PAR Technology Corporation ($PAR)

All right. Great. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us here at the 2026 Wolfe Research FinTech Forum. My name is Paul Obrecht, and I'm on the fintech team here at Wolfe. And today, I'm happy to be joined by Savneet Singh, CEO of PAR for a fireside chat here. So Savneet, thanks for being here and joining us at the FinTech Forum again this year. To start, there may be some in the room who may be less familiar with the PAR story. Can you just give an overview of the company?

Sure. PAR provides a platform to run your restaurant and retail business. We sort of think of ourselves as the core platform, the core mission-critical systems to operate enterprise restaurants or convenience stores. So that includes everything from point of sale and back office to loyalty and online ordering. In the restaurant space, we cover over 100,000 restaurants. We're probably one of the largest providers there. We've got the largest loyalty solution, fast-growing point of sale. But the critical element that we provide is an integrated solution. So historically, the enterprise has been one of a best-of-breed where you've got a bunch of different products trying to work together. Ours is an integrated solution that seems to really resonate with our customers. And on the convenience store side, we are the largest provider of loyalty software and soon to be a lot more.

Great. Can we start higher level with where you see the restaurant industry from a tech perspective? Historically, we saw a very large share, especially in the enterprise segment, using legacy solutions, often on-prem. But there has been a continued shift towards cloud-based platforms over the years. So just curious what inning you see we're at from a modern platform adoption standpoint?

I think AI actually changes that a lot. So historically, I would say it was on a very gradual but accelerating pace in the enterprise. 5, 6 years ago, you still had CIOs questioning if the cloud was where they wanted, it was a safe place to go. The pandemic, the push to digital has forced a lot of restaurant chains to start going into that digital adoption. With the crux being the point of sale, that really is a limiting factor of their ability to be digital. We're still really, really early. The vast majority of enterprise restaurants are on legacy solutions. In the enterprise, I still think we're probably 80% to 80-plus percent are still on legacy solutions. We've got a long way to go in the enterprise over there. And historically, I think restaurants have been a laggard because they're one of the few businesses that hadn't really been disrupted. Really up until the pandemic, the vast majority of QSR and Fast Casual chains didn't have a website or didn't have anything other than a marketing website. They didn't have online ordering. They really hadn't been disrupted. So the push to become digital really wasn't there. It wasn't like a shoe retailer or a clothing retailer. And so they've been historically a laggard. I think what's interesting today, though is, I'd mentioned a guess that AI, they might be earlier adopters of AI than they have been historically of other technologies, primarily because they are in this really challenging world where their businesses are becoming digital very rapidly, where most enterprise chains are anywhere from 5% to 40% digital sales. They've got incredible pressure from the cost side, whether it's labor, whether it's food, whether it's real estate. And they have this real complexity of orders coming from all these different channels, whether it's from DoorDash, Uber Eats, their direct website, their mobile, their [ loyalty plus ], TikTok. And so they're going to need more and more technology to kind of handle this new world they're in. And so we're seeing quite rapid adoption of AI tools to help them simplify the job that they have today. So historically a laggard, so second inning, third inning, but AI, they might actually catch up because I think they need it more than the traditional category.

Great. We'll certainly hit on AI to a great degree in a bit. I'd love to start with earnings. You reported 4Q results a few weeks ago, which were quite healthy with 15% year-over-year organic ARR growth, strong sequential ARR growth in the fourth quarter. And then you also saw the third consecutive quarter of non-GAAP net income profitability. Can you just touch on the key highlights of the quarter in review and as you move into 2026, where you're seeing the most momentum?

