Global Business Travel Group, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to the American Express Global Business Travel third quarter 2025 earnings conference call. As a reminder, please note today's call is being recorded. I'll now turn the call over to Vice President of Investor Relations, Jennifer Purrington. Please go ahead.

Hello and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us for our third quarter 2025 earnings conference call. This morning we issued an earnings press release, which is available on SEC.gov and our website at investors.amexglobalbusinesstravel.com. A slide presentation, which accompanies today's prepared remarks, is also available on the Amex GBT 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 adjusted gross profit adjusted gross profit margin, 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 Bach, our Chief Legal Officer and Global Head 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 third quarter 2025 earnings call. In the third quarter, we delivered outstanding results. Here are the highlights. Total transaction value or TTV grew 23%. Revenue growth accelerated to 13%. Adjusted gross profit margin was 60%. Adjusted EBITDA grew 9%. We generated 38 million of free cash flow. And we continued to win share with 3.2 billion in total new wins value over the last 12 months. Finally, year to date through November 6th, our strong performance has enabled us to return $54 million to shareholders through share buybacks. These results reflect two things. First continued strong execution within our core business, which performed in line with our expectations and is tracking in line with the midpoint of our previous full year guidance. Second, Incremental growth from the acquisition of CWT, which closed on September 2nd. This is an important milestone for growth and value creation. As Karen will discuss in more detail, we are raising our full year 2025 guidance. This reflects the acquisition of CWT, and we are reaffirming the midpoint of our previous guidance range for our core business. Importantly, we also have the confidence to provide preliminary expectations for 2026. Before we get into the quarterly details, I want to explain why this is such an important moment for our business, with multiple levers for growth and value creation in place. We continue to demonstrate the strong execution in our core business. Proof points include our very high customer retention rate, significant new wins value, disciplined operating leverage, and strong cash generation. We are consistently delivering on our commitments. We have made bold moves to transform Amex GBT into a software-driven leader in travel and expense. We've now reached an exciting moment with several significant milestones achieved that we expect will accelerate growth and margin expansion. First, we closed the acquisition of CWT, a global business travel and meeting solutions company. This transaction immediately grows our top line substantially, and we are already executing on the 155 million synergy target to create significant shareholder value. Second, we recently announced a long-term strategic alliance with SAP Concur to strengthen our value proposition, accelerate growth, and develop a larger expense revenue stream. Third, we expect to launch a next gen Agencia travel and expense solution in Q1, 2026, including full integration into SAP Concur expense and a new AI powered booking experience. Fourth, we have an enormous runway in the SME space with even stronger products and distribution to continue to win share. And finally, we are driving AI to further accelerate the digital transformation of our business. Putting it all together, we have a significant long-term opportunity for consistent double-digit adjusted EBITDA growth and margin expansion. And we look forward to sharing more at our March 2026 investor day. Turning to CWT, we are delighted to welcome CWT customers and employees to Amex GBT. This transaction grows revenues by approximately 30 percent, grows our SME business by approximately 20 percent, and brings in new industry verticals to Amex GBT. This is a highly accretive transaction. We expect to deliver approximately 155 million in net cost synergies over the next three years, and we have a proven track record of achieving synergy targets. Our experienced integration team has made good progress in the first 60 days, and we expect to achieve 55 million of synergies in 2025 and 2026. Importantly, this transaction diversifies our shareholder base. CWT shareholders, which are primarily investment funds, now own approximately 10% of the combined company, and our leverage stays within the target range of 1.5 to 2.5 times. Turning to our new long-term strategic alliance with SAP. Let me first describe how significant this alliance is, and then I will share two new ways that our customers and suppliers will benefit. SAP is the world's largest provider of enterprise application software. To put some numbers on it, 98 out of the 100 largest companies in the world are SAP customers. And approximately 80% of SAP's customers are