Nayax Ltd.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to NIACS' second quarter 2026 earnings conference call. All participants are at present in a listen-only mode. Following management's formal presentation, instructions will be given for the question-and-answer session. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the call over to Mr. Aaron Greenberg. Please go ahead, Aaron.

Thank you, Operator, and everyone for joining us today on this conference call. With me on the call today are Yair Nechmad, NIACS co-founder and chief executive officer, and Sagit Manor, chief financial officer. Following management's prepared remarks, we will open the call for the question and answer session. Our press release and supplementary investor presentation are available on our investor relations website at ir.niacs.com. As a reminder, during this call, we'll be making forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements on our call today are based on assumptions and therefore subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause results to differ materially from those projected. We have no obligation to update these statements except as required by law. You can read about these risks and uncertainties in a supplementary investor presentation released earlier today in our regulatory filings. In addition, today's call will include a discussion of non-IFRS measures Management believes non-IFRS results are useful in order to enhance our understanding of our ongoing performance. However, these measures should be considered as a supplement to and not as a substitute for IFRS financial measures. A reconciliation between NIACS's non-IFRS to IFRS measures can be found in our earnings press release issued earlier today. All key performance indicators are intended to evaluate our business and properly measure factors in a macroeconomic environment to guide and support our decision making. These key performance indicators may be calculated in a matter different from the industry standards. And finally, please note that all figures in today's call will be reported in U.S. dollars unless stated otherwise. Yair will start the call with key financial and operational highlights. Following that, I will speak about some of our strategic initiatives in more detail. Finally, Sagit will go through the details of financial results and discuss the outlook. And with that, I would like to turn the call over to NIACS' CEO, Yair Nechmad. Yair?

Thank you, Aaron, and thank you everyone for joining us this morning to discuss our results for the second quarter and the progress we are making across the business. With a strong quarter with revenue up 28% to approximately $123 million, and adjusted EBITDA of $14 million. For the first half of the year, revenue increased 30% to approximately $230 million with organic growth of approximately 24%, in line with the full year guidance we outlined at the beginning of the year. Our business is performing extremely well, driven by our strong growth algorithm. We continue to onboard more merchants, sell payment devices, and then monetize every transaction that flows through our platform. Our flywheel is working. Each new device installed compounds our high-margin recurring revenue stream. To this end, we increased our installed base to more than 1.55 million devices globally, and our customer base reached 125,000. reflecting both our continued success and the significant opportunities in the market. Furthermore, the fundamentals across the business remain solid. Our net revenue retention remains around 120% with historically low churn. This is an indication that we are supporting our customers and they, in return, are buying more from us each year. As our business continues to expand into higher value verticals such as EV charging, growth is increasingly driven by the number of devices we deploy, and also by the increasing value generated by each connected device, as reflected in the continuing growth in ARPU and ATV. This, in addition to the tailwind from the cash-to-cashless conversion trend, presents that we have the right strategy, the right product offering, and the right team to execute against large and growing market opportunities today. We see great opportunities in several key strategic areas across the organization, and we are accelerating these investments to support our growth and take advantage of our leadership position in unattended payment. Specifically, in financial services, we are extending the platform into funding and card products for the merchants we already serve. As many of you have already seen from our announcement a few days ago, we continue to expand the strategic capabilities of the NIEX platform. NIEX Capital give us in-house lending and installment technology that we have been building for several years now. In addition, we have deployed our own card infrastructure as a license principal issuer. Combining those two give us the opportunity to add loyalty solutions. Interweening the complete financial product portfolio while bringing more value to the merchant. These services, coupled with our recently announced application for a U.S. bank charter, would give us a set of capabilities that few of our peers can match, which includes banking, loyalty, financing, and issuing. Aaron will share more about this exciting news and what it unlock in more detail in a moment. In EV, customers of the combined NIEX and LinkWheel offering are driving demand that is enabling us to deploy a higher rate of DC fast chargers at more than double the pace we saw pre-acquisition. We're intentionally not slowing that deployment rate as it directly drive both the growth rate of NIEX future recurring revenue and our market share in the EV market. Every charger deployed faster becomes a source of recurring revenue and captures more shares sooner. While these investments do not change our expectations for revenue or adjusted EBITDA guidance for 2026, both of which we are reaffirming, it will impact our free cash flow in the short term. We believe these investments position us to capture significant long-term growth opportunities and solidify our industry-leading position. Separately, five years after going public, we have implemented a new long-term management incentive plan to recognize and reward our dedicated senior leadership team over the next five years, built around our 2028 strategic milestone and beyond. The vision is simple. NICE is building toward a multi-billion-dollar revenue company, and this plan ties our senior leadership to our strategic milestone we have set out publicly. Let me close with where I believe the company is heading. 20 years ago, we were selling a card reader for a vending machine. Today, we are the payment engine for more than 125,000 businesses across more than 40 verticals, and most of them run their daily operation on our software. Every device we connect is a permanent touchpoint. Running our software and processing on our platform. What excites me now is what we can put on top of the platform. Payments were the first service, software was the second, financial services are next, and others will follow. Each one is a new revenue stream for our new and existing customers leveraging infrastructure we have spent years to building. The investment we are making this year in EV and in our banking infrastructure are expanding the platform we've built and creating additional long-term recurring revenue opportunities. As a founder, I am more confident about where NYX is headed than I have ever been. With that, I will turn the call back to Aaron to discuss some of our strategic initiative in details. Aaron, please go ahead.