Yes. I think the single biggest highlight is we grew -- we added $17 million of ARR in the quarter, which is a really large amount for a company of our size and I think beyond what most people expected. So the growth engine is working. And so I think that's probably the biggest takeaway, which is the growth engines really there. I think the second part that's very interesting is in 2025, 70%, 80-plus percent of our customers bought multiple products. And so we've gone from a land and then try to expand over time to buying multi-products day 1. That is a huge shift in our category, but also for us as a company where ARPUs are going to grow really nicely because you're landing on multiple products at the same time, really proving the thesis we've had for a long time, which is the integrated solution is really the winner, not a point solution. So I think that's the second big takeaway from the year, not just the quarter. I think the third one that I tried to lean into was we launched our first AI products in the quarter, and we're really shocked how fast they sold. And that doesn't ever happen in our category. These are our categories, year long sales cycles. That's why they're so durable. That's why there's such a low churn. But with AI, we sort of released our first product called Coach AI. We had 1,000 stores adopt it, roughly 1,000 stores adopt it and almost all of those are daily active users now. And so it's kind of a really, really shocking insight to us as my comments on the previous question was that there's a clear interest from the category to spend there. And maybe the last thing is I think we continue to expand our profitability, and we announced intention to take out $15 million of OpEx costs this year, leveraging AI. So we're really kind of leaning in to sort of make sure we end on a lower cost base than we started.

Okay. Great. And shares on earnings underperformed. They're down quite a bit year-to-date. And we understand some of it is related to these AI fears, which we'll touch on in a minute. But more broadly, what would you say are the most underappreciated aspects of the PAR story today in the market?

I'd say there's probably two things. So obviously, the AI thing has been a huge drag. And I think it will actually be a great tailwind for us. Like as I mentioned, we serve a category that is not digitally native. When you go to a large -- you go to a restaurant chain that has 1,000 stores, their entire corporate team is maybe 100 people. And of that, maybe 10 people work in IT and half of them are responsible for corporate IT and e-mail. And so the idea that they will take their most mission-critical tools vibe code themselves and displace existing vendors. I think it's just really hard to ever fathom that because that's just not the DNA they're in. And it's just the risk of -- we're like the tax engine. We're like the pay -- these are like really sensitive systems that we -- I'd argue, we're not charging enough for. And so I think that sort of fear will become our biggest tailwind because, one, I don't see them doing a lot of this themselves, and that's at least especially the narrative coming out of them. But two, we'll be able to provide a lot of this tooling for them as the most mission-critical product they have. So I think that's really, really misunderstood and I think a really nice tailwind. I think the second part that's quite misunderstood is, we think we'll have really strong durable growth. Oftentimes, in vertical markets, you see a rapid deceleration. We don't think that's going to happen because our TAM is ironically expanding as we add these new products and as we sort of expand some of the verticals we serve, like we announced our moving into pizza category, we announced moving into this entertainment category. And so I think that we'll be able to have durable growth for a longer period of time than maybe an average SaaS company. And the last one, which is I do think as we get to scale, we'll be able to sort of exceed most people's expectations on margin because we do have a culture that is very, very thrifty and keen on when we see something from an engineering perspective, it's how do we design it for scale. And so we spend that money upfront, but so that when it scales, we can get the benefit of that over time.

Right. That makes a lot of sense. On the topic of AI risks, you certainly hit -- I think they're twofold really in the market. One of them is the merchants bringing in-house, utilizing AI tools themselves. There is also the notion of AI-led software development, allowing for new entrants to come to market sooner, reach feature parity, start to disrupt the incumbents. How do you perceive that risk? And how relevant should that be for investors?

To me, I look at it as -- the competitive risk is always high of a start-up coming in. We sort of view ourselves as that insurgent versus the incumbent. And so it's sort of critical. I think it's -- the entire company needs to sort of rally behind this idea that we need to disrupt ourselves. Now whether it's by design or luck, we're also in a category that has not yet had that influx of point-of-sale vendors that use AI or other parts of the area. So we haven't -- so one is I haven't observed it. But two, I think that it's just incumbent upon us to be the most -- best competitive alternative to everything that exists. And so if we can do that ourselves, I think there's no reason to try to go to something that's new. And again, our products are just so, so mission-critical that I've said this to many people, we use, I think, ADP for payroll. I'm sure we could build a payroll system with AI today. We're not going to do that because I don't want to take the risk of the tax calculations and messing on people's pay for something that costs us $1, whatever payroll. So I think that's -- now if we were building mobile apps, yes, I'd be super, super nervous about that. But I think we feel pretty good that if we go all in on sort of making our products AI native, then we'll be a benefactor. But we have to do it, right? I think that if you don't, that's when that risk really becomes a real risk.

