CM.com N.V. (CMCOM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning all, and welcome to the half year 2025 Earnings webcast of CM.com. My name is Serge Enneman, Head of Investor Relations, and I will coordinate this webcast on behalf of CM.com. As you probably are aware, we will first show video summarizing the key highlights of the first 6 months of 2025. After that, we will have a Q&A session with the analysts present on this call. Sitting here next to me are Jeroen van Glabbeek, CEO of CM.com; and Jorg Graaf, the CFO of CM.com.They will present the highlights in the upcoming video and later answer the questions of the analysts present in this webcast. Before we start video, please be reminded of the forward-looking statements for this presentation. If you choose to continue and watch the video, you are bound by these statements. With this now out of the way, I would now like to ask the operator to start the video.

Hello. My name is Jeroen van Glabbeek, CEO of CM.com. What you are looking at now is my Avatar. In a moment, the half year 2025 results of CM.com will be presented by both Jorg Graaf and my virtual AI Avatar. We do this in order to show you how advanced AI has become already. This morning, CM.com published its half year 2025 results. In our Connect business unit, our revenue and gross profit was lower than in the first half of last year. As explained in our recent Capital Markets Day, our CPaaS business consists of a large and growing stable revenue base with on top of that, a small and volatile wholesale business. Last quarter, this volatile part of the CPaaS business was historically low, mainly due to the absence of a large onetime WhatsApp campaign that happened in the first half of 2024. Now over to our Engage business unit. In the first 6 months of 2025, CM.com launched as one of the first companies in Europe, a fully compliant Agentic AI studio called HALO. Since the introduction, HALO has become the center of the business model of CM.com allowing our clients to better connect to more customers directly than ever before, personalized communication on a large scale, and this is just the start. As demonstrated during the Capital Markets Day, CM.com now offers a complete customer engagement platform to improve engagement between companies and consumers. Our customer data platform and our communication and payment platform are now interconnected through the Agentic AI platform, HALO, which enables every business-to-consumer company to use the best setup thinkable to connect with their existing and potential new customers. The four business units together provide a complete set of tools for every business to consumer company without having to use multiple vendors. The reaction from our existing client base on this innovation has been very positive. Artificial intelligence is becoming rapidly the basis for executing and improving repetitive tasks in a short period of time. The growth in revenues on our HALO platform grew 30% month-over-month since launch, a great achievement so far. The impact and use of AI was also noticed internally. The capabilities of the HALO platform make our employees want to work with the platform as well. Something we facilitate by setting up an internal task force to help turn the organization into an AI-first organization. That resulted in various AI agents becoming operational within our organization in the months after the launch of our HALO platform. This process is expected to intensify. We see that by combining the different agents in the right way, we can construct processes and execute on them within minutes, which otherwise take weeks. We are convinced that the use of AI agents will increasingly support our performance in the coming 12 to 18 months. Next to the momentum, the AI innovation brought the business unit, Engage. CM.com also introduced a number of other innovations and showed its execution strength in especially Live. In Live, a lot happened in the second quarter. CM.com launched a ticketing resale platform in the second quarter of this year. No doubt, everybody knows stories of events being sold out quickly and sky high prices in the secondary market for those who nonetheless want to attend the event. Our ticketing resale platform enables event organizers to keep a better grip on the ticket sale. It allows for tickets that flow back to the market to be sold at a fair price through the original platform of the event organizer. Zooming in on the other business unit, the investment program in the business unit Pay brought many important improvements. CM.com now controls all the steps in the acquiring and processing flow for payments in-house. Compared to the first quarter of 2025, Pay showed an improvement as a result of the updates we implemented and 2024 beginning 2025. That improvement trend in performance is expected to continue into Q3, 2025. Our ambition is to scale our volumes up. Now that the tech stack is on par with market requirements. So enough happening at business unit level, something that also shows in the cross-sell numbers on our platform and the low churn. I will now hand over to our CFO, Jorg Graaf.