Thank you, Yair, and hello, everyone. I want to cover two topics today. The bank charter application we announced last week and what it means for our embedded financial services strategy, as well as provide an update on our M&A strategy. Last week, we announced that we filed an application with the Connecticut Department of Banking to establish NIAICS America Bank Inc., a non-depository innovation bank under Connecticut's innovation bank framework headquartered in Fairfield County. The filing is not the beginning of the process. It follows a year of application drafting and direct engagement with the department and builds on the operational and regulatory foundation we began putting in place in early 2025. Let me start with why. Today, NIACS provides payment facilitation in the United States through partnerships with acquiring and processing banks under the agent to payee exemption. This works for what we do today, but does not give us the regulatory framework to expand our product portfolio. The moment we offer more financial services, such as financing or card issuing, we would trigger licensing requirements across a large number of states, each with its own application, bonding, and examination. Having a single Connecticut bank charter largely replaces that patchwork. So first, the charter strengthens the foundation under the business we already run. Second, it opens the door to embedded financial services, and that is the larger opportunity. Over the past five years, we've built Our own issuing infrastructure from the ground up. We're already a licensed principal issuer in the EU, UK, and Israel. Last year, we brought NYX Capital fully in-house, adding lending and installment capabilities. Together, these give us a nearly complete offering in the embedded financial services built in-house rather than stitched together from vendors. With that, we can serve our customers better than a traditional bank. Our underwriting is based on the payments we process. We see settlement data from these merchants in real time every day on our own platform so we can make a faster decision on a lower risk loan than is possible from looking at financial statements or a credit file alone. Collections run through automated deductions from settlement flows we already control, which materially changes the recovery profile. And our acquisition cost is extremely low because these merchants are already on our platform. It's important to highlight that we intend to only extend credit to our payments customers. This is a value-added service layered on top of the core business, not a separate vertical with a different risk profile. And that will keep the loan book conservative and margins strong. The United States is our biggest initial opportunity, when today almost all of those merchants' financial services are handled by someone else. On timing, the department's review, which includes an independent feasibility study and a public hearing, is expected to take approximately six months. Approval is not guaranteed and we cannot give assurance as to whether or when a charter would be granted or on what conditions. Assuming approval, our plan is for the bank to be operational in 2027 and to begin contributing incremental revenue that year with acceleration as we move into 2028 and beyond. On capital, we expect to fund the bank initially with $10 million using our existing balance sheet with approximately $1.5 million of capital restricted at opening. Once we show proof of concept, we intend to minimize the direct impact on the balance sheet by utilizing off-balance sheet funding structures such as a warehouse facility. We believe this is a large opportunity for NIACS coming from capturing more wallet share from the merchants already on our platform rather than from adding new customers. Turning to M&A, our pipeline remains robust and our priorities are unchanged from what we have previously described. We continue to target two to three acquisitions a year. We are actively working on several opportunities and still expect to announce more this year. As we said in March, we will only guide on acquisitions once they have been finalized. Our playbook is consistent. We look for software companies and verticals where payments and software have to work together. We combine them with our payment stack and we take the results global on infrastructure we already own. We did it with LinkWell and EV, with Tagapo and Family Entertainment. It is a repeatable model and it is how we intend to keep scaling into new verticals. I would now like to pass the call over to our CFO, Sagit Manor, to go over our business and financial results and provide our outlook.

