Global Business Travel Group, Inc.

Thank you for your patience, everyone. The American Express Global Business Travel will begin shortly. Good morning and welcome to the American Express Global Business Travel Second Quarter 2025 earnings conference call. As a reminder, please note today's call is being recorded. I will now turn the call over to the Vice President of Investor Relations, Jennifer Tarrington, to begin. Please go ahead when you are ready.

Hello and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us for our Second Quarter 2025 earnings conference call. This morning we issued an earnings press release which is available on SEC.gov and our website at .amexglobalbusinesstravel.com. A slide presentation which accompanies today's prepared remarks is also available on the AmexGVT Investor Relations webpage. We would like to advise you that our comments contain certain forward-looking statements that represent our beliefs or expectations about future events, including industry and macroeconomic trends, cost savings, and acquisition synergies, among others. All forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from the statements made on today's conference call. More information on these and other risks and uncertainties is contained in our earnings release issue this morning and our other SEC filings. Throughout today's call, we will also be presenting certain non-GAAP financial measures such as EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA margin, adjusted operating expenses, free cash flow, and net debt. All references during today's call to such non-GAAP financial measures have been adjusted to exclude certain items. Definitions of these terms in the most directly comparable GAAP measures and reconciliations for non-GAAP measures are available in the supplemental materials of this presentation and in the earnings release. Participating with me today are Paul Abbott, our Chief Executive Officer, and Karen Williams, our Chief Financial Officer. Also joining for the Q&A session today is Eric Fock, our Chief Legal Officer and Global Hide of M&A. With that, I will now turn the call over to Paul. Paul?

Thank you, Jennifer. Welcome to everyone and thank you for joining our second quarter 2025 earnings call. In the second quarter, we delivered financial results ahead of expectations and reached a significant milestone with the achievement of over 500 million in adjusted EBITDA over the last 12 months. Our focus on efficiency gains and driving operating leverage is clearly evidenced in our Q2 results. Adjusted operating expenses were flat and we delivered strong adjusted EBITDA margin expansion. Increased demand for our software and services resulted in continued share gains. Total new wins value reached 3.2 billion over the last 12 months, including 2.2 billion from SME customers. And importantly, we continue to have a high customer retention rate of 95% over the last 12 months. Our commercial success, margin expansion, and improved demand environment give us confidence to raise and narrow a full year 2025 guidance. I'm also very pleased to share an important update on our pending CWT acquisition. We reached a key milestone last week with the U.S. Department of Justice's dismissal of its challenge to the position and are now positioned to complete the transaction in the third quarter. We look forward to creating even more value for customers, suppliers, and shareholders. Finally, we have a strong balance sheet with reductions in net debt and leverage. We have nearly 1 billion in available liquidity and importantly, maintain the flexibility to pursue our capital allocation priorities after funding the CWT close, including share repurchases. Given the recent clarity on CWT, we will put a 10b51 stock repurchase plan in place under our previously announced $300 million stock repurchase program upon the opening of our trading window tomorrow. This will facilitate additional share repurchases over the next few months, signals management confidence, and drive shareholder value with a strong expected return on invested capital given the current share price. So before we get into the quarterly details, I want to reiterate how excited we are to welcome CWT customers and employees to Amex GBT. We now expect to close this transaction in the third quarter. Our experienced team is ready for the integration and we are confident in the growth opportunity of the combined company. In addition to benefiting customers, suppliers, and colleagues, it's a compelling financial transaction with a highly attractive post synergy multiple. We expect to deliver approximately $155 million in identified net synergies and have a proven track record of integrating large acquisitions and achieving our synergy targets. This is a stock and cash transaction, so it will diversify our shareholder base. CWT shareholders, which are primarily investment funds, will own approximately 10% of the combined company upon closing. The transaction is valued at $540 million on a cash-free debt-free basis. Upon closing, approximately 50 million of shares will be issued to the CWT shareholders at a fixed price of $7.50 per share. The remaining consideration will be added with cash on hand. Turning back to the quarter and the financial highlights, total transaction volume was up 1% on a workday adjusted basis. Heightened macro uncertainty impacted April, but I am pleased to say that demand improved in May and June, so the quarter results overall were slightly above our expectations. TTV, or total transaction value, which reflects both volume and price, grew 3% on a workday adjusted basis to reach $7.9 billion. This was driven by transaction growth, modestly higher average ticket prices and hotel room rates, and a favorable FX impact. Revenue was up 1% to reach $631 million for the quarter, which was above our guidance midpoints. Our focus on margin expansion and operating leverage resulted in adjusted EBITDA growth of 4% to $133 million, with strong margin expansion of 70 basis points year over year to reach 21%. Turning to the transaction growth in more detail, macro economic uncertainty resulted in a modest year over year decline in corporate travel demand in April. This impact was temporary, and our transaction growth inflected back to positive territory, up 2% in May and June combined. We continue to see green shoots into July that give us confidence that the demand environment has improved. And as a reminder, these growth rates are all workday adjusted, which helps neutralize the year over year timing impact of Easter. Transaction growth remained stronger with global multinational customers and was up 3% May and June. SME customers reached 2% growth, a significant improvement versus April. Air transactions stabilized in May and June after declining modestly in April. This trend was most pronounced in regional and international air routes, domestic air routes were more stable during the period. Hotel transactions also saw an encouraging acceleration to reach 4% in May and June. Once again, hotel transactions outpaced air. Our strategy to increase our hotel revenues is working well. Finally, on a regional basis, transaction growth in the Americas reached 2% in May and June, and EMEA transactions improved dramatically from April to reach 3% in May and June. Importantly, our growth continued to outpace the industry. Our strong net new winds impact contributed 2% points of transaction growth in May and June. The trends you see here on slide 9 are global multinational customers' same store transaction growth rates. So they isolate what is happening on a like for like basis and do not include the benefit of net new winds. All of our major industry verticals demonstrated sequential improvement from April to May and June. IT, pharma, business, professional and financial services posted growth in May and June. Industries with greater exposure to tariffs, mining, oil, consumer goods and retail continued to see slower demand. The automotive industry saw the sharpest decline in transaction growth, but improved substantially from April to May and June. And as previously mentioned, on top of same store sales growth, our strong net new winds contributed 2% points of transaction growth in May and June. So demand has improved in line with the commentary from major US airlines. In our most recent Top 100 customer survey, macro uncertainty seems to be moderating, with customers seemingly less concerned or increasingly neutral on the impact of tariffs. We have seen little by way of tangible customer actions taken in terms of travel policy restrictions. Spend outlooks across industry verticals remains mixed. Technology and financial services look strong. Conversely, consumer, manufacturing, energy and mining look softer. Finally, our meetings and events business is performing well. And this is important because it tends to be a forward looking indicator. We currently anticipate a 5% -over-year increase in the number of meetings in the second half of this year. So let me close by summarizing the key highlights of the quarter. We again delivered on our commitments with Q2 results ahead of expectations. We raised our full year guidance. We are excited to close the CWT acquisition in Q3. And we can now accelerate share repurchases to demonstrate our confidence in the business. And now I'd like to hand it over to Karen to discuss the financial results and the updated 2025 outlook in more detail.