CPI Card Group Inc.

Welcome to CPI Card Group's fourth quarter 2025 earnings call. My name is Kate, and I will be your operator today. If you are viewing on the webcast, you may advance the slides forward by pressing the arrow buttons. The call will be open for questions after the company's remarks. If you would like to get in the queue for questions, please press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press star one again. Now, I would like to turn the call over to Mike Thaler.

Thanks, operator. Welcome to CPI's fourth quarter 2025 earnings webcast and conference call. Today's date is March 5th, 2026, and on the call today from CPI Card Group are John Lowe, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Tara Grantham, Interim Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that this call may contain forward-looking statements as they are defined under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are subject to certain risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking statements. For discussion of such risks and uncertainties, please see CPI Card Group's most recent filings with the SEC. All forward-looking statements made today reflect our current expectations only, and we undertake no obligation to update any statement to reflect the events that occur after this call. Also, during the course of today's call, the company will be discussing one or more non-GAAP financial measures, including but not limited to, EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA margin, net leverage ratio, free cash flow, and net sales growth, excluding the impact of the accounting change in the second quarter. Reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures, the most directly comparable GAAP measures, are included in the press release and slide presentation we issued this morning. Copies of today's press release, as well as the presentation that accompanies this conference call, are accessible on CPI's investor relations website, investor.cpicardgroup.com. In addition, CPI's 2025 Form 10-K will be available on CPI's Investor Relations website. On today's call, all growth rates refer to comparisons with the prior year period, unless otherwise noted. The agenda for today's call can be found on slide three, and we will open the call for questions after our remarks. I'll now send the call over to John Lowe.

