Global Business Travel Group, Inc.

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

Hello and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us for our fourth quarter and full year 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 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 issued 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 include 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, Evan Kronweiser, our Chief Product and Strategy Officer, and Karen Williams, our Chief Financial Officer. Also joining for the Q&A session today is Eric Fox, 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, everyone, and thank you for joining us this morning. In 2025, we delivered strong results and expect even stronger momentum in 2026. We are executing on our growth strategy. We continue to gain share and maintain an impressive customer retention rate. Product innovation is accelerating. Our strategic partnership with SAP Concur is well underway as we roll out Complete, a new flagship solution for travel and expense. We are launching NextGen Agencia in April with a new AI-powered user experience. and full integration into Concur expense. And we closed on the acquisition of CWT in September of 2025. We are now at a very exciting inflection point where AI is delivering real revenue and cost benefits. And we are leveraging our platform to power the future of agentic AI and business travel. More on that shortly. Finally, we doubled our share repurchase authorization to 600 million, supported by our strong balance sheet and robust cash flow. Given the current share price and our conviction in our long-term growth trajectory, we believe this represents a compelling driver of shareholder value. Before I talk in more detail about the value that we are delivering with AI, let me quickly review our strong 2025 performance. Here are the highlights. Total transaction value or TTV grew 17%. Revenue growth accelerated to 12%. Adjusted gross profit margin was 60%. Adjusted EBITDA grew 11%. And we generated 104 million of free cash flow. Finally here, excluding CWT, new wins value accelerated to 3.3 billion. and we maintained very strong customer retention rate of 96%. So Amex GBT continues to grow and continues to gain share. Our new wins performance, increased demand from our premium customer base, high customer retention rate, and the acquisition of CWT resulted in impressive top-line performance. And our focus on operational efficiency and cost synergies enabled us to drive strong adjusted gross profit and adjusted EBITDA margin performance. So I now want to address market sentiment related to AI. Let me start by being clear on this. We have proven that automation is a tailwind for our business. A tailwind that is being accelerated by AI. We have already proven that digital adoption drives higher margins and drives higher profits. Over the last five years, we've increased our mix of digital transactions from approximately 60% to over 80%, with over 60% of those digital transactions on our own technology platforms. Over the same period, our adjusted EBITDA margin has gone from 17% to 20%. driven directly by increased automation. And AI is accelerating this positive trend. Our broader AI strategy is focused on three key priorities. Revolutionizing the customer experience, powering the agentic transformation of B2B travel, and reducing operating expenses. Why are we so confident that AI will supercharge value creation for our customers and our shareholders? Because we're already seeing it happen today. And here are some examples. AI is increasing self-service. And even for issues that still require a live agent, our agents are using AI tools to reduce handling times, giving a better experience for the customer and reducing operating costs. AI is also delivering higher revenue conversion in our products through enhanced personalization. Our tech teams are using AI to design and build products, improving both speed and quality. Agentic AI is a decision-making and execution layer with the potential to reshape channels and workflows. The opportunity that we have in managed travel is to integrate Agentic AI with all of our other services, including the supply inventory, company data, traveler data, duty of care processes, disruption management, and the end-to-end workflow to deliver the control and the experience that our customers demand. And we can deliver this consistently and securely on a global basis. Our platform is being used today to power agentic AI experiences, both proprietary and through integration with third parties. In all these cases, MXGBT is providing the essential assets required to power the agentic AI experience at scale. And now I'd like to introduce Evan Conweiser, our Chief Product and Strategy Officer, to share some specific examples of how we are executing on our AI strategy. Evan, over to you.