Right. So speaking to those AI opportunities, you launched PAR AI in September, the intelligence layer embedded across the entire product suite. And the first product was Coach AI, which you talked about being utilized by 1,000 stores. It sounds like daily usage is quite high. Can you just touch on the early traction a bit more that you're seeing with that product and how operators are really engaging with it?

Yes. So Coach AI is not coming out on second version, but the first version was very much like ChatGPT for the enterprise product. How do I query into my data what's happening? So how do I sort of what were everything from daily sales, what was the margin on this promotion to how is my labor schedule looking? Or you can say, hey, where should I focus my time today if you have multiple stores on it. And so really valuable in the sense of helping you streamline where historically, most restaurants would have a singular person who sort of like, hey, can you run the report to figure out did this daypart schedule work or did this promotion work or did this labor schedule work well or however that may be. Now when you can just query it and it was a pretty powerful kind of first use case. The second version is more on the predictive side, where it's actually prompting you and saying, hey, this labor schedule is really not working for you, like you should look at this. Or stop ordering coffee over here because it's going to be a heat wave or whatever. And so that's the next part that I think will actually make it even stickier because then you're going in not just to figure out what you're going to prompt it yourself, but also get that. And then version 3, which hopefully comes by the end of this year will be press this button after change labor schedule or change the inventory ordering or change something in the supply chain. So it's been really neat. The other part that I think is interesting is it also really lowers the bar for you to be an expert in this, where historically, you would have to really understand the tooling, run all these reports, build -- push it into whatever BI tool you're using. Now you don't -- anyone can do it, like literally somebody without a college education go in there and be as sophisticated about the details of the restaurant than somebody who has been there for 20 years. I think that's going to be a need to sort of get more people to sort of understand the data, too.

And how are you making your existing customers aware of this AI offering? And then I'd also ask how you're monetizing it. I think you've seen some competitors in the space roll out AI products, and it's really a focus on adoption first, where they want to push it out and have all their merchants adopt it before then going through the monetization efforts. Just curious what your perspective is there.

Yes. So our Coach AI product was available first to our back office customers, which we've got only 13,000. That's why the 1,000 number was really exciting. And then we'll expand it to more and more as we add more data to go further and further cross-sell of our products. We charge between $40 and $90 a month, so we've been testing pricing. So we do charge. So our philosophy was we obviously gave it to our beta users for free to start testing it, giving us insights, how do we adjust it, what it looks like. But we're charging for it. Our push has always been to our product team, which is you got to make good enough so they want to pay for it. And I think that eventually, every software company will have that sort of chat layer. And so that -- I don't think you charge for that. I think you charge for the predictive nature of it, the action items. And so we'll probably go to a SaaS fee. We did look it early on with a number of customers on a transaction base. In our category, just not going to fly. And so we've gone with a SaaS fee.

And then beyond Coach AI, where do you see opportunities to increasingly embed AI across your offerings, whether in restaurant but also retail?

Yes. So in retail, we launched our first product, I think, last week, which is called Drive AI. And it's really a tool that sits on top of your loyalty system, but really your entire customer engagement to sort of help you understand all the opportunities you have to optimize margin that day, that week. And it's incredibly powerful. It is the most powerful tool we have today where it will literally pull in all your loyalty data, your register data and then sort of give you the insights you have for that day. So as an example, it might actually flag you and say, hey, stop running this promotion like you've kind of exhausted the inventory, exhausted the margin that we need to get from it or the margin loss we did it to bring in someone else. It layers in your tobacco data, your alcohol data. And so we're going to -- we just started selling it. We expect hopefully similar adoption on that side. But the way I actually think about it is the power of having that on the customer engagement side is that you as a CIO or CEO can now go into that system and say, hey, create me a marketing campaign for X and figure out the perfect amount of segments to send it to and so on and so forth. And what that does is it removes an incredible amount of work from the brand. So one is it'll figure out here are the 50 segments customers we're going to send this out. We're not going send out to everybody. We're not going to send it out to 3 generic people. We're going to set 3 generic segments. We're going to go to incredibly targeted. You're a 25-year-old male, this demographic data, like you're getting it. You're 30-year-old, you're not getting it, whatever it is. And that is all done through right to figure out who are the perfect people to send that campaign to. Then it actually builds the campaign. So it's like what are the colors, what makes sure it sticks to the brand ethos. Is it an SMS? Is it a push to an app? Is it an e-mail? It sort of automates all of that and then it actually allows you to run that campaign and then do all the reporting and then dynamically change it over time. And so it is a really, really powerful tool. We'll also charge stats for that as well. So that's kind of what's coming out next.

