XBP Global Holdings, Inc. ($XBP)

Good day, and welcome to the XBP Global's First Quarter 2026 Financial Results. [Operator Instructions] Please note this call is being recorded. I'd now like to turn the call over to David Shamis, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to XBP Global's First Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. Joining me are CEO, Andrej Jonovic; CFO; Dan Avramovic; and our Chief Revenue Officer, Mike Shufeldt. Before we begin, please note that today's remarks may contain forward-looking statements including statements regarding our future performance, outlook and strategy. These statements are based on current expectations and assumptions and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described. For a detailed discussion of these risks and uncertainties, please refer to our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our most recent annual report on Form 10-K and our proxy statement and other filings with the SEC, copies of which are available on our Investor Relations website at investors.xbpglobal.com. We will also reference certain pro forma and non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations of these non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures are included in our earnings release and the appendix to our investor presentation, which are available on our Investor Relations website. With that, I'll turn the call over to Andrej.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Please allow me to sum up the journey that we're on. At the prior call in late March, covering Q4 and full year 2025, I talked about the integration of the 2 platforms, which came together in mid-2025, the voluntary disruption of ourselves to become an AI-led company and the investments we're making in growth, primarily focusing on the expanded sales team. While it's only been about 6 weeks since that earnings call, we're further along on our journey. I would like to spend a little bit of time updating you with a greater focus on the how we intend to become an AI-led company. We're converting the workflows that defines our business process as a solution business into AI pipelines. And we're doing it on our own time line rather than the markets. This is a deliberate shift in how mission-critical workflows are delivered. Let me give you some context before we walk through the investor deck. Historically, the business process as a solution or BPaaS model, existed to manage the exceptions and complexities that legacy platforms could not address. This is where our domain expertise resides, in the rules, workarounds and institutional knowledge required to deliver outcomes, especially for heavily regulated industries like health care, banking, financial services and the public sector. Our differentiation is regulatory-grade precision delivered through a unified execution layer, a combination which we believe resonates well with the ongoing needs of our clients. Our regulatory depth means we're able to navigate the rigorous security and oversight requirements of highly complex and regulated clients where pure-play AI lack the necessary accountability to operate. We're operationalizing our Agentic AI at scale. This means that we are providing the last mile of oversight using human-in-loop processes and bridging data gaps within unstructured and physical data sets. And we then seamlessly integrate everything into our modular cloud-native execution layer. Together, these capabilities create a formidable competitive moat that is difficult for competitors to replicate. I'd like us to turn to the investor deck and Slide 5. We're now transitioning these proven workflows into AI pipelines. A cornerstone of this shift is our patented Komodo rule engine, which has long used binary boolean logic to automate workflows. We have begun migrating these rules into inference-based models powered by LLMs. Our process is unique. Our subject matter experts or SMEs, create logic diagrams and standard operating procedures, SOPs, for edge cases. To remain cost-effective and highly precise, we distill these into smaller domain-specific models tuned for each area of expertise. This allows us to deploy secure private models powered by proprietary SME knowledge, unified software platform and intelligent engines. This approach ensures we uphold the highest ethical AI standards and complete data privacy for our clients. A key element of our strategy is value over volume. Our goal is broad adoption of these AI pipelines to capture a larger wallet share of our trusted clients. Today, at the inception of a deployment, we're achieving approximately 40% to 60% first pass auto resolution rate. This continuously improves to about 85% or more over time. The remaining 15% becomes a new version of BPaaS, a highly focused human-in-the-loop function where our SMEs resolve the final exceptions and continuously train the AI to reduce that 15% even further. Let me help you contextualize this better. Traditional industry automation tools typically have auto resolution rates, which are somewhere between 20% to 35%. This rises to a higher percentage once workflows are matured over multiyear horizons. The workflows we are migrating start at a higher auto resolution percentage and build our way higher up than the industry. In some cases, the remaining 15% can be reduced to a fraction. We're already seeing this model work at scale in our health care business, which is effectively a $200 million-plus business for us. This is our most advanced sector for AI deployment, and we're also making significant progress forward in the public sector using the same approach. Slide 6 walks through an example of how our health care AI pipeline operates. What was once a legacy process burdened by management overhead, training time, quality control, rework and various other hidden operational costs and burdens can be transitioned to an agentic workflow, taking paper, unresolved claims and converting them into a high-quality digital payload that can be processed into paid claims, thereby improving efficiencies in the health care industry. By automating the routine work, this new workflow significantly reduces processing time, lowers manual effort, cuts down handoffs, improves consistency and helps providers get paid faster. While there is still human-in-the-loop element, this is reserved for cases that truly require judgment, expertise or simply put human accountability. It's also important to note that we're just getting started with this journey. While we've seen margin expansion in the last few quarters, we expect this expansion to accelerate. And for this to drive a positive inflection in our EBITDA trajectory in the second half of the year. Finally, as we announced earlier today, our Board of Directors has authorized a formal process to explore strategic alternatives. Given the deep discount at which our stock trades relative to our intrinsic value and the desire to be more focused on core growth engines, we believe this is the right step to unlock value for all stakeholders. The company will consider a variety of potential options, which could also include divestitures. We've been investing in talent that we believe will help us along on this journey. We recently announced the hiring of a CHRO, Acquelia Colaco. And we've decided to invite our other recent joiner, Mike Shufeldt, who is our Chief Revenue Officer, to this call. I will hand over to Mike, who will walk you through our sales strategy and pipeline. Mike?