Yes, thank you, Jeroen. Let me highlight the financial results. In the first half of 2025, the performance was a bit of a mixed bag. Revenue could not match the year-over-year comparison base, declining 7% due to a strong first 6 months in 2024 and a slower performance in the more volatile part of our Connect business. As gross margins continued to improve and remained well above 30%, we saw our gross profit match last year's performance. In the first half of 2024, we executed a very large global promotional campaign over WhatsApp for our customer, which we did in this year, putting pressure on year-over-year financial performance. When correcting for the impact of this 2024 WhatsApp campaign, there was underlying growth in gross profit of about 5%. From an operational perspective, CM.com reported a number of developments in H1 2025, next to a good order intake with both HALO and RCS standing out. There were also new product launches such as the Agentic AI platform, HALO, the ticketing resale platform and the launch of voice AI at the end of the second quarter. After the launch of HALO only about 4 months ago, CM.com already added EUR 1.2 million of HALO business to its ARR. That is an encouraging start. And judging from the pipeline and the first responses on the introduction of voice AI, that development is expected to continue. However, also another effect noted. Compared to Q1 2025, the ARR growth was relatively limited. The main reason for being that we are actively migrating customers from Legacy propositions and price plans to our new portfolio lineup. In the short-term, this has impacted our ARR growth, but it will bring longer-term sustainable value, both for our customers and for CM.com. As a result, growth in the Engage business unit was mid-single digit in the first half of the year. As the new order intake remains healthy and the pipeline is strong and HALO is driving a lot of interest in our portfolio, we expect further ARR and gross profit growth in the coming period. Zooming in on the other business units, we see that in the Business Unit Connect, margins improved to 20%. Revenue was EUR 98.3 million, a 9% year-over-year decline. Consequently, gross profit in Connect declined marginally overall. The decline in revenue is explained by the lower amount of volatile business like the promotional WhatsApp campaign we saw in the first half of 2024, and some high-volume platforms in the first half of 2025. As pointed out during our Capital Markets Day, CM.com has a stable and more volatile components in its Connect business. The volatile business has shown year-over-year decline in the first half of the year, while our stable Connect business continued to grow, excluding the effect of the 2024 WhatsApp campaign, gross profit in Connect would have grown 10% year-over-year. In the business unit Pay, performance was subdued in the first 6 months of 2025 compared to the same period last year. Product mix, pricing changes by the card schemes, but also a slower market in the events industry put pressure on the performance. That said, in the second quarter of 2025, we have seen performance starting to recover to a point where we are now returning to year-over-year gross profit growth. We expect that trend to continue for the second half of the year as we continue to improve our portfolio and adjusted our pricing schemes to better reflect the transaction costs from the card schemes. In the business unit Live, we saw good growth in the number of tickets sold. That includes the tickets sold for the Notre Dame and the Amsterdam 750, a very large 1-day event in Amsterdam to celebrate the city's 750th anniversary. Those are great events with free tickets that we sell in bundles instead of charging per ticket. Overall, the market in Live remains a bit lackluster, with fewer festivals taking place and more hesitation with customers to buy tickets for events. However, CM.com has high expectations from its ticketing resale platform, which enables more customers to attend events at stable prices, and organizers control the secondary flow of tickets that come back to the market. We see the underlying dynamics on our platform remains strong, and our cross-sell continued to be comfortably above 2.0. New clients on average sign up for more than two products, and that trend is improving. The churn rate improved in the first half of the year, so clients stay longer with us, and margins kept trending upwards with our high-margin business, constituting an increasingly large share of our total gross profit, well above 50% now, while Connect margins were very strong as well. The slower activities in the volatile component of the business compared to last year had a material impact on our results. We expect performance to improve in the second half of 2025 with new business coming in, potential pickup in the volatile business and a more favorable year-over-year comparison base. Operating expenses remained nearly flat as we continue to have a firm grip in our cost levels. A significant part of our OpEx is consists of personnel-related expenses. The number of FTE decreased by 1.6% Y-o-Y, to 653 FTE at the end of the second quarter. This is part of our constant optimization of our performance and workforce, increasingly supported by the use of internal AI agents. We reported in total EUR 7.8 million in EBITDA in the first half of 2025, that is 5% lower compared to the normalized EBITDA in the first half of 2024, but 19% better than the reported EBITDA in the same period of 2024. In 2025, we no longer normalize for restructuring costs even though we keep optimizing our organization. CM.com of course, had a major financing event in the first quarter of 2025, improving our funding base. We lowered our net debt position and improved our leverage and successfully redeeming the outstanding convertible bond by a revolving credit facility and an equity issue. The unrestricted cash balance at the end of the second quarter was EUR 15.2 million with only EUR 70 million drawn under our credit facility of EUR 80 million, allowing for financial flexibility. Our free cash flow came in at EUR 2.1 million for the first half of 2025. This was also helped by the CapEx development, which declined 10% year-over-year. The infrastructural investments done last year were not needed to be repeated this year. So that brings us to our outlook. As guided, we expect normalized operating expenses to come in at approximately similar levels as in 2024. In terms of EBITDA, the second half of the year is anticipated to be stronger than the first 6 months, both as a result of seasonality and the visibility on the business that we have coming. Therefore, we expect a full year EBITDA at the lower end of the guided range of EUR 22 million to EUR 27 million. And with this, I would now like to hand it over to Jeroen for his concluding remarks and outlook statements.