Thanks, Mike, and good morning, everyone. We are very pleased to report strong fourth quarter performance and solid results for 2025. a year which featured significant strategic, operational, and technological advancements. As we discussed throughout the year, we anticipated our business to accelerate in the fourth quarter, and we successfully executed to deliver that growth with a record quarter, growing revenue 22%. In addition to the contribution from ROI, this performance exceeded our expectations. We delivered strong growth across our debit and credit portfolio in the fourth quarter, driven by sales of contactless cards and ongoing double-digit growth from our software-as-a-service-based instant issuance solution. Revenue growth in the resulting operating leverage contributed to a 34% increase in adjusted EBITDA in the quarter and a 170 basis point increase in margins, and we generated exceptional cash flow. For the full year, we delivered 13% revenue growth and 5% adjusted EBITDA growth, despite more than $4 million of tariff expenses. We generated $60 million of cash from operating activities and $41 million of free cash flow, both large increases over 2024, allowing us to maintain net leverage around three times at year end. Overall, I'm proud of our team's execution, which resulted in a solid end to 2025 and significant advances with our strategic initiatives. Now, before I cover some of our significant accomplishments of 2025, I'd like to take you to slide five covering how CPI is continuing to evolve with the market and the successes we are having executing on that strategic evolution. After being CEO for two years and after nearly eight years here at CPI, I have recognized we are a company that is constantly adapting with our markets, evolving with technology, and finding new solutions for our customers in whatever forms they need. Historically, the company has been and remains a leading producer of debit and credit cards for the U.S. market, and chances are we're in your wallet. However, while debit and credit card production and personalization are solutions we focus on advancing every day, they do not define CPI or the key role that we play in the U.S. payments market. We are broader than that, with deep value in what we have built over many years and continue to build. We are a connector, an innovator, a company that educates our customers on the next big thing and how their customers can pay, and more importantly, how they can stay top of wallet both physically and digitally. At our core, our solutions help our customers win, allowing them to enable their customers to pay, whether in the form of a physical debit, credit, or prepaid card, a digital mobile wallet, a digital card, a service that provides cloud-based instant issuance or other evolving digital alternatives. To summarize, CPI has evolved into a payment technology company that provides a comprehensive range of physical and digital payment solutions for thousands of U.S. financial institutions, processors, fintechs, prepaid program managers, and more. Our proprietary platform and expertise uniquely position us to deliver today and into the future as the market expands and payment methods evolve. Our strategy is to continue providing payment technology solutions that help our customers win, driven by three primary growth pillars that underpin our value proposition. These include, first, a proprietary technology platform with a vast reach into the U.S. payments ecosystem. Second, a marketable base of thousands of deep and broad relationships across the U.S. payments market. our proven track record of delivering evolving payment solutions that reflect changing market needs. Let me spend a few minutes discussing each of these pillars, starting with our proprietary technology platform and vast reach into the U.S. payment ecosystem. Our capabilities make it simple for any customer to offer flexible payment solutions to their customers. Over more than 15 years, CPI has built a vast network of technology integrations and connections. In simple terms, We call these connections into the payments ecosystem pipes, so an issuer's payment programs can be agnostic to any service provider, maintaining their sticky, long-term relationship with CPI while offering their customers, U.S. consumers and businesses, the payment options they want. Our connections are broad and include thousands of financial institutions, fintechs, credit union service organizations, program managers, processors, core banking systems, payment brands, mobile providers, and mobile app development companies, among others. We prove this every day when we see our customers change their processor or banking core, where we simply move the pipes to maintain our relationships. CPI enables payments and informs the market once. Today, it's debit, credit, and prepaid accounts accessed via cards, mobile wallets, and apps. And while probably many years away, we may see other forms for consumers to pay gain broader market acceptance. such as crypto, biometrics, and more. CPI's platform expands with our customers' growth and their ambitions to meet market needs. Our second pillar is our marketable base. As CPI has evolved, our long-standing deep and broad relationships continue to grow. Through a robust network of thousands of customers, partners, and service providers, CPI solutions reach deep into the U.S. consumer base. As the market shifts to add new payment methods, fundamental need to securely deliver payment credentials does not change. That's where CPI shines with our reach. As consumer needs evolve beyond the physical, in complementary digital issuance and usage grows, issuers count on CPI to enable innovative solutions to meet those needs, and we've kept their trust by always delivering. That trust, built over decades, is why our customers count on CPI for their ongoing