Thanks, Andrej. Let's turn to Slide 7, where we'll walk through our revenue and pipeline momentum. With respect to our sales performance, we are currently seeing a tale of 2 time lines. While our top line revenue for the quarter reflects the tail end of our legacy restructuring, our forward-looking indicators have never been stronger. Short-term revenue remains measured as we transition away from manual volume-based processing toward our Agentic-AI-powered platforms. We are intentionally building a pipeline that is more durable and higher margin even if the revenue recognition cycles are longer than the legacy business we've replaced. Turning to our pipeline. In the past 2 months, we have seen a substantial acceleration in our pipeline with 17% growth from a year ago, 10% growth from last quarter. Specifically, our total contract value, or TCV, in the mid- to late-stage funnel has expanded by nearly 45% compared to a year ago. What's even more encouraging is the velocity. These aren't just leads, these are enterprise-wide transformation programs where XBP is being integrated as the focal point for workflow. We are seeing customers move from AI curiosity to AI production, and our acceleration of specific agentic AI technology ensures that we can scale as these contracts come online. If there's one area that truly defines our current strength, it is the public sector. In February, Everest Group, a leading global research and advisory firm released a report that recognized our AI-driven document processing capabilities as foundational to public sector automation, underscoring the importance of governance, auditability and regulatory alignment. Following the validation from Everest, we have seen an influx of high demand for highly secure on-premise automation. Government entities are no longer looking for simple scanning. They need a agentic AI that can handle sensitive health care and citizen data with human-in-the-loop oversight. We see tremendous momentum in the U.S. public sector. And our recent win in a major French health insurance institution is another prime example. It started as a EUR 1 million pilot and is already showing signs of expanding into a multiyear, multi-departmental program. Across Europe and the Americas, the public sector is becoming the backbone of our midterm growth. To sum up, our short-term numbers were a snapshot of what we were, but our pipeline is a road map to where we are going. We are choosing to build a high-quality, repeatable growth engine. The demand for hyperautomation is at a generational peak, and XBP is now positioned to capture the largest, most complex deals in our history. I look forward to updating you as these pipeline wins convert into recognized revenue throughout the second half of the year. With that, I will now turn the call over to Dan Avramovic, our CFO.