In the first half of 2025, CM.com launched its biggest innovation in years being the HALO platform. As said during our Capital Markets Day, CM.com is ready for the future. In 2025 and beyond, CM.com will continue to focus on growing its bottom line performance, converting its sales pipeline and growing its tech stack through the transformation into an AI-first company. On our outlook, this means that we expect our EBITDA to reach a level in the range of EUR 22 million to EUR 27 million, but at the low end of the range. Focus remains on growing in a profitable way, growing our gross profit and margins, while we maintain a tight grip on our OpEx and CapEx development. Lastly, Jorg will step down as CFO per 1st November 2025 as he accepted another job outside CM.com. We started the process to find a suitable replacement for Jorg. We will keep you informed when there is further news to report on this development. Thank you for your attention. Let's hand it over to Serge for the Q&A session with the analysts. We look forward to your questions, and we will answer them ourselves, not our avatars.

Now that the video has ended, we would like to open up the lines for the analysts to answer any questions you may have on the first half 2025 results. Please raise your hand in Teams if you would like to ask a question, and we will prioritize the sequence. Robert Vink of Kepler Cheuvreux.

I have a question on the volatile Connect business. Clearly, there the top line performance was a little bit disappointing. And you also pointed out that normalizing for this large WhatsApp campaign that was held in last year, the second quarter. Actually, gross profit growth came in at 11%, so normalizing for this. But if I look at your 2023 figures in the first half. And then I look at the figures post for this year, I only see 4% growth in those two years. So essentially a CAGR of around 2%. So yes, I do not fully understand kind of -- had the 11% figure that you're kind of normalizing for the WhatsApp campaign. Yes, is it fair to say that yes, that this figure is relatively weak comparable. And if we go into the second half, the comparable is maybe a little bit tough for your volatile Connect business. And so that the -- yes, this 11% figure is not a good indication for what we should expect in the second half? So hopefully, that is clear?

Okay. Thank you, Robert. Yes, let me answer your question. I think if you look at our results that we post and if you zoom in onto the second quarter, because this was related to the second quarter. Then if we separate out the part of our business that is less stable than we see, we were at a very low point in terms of the contribution to it versus last year when we actually had this very large campaign. So if we just look at the impact of that specific campaign, then indeed, what you see is that Q2 gross profit growth, adjusted for that, would have been 11%. Now that does not necessarily imply that we believe there's going to be 11% growth sustainably, but we just wanted to show the dynamics of the second quarter, first half, but certainly also second quarter results in relation to yes, this comparison base, plus also generically, if we look forward, then we've seen two effects. One is, last year, we had this very large campaign starting at the end of Q1 lasting all the way through Q2 that sort of made it the year-over-year performance a little bit difficult to assess without that piece of information. Then the other element is that in 2025, the second quarter, we actually saw an absolute low point in terms of what we call the more volatile business as we also explained during our Capital Markets Day. And that made that if you want to interpret our Q2 results in the right way, it's good to know these two elements, one related to Q2 2024 and the other one, the volatile part in Q2 2025. Now going forward, that comparison base of 2024 with sort of the WhatsApp campaign, that's out of the way. But we do expect that the volatile part of our business will pick up to more normal levels in the second half of the year, driving gross profit growth. So I think that's the essence of what we try to explain in terms of the underlying dynamic.