payments innovation. They know we'll execute. And if you're developing an innovative service that adds value for issuers, CPI can connect you to a broad marketable base, further solidifying our value. Our final pillar is our evolving payment solutions. By leveraging our proprietary technology platform and our marketable base, CPI has a proven track record of delivering evolving payment solutions that reflect changing market needs. Through significant investments in digital solutions, we're increasing CPI's value to customers. driving new and incremental recurring revenue streams, and expanding access to CPI's platform to enable future digital capabilities. So why are we doing this? According to a prominent study, digital issuance was the number one new capability debit issuers plan to introduce in 2024 and remain the most cited priority for 2025. And we hear the same directly from many of our customers. Additionally, we expect digital issuance to not only be incremental, but to outnumber physical cards as penetration grows. That would be positive for CPI, as we would expect digital to have greater economics than physical. Let me give you one example to demonstrate what all this means, and that's our software as a service-based instant issuance business. The value of instant issuance is not rooted in delivering a payment card. It is about enabling issuers to instantly provide account access to their customers through a cloud-based service that is plug and play for a financial institution. We spent over a decade building the pipes to deliver the service to virtually any financial institution in the U.S. We integrated with and connected to all the major players in the financial ecosystem, resulting in CPI being able to offer the service to nearly any issuer, regardless of the processor, banking core system, or other relationship they operate through. With Instant Issuance, we leveraged our proprietary technology platform provided a service to our marketable base, and evolved our solutions to provide a plug-and-play cloud-based service meeting the needs of the market. In this case, the solutions enable account access leveraging a payment card, but we have been evolving to use these pillars to provide access to mobile wallets and other forms as well, which indicates where we see our solutions going in the future. To summarize our evolving strategy, our decades-long in the making connections, people, and solutions enable payments both physically and digitally for a broad and expanding customer base, and these customers count on us to deliver what's next. CPI will continue to evolve with the market, delivering market evolution to our customers, while creating more value for our shareholders along the way. Let me take you to slide six for how we will execute and share our progress. To advance our strategy and drive long-term growth, we recently announced a new organizational structure, promoting several leaders to new roles. tightening the focus on our customers, our operations, and our digital capabilities. Along with the structure change, we are also reorganizing our reporting segments, driven by the success of our software-as-a-service-based instant issuance and other digital solutions, and to better reflect how we manage CPI today. This change will provide more visibility on our technology-driven solutions, as well as highlight the growth and diversification of our business. Our new reporting structure includes three segments, Secure Card Solutions, Prepaid Solutions, and Integrated Paytech. Secure Card Solutions represents our business as a leading debit and credit payment card and personalization provider in the U.S. market, and we estimate we produce about one out of every four cards in the U.S. We believe we have gained significant market share over the years. and we will continue to push to gain more share in growing markets through innovation, quality, and customer service. Prepaid solutions consist of our market-leading open-loop prepaid card and secure packaging solutions, as well as our growing prepaid healthcare payment solutions. We intend to grow our value in the prepaid market by creating innovative packaging for our open-loop market, expanding into the larger closed-loop market, and providing fraud-preventing ship-based solutions to the broader prepaid market, which we believe should further expand its value. Integrated Paytech, our newest segment, which was formerly a part of our debit and credit segment, has reached the success level where it now represents more than 20% of CPI's profitability. We need the integrated Paytech to reflect its value proposition of integration CPI has built over the last decade into the U.S. payments ecosystem, enabling it to provide ever-evolving payment technology to our customers. This segment represents an incremental addressable market opportunity, added to physical payment cards. When we help our customers stay top of wallet digitally, we're not only creating greater value for our customers, we're adding incremental growth per customer for CPI. And we expect those who adopt digital usage to do so in greater numbers than they do with physical cards. Using that same credential across multiple mediums, such as a mobile phone, watch, tablet, or laptop, As we continue to grow our pipes into the US payment ecosystem, our addressable market for these solutions continues to grow. For a bit more context on integrated Paytex profile, it has roughly 55% gross margins, approximately 40% EBITDA margins, a 95% plus customer retention rate, and an expected growth rate of over 15% in the coming years, as we intend to invest to accelerate our digital solutions growth faster than we did with our instant issuance solutions. Now, let's turn back to the 2025 results, and I would like to highlight some key accomplishments on slide seven. In Secure Card Solutions, we