Thank you, Mike, and good afternoon, everyone. I will now walk you through our financial and operating results for the quarter. Similar to prior quarters, my comments will primarily focus on pro forma results to reflect the combined operations of BPA and XBP Europe on an apples-to-apples basis as it relates to any comparisons versus prior periods. Starting on Slide 9. For the first quarter of 2026, we had total revenue of $197.1 million, a decline of 14.2% year-over-year, and our gross margin increased by 70 basis points year-over-year to 22.9%, driven by margin expansion in our Applied Workflow Automation segment. Our normalized EBITDA was $15.6 million, a decline of 39.9% year-over-year. As I have discussed previously, these revenue and EBITDA declines can largely be attributed to the expected restructuring-related exits. As a reminder, pipeline creation in the Americas business, formerly BPA was significantly impacted over the course of the company's bankruptcy process, which lasted several quarters. Since onboarding Mike and investing in an expanded sales force over the last 2 quarters, we're seeing positive momentum on the sales funnel. Like Mike alluded to in his prepared remarks, we have seen a substantial increase in our pipeline in the last few months alone, and this helped drive 68.8% increase in our total TCV bookings in the quarter versus a year ago. Our total TCV bookings in this quarter were also 45% above the previous 4-quarter average. Our new ACV bookings were down 3.7% from a year ago, but up 4.4% over the last 4 quarter average. Moving to Slide 10, which reviews our segment breakdown. In the first quarter, the Applied Workflow Automation segment had a revenue decline of 12.6% year-over-year on a pro forma basis. Sequentially, revenue in this segment was down 3.7%. Gross margins, however, increased by 260 basis points year-over-year and 190 basis points sequentially to 19.9%. This represents our highest gross margin for this segment to date. Our Technology revenue declined by 26.4% year-over-year and 14% sequentially. As a reminder, the Technology segment includes the sale of software licenses along with hardware solutions and maintenance and results in this segment tend to be lumpier. The reason for the decrease in Technology revenue and margin this quarter was due to lower onetime projects, delays in a handful of larger deals and expected customer exits. Going forward, we would expect a gross margin of approximately 55% to 60% for this segment, in line with previous periods. Turning to Slide 10 (sic) [ Slide 11 ]. While our revenue declined this quarter, which, again, was primarily driven by revenue attrition as a result of BPA's restructuring, we continue to see an uptick in gross margin with 3 straight quarters of margin expansion in a row. As we look forward throughout the year, there are a few things I'd like to point out. First, given the growth in our pipeline and recent TCV wins, we have increased confidence that our quarterly revenue will be stable in the near term, and that we will experience revenue growth in the second half of 2026. Secondly, we expect gross margin increases to accelerate as our sales pipeline converts in the second half of the year with a greater focus on agentic workflows and higher use of automation. With respect to the normalized EBITDA decline in the quarter, this was primarily driven by lower volumes, a handful of expected customer exits and further investments in people, which drove higher SG&A in the quarter. In addition, as we highlight on Slide 12, we expect an approximate 20% reduction in our global workforce by the end of the year compared to the end of 2025 as a result of AI-driven productivity and efficiency. Combined with over 80 nonpayroll initiatives, we're expecting approximately $55 million to $60 million in annual operational efficiencies with nearly half of these underlying actions implemented to date, but not yet reflected in our financials. Combined with stabilizing revenue and increasing gross margin, we believe that we've reached an inflection point and expect to see a meaningful step-up in our performance throughout the year as a result of these actions starting with an increase in normalized EBITDA next quarter. With that, I'll turn it back to Andrej.