Yes. Yes. Yes, clear. And in terms of your EBITDA guidance, now you're, of course, focusing on the lower end of the threshold of the bandwidth. Is that mainly driven by the performance in your full time Connect business? Or is it also impacted by your Pay business? Or could you maybe, yes, kind of explain a little bit, yes, how the lower end of the bandwidth was chosen and how can it fit with the first half year performance kind of impacted that?

Yes. Well, I think it is based on sort of the generic gross profit performance that we have shown. So a 0% year-over-year growth year-to-date is less than what we had anticipated. That is to a -- for a material amount, driven by the volatile part of the business, but we also see indeed that the minus 20% on Pay year-over-year on gross profit and also a bit of a slower growth that we've seen uptick in our Engage business is impacting where we are today. And therefore, if we look ahead, then there's -- yes, we cannot catch up what we've lost so far. But if we look ahead, then we do see that Pay is expected to return to gross profit growth year-over-year, again, that will contribute. I think we also explained the dynamics within our ARR and our Connect business with the migration of customers to new propositions. Also, that is something that, yes, we've now for very large part done and completed. So we expect also there to accelerate growth. And then indeed, the volatile part of our business should go back to normal levels, which will also help us speak of gross profit growth. And the combination of all those elements, how they performed in the first half of the year and how we look at them for the second half of the year contributed to this adjusted guidance towards the lower end of the bandwidth.

Thank you for your questions. Thymen of ING.

My first question is on Engage, especially HALO, you mentioned 30% month-over-month growth for HALO. The ARR only grew marginally if you look at it from a quarter-to-quarter basis. So what I'd like to better understand is -- to what extent is HALO displacing these Legacy products rather than driving net new growth. And so can you also quantify maybe the expected uplift when a client migrates from a Legacy product to HALO. And how confident are you that HALO actually will become a material ARR driver in the coming, let's say, 6 to 12 months? That's my first question.

Yes, Thymen. Indeed, we saw that the HALO is growing very rapidly in, I think in our own history, 30% month-over-month growth is very high growth to have for new products. But in -- yes, it started from 0 in the beginning, so it grew to 1.2 ARR now. And eventually, yes, this number will grow further also the coming months. And we have very good visibility on that because we have already sold deals, which we are implementing now. We only book the ARR in the -- yes, once a client is live. So we're already implementing clients who already signed deals, which we're now implementing and once they're live, we sent the first bill, and once the first bill is sent, then yes, we take the revenue and also the ARR. So we have clear visibility that, that will go up. And in the upcoming months, we also have a good pipeline of new to win clients. Initially, the first clients who went live where existing clients who already were on our platform and added to HALO -- to the portfolio or migrated part of the conversational AI to HALO. But now we see more and more new clients also coming live and they will contribute to new ARR as well. And then eventually, that will accelerate the drive, the growth in ARR and also to show revenue and gross profit in Engage. So we see it already accelerating a bit, but we -- yes, based on the numbers we have, we expect it to accelerate further in the upcoming quarter.

Okay. And if you can -- if you -- let's say, you've talked about this split between cloud migration versus new clients in HALO?

