historically like risk and management of compliance and onboarding and all the kind of interesting stuff that we didn't want to go out with a new sales team and have them bring in a bunch of customers and then throw them on the floor because we couldn't onboard them. So it just took a little bit longer, I guess, is the bottom line, but we are up and we are running, and it's looking good so far.

Okay. And then just one on share count and buybacks. You're spending quite a lot of money or at least will do. Let's say, what would be your sort of expectation if we exclude share counts, what would you expect to issue, let's say, on a percentage basis on a per annum basis to satisfy LTIPs if we sort of exclude the Amazon warrants, which were a bit of a one-off. Yes, that would be helpful if you've got any guidance. Cheers, Rob.

It would be around -- would be about 1.67%, Harry, to satisfy staff options. So obviously, that's one of the reasons we buy the shares to avoid that creating dilution.

So roughly speaking, 1.7% on a per annum basis, that would be the increase in the share count if you hadn't done the buybacks?

Yes, that's correct.

And that will be sort of fairly ongoing going forward?

We want to look at, and we will look at during 2026 quite -- or what is the structure, the compensation structure we want to offer colleagues to both reward them fairly and incent them. So again, I don't want to say too often watch this space, but we do want to look at it, Harry, and see for people perhaps earlier in their careers, how would they wish to be rewarded versus more senior people and how do they wish to be rewarded. So we've certainly created an inclusive feeling in terms of our reward structures to date, and we don't want to dissolve that. But we do want to make sure that we, as I say, both reward people fairly and in line with market, offering decent incentivization. So we will look and consider how we use shares as an incentive as we go forward.

Our next question comes from Katherine Thompson of Edison.

Just one last question for you. You've talked about working on the platform to develop more standardized connections, so it's easier to onboard maybe some of the smaller merchants. I just wondered where you are in that process? And have you yet been able to onboard any merchants in that way?

Yes, we do. And ironically, we -- not all of our merchants. It would be a misrepresentation to think that all of our merchants are somehow on bespoke connections. They're not. Maybe the top 3 or 4 are, and they're justified by their sheer size. But the vast majority of our merchants take an API from Boku. So they're coming on to our tech. What we didn't have standardized was some of the wraparound things like a standard contract, standard pricing, standard onboarding process. And so that was what we were really solving for there so that we could go out and with certainty, get merchants up and trading within a much shorter time period. And we are now starting to see the first 1 or 2 coming on that path. And some of the things that did need to get put in place, things like compliance and onboarding and KYB and risk are all being addressed. So look, I'm confident this is the year when we will start to see our merchant numbers tick up. And I imagine the first revenue from those will start to come in, in the second half of the year.

I will now hand back to Stuart and Rob for any closing remarks.

No, I just want to say thank you, all the great questions. Thanks for attending the call. It's been a great year for us. We're super excited about what we've delivered, but we're even more excited about what's coming for the rest of the year. So again, thank you for your ongoing support and your ongoing interest in the company, and I look forward to seeing many of you over the next couple of weeks as we do our road show. So thanks again, and have a great day.