Thank you, Aaron, and good morning, good evening, everyone. We appreciate having our shareholders, analysts, and the entire NYX team with us today as we review our financial results for the quarter. As Yair and Aaron highlighted, we continue to execute well across both our core business and continue to invest in our strategic growth initiatives. The fundamentals of the business continue to strengthen During the second quarter, we delivered record revenue as well as record total transaction value while we continued to grow our customer base and install base of management connected devices. We also continued to improve key operating metrics, including R2 and ATV. These results reinforced the strength of our business model. The more customers we onboard, the more opportunities we create to expand payment adoption, increase transaction activity and grow recurring revenue across our platform. These quarterly achievements demonstrate both our ability to scale the platform and to deepen customer engagement across our install base. Looking ahead, we believe we are still in the early stages of our long-term growth opportunity. As our newer verticals continue to scale and our OEM partnerships mature, we see meaningful opportunities to extend both our installed base and the value we generate across the base over time. Let me now walk you through to how our execution is reflected in our financial results for the quarter. Turning to the financials, revenue increased 28% to approximately $123 million including 21% organic revenue growth over the prior year's quarter. Organic revenue growth for the first half of the year is approximately 24% in line with our guidance. Recurring revenue grew 24% and represented approximately 72% of total revenue. We ended the quarter with an installed base of more than 1.55 million managed and connected devices while serving 125,000 plus customers globally. Total dollar transaction value grew an impressive 29% to $2.1 billion. Consistent with recent quotas, we continue to see a favorable mix shift towards higher value verticals. Favorite transaction value, or ATV, increased to $2.52 from $2.20 while take rate remains strong at 2.62%, representing a mix of both regional and vertical shifts. Combined, these indicators show that our growth is increasingly driven by adding devices and also by increasing activity and monetization. We saw a continued increase in the revenue generated from each connected device. Everland Revenue Per Unit, or ALPU, increased to $251, up 13% year-over-year. This increase continues to be driven by two main factors. First, the ongoing conversion of existing machines from cash-to-cash transactions. And second, a strategic extension into higher-value verticals, such as EV charging, amusement, and car wash. Turning now to hardware revenue. How the revenue increased 40%, increasing by approximately $10 million year-over-year to $35 million. This growth reflects continued demand across all markets, together with the contribution from Linquil. Approximately two-thirds of the year-over-year increase in how the revenue came from Linquil reflecting the continued expansion of our EV platform and strengthening our position in this important long-term growth market as we continue to capture market share. Linkwell is the second largest charging network in New York area and seventh largest in the U.S. In the current present payment solution through NIAX LLC, we believe we are leading provider in the U.S. By combining our payments with the LinkVault platform, we have a differentiated solution that sets us apart and which we continue to scale. This success is shown with our first half beating internal estimates in the EV-related revenue. Moving now to profitability and margins for the quarter. Overall gross margin for the quarter was 47%. The continued expansion of our recurring business remains the key driver of our long-term profitability, with both processing and SaaS margins improving again this quarter. The carrying gross margin increased to 54%, up from 53% in the prior year quarter, reflecting continued scale, higher transaction volume, and broader adoption of our software solution across our install base. Processing margin improved to nearly 41%, up from 39% a year ago, reflecting the continued benefits of our renegotiated acquiring agreements together with our enhanced smart routing capabilities. Staff margins also expanded to 76% from 74%, reflecting continued scale. Turning to hardware margin, that came at 28.1%. The primary driver for hardware margin this quarter was product mix. As I mentioned, approximately 65% of our hardware revenue growth came from Linkwell, which has lower hardware margin than our deepest product family. In addition, higher freight and logistics costs created modest pressure on our hardware margin during the quarter. Adjusted OPEX was $44 million, representing approximately 36% of revenue and consistent as a percent of revenue, both sequentially and compared to the prior year period. While we maintain an active hedging program, the appreciation of the Israeli shekel against the U.S. dollar resulted in an approximately $2.3 million headwind compared to the first quarter. Adjacent EBITDA increased 12% to $14 million compared to the prior year's second quarter. Adjacent EBITDA was impacted primarily by the appreciation of the Israeli shekel against the U.S. dollar, which increased our operating expenses in dollar terms. At the same time, as we enter into the second half of 