NCR Voyix Corporation (VYX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us here. My name is Erik Woodring. I lead the hardware coverage at Morgan Stanley. I'm very pleased to welcome David Wilkinson, the CEO of NCR Voyix, to our conference first time, obviously, after a big 2023 and spin and whatnot. And so we'll get all into those details. Maybe just to quickly tell you who David is for those of you that don't know. He spent over a decade at NCR in various roles but he was most recently the President of NCR Commerce, which obviously included the restaurant and retail businesses. So perfect to be the CEO here of NCR Voyix. Before we start, let me just read research disclosures here. For important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley research disclosure website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative. So David, thank you very much for joining us.

Yes. Thanks for having me.

So I think maybe to start, it's best to kind of talk about what NCR Voyix is today. Obviously, it's been a long journey since 2 Septembers ago when the spin was originally announced. And so can you talk about maybe where the restaurant, retail and digital banking businesses were 5 years ago, the progress you've made since then? And why and how Voyix is a more competitive business as a standalone public company today? And then we'll go from there.

Okay. Great. So if I think 5 years back, at the time, we had new leadership at NCR. Mike Hayford had just come on board. And we were looking for ways at that point even as a company to unlock value. And we had a retail, restaurant and digital banking business that, quite honestly, were in, I'll just say pretty bad shape. In the digital banking side, it was losing market share. I mean I've heard some people call it we were the donor pool at that point in time where we allowed some of the start-up companies that we talk about today to come into existence because of our inability to execute and have great products. On the retail and restaurant side, I would say the same thing. We were probably kind of sleepy as a company, and we had bad customer satisfaction scores. So I won't say we were completely broken as a company, but there were a lot of things to improve. And so what Mike and the rest of that -- and when I got involved with Mike is we started reinvesting in the product. And we took a different cultural view as a company. So when you look at what we've done in terms of turning customer satisfaction around, investing in our core products, investing in digital banking, we're at a place now where we have a real digital banking platform. We have a real commerce platform across retail and restaurant. We have a focus on our customers. We have satisfied, happy customers that are buying more stuff. We have a culture of people inside of our company that believe in supporting the customer first. And so I think we've come a really long way. Take that one step further, and I would also say that over the -- like you described it, it's been a couple of years since -- it feels like since we announced the spin. But before that, I felt like we were in this continuous strategic review health of just -- so I think there's been 3 -- and then I forgot about COVID. That was a little thing we call COVID. So if you look at the past kind of 3.5 years, it's been an interesting ride. While we've been continuing to invest in the company, we also recognized through the strategic review process that these businesses were very different. This ATM and this ATM-as-a-Service business were very different from what we're looking at as a platform-led software and services business. So what the separation has allowed us to do, and it's really been exciting in terms of the ability to get focused on the 3 segments that we serve, digital banking, restaurant and retail, and purpose build an infrastructure and operation around platform, software and services. And that's something that has allowed us to see things like, okay, there's cost opportunities like we talked about on our last earnings call. There's opportunities to grow software and software ARR. There's opportunities to grow our services business. And it has allowed us to then take that cultural refinement that we started to make 5 years ago and get it even more focused on a purpose-driven organization that has deep industry expertise, that understands software and understands how you all as consumers interact with banking, retail and restaurants. So it's been a pretty -- and the teams are fired up. We changed our -- obviously, we spun out -- Tim Oliver, who's the CEO of Atleos. I always say, yes, we kicked him out, got rid of the ATM guys. And we changed the name of NCR to NCR Voyix, and we changed our company color to purple. So I said you'd be amazed at how much purple is inside of our building. People buy purple clothes, purple jackets, purple shoes, purple hats. So it's been -- the culture inside the company has really embraced this change as well. So it's been exciting to watch.

Good. And since that split, because it is still relatively recent, especially in the lifespan of the NCR.

In the quarter that we just -- the last quarter we just reported results on, yes.

What have been your top priorities? Again, in this new NCR standalone, NCR Voyix standalone, what have been your top priorities?