So on the topic of retail, while historically more focused on the restaurant TAM, PAR continues to see traction there, notably in C-stores and fuel retailers. Can you touch on the success you're seeing here and how over the years, you've expanded your product offerings to drive greater merchant adoption?

Yes. We got pulled into retail 4, 5 years ago. What we sort of observed was that retailers are really encroaching upon the territory of restaurants. The fastest-growing segment of convenience stores for the last 4 years has been prepared foods. So not your bag of chips, but actually real food. And that growth was leading them to wanting to have the same digital tools that restaurants had to compete with restaurants. And so we started -- our loyalty solutions started to get pulled into these larger brands because they wanted to have great loyalty engagement on the food side. When we saw that really take off, we realized that we needed a more focused effort. And so we made an acquisition there that's since grown really nicely. And I think the major lessons we've learned from that category are that C-stores are really healthy businesses. So they are businesses that are in many parts family-owned or family controlled or influenced. They take very, very long-term bets. And they are -- if restaurants were in 2 or 3, they're like walking out of the dug out. They're really, really starting and because they take their time, they measure twice. And so as a result, we have -- what we've realized is we have way more influence on our retail customers than we do on our restaurant customers because we're actually their first true digital partner. We're literally almost -- I suspect every other vendor is still running off a server in the back of the store. And so we've created tremendous ROI to our brands. You can sort of see some of the stuff on our website, but you can even see it -- when we launch a brand, you can see it in their earnings call. They start talking about us, and that doesn't really happen in our other categories where we're getting shout-outs as regularly. Our margins are higher because we charge roughly double for retail that we do in restaurants. So it's a higher-margin business. And I think one of the things we like about it is since it's earlier in that digitization phase, we can actually bring in AI potentially faster because you're not replacing a bunch of stuff, you're not competing with a bunch of other modern vendors. You're really going and saying, hey, let us become that new platform. So it's been a really, really nice growth for our business. And I think also kind of hedges us to degree that convenience stores become restaurants.

Right, right. That's really helpful. Let's briefly hit on your 2026 guidance where you're calling for to sustain mid-teens organic ARR growth. And you've also noted seeing a step change in operational efficiency during the year. What's giving you confidence in achieving this? And are there any key puts and takes in your outlook that investors should be aware of?

The major difference this year from last year was a lot more of our business is baked or booked than in normal years. And that was because we had a really, really strong bookings year last year. We had record bookings in most of our products. And so that allowed us to have a lot of visibility into what will and can get rolled out in 2026. So that's why we felt pretty confident in sort of hitting our mid-teens guidance. And what I said on the call is that includes almost nothing for these AI products that are coming out, which clearly, we're excited and seeing what we can drive there. And it includes nothing from any new large signings. So these are -- our guidance very much depends on the customers we've signed already. So we're not depending on signing a new customer to hear our guidance or you know some magic whale. It's stuff that's right in front of us. And so we feel really comfortable about it. We think it's also a really positive sign. I suspect we'll be one of the very few companies that is targeting not to have decelerating growth in this environment. And then on the OpEx side, that's the easy side, right, because you're taking out costs, so you control that fully. And we mentioned on the call, we want to take out $15 million, and we're going to keep charging, hopefully, we hit that and go well beyond that over time as we ourselves become more and more AI native figuring out what we can pull out.

So speaking of key wins, one of PAR's notable recent wins was Papa John's, which is transitioning from its legacy on-prem systems to PAR's POS and ops solutions. What were the key factors driving this win? And what made PAR really stand out to Papa Johns?