Yes. We don't have a particular figure to share about that. Roughly, you could say in the beginning, it was like half, half. We see now more and more new clients are added or new business. So we saw in the past, in the early beginning, the first clients who went live were existing clients at HALO or replaced, for example, conversational AI cloud with HALO. Now we're seeing more and more new. And why is that in this order? Of course, it's easier for our implementation colleagues to implement HALO on existing clients because they are already on our platform. We have all the history already in the system. We have all the connections live on the website. So they are like already 80% or 90% live, when you look at HALO, because they only have to add HALO, since it wasn't easy, selling out an easy delivery. So the first deliveries of HALO were towards existing clients in the first months. Now we see that, yes, we took the time also to onboard a lot of new clients, which went live recently, maybe this month or will go live next month, and they will contribute for Q3.

All right. And then a question on Pay. So on the weaker performance in Pay. So is the issue still more in online payments and not necessarily in the POS part. And what was the reason for the drop in gross margin within Pay to low 50%? And then maybe a bit on a higher level, Pay has been positioned as an important pillar in your integrated platform, but performance recently remains quite weak. So my question is really how strategic is Pay to your long-term platform vision? And do you see it becoming a growth engine again? Or do you see it more as a retention tool for customers to look in into your overall platform?

Yes. I think -- you had two questions about Pay. The first one is online versus point-of-sale. Yes, we do see in the point-of-sale part of it, the most traction at this moment in personal payments, so where people go to a retail chain, insert their cards and pay. That's where we see the most growth. Last year, I already announced this deal with [indiscernible], where we are replacing basically the whole infrastructure. Also recently, we had quite some wins in the retail sector where we placed more -- sold more IPP terminals that will be implemented in the upcoming months. So we see the most growth in traffic at the moment in the in-person payment part of that business. That's also because we have the most innovations in that part. So we have innovation like multi-merchant approved transactions, which we also call forward of offline. [indiscernible] it also works if the Internet is down like in festivals, which is also interesting for retail. We introduced an innovation and Pay what we called shopper recognition, where we recognize recurring visitors in shops based on the bank pass and without having the need of loyalty cards, which is very interesting, and we sold it a few times now, and that will also generate new business. And that is also the lock-in into CDP, the customer data platform. It will enable the mobile marketing cloud. So it is like a starting point and that is also the strategic part that we -- payments are also like data. And every payment, you learn from the consumer behavior. And it's also like an endpoint of conversion. So all the marketing efforts we do with the mobile marketing cloud, in the end, it leads to conversion and payments is the ideal conversion. And then there are also a number of other innovations we have within payments, which are also now coming to the market. One is regarding to EV charging, how you pay in that area and a few others, which we will introduce in the upcoming months. So yes, we have a good product. We have good traction. We sell. We sell -- yes, with IPP, it's first you sell the payment terminal, then you have a subscription. And on top of that, you're also doing the payments. And payments indeed, the margins we see it going up, especially in the last months when the new processing platform came also in place for IPP. And then on the online part, online, yes, we have a group of clients that's quite stable. We also sell it in the omnichannel, so where you have the combination of IPP and online, so in the shop and on the website. This combination is also quite strong. And we see the traction now coming in what we call credit management. So a lot of businesses are in credit management. So clients do not pay. You have to communicate to the clients that they have to pay. They can do that through our platform, of course, e-mail, SMS, WhatsApp. And then, of course, if you combine with an ideal link of payment link, people can pay and also can measure the conversion. It's a combination there, messaging and payments for the vertical credit management is also going quite well. And combined -- the combination of all these developments give us a strong impression that we really expect and see already gross profit growing in the Payments division for the upcoming months and quarters.

Simon [ Dan ] of ABN AMRO. Today, we do not have present of him. He couldn't make it. We have Julien present of ABN AMRO. So Julien, I understand you -- you are online. So please go ahead with your question.

Couple of follow-ups. Just on the HALO to be sure the 30% month-over-month, that's subscribers. But is that ARR, wasn't really clear for me [indiscernible]?

There is a number how we calculate is the growth in revenue month-on-month. So new clients come live, existing stays, so every month with more and more clients paying more subscription. And then if you calculate it from February, March, April, May, June, we see the average growth rate month-on-month, meaning 30% if you look at revenue, but also if you look on ARR because they are related to ARR just 12 times, not easier.