Yes. Priority one is how do we grow this business. And so you all say, well, I thought you said customer-first and employees. I'm not saying that you can't be customer-focused and employee-focused while you try to grow. I think if you're customer-first only, and you're not trying to grow, that's interesting. You have happy customers that watch you go out of business. And then you have to be employee-focused because employees are what make your customers happy. So that's good. And then we've been -- I've been spending a lot of time, honestly, with the investment world with you and your peers and our investors just trying to help understand what -- this is a complicated story. This is probably one of the more complicated transactions that the market has seen in a while. And it's not always the easiest thing to follow on the page. And I think that -- and we want to make it a little easier. And I've been telling the folks we have meeting with today and we met with investors after our earnings call, we are changing some of the ways we're talking about the business. And we're not doing it in a way that we're trying to say there's a shell game happening that we're moving everything around because we're trying to make it look better than it really is. That's not at all what we're doing. We're trying to articulate the things that we know are working inside of this business. Where we see our strategy taking hold and the green shoots that are coming through, we want to expose those to you all so that you can get all as excited as we are about the business and how we're executing. So that's really where we're focused. And we're going to -- and we've had a lot of feedback. So we've -- we'll continue to take feedback on what you want to see on the business. We're trying to be as transparent as we can to help you understand and help you get on the same path and the same wavelength that we're on.

Perfect. And maybe just to touch on that, you did provide some additional disclosures yesterday, kind of clarifying the '24 versus '23 walk that you provided at the Analyst Day. Can you maybe just talk about some of the additional data points that you included that would help all of us think about the changes that you're making under the hood?

Yes. Yes. So we did, and thank you. We -- in our conversations with investors and the sell-side teams after earnings, we recognize that while we tried to tell a simple story, we were missing a few big pieces of that, I'll call it, the modeling -- some of the modeling bridge. And then we dropped out some of the data that we may have provided in the past just because we didn't, again, didn't want to crowd the story. So the one piece that we provided everybody -- that everybody saw was the bridge that we made from what we talked about at Investor Day to what we described. There are 3 really big impacts there. One was the divestitures that we had made. We had divested of some businesses. In the spirit of getting very focused, we're trying to simplify who we are. And there were some noncore assets that, quite honestly, are just a distraction to this company. So we're -- I'm encouraged that we have the fortitude to get rid of some of these businesses. It may be painful a little bit in the short term, but it's the right thing to do for us longer term. There are some commercial agreements that have nothing to do with the operations of this business and everything only do with spin. We still provide some services to Atleos. Even though we kicked them out, we still provide services to them. We're getting -- we're doing less for them than we thought we would originally. And that's good. They're doing less for us than we thought they would do originally. So this is what you want. You want us to get divorced faster. And we still like -- Tim and I are very friendly, but we want to try -- yes, we want to try to get the separation done as fast as possible. But then the bigger one was hardware. And that's the one that I think caught everybody off guard. And what we described was in September, we believe that we were going to see these projects and some of these refreshes get budgeted for by our major clients. We're heavily weighted towards the enterprise business in both retail and restaurant, and we thought we were going to see these projects get budgeted. And as the budgets start to firm up across our customer base in the fourth quarter, those projects were not being budgeted for. And as we started seeing that happening, you kind of stick your head up and go, wow, what's going on? Is it just us? Or is it the market? What's happening? And so as we start to look around the market, and I had a lot of conversations with other people that are more in that hardware space, we found it seems to be more of a market dynamic than just happening to NCR Voyix. And so that's when we made the decision to -- we can't -- we're not going to see those projects budgeted for you. You can't create that kind of budget inside of these big customers in that short amount of time. These are longer lead time element. So we pulled that out. And then that was really the bridge. And so those were the big 3 drivers. And then what it also was exciting, too, is we -- and you all reminded us, we left out our ARR story. And so we added that back in, and we're really excited about that. We saw 5% ARR growth in '23. And then we exposed a new metric called software ARR. And software, so ARR, annual recurring revenue is software and services. We still have a pretty big services business inside of the business. The software business is growing a lot faster than services in that space. So when you look at software-only ARR, we saw 9% growth in '23. So we're -- that's what gives us the confidence in the software and services growth overall is seeing those metrics play out because that's the -- or that -- we'll see that continue to grow into '24 at very similar rates. So we're excited about the ARR growth overall.