Huge win for us for a number of reasons. One, it will probably be our second largest restaurant customer on the software side. But the main reason was it's a new TAM. We don't sell into pizza. We've never really sold into pizza aggressively before. Pizza, surprising to most, is a really different type of workflow in the restaurant. And so as a result, most of the large pizza chains in the United States operate custom-built point-of-sale systems. So Papa Johns has their own custom-built point-of-sale system. So does Domino's, sort of most of these brands. And so -- and they haven't really had an alternative because they couldn't go to an off-the-shelf system because it wasn't built for pizza. And so it's big for us because it kind of opens up this TAM, and we saw very quickly that as soon as we launched that, we got a bunch of inbounds. So that's why it's just a really kind of exciting thing for us and price point is strong, and it will be a multiproduct customer as well. But as far as why they picked us, it was, I think, 2 core reasons they picked us. First and foremost is Papa Johns wants to be an innovative brand. Their CIO, Kevin Vasconi, was the CIO behind Domino's big turnaround a decade plus ago. He's on stage with Google all over the place. He's got -- he's really, really sort of a visionary guy. And I think that he was very much aligned to our product road map and our vision. And so I think that was really important because somebody who's sort of got a legendary career in our category for being a visionary, like he or she is not going to partner with something that can't keep up with their dreams because in the end, we'll be the stumbling block if we can't get to where he wants to get to. And so I think that alignment on vision is there. The second part was in our enterprise category, I honestly don't think they thought anyone else could get to the requirements they had because none of us have pizza, they're really taking a leap of faith. Can we build all the functionality in time for them to go out to market and they were willing to bet on us. And a lot of that came from references. They called our largest customers and sort of said, hey, when we deliver, do we deliver in Q4 or do we deliver in Q5? And I think they got a lot of confidence that we deliver on time. And so I think that's why they picked us. That's why they -- we got a very fair price. And you can see on their earnings calls and their public calls, they're very complement to us and just like we are to them because we're going to hopefully help them really change the way that things are going.

Right. And for an enterprise win of this size, what is the implementation time line typically look like?

It's very brand dependent. This one will probably kick off in a small part of Q4, but really, it's a 2027 event. It's a longer start time because we're building it out. So this is more of a -- when we signed Burger King, we started installing stores 3 or 4 months right after, so it was pretty fast. This is a little bit longer lead time because we are building the functionality before we launch. Generally, once you sign a brand, you can get going in a few months. But you do roll out roughly sort of medium-sized chains within a year, super, super large chains in 2 years.

Right. And then can you provide some color on the incremental opportunities you see with this partnership over time? I believe on the earnings call, you called out international as a potential.

Yes. We're hopeful to sort of win some of the international markets and hopefully 1 or 2 other additional products that we sell. And sort of looking at it as the sort of platform approach as opposed to going in as here's a bunch of branded products. What's powerful about it is every time we sell them an additional product, they will actually get functionality that could not get elsewhere. So I'm making this up, but they bought our back-office software alongside point of sale in this deal. They could have bought someone else's back-office software, but the functionality they get by having it under one roof is really unique. So it's simple stuff like well, it's single sign-on. So that's kind of nice because I don't want to go to 2 systems, but it's also the same database, the same reporting in the 2 different systems. It helps unify a lot of that workflow. And so that's kind of our plan, similar to what we do with every other brand. Here, we're hoping for a rapid adoption.

Great. That's helpful. I'd love to hit on competition. Obviously, been a hot topic for the restaurant POS space for years, at this point, I'd say. And we're increasingly seeing many fintechs invest in the space. I'd say more so in the SMB mid-market portion of the TAM, but you do see some meaningfully trying to go upmarket. Just curious what your latest views are on the competitive environment? And if anything in the last year, call it, has changed materially in your view?