And is there a difference between -- on the [indiscernible] if you look at the contractual value of these existing and new clients, is there a difference that you make in terms of billing?

Yes. Sorry, we missed a bit sum -- repeat the question, please?

Yes. I was wondering if you look at the ASV, so annual contract value of the customers and if you try to look at both cohorts, so the ones which are being migrated internally and the new customer wins, is there a difference in pricing that you charge on to customer cohorts?

No, I don't think so. We have more or less fixed price for HALO, which we charge. What you see with an existing client, sometimes, yes, we deal with them. So they have already a commitment to us for recurring revenue for like an existing product can be Inspire, can be [indiscernible] as we call it, is the conversational AI cloud. And then sometimes they swap a bit of the existing revenue commitment they have already for this existing product towards HALO. We like them to do that, because they experience the newest technology and both our clients and their consumers, they become, yes, more happy with the product, so to say. So they are more willing to use it more often and the clients more often is more willing to renew us the contract in the end. So yes, we encourage our clients sometimes to bring in like an older subscription and update it to HALO. And as we saw in the beginning, the first months, Feb and March and April also contributed to growth in HALO where it costs a little bit revenue on the AI cloud. But I think the price we sell at existing clients and new clients, I don't see any difference in that. Do you, Jorg?

Yes. I think it depends on the -- we have customers sometimes have within our -- or actually quite regular in our software business, Engage business. We signed multiyear contracts. So a 3-year, 4-year contracts. And during that period of time obviously we put a lot of development in here. So the whole product that we have developed a lot. So for a certain feature and functionality that a customer uses, the price today may be different than the price that they are paying contractually from three years back. However, our product has evolved. So we're offering new functionalities, new features. And we're bringing our customers on there. So if you look at it on a feature level functionality level, that can be a price difference, but our product is no longer the same. And that's basically what we're trying to do. We're migrating the customers to this new product. So they are not paying as much potentially for this individual feature, but are still getting more value because we're offering more advanced solution.

Understood. And two questions, maybe three on the EBITDA topic. If you look at the Q1, Q2, this one kind of came, I think, flat, so I think about EUR 3.9 million in every single quarter. But can you please speak about the phasing in Q3 and Q4? Does this clearly implies a material acceleration versus Q1 and Q2. How do you think the trend in EBITDA is going to trend in Q3, in Q4 in 2025?

Yes, of course, what we always see is that the second half of the year is stronger in their performance than the first half of the year. So obviously, that's also what we expect, also due to phasing of certain activities, marketing spend, but also sort of special dates like Black Friday, all these things that we sort of facilitate. We think it is often more skewed towards the end of the year. So Q4 is typically a very strong quarter. So we expect a buildup there over the next two quarter, getting us to our full year adjusted outlook.

Okay. And then also, if you look at the guidance itself, so you do indicate a bit of caveat there that we might handle the lower end. So I think we are kind of looking at EUR 22 million, but it don't really shrink the guidance. So, I was just wondering, hypothetically speaking, what is a bull case that would get you to the upper end of the EBITDA guidance?

I think the bull case is in terms of immediate impact is very much related to the volatile part of the business, because that has sort of the shortest term material impact. So we will grow our software business steadily, but that's not sort of a onetime hit. We will also grow our -- start growing our Pay business again. And then -- but the big swing that can have a material impact is on the volatile part of our Connect business. Also at the same time, there are a number of deals that we are working on that may have a sort of a front-loaded impact in the second half of 2025. So we don't anticipate all of them to materialize, but if some of them materialize, that could actually help us quite a bit as well.