Perfect. So that's a kind of great introduction to everything. Maybe if we go back to December quarter earnings, obviously, relatively recent for you guys. You noted -- I wrote down 3 things here, strong traction with platform sites, some of your key KPIs and then competitive deal wins. Can you maybe just talk us through some of the highlights from the quarter that you want to emphasize?

Yes. I think the platform site growth is encouraging. So you look across -- I won't go into the exact numbers, but it's approaching 30,000 in restaurants and approaching 30,000 in retail in terms of the number of sites that we have connected to the platform. It was north of 60% growth in retail and about 8% growth in restaurants. And what makes that exciting -- or what's exciting about that is, that is really -- when we connect you to the platform, it gives us, one, we get an uplift immediately in terms of the recurring revenue stream. And the second piece of that is we get the recommitment from that client that they're our customer, and they're recommitting to our platform as their go-forward path. And then it creates the jump-off point for cross-sell and upsell. And that's where we're seeing the growth. That's what's driving that software ARR growth is all that connection to the platform. The other piece is over the past couple of years, we've doubled the number of payment sites. While that's still a small part of our business, it's going to be critical for us. And we're still going to continue to focus on how do we get more payments growth, both in the restaurant space, the mid-market side of restaurant, the mid-market side of retail, where we think we have the largest opportunity to take share is we're going to focus on attaching payments or being a payments-led offering in that space. So that was exciting part of that announcement. And then the wins, we are winning in the market. We talked about digital banking. I'll start there. We had 39 wins over all of '23. And when we look at those wins, it is undeniable that we're taking share in the market. So that is a crown jewel within the portfolio that we have inside of NCR Voyix. On both the restaurant side that win we have with Nautical Bowls speaks to the strategy we have around the mid-market. When you get a little more complex as an operator, our value increases. And it's really that full service, not just the tech itself. It's the ability to wrap services around it and offer that full offering. And Nautical Bowls was one that we had won. It was a competitive takeaway from one of the companies that is winning in the single-site space but struggles to get up into that mid-market space as we described. That's again, where we see a lot of value. And us winning in the mid-market space also creates a little bit wider moat around that enterprise business that we described where we're -- in restaurant and retail, we have over 300,000 sites that we support today in our installed base. So we want to create a competitive moat around that. In retail, we won a competitive win, and we're expanding with existing clients. We talked about a major e-comm player that in their physical stores is deploying our self-checkout capabilities. So that's fun for us in terms of we still see self-checkout as a big driver, not just the appliance and piece of furniture itself, but it's really more about the software and services that go around that as we think about consumer choice and computer vision and mobile and RFID starting to win out in that space as well.

Okay. Perfect. And so you alluded to the hardware challenges that you mentioned at earnings led to part of the guide down for 2024. Can you maybe just talk to us about how we should think about growth by each segment in '24? And just how does that differ? How is your thought process? Or what do you see in the market today different from when you had your Analyst Day, handful market?

Yes. So we -- I'll run through the businesses quickly. Digital banking, we think is going to grow.

We'll get into more detail, obviously, in each one.