2026, We continue to drive initiatives to improve productivity and operational efficiency as we scale the business. We expect adjusted OPEX to be roughly $42 million per quarter in Q3 2026 and in Q4 2026, excluding any impact from changes in FF. Let me provide some more details about where the improved productivity and operational efficiency will come from. The meaningful step up from the first half will be driven by the continued mix shift towards recurring revenue with higher processing and SaaS margin, as well as an expected uplift in hardware gross margin in the second half of the year. The balance will come from operating leverage as we continue to implement AI in our day-to-day business and continue to integrate process automation. As Yair mentioned, In the second quarter, we initiated a company's senior leadership stock-based incentive plan called the Diamond Plan. The total consideration from this plan is approximately $48 million over five years. In addition, the company awarded our CEO and CTO, both co-founders, with a long-term incentive plan tied to the NIAC's total shareholder return, with its full investing at $240 per share. The total consideration from this plan is approximately $10 million over three years. This aligns the long-term future of our co-founders and senior leadership with the shareholders towards a common goal. This quarter includes several stock-based compensation items that are separate from the underlying operating performance of the business. Stock base compensation totaled $12.4 million in the quarter compared to $2.5 million in the prior year period. The increase reflects three elements. First, $5.8 million stock base award related to employee performance in 2025, which under applicable accounting rules are recognized in the current reporting period. Second, A $5.9 million stock-based award regarding the launch of our Diamond Plan, a new five-year long-term management incentive plan, as mentioned above. Q2 specifically observed a higher stock-based expenses related to a one-time fully vested RSUs of $4.5 million, given as part of the Diamond Plan. and Yair Nechmad. We expect stock-based compensation to be approximately $27 million for the full year 2026, representing approximately 5% of the revenue for the year. Net financial expenses increased $4.3 million compared to the prior year period. in reflecting higher expenses due to FX and interest expense associated with the bond issuance completed in 2025. We reported a loss of $10.1 million for the quarter compared to net income of $11.7 million in the prior year period. The primary driver in Q2 2026 for this change was a significant increase in non-cash stock-based compensation expenses of $12.4 million, as mentioned above. The prior year net income included a one-time gain of $5.6 million related to the show purchase of the remaining 51% of NIEX capital, which was previously held as a joint venture. Given the significant non-cash Stock-based compensation recognized during the quarter, we believe adjusted net income also provides a useful view of the underlying operating performance of the business. Adjusted net income for the quarter was $6 million compared to adjusted net income of $11 million in the prior year period, driven primarily by higher financial expenses. Turning now to our balance sheet. Out of June 30, 2026, cash-in-cash equivalents and short-term deposits totaled $304 million while total short- and long-term debt stood at $349 million, maintaining a strong balance sheet and significant financial flexibility. Cash generated from operating activities for the first half of 2026 was $2.3 million. For the quarter, free cash flow was negative $13.1 million, primarily reflecting link with project-heavy business, securing sourcing of key components and costs, increased banking infrastructure investments, and the timing of cash settlement from our processing activities. Turning now to our outlook and referring to the forward-looking information included in today's press release. As Yair mentioned earlier, we are reaffirming our full year 2026 revenue and adjusted EBITDA guidance. We continue to expect revenue of between $510 million and $520 million, including organic revenue growth of 22% to 25%. We also continue to expect adjusted EBITDA of approximately $85 million to $90 million, representing and adjusted EBITDA margin of approximately 17% as we continue to improve our margins and our operating leverage through AI implementation and process automation. The one element we are revising our guidance is our free cash flow outlook. We now expect free cash flow conversion from adjusted EBITDA of approximately 5% to 10% for the year. This primarily reflects and Accelerated Investments we are making to support our long-term growth initiatives. The area of investments are in financial services, including lending, installment and issuing capabilities, capturing market share in the EV charging space, and securing sourcing of key components and costs. Importantly, this update reflects the timing of cash flows rather than a change in our underlying operating outlook. As Yair discussed earlier, these investments are aligned with our long-term growth strategy. Overall, we remain confident in our outlook for 2026. The fundamentals of the business remain strong, and we believe the investments we are making today position NIACs to further strengthen our leadership position and create long-term value creation. I want to thank all of our NIACs colleagues