I think to add a bit on that, on Page 7 of our press release today, we added a very nice graph, I must say, where we split up this stable and volatile gross profit like we did in the Capital Markets Day as well. And there you see the stable growth of our stable business in Connector. It grew from EUR 15.4 million to EUR 80.1 million quite steadily over the last quarters. And you see also the volatile part of the gross profit, and that fluctuates from the lowest where it was last quarter, EUR 1.7 million to the highest where it was last quarter last year, EUR 4 million. Yes. So historically, it was always in between those two brackets, EUR 1.7 million on the low end, like last quarter, EUR 4.0 million gross profit on the high end, like the last quarter last year. Yes, this fluctuation will impact growth and gross profits also in the next. So if you talk about bull case and more in the EUR 27 million EBITDA territory, then that has to really kick off like -- you've to just explain, but we are a bit modest about that. And that's why we guide on the low end based on the performance last quarter, where it was the lowest part historically, this volatile gross profit part of Connect.

Okay. Thank you, [indiscernible]. Okay, thank you very much Julien for your question. Robert, I believe you raised your hand again. You have a follow-up question?

Yes, I have a follow-up question. So just to confirm, so excluding the WhatsApp campaign, you still saw pressure, I think, in your wholesale volatile Connect business. And clearly, for the second half, you're hoping to have some of those volumes to return. So do you need those volatile volumes to return to achieve your EBITDA guidance? Or is the lower end of your EBITDA bandwidth already assuming that these volumes will not return? And the second question on that is, why are these volumes under pressure? And why do you think there's a reasonable chance that this business could return?

Yes. Let me answer those. We do expect a normalization of our volatile business in our outlook. We also have information indications that, that's a realistic assumption. Obviously, of course, we wouldn't put it into our outlook. We don't expect what we just mentioned [indiscernible] where it goes all the way up, but we also expect it to recover above the levels that we've seen in the second quarter, because that was a really very low point. So that's part of our assumptions, yes.

Then, may be a question on Pay for Jeroen, is these are a strategic priority, of course, in the Netherlands, you have some experience processing [ IPO ]. So do you maybe have an advantage from your experience with IPO that maybe could be an advantage to kind of capturing the opportunity that could arise from [indiscernible]. And then maybe a question for Jorg, since I think it's the last time that we'll be having you in the conference call. Of course, recently, you announced your departure from CM.com here effective November, so maybe you could reflect on your period at the company. Of course, it's been a volatile route, right, when you look at the stock price, but maybe you could tell us how the company changed from when you arrived to where the company is standing today. And why that kind of makes you confident in the continued success of CM.com?

All right. Now before we go to the [indiscernible], I will dive into [indiscernible]. So he can -- he is busy typing already in the meantime. So I'll give you a long answer about [indiscernible] in the meantime. No, Wero is a great development. It's an effort of banks in Europe supported by a lot of other European organizations like the European Commission to have a stronger foothold in payments for Europe. Of course, we have Mastercard and Visa as two very dominant payment schemes in the European development area, but they're both not European anymore. They're more U.S.-based listed companies. So we are always very important for Europe. That's one, but it's also very important for us because it really fits into our strategy. We always believe within payments that the future will be a convergence of payment methodology. So in the future, we strongly believe there will be less different payment methods and local payment methods than in the past. So where in the past, payment service provider could be very successful to have like a multitude of local payment methods connected. We see that they converge together in the near future will be Mastercard, Visa and Wero. And we invest in the three of them. So we have Mastercard and Visa Live. We built our own processing platform, which is quite unique. We have our own acquiring. We are migrating traffic onto our platform. We see higher margins there coming up. And then indeed, our next strategic development will be Wero. We expect more of Wero to launch and to implement next year in 2026 and then even towards the end of 2026. Why? Because iDEAL in the Netherlands is still very strong. It works well. People are happy with it, both retailers and consumers. And we are in close contact with AP, which is the owner of Wero. That's the European payments initiative. And we expect that the first migration in the Netherlands for iDEAL to Wero will take place towards the end of next year, based on our information. We are already investing in it. We are already looking at it. We are making more plans. We are already communicating about it, but the real impact will be in a year from now. The strategic advantages will give CM.com is that Wero is really well positioned to be a unified payment methodology across Europe eventually. And it means that once we have that on our platform, we can easily also use it in France and in Germany, in Spain and other countries where it will be implemented over time. Firstly, online, later also in the IPP. It's not really clearly communicated yet. So we're still not certain. But our expectation, our personal expectation is that Wero will also become a card scheme like Visa and Mastercard in the future, also, yes, because of the European soverenity that we have our own card present system again in Europe. So yes, very positive development for us. We are, yes, looking at it, we're investing in it. We are expecting a lot of in the midterm. But this year, our focus will mainly be around Mastercard and Visa and some other schemes and some other payment methods to implement it in our proposition. But next year, we will really play a role in that. And yes, we expect also positive outcomes in terms of growth and also -- yes, a lot of people will look again for core technology behind these payments. And this is the core technology we typically develop. Yes, looking forward to it. And now I give Jorg some time to flex, because, yes, you have a new job from the 1st of November. E-mobility dealt the worldwide headquarters of the mobility division of ABB. He will become the CFO there. It is a bigger company close to your home. [indiscernible], yes after 5.5 years being CFO of CM.com we have to look for a new one. And yes, this has never come as a good moment, I think. But I think in the last 5.5 years, it was the best moment. Now we are stable, we're growing, we are refinanced. So it's becoming a better moment now. And we are confident that we will find a new CFO. It's a beautiful company to be CFO of, and we already see some progress there and we're going there to find a new CFO before you leave. But over to Jorg.