acquired Airway and made significant integration progress, paving the way for future revenue and cost synergies while driving strong results during the process. Airway contributed $43 million of revenue and more than $6 million of adjusted EBITDA in less than eight months in 2025, implying approximately 9 million of adjusted EBITDA on an annualized basis, even before most of our expected synergies have been realized. Post-acquisition, Airway has signed more than a dozen new customers, showing the value proposition they have in the market when combined with CPI's packing. We also completed the build out and transition to our new state-of-the-art secure car production facility in Indiana. which will provide operational efficiencies, increased capacity, and additional capabilities. And we invested in automation in our Colorado facility, which we believe will drive even more efficiencies. We believe these investments have already helped us gain share in 2025, including being a key driver to winning another four years with Valera. Valera is one of our larger, longstanding secure payment card customers and the premier payments credit union service organization in the U.S. servicing 4,000 financial institutions. We made significant improvements to our personalization operations, which allow us to continue to increase capacity and maintain high quality, all while driving greater efficiency as we grow. We believe these advancements were a key contributor to winning one of the largest credit unions in Texas in 2025. And we expanded our metal card offerings, providing market-competitive options to our marketable base. while still small relative to the overall market position, contributed to our strong contactless cart growth during the year with nearly $15 million in metal sales in 2025. In prepaid solutions, we developed production and operational capabilities to enter the closed-loop prepaid market, which we believe has volumes greater than five times the open-loop market and will increase in value as fraud prevention features are further adapted. We had a successful start in the fourth quarter and have already signed multiple deals since launch, including with the leading provider, CDS Gift Cards, who services many blue chip customers in the U.S., such as Uber, DoorDash, and others. Our reputation for quality, innovation, and execution in the open-loop market is proven, and we are leveraging these attributes to drive our closed-loop expansion. While our prepaid business was down in 2025, We see strong signs of the transition starting to occur in the prepaid market. Fraud continues to drive either higher-value packaging or greater use of chip-embedded gift cards, both of which would result in a unique market position for CPI, as we are the only U.S. company that is a leader in both categories. And in our new integrated pay tax segment, we grew revenue nearly 20% as we continue to increase our instant issuance penetration and further build out integrations and customer pipelines for our evolving proprietary technology platform, including to expand the addressable market for push provisioning for mobile wallets. We expect to continue to see great things out of this segment, including strong growth and high margins, leveraging our market-leading value proposition. One driver of our expected growth is our recently signed deal with a large U.S. processor and global leader in payments and financial technology, where we have gained preferential access to more than 450 financial institutions and 3,500 banking locations, representing an opportunity to grow our software-as-a-service-based instant issuance solution footprint by 25% over the coming years. We also invested in an Australian fintech and program manager, CarTech. to introduce into the U.S. chip-embedded prepaid cards, which enhance security and provide user-friendly physical to digital experience. Our ownership in CARTA after our investment is 20%, with the option to purchase an additional 31%. As we have worked with the CARTA team, we continue to be impressed by their growth as a program manager in Australia, the large opportunity to grow their digital card validation solution, branded as safe to buy in the U.S. prepaid market, and their potential value as a program manager in the U.S. Our agreement with Carta also makes us their exclusive U.S. supplier of their safe-to-buy solution, providing contactless prepaid cards with chip technology, embedding Carta's safe-to-buy applet. Carta's solution eliminates the need for data to be printed on cards, significantly reducing the risk of prepaid fraud. And as a reminder, prepaid gift cards in the U.S. rarely are embedded with chip technology. So, between Carta's technology to reduce fraud and CPI's prepaid and chip solutions, we were a perfect fit to drive meaningful and positive change in the prepaid market. We are currently in the second stages of a pilot for this solution with a large national retailer across hundreds of locations in the U.S., and we are seeing encouraging results. Overall, we are proud of what our teams delivered in 2025, and we look forward to continuing to advance these initiatives and their benefits over the next several years. In 2026, we expect to deliver good growth again, and Tara Grantham, our new interim CFO, will give you more color on our outlook in a few minutes. Tara brings a wealth of CPI and industry knowledge and experience to this role, including most recently leading CPI's enterprise growth and strategy area and previous leadership of our financial planning and analysis and treasury teams, among others. She has been with the company for nearly 10 years, and I want to congratulate Tara for being promoted into this new role and I'm happy to have her join us for the call today. Sarah will now take us through the fourth quarter results and 2026 outlook in more detail. Sarah?