Yes. Yes. Digital banking is going to grow at 7% is what we talked about. Restaurants will be flat to 1% up. And retail will decline 4%. So when you look at the retail business decline, that will take us back to hardware. The muted growth on the restaurant side is really about hardware. There's just more hardware projects in the big enterprise clients in those two businesses. When you dig deeper and look at ARR growth and software ARR growth, while we didn't provide guidance, I think they're going to grow and similar to what we described in '23 for the total business. So retail was only 1% growth in ARR in '23. I think it will be more in line with the average for the -- all the businesses in '24. Just we had some service contracts that are embedded in that, that quite honestly, in the department of specialty has been challenged. It's a small part of our business, but we had some big services contracts with a couple of departments, specialty stores company that went out of business that filed for bankruptcy. So that had a short-term impact for us. We've insulated for that. We've isolated that. It's a very small part of our business. We moved on. So that's not going to repeat. But that was a driver there. The restaurant side is continuing to grow. That will be payments-led in mid-market. I described the go-to-market investment across all 3 businesses of about $15 million across -- for just straight go-to-market, how do we get more energy focused on adding net new sites in converting our existing base. And then digital banking is just a strong business that's growing at 7%. I mean we're going to continue to take share with a great product in that space.

And then just one lastly, touching on the hardware thing that you mentioned. Are these projects, when you talk about the [indiscernible] budget, are they being canceled? Are they just being pushed out? Is it the macro that's the biggest factor? Just how should we be thinking about maybe that return of hardware as we think forward?

Yes. I mean these companies are still spending. They're not spending on hardware. They're focusing on software and other services that are creating experiences. And so we're continuing to grow in a lot of these relationships that would have bought hardware in the past. So again, we'll probably fall in line with normal refresh cycle rates with these. They're sweating assets a little longer. Our edge and our platform software start to break the hardware to software dependency a little bit, too. We're breaking some of that ourselves. And so we'll see less dependency on that on hardware growth. But we think we've -- that business will kind of normalize out. We talked at Investor Day of low single-digit declines in that business. We think that will -- that's the way we're modeling that going forward from this point forward. So we think we'll get the hardware behind us. We believe this business is -- overall, it should be a mid-single-digit grower like we've described, and we'll have pockets of really high growth in software.

Cool. So let's dig into retail and restaurants first. The growth algorithm for you guys is based on converting your customers to the platform, obviously, and upselling and cross-selling products and services. What are you upselling? And what kind of gives you the confidence? I think your goal is to reach kind of almost 40% of the installed base on the platform by 2027. What gives you the confidence in reaching that target?

Yes. So on the absolute 40%, I feel good. If I plot that line from where we are today when I described, we -- at Investor Day, we said about 10% in retail and 20% in restaurant. And I look at the progress that we've made, the higher growth in retail would suggest that, that trajectory of that line gets us to that 40%. I think restaurant's on that right path. So we're seeing the evidence supported by platform connections that, that is playing out in terms of what we're selling. So right now, we're doing it -- our strategy is really a pull strategy for both retail and restaurant based on a need. So if you're a restaurant and you come to us, I need better data and analytics in terms of where I'm selling across my entire chain, how am I doing on promotions? How do I drive value and demand? How do I do dynamic pricing? We would say the way we deliver that to you is through our platform. And so we'd get you connected to the platform at that point, take your -- we don't have to change your legacy application in the store, which is a benefit. We don't have to do a rip and replace. We connect you to the platform. And now we have the data and we up -- we change your contract to a subscription, and then we add the content on data analytics package as an example. And that's why we're seeing an ARPU uplift immediately upon signing. And then -- and we start to cross-sell. We can cross-sell loyalty. We can cross-sell kitchen. We can cross-sell self-checkout. We can cross-sell payments. So we have modules that will start to add on to that core layer of services and the platform that allow us to that cross-selling and upselling. And we're seeing it play out. I mean on the -- we are seeing the uplift of the 1.5 to 1.7x the existing recurring revenue stream that we have with that client, and we sign them up. And as that cohort ages over 12, 24 months, we're seeing that expand like the example that we described at Investor Day. It's all playing out. It's a little ahead, I think, on the initial sign up, but it's playing out as we expected on a per site or per customer economic level like we described at Investor Day.

Okay. And staying on the retail business and talking specifically about self-checkout, there was a very publicized kind of interview with Jim Cramer earlier this year with some more bearish comments. And so how should we be thinking about the popularity of self-checkout? Because you also just described a new win that you guys had for that business. So there are competing forces, but what's the view on self-checkout as we go forward?