Thanks, Dan. We've seen a steady decrease in our headcount over the last several quarters, as you can see on Slide 13. Given the workforce rationalization that automation is generating, we expect further significant change to the way we operate, creating a leaner, more nimble and more effective enterprise. With respect to the revenue per employee metric, which I've talked about in the past, we currently stack near the top of our publicly traded peer group at approximately $82,000. Based on our projected year-end head count, we expect our revenue per employee on a pro forma basis to lead these peers by a wide margin, putting us somewhere around $100,000 per employee versus the peer average of approximately $60,000. We expect to continue to separate ourselves from the legacy Business Process Automation pack with a focus on lean, efficient, high-margin growth with ever-increasing use of automation. Skipping ahead to Slide 16. As Mike mentioned earlier, we've seen positive momentum in our TCV signings and the overall pipeline growth. We're still in the early stages, so it would not be prudent of me to state when exactly we expect the revenue growth inflection point. On the right side, we show our new ACV signings by industry. And the key takeaway here is that our bookings are diversified and not overly focused in any one industry. In the first quarter, we closed $27.3 million of new ACV from over 460 separate transactions. The public sector was an area of success for us this quarter. And like Mike mentioned in his comments, we think the public sector is a growing area of opportunity for us as governments around the world embrace AI in order to create higher efficiencies. I'd now like to thank our dedicated team for their continued efforts. And with that, I'll turn it over to the operator to open up for questions and answers. Operator?

[Operator Instructions] And our first question comes from Anand Balaji with Cantor Fitzgerald.

Congrats on the quarter and all the progress. I just wanted to start by touching on the TCV momentum. You closed with over $100 million in TCV in the quarter, up by a lot. I was wondering if you could talk to us about what drove the step up this quarter, whether it's momentum coming from more renewals, win backs or new enterprise mandates? And maybe how do you expect that TCV momentum to trend over the next few quarters as your sales pipeline, especially in North America is back on?

This is Mike. Thanks for the question. I do think it's a great mix of new bookings and renewal. And we expect to see more of that momentum that we talked about, not just in the public sector, but in other aspects as well. And so we expect a healthy mix of those 2 things.

Got you. Appreciate the color. And I wanted to touch on AI as well as a follow-up. You guys highlighted a transition from legacy rules-based workflows into agentic AI pipelines, 40% to 60% initial auto resolution today. I was wondering maybe can you discuss where you're seeing the most tangible progress from AI automation so far? And can you talk about what gives your AI applications an edge versus your clients doing it themselves in-house or potentially what competitors are doing?

Sure. This is Andrej. Thanks for the question, Anand. I mean, there's sort of a multipronged answer to this. We have, as we have said many times, decades of experience, a lot of deep domain knowledge. We also have built rules along the way that have expanded over time to give us a certain baseline automation level. We're supplementing that with an entirely new stack that's able to achieve higher automation rates upfront and then work its way higher up thereafter. I don't know -- it's not always possible to say we're definitely better than so and so. What I can tell you is that when we interact with clients, we can see that the clients' reactions are suggesting that this is highly valuable to them. And I think these discussions that we're having are giving us a lot of encouragement. So I think to some extent, competitors will do what they do. And even clients will attempt to do some of these things themselves. But I can also tell you that we've won clients who have attempted to do this themselves and haven't been successful. So when they reached out to us and when we've socialized with them, our approach, those have yielded beneficial outcomes for us and the clients.

Got you. Appreciate all the color. And maybe if I could sneak one last one in. You guys announced a formal review of strategic alternatives. Maybe can you help frame for us what the Board considers core versus noncore within XBP's current portfolio? And how does this process help simplify the business while preserving that AI-first workflow automation strategy?

Thanks, Anand. Again, it's a great question, very pertinent. We are reasonably large substantial enterprise with a lot of different businesses within it. These carry a lot of intrinsic value on their own. And we don't think that our company as a whole is getting the right kind of valuation from the public markets. We are interacting with advisers. We expect to select one adviser in the near term. And the Board will take cue and advice from the advisers in deciding how to proceed. So I think this remains very much an open-ended and open-minded process, and we haven't made any conclusions yet pending the advice from advisers.

Thank you. This concludes the question-and-answer session. Thank you for your participation, and you may now disconnect. Everyone, enjoy the rest of your day.