Thanks, John. I'm pleased to be here and look forward to meeting many of you in the coming months. I'll begin the detailed review on slide nine with the fourth quarter results. Fourth quarter revenue increased 22% to a record $153 million which reflects a strong $18 million contribution from ROI, as well as double-digit organic growth from our debit and credit portfolio. Debit and credit segment revenue increased 40%, including the impact of ROI. Organic growth for the segment was 20%, driven by strong sales of contactless cards and continued excellent performance from our instant issuance solutions, while personalization services also delivered a solid sales increase in the quarter. Prepaid revenue declined 27% compared to the exceptionally high prior year fourth quarter when sales increased 59% to $33 million, but revenue increased 4% compared to the third quarter. As we said at the beginning of the year, we expected prepaid growth to be constrained due to comparisons with the very strong year in 2024 and we ended the year down 3% when adjusting for the impact of the revenue recognition accounting change in the second quarter. And as John said, the prepaid market is transitioning, but we expect that to be a positive for CPI. We began closed-loop prepaid shipments in the fourth quarter of 2025, and we expect this business to ramp significantly in 2026. Turning to profitability, fourth quarter gross profit margin declined from 34.1% to 31.5%, although it increased from 29.7% in the third quarter. Compared to prior year, the margin decline was driven by increased production costs, including increased depreciation and tariffs, and unfavorable sales mix, partially offset by benefits from operating leverage on sales growth. Mixed trends stabilized, though, and were comparable to the third quarter. Production costs in the quarter compared to prior year included $2 million of increased depreciation, primarily related to ROI in the new SecureCard production facility, and $1.6 million of tariff expenses. Fourth quarter SG&A expenses increased $3.3 million from the prior year, primarily due to ROI integration costs of $1.8 million in the inclusion of ROI operating expenses, partially offset by reduced medical benefit expenses compared to a high level in prior year. Our tax rate for the quarter was 27%, which brought our full year rate to 31%, higher than anticipated coming into the year due primarily to non-deductible expenses related to the ROI acquisition. Net income increased 9% in the quarter to $7.4 million as the benefit of sales growth were offset by integration costs related to ROI and a higher tax rate. Fourth quarter adjusted EBITDA increased 34% to $29.4 million and margins increased by 170 basis points from 17.5% to 19.2% driven by sales growth and the resulting operating leverage. Full year results and variance explanations can be found on slide 10. Highlights for the year include revenue increasing 13% led by double-digit growth from contactless cards and instant issuance solutions and a $43 million contribution from ArrowEye following the May 6th acquisition. We believe ROI is already benefiting from being part of CPI, driving strong execution and increasing its ability to sell into the market. Net income decreased 23% to $15 million, reflecting $6 million of acquisition and integration costs and a higher tax rate, partially offset by lower debt retirement costs compared to prior year. Adjusted EBITDA increased 5% to $96.5 million as profitability from increased revenue was partially offset by the impact of unfavorable sales mix and $4.4 million of tariff expenses. Turning to slide 11, we had very strong cash flow generation in the fourth quarter and for the full year. Our cash flow generated from operating activities for the year increased from $43.3 million last year to $59.5 million in 2025, with $40 million generated in the fourth quarter. The increase in operating cash flow was driven by lower working capital usage, including better receivables and inventory management and cash tax benefits from the US budget reconciliation bill. Full year free cash flow increased from $34 million in prior year to $41 million in 2025, driven by lower working capital usage, partially offset by increased capital spending. We spent $18 million on CapEx in 2025, double the prior year level as we invested heavily in our new Indiana production facility and other advanced machinery to support operating efficiency capacity expansion, and new capabilities such as closed loop prepaid. On the balance sheet, at quarter end, we had $22 million of cash, $25 million of borrowings on our ABL revolver, and $265 million of senior notes outstanding. Our net leverage ratio at year end was 3.1 times as cash flow generation mostly offset the funding of the ROI acquisition in May. During the course of 2025, significant capital allocation included the acquisition of Airwise for $46 million, an investment in Australian prepaid FinTech Carta, and completion of the new production facility in Indiana, as well as retirement of $20 million principal of our 10% in your notes in July. Before turning to our 2026 outlook, I would like to share the new business segment reporting John mentioned we are implementing this year on slide 12. Beginning with the first quarter reporting, our business segments will include Secure Card Solutions, Prepaid Solutions, and Integrated Paytech. Secure Card Solutions includes our debit and credit card production and personalization businesses, including our AOI on-demand solutions. This business should provide steady growth over time driven by ongoing cards and circulation growth and share gains from our leading innovation, quality, and service. As noted in our appendix slide, cards and circulation in the U.S. continue to increase with the latest U.S. cards and circulation trends from Visa and MasterCard showing a 7.5% compounded annual growth rate for the three years ended September 30th. Prepaid solutions, which has not changed from our prior prepaid segment, includes our open-loop gift cards and secure packaging, healthcare payment solutions, and closed-loop. We expect open-loop growth to be driven by continued innovation in fraud prevention packaging and the introduction of chip cards into the prepaid market, and overall segment growth to benefit from expansion of healthcare and development of our closed-loop solutions. Our third business unit is integrated pay tech. As John said, as our success has grown, we are now breaking this out as our fastest growing highest margin unit consisting of strong recurring revenue businesses that rely on our vast and expanding technology connections into the US payment ecosystem to provide various payment solutions to our customers. The majority of our revenue in this segment today is driven by our software as a service based instant issuance solutions, but we expect to ramp digital push provisioning for mobile wallets and other digital solutions in the coming years. On a pro forma basis, this segment would have represented 14% of our 2025 revenue and more than 20% of our EBITDA at an 18% growth rate with EBITDA margins of approximately 40%. Over the next few years, we expect more than 15% annual top line growth from the integrated paytech business segment, while the EBITDA growth will be impacted by investments to accelerate our top line growth. Turning to our 2026 financial outlook on slide 13, we expect another good growth year while continuing to invest heavily to support our strategic initiatives. We are currently projecting high single-digit revenue growth with growth across our portfolio led by expected double-digit growth from our integrated pay tech segments. Our adjusted EBITDA outlook for the year is low to mid single-digit growth, which reflects benefits from sales growth and cost savings activities, partially offset primarily by approximately $4 million in incremental spending to drive integrated pay tech growth and penetration and other technology investments. Our outlook reflects $6 million of tariff expenses. Similar to our instant issuance trajectory, which took years of investment before scaling and turning into a high margin recurring revenue business, we are still in the investment phase with many of our digital solutions, which is impacting our overall near-term profitability. While some level of paytech investments will continue into future years, we expect our digital solutions profitability to expand greatly once revenue begins to ramp and scale in the next two to three years. Regarding tariffs, there is still uncertainty on how the newly announced tariffs will be applied and what permanent tariffs may be enacted later in the year. At this point, our outlook reflects estimates based on a full year of the tariffs we paid in 2025. We are working hard and pursuing various avenues to seek refunds for tariffs paid in 2025 based on the recent Supreme Court ruling. We expect a tax rate between 30% and 35% in 2026 and strong cash flow conversion with capital spending likely similar to 2025 levels as reductions in spending on physical capital is replaced by increased technology capital spending. We would also expect free cash flow conversion at similar levels to 2025 and continued improvement in our net leverage ratio ending the year between 2.5 and three times. As we complete integration of Arrow-Y in the first half of 2026, we are projecting approximately $5 to $7 million of final integration costs. Similar to 2025, we expect revenue and EBITDA levels to ramp during the year with the fourth quarter again being the largest, although revenue growth rates will benefit early in the year from the addition of ROI. However, we expect adjusted EBITDA in the first half of the year to be flattened down slightly with prior year due to digital and technology investments and a slow start of the year in prepaid. Overall, we believe the environment is healthy and our momentum is strong, and we look forward to delivering a good year in 2026, while continuing to invest and advance various key strategic initiatives for long-term growth. I'll now turn the call back to John for some closing remarks.