Yes. So self-checkout, we believe, will grow. If you think about the unit -- so I'll say units. I'll ground us on hardware for a second because it's the physical manifestation of that. All the people that track this will say it's going to grow mid-single digits unit volume. We think ASPs are collapsing a little bit because of the form factors. They're not this giant piece of furniture with a lot of bedsheet metal. It becomes a kiosk maybe with a scanner that -- or maybe we think about self-checkout, too, as differently. It's not just a piece of hardware, it's a capability. And so you walking through a store scanning on your mobile phone items through the -- as you check out is self-checkout. It just doesn't mean -- there's not an associate from the store there with you or it might be RFID where you have soft goods and you lay it down on a counter, that doesn't look like a checkout, but that's self-checkout. So we see that trend continuing, but it will be more of a software and an operational workflow play that we'll sell as an add-on to the platform. We -- I hear all the negative side of self-checkout. I get all those articles, too. People call me up and say, what's going on? We just had the big -- the National Retail Federation just had the big show in New York. And I sit on the Board of NRF as well. And we talk a lot about the $100 billion problem that is called shrink. People use that as a case study for why you wouldn't do self-checkout. Very little of that shrink is happening at the self-checkout. That's what the studies would tell you. I just had a large customer. I was on the phone with him yesterday as a matter of fact, the president of this very large retailer that across 1,600 stores just rolls self-checkout. He just got the shrink numbers in pre and post self-checkout. It didn't move an inch. So yes, I hear all that. And if you roll it out poorly and you have a bad experience, and you don't operationally roll it out well, it could be bad in terms of your customer experience. We believe, as a company, that not one single form of checkout is going to win. Like all self-checkout is not the -- at some point, you as a consumer want choice. Some days, I feel like using self-checkout. If I have a whole basket of groceries, I'm likely not going to use self-checkout. So you want your customers to have choice, and that's the model that we subscribe to, and we think that's the flexibility we have in the platform. But we think that trend towards, I'll call it, unattended or unassisted checkout will continue, and that will be a source of growth for us.

Okay. Okay. Good. If we turn to the restaurants business. Again, you talked about kind of platform conversion being 20% today. The goal is also 40% by 2027. You are historically over-indexed to that enterprise part of the segment of the market versus mid-market. Can you talk about the different strategies for kind of attacking each of those verticals and driving forward those platform conversions?

Yes. So 75% of that business is what we call enterprise. And it would be -- that would be pretty typical. Those are the big brands that you all know and maybe not love but you know. We would draw a line that says enterprise is anything that has 50 sites or more. It's kind of a weird arbitrary line. Most of our enterprise customers are much bigger than that. And then we were calling everything below 50-sites SMB, and we're also recognizing that, that was probably not fair to that segment. So we've kind of peeled out single site. That's not really a target of ours, these single site operators. We don't deliver the most value there. It's a very competitive market. We've started to focus on 5 to 50 and call it mid-market. And so we think that's where we're going to get a lot of growth. That will be a payments-led offering. We'll have a specific sales force that's focused on getting growth in that space. And it's really the differentiator, it's creating a full-service offering in that space. On the enterprise side, it's really a relationship management task that we have migration plans for all of our enterprise clients. So we have a path, a road map, we'll sit down, we'll go through it. What are you trying to get done? What capabilities are you trying to solve? And then over what time are you going to convert to the platform? So we'll map all of that out with all of our enterprise customers. So that will be a very metered one-on-one set of conversations. That will be a very similar conversation the one I described in our earnings release around Red Robin. So when I sit down with G.J. Hart, the CEO of Red Robin, and we have a conversation about what he wants to get, what he's trying to do, what his mission is, he's like, look, David, I want you to take all the tech in the store because I'm trying to make great hamburgers. And that's kind of the simple value prop that we have is like you focus on making great burgers, and we'll focus on tech, and we're both going to be happy. And that's been -- so that's what we'll do in the big side of the enterprise.