Thank you. We'll now be conducting a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad and the confirmation tone indicate your lines in the question queue. You may press star 2 if you'd like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys.

One moment, please, while we assemble the queue. Thank you. Our first question is from the line of Josh Nichols with B. Reilly Securities.

Please proceed with your questions.

Thank you for taking my question. Good to see another strong revenue post for the quarter. Maybe you could provide a little bit more granularity on a little bit of the insights, particularly what's driving that top line. You obviously had Linkwell this quarter, but EV Charging, I assume, has been ramping up pretty specifically. But also, if you could provide any commentary about specific geographies, whether it's U.S., Europe, or Latin America to what you're seeing there, that could be helpful.

Thank you, Josh. How are you doing? We saw a beautiful Q2. As you said, it's 28% quarter-over-quarter and 30% since the beginning of the year. The growth comes actually from all geographies and all verticals. You can see that in the geography pie that we usually provide. Very strong quarter. Yes, EV is also growing beautifully through Linkwell. We were able to secure and several large deals that are growing nicely. And as you know, the hardware is just the beginning. It's the lock-ins and the enablers for the CPMF, which is the ChartPoint operating system, that later on will bring the recurring revenue, including payments.

Thank you. Maybe Josh, Josh, yeah. Sorry, this is Aaron. Maybe I'll just add on the EV side. You know, we've had an acceleration in the U.S. because of the LinkWell acquisition, and we're seeing a lot of success right now with bundling the payment solution, our payment solution, with LinkWell's OCP Management Solution. We're also starting to see some more success year-to-date in Europe after the BPOS media came live in the past several months. We've won a couple of large RFPs in Europe recently because of the pin-on-glass device. And we expect to see more acceleration in the rest of the world for the EV side going forward.

The context there. And then just to touch on it, you know, you reaffirmed the guidance for the revenue and EBITDA. Makes sense that you're doing some more investments in the near term that are taking free cash flow conversion down a little bit. You also mentioned it like, you know, with LinkWell, some of the hardware margins were down, but you expect those to rebound in terms of timing. Are these mostly like 2026 investments? And do you think that things revert to a little bit more traditional Thank you, Josh. So with respect to the investment, we expect that to be mainly in 2026.

We've mentioned that and this is really the reason why we reaffirm our guidance on the revenue and adjusted EBITDA because it doesn't really affect that. But we revised our guidance on the free cash flow because of those investments. And it's actually three or four elements of cash investment. One is, as you can see, Linkwell has a heavy cash investment at the front to later on Thank you very much. Thank you. So with those investments, and we have a great opportunity here, right, to capture a market share, we do not want to pass on that. The second area of investment is the financial services area, where, as you know, we have the issuing through CoinBridge, and we have the financing through Nice Capital. We also have the loyalty, and now we have the banking through the bank charter and through the application that we just did. Announce in the Connecticut Department of Banking. It obviously would take six months, but those four elements, again, the issuing, financing, loyalty, and banking really gives us the full solutions that are needed to provide our customers what they need the most, right? One end-to-end solution that gives them not just the area where we built at the beginning, which was the hardware, the software, and the payments, Now we actually have those financing services. And that's the second area of investment. The third area is securing a few key components from a sourcing and cost perspective. We were able to really manage our costs despite the memory issue. The memory issue might come in 2027 to the second half of 2027, which is a long time from now. We are focusing on the now and we are able to really focus on how do we manage the cost and the beautiful margin expansions we showed also in the hardware margins. And lastly is the timing obviously that we have every time between the funds from our customers and the processing requires money. So all of that created that really looking at our free cash flow. What do we want to invest now that has a long-term growth initiative and opportunities in the future?

Thanks for the clarification. I appreciate it. Have a good one.

The next question is from the line of Raina Kumar with Oppenheimer. She has a question.

Good morning. Thanks for taking my question, and congrats on filing the bank charger. I know that was tons of work, so congrats. I just want to start on the hardware margin. So was that decline in hardware gross margins anticipated in 2Q? And how should we think about hardware and staff and payments margins for the remainder of the year? Thank you.

Hi. How do margins, well, we're, you know, I'll start from the beginning. We're going to take any opportunities we have, especially when it comes to create a strategic opportunity from our perspective to capture market share, and that was Linkwell's story this quarter. Almost two-thirds of the revenue, the growth of the revenue came from Linkwell. That's the reason why it has a higher weight, if you will. on the margins. However, as we step into Q3 and Q4, I'm expecting the margins to go back to more or less where they were in Q1. So that will help us in that sense to continue and keep our margins in the high 40s as we showed recently.

Okay, that's great color, very helpful. So I understand that you're reiterating your EBITDA guide, lowering free cash flow guide because it's accelerated investment. So are all of these investments going through CapEx? Like why isn't it flowing through EBITDA? Thanks again.