Thanks, Sarah. Turning to slide 14 to summarize before we open the call for Q&A. We had an exceptional fourth quarter with revenue growth acceleration, strong adjusted EBITDA growth in margins, and excellent cash flow generation. For the full year, we achieved solid revenue and adjusted EBITDA growth and generated over $40 million of free cash flow. We accomplished many strategic and operational objectives, including the ROI acquisition and investment in PARTA, the completion of our new secured card production facility, entry into the closed-loop prepaid market, and the ongoing build-out for our other digital solutions. We are excited about our new organizational structure to drive our strategy, and the long-term opportunities to enhance incremental growth. We intend to continue leveraging our expanding proprietary technology platform, our extensive marketable base, and our evolving portfolio of payment solutions to meet the market needs, drive growth, and enable our customers to win. We are confident in our strategies and teams, and we expect to deliver another good year in 2026. Operator, we will now open the call up for any questions.

We will now open the call for your questions. If you would like to ask a question, press star then the number one on your telephone keypad. We will pause for just a moment to compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Jacob Stefan with Lake Street Capital Markets. Your line is open.

Hey, guys. Good morning. Congrats on the results. Welcome, Tara. Maybe just to touch on something that you kind of talked about on the closed-loop market being five times larger, so pretty significant opportunity for you guys. How are these sales cycles any different from, you know, potentially other prepaid deals? And, you know, do you have to change anything internally for, you know, to kind of capture this market?

Yeah, Jacob, good morning. So it's interesting, the closed-loop market, you're right, five times larger in volume, probably slightly higher than that. The value of closed-loop we expect to continue to grow and become even greater as we expect packaging to become more pervasive, if you will, across the United States, mainly due to regulatory changes and fraud. But from a sales cycle perspective, we actually have a slightly accelerated sales cycle versus our normal, just our broader portfolio in general. And that's because, you know, in the open-loop side, we've been working for most all the program managers that are out there with the addition of ROI. Now we work for all of the major program managers. So, we have relationships with, I'd say, more than half the market that is already selling into the closed-loop space. So, as we build out our capabilities, We have the proven ability to execute and deliver. And so that's given us the right, if you will, to move into the closed-loop market fairly quickly, winning some deals, locking down contracts, and really building out the whole operation in late last year. And ultimately, we believe we're going to have decent growth out of that in 2026.

Okay. Got it. Helpful. Maybe just to kind of put a cap on that, so can you kind of help us think through, you know, the recent announcement with TDS and, you know, how the closed-loop opportunity kind of plays into the high single-digit growth guidance for 2026? I know you guys kind of talked about that being an important driver this year.