Okay. You made a comment that I thought was interesting and important, payments, the payments attached. So 90% of mid-market customers that you convert to your platform. This all kind of stems from the JetPay acquisition done a couple of years back. So can you maybe just explain the history of that deal and the real value proposition? Like why are we seeing such strong payments attached? What are you providing? Is it that full solution? Is it as simple as that? Is there anything more to it, would you say?

Yes. It is -- while it's not as simple that -- it's as simple as that. It's the -- so we did -- when we acquired JetPay, we got some payment capabilities. And then you saw one of the bridges was we sold some noncore elements of JetPay last year. And that was -- there were some bespoke standalone contracts that had nothing to do with attaching to a retailer or a restaurant. So they were government municipalities and other things that were not core in the required investment. So we sold those off. And so our value prop is really we start the payment anyway. We likely route it through our gateway. We just weren't processing it. And not having that processing piece required a lot of integration work for both the customers and for us and likely the payment provider. So what we've done is we've removed some value steps in that value chain where there were just people -- it was slowing them down the ability to take different forms of payment. It was creating different economics. So we can do it end to end, not on a payment processing. We're not going to save you bps off of processing. I mean that's just not -- we're not that much of a scale player in that space. What we're going to save you is the total cost of how you think about payments and your time to market in that payments ecosystem and a little bit of brain damage on the integration side.

Let's talk about competition, but I want to do it from the Voyix perspective, obviously, because that's where a lot of -- we get a lot of investor questions there's newer start-ups, faster growing start-ups. You're obviously very incumbent, very sticky solution. And so how do you think about the competitive pressures in retail versus restaurants? And what is a true value prop that you deliver that perhaps some of these competitors can't deliver, don't deliver.

Yes. Our value in both restaurant and retail, specifically in the enterprise space, is the full-service capability. Our ability to take the tech, as I described earlier, and wrap it with services, whether that -- whether we're taking a first call from a store, whether we're doing -- or we have a connected set of capabilities where we understand the health of the devices in the store, the health of the software. We're monitoring it. We're fixing things remotely. That's value that we create, where scale really matters. If you think about -- we do services for the largest retailers in the U.S., the largest retailers in the U.K., the largest retailers in Australia. That kind of scale allows us to do some really interesting things with some of these bigger clients. And so I think that's where we differentiate. That also starts to play down in that mid-market space because when you get -- and you're in that 5 to 50 space, you're sophisticated enough to where you need scale and growth, and you might need to build an IT team because you can't do it all yourself. If you build -- most of these restaurants that are 10 restaurants or either a chef or somebody who's been in the business for a while, and they're like, I want to build great food or I have a great concept that has a great experience, and you realize you wake up one day and think, man, I need an IT team to manage this. That's where we come in, and we have -- we give -- we kind of give them their IT team where they don't have to build it. So that's really where we differentiate. We're not the -- we have some products that compete in the single-site space, but that's not where we leverage our scale and our differentiation. So I mean you're going to see us in that full service software and services.

Let's talk about digital banking. We haven't talked about that one yet. But it's kind of the crown jewel, so to speak, of the Voyix business. You've done a phenomenal job turning around that business. What has really changed and allowed you to start winning back customers and be more competitive in the market?