Some of them are coming through EBITDA. Some of them is like the financial services, not everything can be capitalized. and that's one of the reasons why adjusted OPEX was a bit higher on top of the hedging of the exchange rate impact. Having said that, let's start from an OPEX standpoint or adjusted EBITDA standpoint, we are expecting an improvement both in the hardware margins as well as continue on the recurring margins. As you can see, processing margin improved almost by 1% and SaaS even improved. So continue to push where we can on the margin extension overall. We also implemented a few efficiencies within our company both from AI implementation, looking at our customers and what we can and make the smooth transition and reduce the friction with them as well as internally. How can we do more with less, especially that we've implemented AI almost across all of our departments? So there's a lot of things that are being done from a P&S standpoint to meet what we said we're going to do. On a cash flow perspective, I've provided kind of a bit of more color on where those investments are going and how that's impacting the 2026 free cash flow forecast. Thank you.

The next questions are from the line of Chris Kennedy with William Blair.

Please proceed with your questions. Great. Thanks for taking the questions and appreciate all the information. Yair mentioned how financial services could represent the next leg of growth for the business. Is there any way to frame the opportunity there relative to payments or software?

Hi Chris, it's Yair. We're not putting now some kind of what we call more color to this right now, but I can say the following. We're holding more than 125,000 customers. Basically, I'm always saying that the pay-in was part of what we call the business of the acquiring that we're doing, and you see the take rate that we're having out of it. But we can all imagine that if everything goes well, the payout will be part of it. So you can imagine that pay-in and pay-out altogether, both sides, is protecting our margin, protecting the churn, protecting the growth of the business, and for sure, creating the working capital better for the customer.

Chris, maybe I'll just add that the financial services, it's a value-added service to the payments and software that we're doing. We're not trying to become a bank forward first. We're still a payments company and payments is the core of our business. The financial services are really to try to add additional value to our existing customers and that's a large part of what I was discussing. is we're trying to come in from a low-cash perspective, but we're trying to bring value to the customer, which means because we can underwrite at lower risk, because we know their payments flow, we know day-to-day how they're transacting in their business, we're able to underwrite easier, we're able to make decisions faster and more nimble, and at a lower risk, which allows us to be able to give a lower interest rate, hopefully, to the customers than competing traditional banks. So if we're looking forward, Can it be a good accelerant to the business? Absolutely. Do you think that it's going to become the majority of revenues? Absolutely not. It's going to be a value-added service to our existing customers. And obviously, we'll have more to talk about over the coming quarters. And once we launch the bank charter in 2027, like we mentioned, we'll hopefully give some more guidance then on how we're seeing things as well.

Great. Thanks for the additional color there. And then Sagit, I know you affirmed full year organic growth guidance. Can you just talk about the modest slowdown in the second quarter and the implications for organic growth in the second half? Thank you.

Thanks, Chris. You know, we look at it, you know me, we know each other for a few years now that we never look at one quarter and, you know, and look at it as a trend. I look at this from a six-month perspective, 24% organic growth, 30% growth for the first six months, showing that everything is working. The flywheel is working, the fundamentals of the business are there. We had a great Q4 and Q1 from Retrofit on the VPUS media. Q2 was great as well, but you can see that it's kind of getting back to where it was before. And I'm expecting the same, you know, 22% to 25% as we've initially guided for recurring revenue. But we see the growth, as I said, in all geographies growing beautifully, both in Europe and in the U.S., as well as in other areas like Asia and Latin America. So I'm expecting to see Q3 and Q4, which are always higher. The first half is usually around 45% of the revenue. Second half is around 55% of the revenue. So that's where it's going to come from. All the great verticals that we've been able to build during the last 20 years of the company with 1.55 million devices that are paying. The growth and the strong recurring revenue of 72%, the flywheel is working.

Understood.

Thanks for taking the questions. The next questions are from the line of Hans Leitner with Jefferies. Please proceed with your questions.

Thanks for letting me on and I have also a couple of questions. Maybe just on the banking charter you have given quite extensive commentary here. Maybe just like why is it now the right time just thinking a little bit about your scale and why would you think that you can do this under self-control better than through a smart partnership? That's the first question and then maybe just thinking about the H2 partnership Outlook Comparatives especially in POS gets tougher but also in Geographics like Europe and the US if I look at previous years growth rates per region so maybe you can comment about the moving parts and maybe not only about Geographic but also in terms of products that would be very helpful. Thank you.