It's really hard to go SMB up. The needs of an SMB restaurant are just radically different than enterprise. Like I always think about it, if you ran your local Italian restaurant, you're the chef, you're the CEO, you're the CTO, you're CIO, you're the Head of Security, compliance, like your -- it is -- so by definition, it's got to be a simple-to-use plug-and-play kind of model because you don't have an IT team, you don't have a compliance team. You don't have a CFO generally versus you're selling to the enterprise, the robustness of the product is totally different because you've got compliance in there, you've got CFOs, office of CFO in there, you've got ops, you've got marketing, you've got everybody in there. And so the products are just so different. And so to go from SMB to enterprise, you kind of need almost like an entirely new product team culture because enterprise sales cycles are a year. SMB sales cycles can be 2 weeks. So it's really different. And as a result, we haven't seen major changes in the competitive landscape really ever. The big established players that have huge market share continue to sort of have aggressive marketing pushes. Generally, their goal is to retain, not to sort of grow net new logos. And we love fishing in that pond because similar to like in the Papa Johns experience, if you want to be a digital brand, you want to be innovative, which is probably almost everybody. I think you want to go with the sort of -- the company that's growing that sort of can give you this unique functionality. From the SMB side, I think you'll always have Toast. They're super well run, have a great product SMB market, will probably win 1 or 2 mid-enterprise like logos every year. But I just think it's going to be very hard for that to really get to scale. And I kind of always wonder like what's the ROI with so many people and so much time on the category. And then we don't really see a lot of other people come from down there upwards. We don't see Block at all. We don't really see Shift4. We don't see Clover. So it is a relatively small group of core competitors.

Right. That makes a lot of sense. Let's turn on restaurant trends. Just curious what the latest trends you're seeing in the restaurant industry are thus far in the first quarter? And are you noticing any shifts in consumer spending or dining patterns?

Yes. So it's changed a lot. So last year was probably the worst year for restaurants since the pandemic, but really since the great financial crisis. So it was a really painful year for the entire category. What made it unique was that in a -- normally in a challenging economic year for restaurants, the QSR category does really, really well. In 2025, it did not do well. In fact, the full-service dining chains took share from the quick service chains. And a lot of that was this pricing dynamic where you could go to Chili's and pay roughly the same amount as going into your favorite fast food restaurant and getting a meal. And so the full-service guys came back and stole share. So you saw, particularly from the public companies, a lot of pressure on traffic. Traffic was down for most chains last year, which is just a crazy thing to think about. By the end of the year, we did see things start to stabilize. A lot of that was this push to value. Almost every QSR brand went back to their roots of being value-oriented, and that started to sort of win some of that share back. And we saw a stabilization and we had a really strong holiday season in the United States in Q4, which helped. I think, obviously, people go shopping, they go eating. So I think that helped. And then early in this year, you're seeing -- obviously, CAVA had really awesome results, but you're seeing some good traction in the larger chains. So you are seeing -- I'm saying stabilization, I'm not comfortable saying it's like coming back. Ironically, it's like the perfect market to be a vendor because they've got cost pressures and revenue pressures. And so we had our best bookings year ever last year by a decent amount. And so I hate saying it, but you know, [ pandemic ] definitely helped sales.

Right. Speaking of cost pressures, there are certainly rising costs of hardware components for the POS providers themselves, particularly memory chips have increasingly been discussed in recent weeks. Can you share any details on these dynamics that you're seeing? And how is PAR really trying to mitigate some of these risks?

So memory is a small portion, but it is a portion of our hardware cost. We sell point-of-sale terminals that are basically computers that are far more robust than your average computer. We've done a bunch of stuff. So the first problem last year was tariffs before memory chips. And we've now been able to -- on most of our customers, get waivers to push that -- most of that cost through, not everybody, but most of them. On the memory side, we've front-loaded some purchasing. So that's sort of the first mitigation step. We pulled forward roughly $2 million of inventory to make sure to avoid any supply shocks. And then we've worked on reconfiguring our board so that we can use different suppliers, different forms of memory, but also less memory. And then one of the unique things about our product, point-of-sale product is that you can launch it on existing hardware. And so for a customer that might be scared if there's a little bit of a price increase, you're able to sort of say, well, we'll just run on your existing hardware. We don't need it. And so for example, a lot of Burger King storage, you'll see us running on a device that has a logo of a different company on it. In the end, memory is not a huge portion of the bill of lading. So it's not like it's -- our customers are seeing 50% spikes or anything like that. But we've kind of budgeted for it. We talked about on our call that we'll lose some gross margin to it. But I don't expect it to be dramatic for us just because we've brought in a lot, and it is not a huge portion of the bill for our customers.