Yes. The product is so much better than it was before. And we've done a really good job of not only taking the core retail banking product and making it better, but adding business banking functionality, adding functionality like account opening. When we acquired Terafina, that gave us that capability. And then we have this unique, what we call the channel services platform, CSP, that stitches together the digital channel, the ATM channel, the call center and the in-person branch allows you to have an end-to-end experience with your customer at a bank that doesn't exist anywhere. I mean nobody else is really stitching all that together to create that experience. So that's really what is allowing us to differentiate. And then focus. The platform itself wasn't stable in the old world. We finished in '22 and going into early '23 moving all of our customers into Google Cloud. We moved our platform to Google Cloud for stability purposes. It came out of the old NCR data centers and truly into the cloud in a multi-tenant cloud solution, and it's created a lot of stability for us. And obviously, that's important as we move through this. So -- and then we've -- the extensibility of that platform. So we have over 200 partners in our kind of our partner ecosystem. And what that allows is if you're running our digital banking platform, you can create new capabilities to offer to your customers, whether it's peer-to-peer payments or card management or new account opening and those kind of things. We can bring in an ecosystem of partners. It doesn't have to be invented by us. I mean we don't care. We'll take a rev share, and we'll allow you to connect to the platform and take -- we'll get a transaction fee or something off of that. But we're open. We have an open, extensible platform.

Okay. And how do you -- or how would you characterize, because you talked a lot about the platform. How would you characterize the biggest competitive differentiator versus some of your very well-known and publicly traded peers or peer?

Yes. Yes, I would say the -- we -- when I think about the market, what happens in the market as a financial institution makes a decision, their -- they'll make a decision to say, I want to move. I need something new because what I have today isn't modern enough to compete in the digital world. I got to compete with Chime or these neo banks or my war on deposits is raging, so I got to go figure this out. They're typically coming from one of the core providers, and then they say, I need something new. So then they start to assess us and the other people that you're thinking about. And then -- so that's typically the decision point. And then once we get into that discussion, our ability to -- our presence in the market, the stability of our company, the fact that we've been through multiple business cycles, I think, is attractive to some financial institutions. And then when I describe that end-to-end set of capabilities and that ecosystem of partners, that's where when we win in those head-to-head, that's because we have that -- the broader solution capability on a -- if you're looking just at a single piece of functionality, there might be somebody that they say, okay, I'm going to choose somebody else on a specific tiny piece of functionality. But we have this breadth of portfolio that helps us.

Okay. So let's kind of take all this together and think about how it impacts kind of financials and whatnot. And so at the Analyst Day, you guided to kind of mid-single-digit growth, 6% revenue growth CAGR through 2027. You started at a little different point and then accelerate from there. What drives that acceleration? What should we be looking for to go from where you guided 2024 to the end market state that you're thinking about as we get to '27?

Yes. So I would tell you that the fundamentals of the business, in my mind, haven't changed from Investor Day outside of hardware. So the jump-off point has changed. I admit that. I think the growth, what you'll see is as we describe platform lanes and platform connections, as we start to think about total ARR, and specifically software ARR, those will be the metrics that we will be watching internally. That's the way we'll incent our sales teams to grow. Those are the things that we're watching for in terms of the elements, the core elements of growth that will create true durable growth that has a higher margin profile that will drive the right mix to create the EBIT expansion. We're kind of thrilled that the EBITDA margin expansion is a little bit better than we thought in terms of a rate at Investor Day. That's a function of some of the aggressive cost actions that we're taking. We're finding more cost savings opportunities as we spun these business, as we spun ATM out and we get really focused. There's a lot of opportunities to get more efficient. So we're taking advantage of those. We announced that $100 million annualized cost takeout plan to both offset synergies, allow us to invest in go-to-market and deliver some additional margin back to the business. So we're excited about what that looks like. We targeted -- we talked about it when we set that -- we targeted a mid-single-digit grower of this business at Investor Day. I still think that's the right target for this business. I still think it's the right target.

Okay. You kind of answered some of the questions that I had on how you get to that EBITDA growth that is faster than revenue growth. So we'll move past that and just go to free cash flow because you've talked about, and free cash flow conversion improving as well. Are there any underlying -- are any of the underlying drivers kind of different than what you just outlined in terms of what gets you to the mid-single growth, what gets you to the faster EBITDA growth, anything we need to be thinking about from a working capital standpoint or shift in the model, more ARR that gets you to that better free cash flow conversion?