Yeah. Yeah, no, and, Jacob, good question. There's a lot of moving parts in our business. We diversified quite a bit over the years. You know, the prepaid market in general is, it's kind of odd because it's actually a little bit choppy right now, but that is positive for us. And the reason I say that is because if you look at the broader prepaid market, fraud has been prevalent for a number of years. It's been a bit of a cat and mouse game. That has caused, on the open loop side where we are the market leader by far, that has caused significant kind of improvement in fraud preventive packaging, if you will, that, you know, we're constantly trying to innovate with our customers to stay ahead of the, you know, I would say the criminal activity from a fraud perspective. But because of that, you're also starting to see on the closed-loop side the same thing happen, right? You're starting to see state regulations that say the closed-loop gift card has to be a package or has to have a chip in it. And you're starting to see, as an example, on the open-loop side, just like, you know, our investment in Carta, where we own 20% and have a call option to grow to 51%, we're using their unique technology with one of our larger customers on the prepaid side and ultimately one of the larger national retailers in the United States to go through a second stage of pilot where we're putting chips in prepaid carts to reduce fraud. Those results have been very strong. That said, it creates kind of this environment in the prepaid market where the program managers, the distributors, others, the merchandisers are trying to understand, okay, do we move towards greater packaging? Do we move towards putting chips in prepaid cards more broadly, which is more expensive? But ultimately, you know, if you think about CPI and what we do, right, we are by far the leader in open-loop packaging. We have the scale that no one else in the market has. We are also one of the leaders in the United States from a chip embedding perspective in the debit and credit market. So, we are the only player in the U.S. market that has strong capabilities in both sides. And so, while the prepaid market is choppy this year, and actually, you know, they're starting the year slow, and we would expect that to ramp up over the course of the year, but still have a fairly flat year to slow growth year. Ultimately, over the long term, it's going to be really positive for us given how we're positioned in the market. So, I know a lot to take in there, but hopefully that helps.

Yeah. And you kind of touched on my last question. Obviously, fraud's been a pretty important theme over the last, you know, year, year and a half. As we kind of look out to 2026 and maybe even beyond, You know, is there potentially another sort of like recurring revenue type business that you would be interested in, you know, potentially acquiring, you know, with AI kind of boosting fraud rates? And I'm wondering if there's any sort of additional software solution that can help on the fraud prevention side that you guys might be interested in.

Well, we do already resell one major fraud solution that uses AI in their modeling, if you will, in their machine learning to prevent fraud on the debit and credit side. That's something that they're a fairly large player in the debit and credit market connected into a lot of the processors to kind of build off our proprietary technology platform and our ability to provide those types of services to our financial institution base broadly. Fraud is a market that is constantly changing. And so, from an acquisition perspective, it would have to be the software that's proven and has an ability to constantly pivot on the fly. So, right now, our strategy on fraud is really to help from kind of the production perspective, as well as producing technology from what Carta produces to be able to prevent fraud on the prepaid side, where we believe there's probably a lot more value. And ultimately, in the debit and credit side, provides solutions from a more commercial perspective. But if you think about on the prepaid side of our business, what Carta does, they're taking data off the prepaid card and ultimately using their solution to not only reduce fraud just by the fact that you can't steal the data off the card, but their solution also loads the prepaid gift card onto your mobile wallet and is a digital issuance platform as well. There's kind of multiple value propositions on the CARTA side, but from a fraud side, it's constantly changing, so it has to be someone who has really unique technology to look at them from an M&A perspective.

Okay. Got it. I appreciate it, guys. Thanks.

Your next question comes from the line of Craig Irwin with Ross Capital Partners. Your line is open.

Hi. Good morning, and thanks for taking my questions. So, John, when I look at my wallet, I'm seeing new cards from Chase, Wells Fargo, and Fidelity provided by CPI. These are large issuers. I'm not asking you to comment about any of these specific large issuers, but I'm sure there's probably others. Can you maybe just give us a high-level commentary on, you know, these customers that I don't think you did a lot of business with over the last several years? Are you seeing an increased capture rate with large issuers? You know, what was the contribution, if you could give us color, on the 40% growth there in debit and credit from large issuers?

Yeah, Greg, thanks for the call-out. We're happy to have you on our marketing team anytime you want to join. But, no, in all seriousness, the large issuer base, I mean, we've said this over time, we work with about half of them. You mentioned a couple different names there. One of those we're actually doing metal with as part of our metal growth. I won't name names. So very positive in terms of our relationships we have with the large issuers. We have been growing share over the last, I'd say, five years with the larger issuers. But I wouldn't comment specifically on the growth rates in Q4 or 2025. What I would say is just broadly – the larger players in general. So go beyond the large issuers that, you know, are the names you're thinking of. Think of the credit union service organizations. We mentioned Valera this morning that we signed another four-year deal with. Think of the large processors out there. There's a number of partners that we have that are fairly large that we also have been growing share with. And so we're excited about our position in the debit and credit market. Our Secure card solution side between our card production, our personalization business, the acquisition of ROI really gives us a unique value proposition and allows us to continue to execute on our strategy and win share, not only in the large issuer market, but in the broader FI, FinTech, and other markets.