Hi Hannes, this is Aaron. So I'll take the first question and then Sagit will take the second question. So with regards to the bank charter, this is the process that we started to look at in early 2025. And it's something that even before that, we've been investing in the technology for financial services for several years now. We've been working on issuing We've been working on the financial services with lending and hardware purchase financing with the NYX Capital solution since around 2022. This has been part of the long-term plan for many years. Why now? Because we see this huge opportunity in the market, especially with all the AI enabled and everything. The ability to be able to understand data now is significantly better than even 12 to 24 months ago. How can you monetize data? In many different ways. And this is something that we've been looking at for the last several years. But if we look forward, really what we want to do is to be able to help our customers be able to better operate their business. And that's come really in two ways. One, we've already implemented. The second one we are implementing. So the first one is being able to give more actionable insights to our customers. Think like through the MoMA application, for example, and being able to utilize AI to allow for planograms and to give them better insights on what they should be stocking with in order to get higher revenues. That's number one, and we've been putting a lot of time and investment into that. The second is the financial services. So as we look forward, the bank charter is not a two-day process. It doesn't only take six months. This is a multi-year process. Strategically, we've started planning this a couple of years ago because we believe that we're now at the inflection point of our business where being able to take on these financial services will be able to add value and we have enough scale to be able to service our customers. And then to the final question that you asked, why do it ourselves and not run it through sponsor banks? It's a really good question. And again, it kind of goes back to where we stand in AI right now. What is the most important asset that you have nowadays? It's data. And if you give up your data to the sponsor banks, they are the ones who are essentially underwriting the customer. They're the ones who own the customer at the end of the day. and we've essentially lost all control over our customer. So we believe that as we go forward in our business, these key services, payments, lending, issuing are three very core parts to our business that we want to have full control over the risk tolerance, being able to manage our customer base and being able to really help support our customer's growth. We don't want to be relying on third parties to go and make that decision for us.

Hope that helps. I will add to this, Hamiz. I think if I understand correctly the question, I can say the following. The tailwind that we are seeing, what we see in the market is crossing all territories. We don't see any kind of what we call headwinds in the way that we operate. But what you can see in depth of the data that we are growing on the ATV and the transaction, the payment is growing as fast as we expected, but the ATV is growing even higher. And if you take a track record between 2021 when we started, it was like $1.3 or $7, now it's like $2.5. So this growth is all coming to our, what do you call, to our revenue. And if you look about the gross margin, how we are managing the gross margin on top of this growth, and we're keeping this gross margin, this is what, it is a testimony to how we operate. And the growth of this kind of tailwind will keep on growing and will grow up, I believe, between 2.5, again, the next five years will grow up in terms of the ATV. and that secure the growth of the company all the way up and what we have to do is invest and put more and more ability of us access to more segments according to opportunities that we see and that's secure the long-term growth of the company.

Thank you. The next question is in the line of Sanjay Sakrani with KBW. Let's just see what your question is. Sanjay, your line is open for questions.

Sorry, I was on mute. Sagit, you mentioned some of the drivers of ARPU, but maybe you could just give us a little bit more on how you see it progressing over the course of this year and into next. What kind of growth can we see in ARPU going forward, and what would be the main drivers? Thanks.

Thank you, Sanjay. So we're not providing specifically guidance on output, but there are two main factors to the average revenue per unit improvement that we see. First is existing machines moving from cash to cashless. So, you know, this is one, and this is really, and we know that most of our growth comes from our existing customers. And the second, of course, is the move, you know, or kind of the transfer to higher Transactions Value Verticals like EV charges, like car wash and family entertainment center and whatnot. This is a trend that started probably close to six quarters ago and we continue to see the trends of that going overall. Sometimes, you know, and as you know, there were a couple of years that we gave it annually but then the growth is actually now being shown even quarterly. So we wanted to share that information with the rest of the investment community. I see that trend continuing. I remind you that still 70% of the unattended machines out there, which we think that there's 48 million devices out there growing to 60 million by 2029. I'll say it again, 70% are still accepting cash only. So this is on us, and we have 1.55 million of those. So it's on us to drive more, to sell more machines. As you know, we are at the soul, which means that we are working really hard to secure the OEM partnerships In China and other areas where we, you know, the machine is already coming with the NIACS device, whether it's the Vipos Touch, Vipos Media outside, or is it the NIACS inside where it comes to the Uno Mini, et cetera, from that series. So, you know, working from all angles to continue to enjoy the tailwind of cash-to-cash conversion. And as you know, we are the only leading company and the global company in that space. and being at the 44 different verticals, obviously, and whatnot. So, you know, any, as you can see, if we see a great opportunity in the EV charging, for example, right, area to capture market share, we're there to capture it. Even if it means, you know, a little bit on the setback on maybe margins for a little bit or maybe even cash flow, you know, this is a very important investment that we do today for a beautiful growth opportunity in the future.