Yes. Some of it is that shift to ARR, the predictability of the revenue, that will help us do things like improve DSOs and get us a little bit more efficient in working capital. There's not anything major in terms of that. There's some basic, we'll call it, better management and blocking and tackling that we'll do in terms of how to improve that as well. Obviously, the higher margin helps us drive more cash flow. From a capital investment in the products, we said 6% to 7% investment this year. We said $250 million of CapEx. 90% that goes towards software. As we grow ARR a little faster, the dynamics of that capital allocation strategy might shift. You can kind of get to the lower end of that range. Probably as software becomes a bigger part of what you're doing, the portfolio matures, maybe you pull that CapEx down just a hair to get a little bit better conversion to cash. But we are going to convert cash better. We're going to use that cash to build up some cash balances, and that will help us on our net leverage. We'll look to delever. Those are the ways we'll think about that. And then we have the onetime cash expenses due to separation that I'm ready to be done talking about, but they're still real. And we'll get those -- we'll get through that knothole of all the separation costs that I know you all are just -- you don't want to hear from me on that either. I mean you want to talk about the operations of the business. It's just real and the complexity of what we're doing.

Right. So let's -- we have a few minutes. I'd love to talk about -- you mentioned capital allocation. But talk about what are the priorities here? You talked about delevering a bit. What are the targets for you? And then again, historically, there's always been this angle of kind of like strategic assets that NCR Voyix has. How do we think about your ability to either spin or do any -- take any types of different action further to what's already done since the spin in September?

Yes. So on the leverage and the capital allocation, we said we're going to try to get down to [ 3.3, 3.4 ] this year. So that's -- we're going to be on that path. We built -- we set up this new company coming out of the spin, NCR Voyix, changed the name, changed the colors, bought shirts for everybody, whatever we did. And I built a new leadership team. And I probably changed that more leadership than I thought I would originally, but I did -- I built out a new leadership team. I built these businesses to have presidents for each of those 3 businesses. And that's the way we're running the company by those 3 businesses, then we have the support functions. I was part of all of the strategic review processes that were happening inside of NCR before. I sat at the table with all of the ideas that everybody came with. I watched the -- all the permutations of everything you can do with every piece of all these businesses. And I'll tell you that we are now exploring ways to look at our business differently, both from a subproduct level and sub geo level or a footprint level that we never had the ability with NCR because we were so complicated at NCR. So we're much smarter about those businesses. And I will tell you, structurally, as a company, I know what all the different options could look like. And I'm creating a company that can operate and create ultimate flexibility and how we're structured. And I also want to say that, I also know how distracting strategic reviews and spins and all this stuff can be because I've lived it for 3 years. And right now, I'm excited about what this team is doing, the leadership team. They're coming together as a team. They believe in the strategy that we have on the page. We have a good strategy. We're putting up good numbers in terms of the core areas of the strategy. And this team is excited to execute and deliver what we have on the page. That's what their focus is. We'll continue to think about how we structure the business and do all the stuff. Yes. We're not distracting the teams. They are focused on execution. And I think that's -- I want to get some of that distraction behind us and just get focused on execution.

Yes. And that's a great place to end because we just have a minute, but maybe leverage those comments and just give us a final word about why should we be excited about NCR Voyix? What's kind of underappreciated? What should we think about this business as we go forward, kind of the key highlights that you want to leave us with.

Yes. I would tell you that I appreciate everybody's patience as we get through this spin. We know it's been noisy. There's a lot of noise in the system. And again, I assure you that we're trying to make it as easy as possible. We have an amazing employee base. We have an amazing customer base that we are taking on this journey. They are all willing to sign up with this journey with us. When we do, we're going to grow the software revenue stream. In the meantime, we're putting a new focus on adding new customers to get -- to either do some growth out of that space or continue to show that we're winning in the marketplace. Our products are winning in the marketplace as evidenced by the wins that we put up on the board, and disciplined about not only creating a team, but taking cost out and executing this business. So we feel -- on behalf of the management team, we feel really good about the strategy. And we're excited and we're winning.

Good. So I'll leave it there. Thank you, Dave.

Thank you.

Perfect.

All right.