Right. Got it. That makes sense. I'd love to go back to the notion of cross-selling. It sounds like there's certainly momentum there in the business right now. And you noted during earnings that most new deals are now multiproduct. What's driving this momentum in the shift of, to your point, initially being a land-and-expand model and now landing with a larger base of work being done already?

I think it's the thesis being right in the sense that if you want to run a restaurant in today's world, you need a more integrated set of products to make it work. The idea that you could have a really nice unified experience for your customers with having a different vendor for your loyalty app, a different vendor for your online ordering app, a different vendor for your mobile app, like it's just hard to make all that stuff work together. And as restaurants so rapidly became digital, again, we really do forget that you do not have an app for any of the restaurants you liked until just a few years ago. It just stretched their needs. And so the idea of having your data in one place is very, very powerful. The idea of having one system across the different parts of your tech stack allow you to actually be more innovative. And so I think it's just this consolidation of data, the consolidation of systems and vendors because like I said, these are really small tech teams. And so they went from managing 5 vendors to 5 years later managing 15 or 20. That's really tough. And so I think that those are the core points and the functionality we can have by having that stuff under one roof is really powerful.

Can we discuss what the international opportunity looks like for PAR? I know you've continued to internationalize core products of the platform over the years. So just curious where you see the runway there.

Yes. Internationally, it's market by market. So we've got a good business in Australia that's growing. We serve Starbucks out there, Wingstop out there and a number of fast-growing chains in Australia. And you'll, over time, see us plan to flag additional markets, Canada, others, English-speaking and then non-English. The goal, I think, has been to become the partner for the big U.S. brands to move out there. As they expand their opportunities, we want to sort of be their partner everywhere because, again, having your data at one place in this world of AI is really powerful. But equally important is that these brands have suffered under like very disjointed technology outside the United States. So if you go to the Head of International for most restaurant chains, they'll literally tell you that they're losing meaningful amount of royalties because of old point-of-sale systems not reconciling, taxation. I mean it's kind of nuts. And so I think we're going market by market. And then our second growth has been we operate a product called Plexure, which does McDonald's loyalty in 68 or 69 different countries. We continue to grow them. Last quarter, we launched with Japan as an example. And so we've got that lever too on the loyalty side.

Great. I'd like to open it up to anyone in the audience who may have a question. I have one more though. On the topic of capital allocation, I think we can end there. So I'm just curious if you can provide your framework for 2026. I know the Board recently authorized a $100 million share repurchase program. Also curious what the bar looks like for M&A this year? And if you are open to M&A, what are any key areas you'd be looking to grow into inorganically?

Yes. On the M&A question, I think we're probably not going to do anything with where our stock price is today. I think it's hard to get something done. But also I think nobody wants to sell their business now either. So I don't think -- hopefully, we're not missing on anything, but I don't see a lot of founders rushing for the exits of high-quality products. A lot of the junk will get out there and sell. From a capital allocation perspective, we're focused on first co-operations. We -- like I said, we feel really excited. I mean the internal versus external is really interesting. I mean it's -- like internally, we've never felt like we had a better business. We've never felt like we -- our sales team has never won more business. We never had more sales this many sales quota. It will be more profitable this year. And so I think the goal is to fund internal operations and then continue to sort of look at our options. So I think before we ever repurchase shares, we'll look at -- we've got converts that are due in 18, 20 months, so we'll look at addressing that. But the idea of the repurchase was we do expect to generate meaningful cash flow as we get to the end of this year, next year, and we want to make sure that we have that as a tool. We are constantly looking at all what's the best return on invested capital. And I think today, it's the internal business will be the best return that we have given how much demand we're seeing and also just this AI change and again, being able to sell your products in a 3-month sales cycle versus the year cycle is really like it is an enlightening thing for us.