Okay, wonderful. Thank you for that. Erin, maybe just one question on this bank license, the Connecticut State Banking License. What, I guess I'm just trying to make sure I understand sort of how it compares to an ILC versus a bank holding and what it allows you to do and what it doesn't allow you to do in terms of banking and how the scope of it, so like is it just for North America or can you, utilize it to fund in other geographies. I'm just trying to make sure I understand how it sort of works through the model. Thank you.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, it's really interesting because when we looked at the beginning of last year, we looked at all the options, including all the options that you mentioned, you know, and, you know, federal charters, etc. And, you know, what we saw was that, you know, Connecticut came out with this only in the last few years or so. It's a relatively new initiative of theirs. This was meant by the state to compete against some of the other states with regards to some of these more fintech type of bank charters. The uniqueness of it though is that unlike some of the other ones that are heavily restricted bank charters, This one really is not very restricted at all. The biggest restriction of this charter is that it cannot be used for consumer business. So it is a commercial bank, meaning that we can only work with businesses, which is fine because that's all we do today and all we're intending to do right now. and besides that we're allowed to do everything else. We chose when we applied for the bank charter to be considered a credit institution. So as you probably know there's two things that define you as a bank. One is deposits and the other is credits. We've decided to take the credit route at the moment. The license does allow Thank you for joining us today. So this was a faster path for us to be able to do what we wanted to do in the market today, and we are very happy with our partnership with Adyen, and we just launched the yellow accounts also last week, which has been so far very successful. So we feel we're on the right plan with regards to that.

Great. Thank you very much. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Chris Tsang with UBS. Let's see what's your question.

Good morning and thanks for taking my question. So my first question is about the M&A outlook for the rest of the year. Maybe can you share with us what you're seeing in terms of the opportunities and the valuation in different areas in the market and are there any other kind of incremental areas you've been thinking about in terms of M&A and understand that You've been primarily looking at opportunities where there's an intersection between payments and software, but any general updates at this point of the year would be helpful. Thank you.

Yes, this is Aaron again. So with regards to where we stand, we've really been successfully executing on this playbook over the last few years of buying software-enabled companies that have the payments tied to it, essentially, but they're not necessarily doing the payments themselves. We've done that with Tagapo now and verticalizing in the arcade gaming space. We've done it now with Linkwell and verticalizing in the EV charging space. As I mentioned at the beginning of this year, and I'll reiterate that, there's a few other verticals that we believe strongly in if we're looking at our M&A strategy over the next couple of years on areas that we can verticalize in that can bring Thank you. Thank you. like buses and trains, for example, and laundry solutions. Those are the three areas that we've been looking very heavily in. With regards to geography, we've never been restricted to geography with regards to M&A, although keep in mind, obviously, that 80% of our business is happening in North America, Europe, and UK. So what generally we're looking for, either it's going to fit within that market because we have a lot of cross-selling capability or It's coming from another region. Let's take, you know, Brazil, for example, but an ability to be able to take that technology potentially to other parts of the world, like in our core markets. So, you know, with regards to where we stand right now, as I mentioned, we're still very active in M&A. We're intending to deploy capital this year in M&A. Nothing has changed there, and I hope to have some more updates by the next quarter.

All right, awesome. Thanks a lot, Aaron. And I have another question on the Thank you very much. for the CapEx that also kind of ticked up a little bit in the second quarter. Maybe can you talk about what you're expecting for the full year for the second half for those items and basically kind of in terms of the incremental investments on the cash flow side, what's kind of the split between working capital and the capitalized R&D and CapEx?

Yeah, of course, it's a git. So this quarter, definitely, you know, there is an FX impact on all areas, right? You know, I've spoken about the P&L impact, which was 2.3 million, but of course, also in the CapEx, it has an impact on that. Having said that, you can see that CapEx increased As a result of some several investments that we are doing, both from an R&D capitalization standpoint as well as CAPEX, which are infrastructure projects that we are implementing that were obviously planned. But if we see, again, additional investment that needs to be done, this is where we are here. And that's some of the reasons why we revised our free cash flow forecast. I'm expecting that the R&D capitalization kind of in the capex that you've seen in Q2 that will continue in Q3 and Q4 is not increased a bit simply because of everything that we are trying to do in a very short period of time. I'm expecting that in 2027 free cash flow will be improved to, you know, and we'll talk about it more as we, you know, as the year progresses.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's teleconference. You may now disconnect your lines at this time. We thank you for your participation. Have a wonderful day.