Thank you for that. So my second question is about headcount, right? When I looked at your K, I saw you now have about 1,700 employees beginning 2026. and it's up about 13%, a little over 13%, consistent with your revenue growth last year. Now, that doesn't kind of point to leverage in the model, and I know there are a bunch of initiatives you are staffing up, particularly on the technology side and some of these things with, you know, incredible long-term potential. Can you maybe flesh out for us, you know, where you would likely be hiring in 2026? And, you know, would you expect mid to high single-digit growth consistent with revenue, or do we potentially see a more tempered rate of hiring?

So, a lot of our hiring last year, when you just look at a headcount perspective, was through the acquisition of Arrow Eye, right? I mean, they have, I don't know the exact number. I think it's 250 people, roughly, in Las Vegas. So fairly decent sized business there. So you have to kind of take that into account, Craig. But if you went out and looked at who we're hiring and who we have hired over time, it has been predominantly in the go-to-market side to try to, you know, push our solutions further into the market, expand our go-to-market efforts, as well as on the technology side within our integrated paycheck segment. So those are probably the two areas where we'll continue to invest in and We continue to invest broadly in the business as we grow. But I think if you stripped out ROI, you'd realize we're definitely growing in the number of people that we have. But I wouldn't say we're not getting leverage out of the model. And you saw that in Q4 from our growth in Q4 and what we pushed to the bottom line.

That was an excellent quarter of the fourth quarter. Congratulations. Thanks for taking my questions. I'll hop back in the queue.

Your next question comes from the line of Hal Gotch with BU Riley Securities. Your line is open.

Questions on CapEx. CapEx is up, you know, from $8 million to the high teens, and you said it's going to be similar to that in 2026. Is this a number we should expect going forward, or is this a number that might come back down after, you know, a two-year investment period?

Yeah, that's a good question. How I'd say it probably will come down in the outer years. It has grown, you know, quite a bit in 25. As we've built out a closed loop, we've built out Indiana. But I'd say it's more on the physical side in 25 and more on the digital side in 26. And what we might expect in coming years, the charity want to add to that?

Yeah, just to add to that, we did spend about $5 million in CapEx in 2025 on our new factory in Indiana. So that is going away, but we are replacing that with higher investments in our technology spend. So that is on the CapEx side to support the growth of our integrated pay tech business and also to help upgrade some of our other technology as well. I will say that, you know, even with that CapEx spend, we are expecting similar cash flow conversions in 2026 as we had in 2025. So we're happy to be investing in the business and continuing to convert on the cash flow side as well.

Yeah. The goal is to drive leverage down even while investing.

Could you share with me on the tax side, you seem like your tax rate is higher than most of the companies I follow that are mostly domestic and I think you said over 30%. Is that correct? And what was the cash flow impact, free cash flow impact this year from the big beautiful bill or tax change that might have lifted free cash flow this year? And what might be the impact next year from tax law changes to your free cash flow?

Yeah. How we did get a slight benefit, I don't think it's a huge number. I think it's in the few million range. Just on the tax rate in general, I think the big impact this year was due to the ROI acquisition and integration costs that are not necessarily tax deductible. But, Sarah, I don't know if you have any comments.

Yeah, so we are expecting a benefit from between 25 and 26 from the the U.S. budget bill of $3 to $5 million from across 25 and 26. Just a reminder, though, that that is a cash impact, and it doesn't impact our EPR.

Yeah. And follow-up, last question for me on kind of more like modeling. Are you going to provide performance for the new three segments going back maybe at least quarters for 2025 that we can project trends and margins off of? Thank you.

Yeah, Hal, I think we did. I think there's a filing this morning, if I'm not mistaken, that has 2025 quarters as well as the full year. Okay, terrific. Thanks.

As there are no further questions in the queue, I would now like to turn the call back over to John Lowe for closing remarks.

Thanks, operator. First, I'd like to thank all of our CPI employees for what they accomplished in 2025 and their ongoing commitment to serving the company, our customers, and executing our strategy to win in the market. I hope everyone enjoyed learning more about CPI's evolution this morning. We're proud of our 2025 and year-end performance, and we look forward to sharing more on the progress in future calls. Thank you all for joining, and we hope you have a great day.

Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes today's call. Thank you all for joining Humano-Disconnect.