Yes. Well, to be very honest with you, Robert, we still have more than 3 months to go. So I'm not looking back yet. I'm only looking forward to all the stuff we still have to do. So this is really off the cuff. But I think the company in the last 5.5 years has gone through an enormous transformation. And -- when I joined the company, so about when the company got listed, it was very dominantly a CPaaS company at the time, raised capital invested that in growth, which we've done successfully, very accelerated growth, but at the time, efficiency, profitability was of less important versus growth. Obviously, capital markets changed. So we changed our point of view and our approach as well. And I think -- if you look at where the company is today, then we've made enormous strides forward in terms of efficiency, how we organize our business. We have business units in place that sort of run their own shop, but in a way that is very close to the customer, to the markets and the whole sort of chain from ideation to delivering something successfully to a customer is now much closer tight. So we see that work very effectively. At the same time, we've also seen a massive transformation in our product portfolio, what we do, the capabilities we have developed where we are today at the forefront of AI, Agentic AI, all the way from [indiscernible]. So I think that's been a massive journey. And what I'm most confident about is that the vision that we already had as a company five years ago, is coming very close to being a reality right now. So we started off with the vision that the interaction between consumers and businesses could be done a lot better if you integrate a number of capabilities powered with advanced software, using all the channels, integrating transactions, whether be it payments or signature, digital signatures, and verifying identity security. That was sort of our vision already back then. I think we were way ahead of the market at the time. If I look at where the market is today, I think we're getting a lot closer where that sort of that vision is embraced by the public a lot more and is becoming reality, which makes us very well positioned to capitalize on that. So -- even though there is always a lot to do, and I'm leaving the company with a very heavy heart, because I think wonderful, it's a wonderful company, very talented people, the people I work with every day. It's really very inspiring. But I think we're now at a place where we're well positioned. We have a professional organization. We run it efficiently. We translated to increasing profitability. We have refinanced our debt, so we have a strong balance sheet. So I'm leaving in that sense with a strong conviction that the company is in a good place and well positioned for the future.

Yes. And to add a little bit on that. The next few months will be daily, day-in, day-out work very hard to get a good quarter and a good half year for second half, while we in the background, look for a new CFO, but, yes, I also really feel that together since you announced it a few weeks ago, yes, every day, we work as hard as we did before to make things happen, and there's still a lot to do, and we're making progress. We're doing it together for the next month. So this is not a good bye today, we will save that for October 31. Yes.

This then concludes the Q&A, and also concludes this call. Thank you for attending this webcast and for all your questions. Our next release will be the third quarter trading update, which will be released on the 21st of October. There will be no webcast for that release. As always, for other details and our financial calendar, please visit our Investor Relations website on CM.com. This concludes the call. Thank you all.