SMEs. SAP Concur is the world's largest travel and expense software solution with over 104 million users. By joining forces, we will deliver a step change in our travel and our expense capabilities. First of all, we are co-developing a new solution called Complete, a new flagship solution for travel and expense that will offer an AI-powered user experience. Complete features include richer content, a booking experience that will feel like shopping on your favorite website, one app for everything end-to-end, and a seamless customer support from industry leaders. We launched last week to the first customers, so the impact is already starting now. Second, we are integrating SAP Concur expense with Agencia. This is exciting because it will provide our Agencia customers a seamless travel and expense experience. And additionally, the Strategic Alliance creates the opportunity to accelerate our growth by marketing a new flagship solution to the large SAP customer base. In Q1, 2026, we plan to launch a next gen Agencia travel and expense solution. It will feature SAP Concur expense integration, new agentic AI search capabilities, and a redefined customer experience. Agencia is our all-in-one travel and expense platform that continues to compete very effectively against other software solutions. Agencia is already operating at scale with approximately 8 billion of TTV in the last 12 months, over 90% online transactions, and approximately 7,000 corporate customers, all supported by world-class service from American Express GBT. Furthermore, it has gross margins that are higher than our average, and very importantly, it is profitable and generating cash. We have an unrivaled value proposition for SMEs, savings, control, and service. This strong value proposition drives profitable growth in the over $800 billion SME segment. and an estimated $625 billion of the global SME opportunity is unmanaged, representing a long runway for future growth. Over the last 12 months, excluding CWT, our SME new wins totaled 2.2 billion. With the enhancements that we're making to our products and our sales strategy, we think we can further accelerate new wins and capture more share with SME customers. Our overall total new wins value also remains strong at 3.2 billion with an impressive customer retention rate of 95% over the last 12 months, excluding CWT. Finally, when it comes to AI, we are a clear beneficiary. AI is delivering results, increasing revenue, conversion, and productivity. Let me give you some examples. The Agencia AI experience is solving customers' needs faster and delivering savings. Agencia Chat powered by AI is driving a 23% reduction in the need for human intervention in chats. Our AI-powered hotel dynamic rate cap delivers average savings of approximately $60 per booking for Agencia customers. And AI is increasing hotel attachment rates, which provides increased revenue opportunity, with 85% of booked hotels chosen from the top 10 AI-driven display. We're also driving AI to deliver cost savings and margin expansion. We've previously spoken about the significant opportunity with Travel Council of Productivity. Excluding CWT, over 40% of our calls are now assisted by AI, driving efficiency gains. And we've seen a 40% quarter over quarter increase in daily users of our internal AI productivity tool called AI Assist. This results in a 60% adjusted gross profit margin in the third quarter with significant runway for continued margin expansion. And we continue to increase the share of digital transactions, which now totals 82% with over 60% on our proprietary software platforms. Now let's turn back to the third quarter and the financial highlights. Last quarter, we talked about green shoots that gave us confidence in an improved corporate travel demand environment. And that is exactly what we saw TTV. which reflects both volume and price, grew 23% to reach $9.5 billion, driven by CWT and 9% growth in the core business. The core growth was driven primarily by higher average ticket prices and hotel room rates, in addition to transaction growth and a favorable FX impact. Transaction growth was up 19% driven by the one month contribution from CWT post close and 4% growth in the core business. Within the 4%, same store sales were up 2% and our net new wins drove two percentage points of growth. Revenue was up 13% to reach 674 million, excluding CWT revenue growth of 3% was in line with our expectations and largely in line with transaction growth, which drives the majority of our revenue model. Finally, adjusted EBITDA grew 9% to reach 128 million, excluding CWT. Underlying adjusted EBITDA growth was 5%, which was in line with expectations and outpaced revenue growth as a result of our continued focus on driving margin expansion and operating leverage. Going forward, Amex GBT and CWT are one business. But we wanted to give you the breakout between our core business and the impact of CWT this quarter to help you understand the underlying performance. And now I'd like to hand it over to Karen to discuss the financial results and the updated outlook in more detail.